Duncan Admits He Was Once a Coterie Member is the conversation in which Duncan discloses his past inside the Coterie and explains that, decades earlier, senior members asked him to take its leadership. His refusal helps explain why Venus sees him as a threat, while forcing Ava to confront a painful counterfactual: the Coterie might have followed a different course if Duncan had accepted.

Background and the Leadership Vacuum

The disclosure follows a discussion of the Coterie’s power and of the Council, which, in some areas, protects the weak and keeps groups like the Coterie out. Ava has treated Venus as practically synonymous with the organization: what came before Venus has seemed irrelevant beside the immediate danger she represents. Duncan challenges that narrowed view, explaining that Venus wants people to believe the Coterie begins and ends with her. The organization has a history, and its authority is not absolute everywhere.

Duncan then describes the succession crisis that followed Venus’s predecessor’s sudden death. Ordinarily, he says, a lieutenant would be ready to take over; this time, no successor had a clear claim. Venus wanted the position but was unpopular with some of the higher-ups, and she had only been with the Coterie for a year or two. A couple of those senior figures approached Duncan and asked him to step in. The revelation makes his former membership more than a biographical detail: he had been considered for the organization’s highest position at a moment when its future was unsettled.

Duncan’s Refusal

Lock responds with surprise, questioning whether Duncan seemed like a plausible candidate. Duncan answers by distinguishing the Coterie of that period from the organization under Venus. It was not benevolent, but he believes it was less lethal and might, under the right leadership, have become something close to a new Council. In his account, Venus took it in the opposite direction. The contrast is a possibility, not a history that actually happened: Duncan does not claim he could certainly have transformed the organization, only that its trajectory could have been different.

Ava, hearing that Duncan was offered the leadership, imagines what his acceptance might have changed. She connects the unrealized alternative to events in her own life: Cade would not have been kidnapped, Broken Spines would not have burned, and she might not have had the work she now faces. These are her counterfactuals, not outcomes Duncan promises. When she presses him to explain his refusal, Duncan says he did not want the position. He was already old and tired, and wanted to live in his cabin, fish when he felt like it, and enjoy simple things. Ruling the Coterie, he says, was not simple.

Ava’s Anger and Grief

The refusal lands on Ava as more than a political decision. Her mother’s death occurred after the period when Duncan might have taken charge, and Ava’s thoughts turn to the possibility that a different leader might not have ordered her mother’s capture—or might have sent a more competent recovery team. She also recognizes the argument against blaming him: Duncan could not have known what would happen, and he did not send the people who came after them. Yet the possibility that her mother might have survived under different leadership cuts through that logic. The scene presents her anger as grief searching for a person to hold responsible, even as she knows Duncan did not directly cause the death.

That response is sharpened by Ava’s own history with the organization. At barely thirteen, she was forced through a blood-pact ceremony while Venus’s guards restrained her and her legal guardian, Cade, was barred from attending because he was not Coterie. The ritual marked her body with oil and ash, joined her blood to Venus’s ward, and made the pact’s magic more consequential than the signature she later put on parchment. Venus declared that the Coterie was Ava’s family and that Ava belonged to it; after the ceremony, the cowls came down and Ava was recognized as Elite and Made. Against that experience of imposed belonging, Duncan’s former place inside the organization—and his decision to leave its leadership untouched—carries an intimate weight.

Consequences and Significance

Duncan’s admission clarifies the danger around him. Because senior members once considered him for the same leadership Venus secured, Ava concludes that Venus will continue to regard him as a competitor and a threat until he is eliminated. The disclosure therefore changes the meaning of his quiet life: his cabin, fishing, and woodcarving reflect the life he chose, but they do not erase the political history that could still endanger him. When Ava asks whether he would accept the position now, he again refuses, brushing a curl of wood from his unfinished carving and saying he has no desire to rule. He then directs her to bed and says there is nothing more she can do that night, while Les’s drove will watch the cabin and what remains of Broken Spines and try to find information.

The scene leaves both its alternatives unresolved. Duncan does not claim that he would have saved Ava’s mother or prevented the current crisis, and Ava cannot make the past answer for what happened. What the conversation does establish is that the Coterie’s present violence is not inevitable simply because it has always been that way: its succession once remained open, and Duncan was asked to shape what followed. His refusal, rooted in a wish for an unruled private life, becomes part of the history Ava must reckon with as she understands why Venus may target him.