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CHAPTER 1

*** DIANA ***

Diana Montanari had exactly one hour a day that belonged to her, and she spent all of it with the one person in the Colony who couldn't lie to her yet.

Her son was awake when she came in. He was always awake, staring up at the ceiling like it owed him money, and the second he heard her step his whole body turned toward the sound. He was six months old, and had dark hair, like hers. There was a scatter of small scales along his shoulders that caught the light and threw it back in colors she still didn't have names for. And when his eyes found her and locked on, they were gold.

Boradrith's gold. The king's gold, the same gold nine generations of kings had worn, set in the face of a half-human baby that half the planet swore could never be born.

"There you are," she said. She scooped him up, and for one breath let herself be nothing in the world but his mother.

She hummed against his scalp, low and tuneless, a habit with no melody that her own mother had used on her a lifetime and a galaxy ago. Plovus went quiet and grabbed a fistful of her collar the way he always did. He'd decided early that she was the one solid point in a spinning world, and he wasn't about to let go of it.

"You're going to be difficult," she told him. "I can tell already. Every difficult person I've ever met turned out fine. Mostly."

He blinked at her, unbothered.

"Mostly," she agreed.

This was the one hour she didn't perform. She performed all the rest of them. Calm in the council chamber. Warmth with the stewards. Cool, useful competence for the king. She was so good at every version that most of the court had stopped wondering whether there was a real woman under any of them. There was. She kept her here, two levels down, in a warm little room, in the weight of a baby who wanted nothing from her but the sound of her voice.

She'd have died before she let anyone see it. If the court ever learned how much this baby undid her, someone would find a way to use it. So no one ever saw.

* * *

She hadn't come to Dobromia for any of this.

She'd come down with the diplomatic mission, and she'd meant to do her job and go home. Then she spent a week in a Colony still raw from the crisis that had brought the first humans here, and she started to care, which was the one thing she'd promised herself she'd never do again. She saw children going hungry over a clerk's bad calculations. She saw six human women treated like luggage nobody wanted to claim. She saw an aging king carrying all of it more or less alone.

And she'd liked Boradrith. That was the part she never said out loud, because it complicated the story everyone preferred to tell about her. He wasn't warm, but he wasn't cruel either. He was tired and fair and lonely, surrounded all day and truly known by no one, and when she talked he actually listened, which was more than she could say for most of the people she'd ever worked under. It was never love, and neither of them pretended it was. But it wasn't nothing, and it was never cold. Two clear-eyed people who liked and respected each other, honest about exactly what they had to give. She'd built a life on worse ground than that.

So she stayed. She took the seat beside him, never the chair above it. They never married; she'd never wanted a crown, and he'd never offered one. She used the place to do the good she'd come here unable to stop wanting to do. She got the hungry children fed. She kept the human women from being traded away like coins. She had never once been sorry.

She wasn't even the strangest turn this court had taken. Athena had gotten there first. The human ambassador had come down with an earlier mission and fallen, hard and against every rule, for a Weredragon warrior named Varek, and built a whole life out of it, right down to a small daughter with her father's amber eyes. Theirs was real love, the loud and lucky kind Diana had spent her life watching happen to other people, the way you watch good luck happen to someone else. Her own arrangement had none of that in it, and she'd made her peace with the difference years ago.

Then Plovus happened, and rearranged everything from the inside.

She hadn't planned to fall this hard for her own son. She'd made the decision to have him with a clear head, the same clear head that had carried her through three postings and two wars and a crash landing. Then he grabbed her collar and refused to let go, and that was the end of her clear head. Boradrith's interest in her cooled the day the boy was born; the child had been the whole point, to him, and now the child existed. She didn't mind. If anything, she was relieved. Once he stopped wanting her, he mostly stopped watching her, and she'd take being left alone over being wanted any day.

Sillevia, on the other hand, had never once stopped watching.

* * *

Diana’s son was a problem of math, and she'd done the math the day he was born.

Plovus was the king's son, but he wasn't the heir. That place already belonged to Toren, Boradrith's grown boy by the wife he'd lost years before Diana was ever known. And Toren had spent his inheritance in the most scandalous way a crown prince could manage. He'd fallen for a human named Marina, married her, and gone off to Earth, where he now ran half the alliance between Earth and Dobromia from the far side of the sky.

The old blood had barely finished choking on that when Diana arrived and handed the king a second half-human child.

Two humans in the royal line now. One beside the heir, one born straight into it. To a court that had kept the D'Karr's blood clean for nine generations, that had stopped being a scandal. It was an infestation.

And the queen's chair sat empty. Boradrith's D'Sharr had died years back, and no one had filled the seat since. Which left the most dangerous question in the Colony wide open. Could a human ever be raised into it?

Diana had never once said she wanted the chair, and the truth was she never had. But she didn't need to want the crown for the fear of it to be used against her. The possibility alone was enough to make an enemy of the one person with the standing to stop it.

That was Sillevia. The Dowager D'Sharr. Boradrith's mother, a queen in her own day, widow of the king before him, and she'd held this Colony's real power in her teeth since before Diana's grandmother drew breath. She'd watched one human climb toward her grandson's chair and another into her son's bed, and she'd decided Diana Montanari was where the rot got cut out.

Diana didn't hate her for it. In Sillevia's chair she'd have wanted the very same. Hating the woman would only slow her down, and she couldn't afford to be slow.