Ava–Duncan

Ava’s relationship with Duncan is a chosen-family bond formed through everyday generosity and tested when the Coterie orders her to kill him. To Ava, he is the closest thing she will ever have to a grandfather; to Duncan, protecting the family he has made is important enough to shape his choices about who should lead the Coterie. Their bond makes her refusal more than disobedience: it is a defense of the people who gave her a home when her life was defined by flight.

A Place at Home

Duncan becomes part of Ava’s sense of home through repeated, unceremonious acts of care. He regularly brings food to the house: fish after fishing, jam he has made, and eggs from his many chickens. He is one of the few people Ava ever sees in the kitchen, a familiar presence in a household otherwise narrowed by the danger surrounding her. His gifts are not grand declarations, but a dependable practice of showing up and sharing what he has.

That dependability matters against Ava’s childhood of running with her mother, Lilia. Sometimes Lilia sneaks back to Currant despite the danger to Cade; the effort of staying away is so hard that home becomes a place she returns to for renewal. Even at five, Ava understands home as wherever Cade is. Duncan belongs to the rare, small circle that makes that home feel inhabited rather than merely safe.

A memory of a snowbound holiday gives the relationship one of its most vivid forms. Ava, Lilia, and Cade are stuck at home for a week, and Duncan comes to visit. When Ava asks whether he is related to Santa because they look alike, he plays along and gives her a present. Inside are four wooden animals—a five-inch pony, a dog, a cat, and a bird no larger than his thumb. Duncan taps the carvings, and they spring to life, lining up and parading to Ava’s clapping. She falls asleep in his lap with the figures clenched in her hands. She has to leave them behind when the family departs, but Cade keeps them on a shelf in her room. Their continued presence preserves a childhood moment in which Duncan’s gift feels like magic and his lap feels like somewhere she can rest.

Kinship in Small Gestures

The bond is carried as much by habitual gestures as by memories. When Venus contacts the household and Ava prepares to leave, she kisses Cade and Duncan on the cheek. Between her and Duncan passes a familiar, silent exchange: she asks him to look after Cade, and he answers that he will. Neither clarifies whether the promise is for her return or for the possibility that she will not come back. The uncertainty remains unspoken, but the exchange makes their trust plain: Duncan understands what she is asking without requiring her to say more.

Ava also measures family by the people who have stayed and cared for one another, not only by biological ties. The Coterie’s threat gives that conviction a harsher background. Lilia fled because Venus might claim a firebug child as a weapon or use a human child as leverage; Ava herself inherited the firebug gene from two parents who carried it. The possibility that the Coterie would control her life through her birth helps explain why a chosen family, built through care rather than possession, matters so much to her.

The Order to Kill Duncan

When Venus gives Ava a file containing her next assignment, Ava sees that the target is Duncan and immediately tries to return it. She refuses, telling Venus that whatever grievance she has with him, Duncan is off limits. Her refusal rests on a personal rule: she does not kill people who spend time in her kitchen. The dry humor does not soften the boundary; it translates affection and ordinary hospitality into a line she will not cross.

Ava makes the reason explicit to herself: Duncan is the closest thing she will ever have to a grandfather, and she has already lost her mother and never knew her father. She is not willing to lose anyone else. Cade’s love for Duncan is reason enough even if her own attachment were not. When Venus continues to press the matter, Ava tells Owen that she will roast him if he comes within burning range of Duncan. Owen answers with a display of flame and a challenge to her ability; Ava insists she means what she says. Her loyalty becomes an open confrontation with the people who expect her obedience.

The assignment is not an isolated test of Ava’s will. Owen later describes a future in which her defiance has made her unusable as a field operative and she will instead be kept under lock and key in the Coterie’s breeding program. Ava recognizes in that threat the prospect her mother had spent years warning about: her body and future treated as Coterie property. In this context, refusing to kill Duncan is part of a wider refusal to let Venus define which lives matter and what family is for.

Duncan’s Choice and Ava’s Understanding

Duncan’s own choices reveal a parallel form of familial loyalty. After Venus’s fall, he tells Ava that he never wanted to lead the Coterie; he only wanted to prevent Venus from leading it. He believes that sooner or later she would have killed Cade, either to spur Ava into action or punish her. Duncan says he has no children of his own, but that Cade is it, and that he could not be prouder of him if they were related by blood. His affection is not an abstract claim: it is the reason he made political choices he otherwise did not want to make.

Ava recognizes the resemblance between Duncan’s reasoning and her own efforts to protect family. Earlier, she tries to make Lock’s mother understand that she, too, is acting with family at stake. Duncan’s explanation gives that shared logic another form: people can choose danger, conflict, and responsibility because someone they love is threatened. Ava cannot quite bring herself to be angry with him for having helped set events in motion. She judges that, in his place, she would have made the same choices.

Their relationship therefore rests on a mutual recognition that care is an action with consequences. Ava protects Duncan by refusing the Coterie’s order; Duncan’s opposition to Venus is rooted in protecting Cade, whom he regards as his son in all but blood. The bond does not erase the painful decisions that bring them into conflict with the Coterie. Instead, it gives those decisions their measure: they are willing to risk power, safety, and even their own return in order to keep the people they call family from being used or destroyed.