Ava and Duncan

Ava and Duncan’s relationship is an old friendship with the texture of family: he was a welcoming presence in her childhood, a steady source of practical kindness, and later a refuge when she was in danger. Its deepest strain comes when Ava discovers that Duncan once belonged to the Coterie and declined the chance to lead it. She connects his choice to the loss of her mother, though she ultimately understands that his decisions, like her own, were made to protect the people he considered family.

Childhood, Home, and the Meaning of Care

Ava’s memories of Duncan are bound up with her mother’s attempts to return home. Ava and her mother spent much of Ava’s childhood on the run, but her mother sometimes sneaked back to Currant despite the danger. Even at five, Ava understood home as the place where Cade was. During one winter visit, a week of snow kept them there through the holidays. Her mother seemed happy, and Ava was spoiled with candy, books, and homemade cider. Cade gave her new pajamas and helped her make popcorn-and-cranberry chains for a Christmas tree decorated with paper snowflakes.

Duncan came to visit during that snowbound Christmas. Ava, seeing his resemblance to Santa, asked if he was related to him; Duncan played along and gave her a present tied with a large red ribbon. Inside were four carved animals: a five-inch pony, a dog, a cat, and a tiny bird no larger than his thumb. Duncan tapped the figures, and they sprang to life. With Ava clapping a marching beat, they paraded through the house before freezing in mid-step. The wonder of that gift became part of Ava’s childhood image of Duncan: not only a visitor, but someone who entered her home and made its small, handmade holiday feel magical.

His care continued in ordinary, recurring ways. Duncan often stopped by with something from his life: fish after fishing, a jar of jam, or eggs from his many chickens. He was one of the few people Ava saw in the kitchen, where Cade and Ava had few visitors. That routine mattered to her beyond the food itself. After a night spent hunting an ice elemental, Ava wanted to return to ordinary life by doing chores. She regarded daily work as a ritual and a sign of normal teenage life; Duncan seemed to understand this, while she suspected Cade thought she worked to repay his kindness. Their closeness is shown not only in dramatic rescues or confidences, but in Duncan’s ability to recognize what a small domestic routine means to her.

Trust and Sanctuary Under Suspicion

As an adult, Ava still feels the force of Duncan’s presence. When she reaches his coastal cabin, he greets her with a hug and offers her a hot meal. His appearance suggests a woodland Santa, but his manner carries an authority that makes her instinctively want to tread carefully. She resists that impulse, yet the contrast captures the complexity of her trust: Duncan feels safe and familiar, but he is also a powerful figure whose past and intentions she does not fully know.

That uncertainty sharpens when Ava realizes Cade is not there. Venus has offered Ava a contract against Duncan, and Ava suspects the invitation to his refuge may be a trap: Venus has accused him of building an army, and the people gathered at the cabin look like a force. Ava tells Duncan that he knows she can get close to him, and that the circumstances make her doubt the sanctuary he has offered. The room’s guards tense, but Duncan remains composed. He says he knows she did not come to kill him because he knows her; that knowledge, he explains, is why he gave her sanctuary. Their friendship is therefore both the basis of his trust and the reason Ava finds the possibility of betrayal so troubling.

Duncan does not dismiss the danger behind her suspicion. When Ava asks what would happen if the Coterie had persuaded her to kill him, he answers that they would have needed leverage, and that leverage would have been Cade. He says the Coterie does not have Cade, though he acknowledges that Cade should already have arrived. The exchange exposes the stakes beneath their familiar rapport: Ava is not merely assessing Duncan’s hospitality but weighing whether the people she loves might be used against one another.

Duncan’s Coterie Past and Ava’s Resentment

Ava’s suspicion gives way to a more personal question: why does Venus want Duncan so badly? Duncan explains that he had once been part of the Coterie and that, roughly twenty or twenty-five years earlier, he had been considered for its leadership. In his account, the organization was not benevolent, but under the right leadership it might have become something like a new Council. Venus took it in a more lethal direction. Duncan’s former membership explains why he matters to her, while his refusal to lead helps Ava imagine a different history for the Coterie.

Duncan says he turned the opportunity down because he wanted a simpler life: his cabin, fishing when he pleased, and ordinary comforts rather than the demands of the Coterie. Ava hears something more painful in that explanation. Her mother is dead, and Ava’s anger fastens onto Duncan’s wish to fish. She imagines that if he had taken leadership, he might have steered the organization differently; in her increasingly furious counterfactual, there might have been no abduction of Cade, no burned store, and perhaps no death of her mother.

The narrative distinguishes Ava’s grief-driven accusation from established responsibility. Even as she thinks that her mother died because Duncan chose fishing, she recognizes the counterargument: Duncan could not have known what would happen, did not send the people who came after them, and would not have sent such an inept recovery team. But reason does not immediately quiet the voice in her that wants someone to blame. She grips the chair and tries to control the anger, aware that a firebug’s outburst can become dangerous. The estrangement is real, but it is an inward conflict as well: Ava knows Duncan is not simply guilty, even while her hurt makes his old decision feel inseparable from her loss.

Family, Choice, and Reconciliation

A later exchange clarifies why Duncan’s choices were not simply a preference for an easy life. When Angela warns Ava about endangering her family, Ava answers that she, too, takes family protection seriously and says Venus would eventually have killed Lock. Angela recognizes the parallel: Ava acted to save her father just as Angela would act for her son, and Lock, like his father, had chosen to throw himself into danger to help her. The moment gives Ava language for a kind of loyalty that is based on protection and action, not only on biological ties.

That distinction also frames Duncan’s understanding of family. He tells Ava that he has no children of his own, but that Cade is it, and that he could not be prouder of him if Cade were his flesh and blood. He believes Venus would eventually have killed Cade, either to spur Ava into action or to punish her. Duncan did not want to lead the Coterie; he wanted to prevent Venus from leading it, and he made his choices with Cade’s safety in mind. His explanation echoes Ava’s own defense of saving her father, bringing their separate acts of protection into the same moral frame.

Ava understands, though understanding does not erase what his earlier refusal means to her. She had wanted to be furious with Duncan as one of the small forces that set a terrible chain of events in motion. Instead, she recognizes that, in his place, she would have made the same choices. Their relationship ends this conflict with a difficult form of reconciliation: not a claim that the past caused no harm, but an acceptance that both of them have acted from attachment to the people they call family. Duncan’s affection for Ava is visible in his trust and sanctuary; Ava’s eventual sympathy comes from seeing the protective motive beneath his decisions, even when their consequences remain painful.