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The words hung there, and Diana understood exactly what they were. She'd spent her life weighing what things cost the people who said them. This wasn't small. This was a soldier of the Dowager's own house telling her he'd been lying to the only mother he'd ever had, for weeks, for her. It was the most dangerous sentence he could have said, and he'd said it plainly and asked for nothing back. She didn't have a plan ready for a man like that. In her experience he didn't exist.

She looked for the trap. She was very good at finding traps. There wasn't one. There was just a soldier who'd chosen her over his whole life and hadn't admitted to himself yet that that was what he'd done.

"Why?" she asked.

He didn't have an answer he could say, and the not-having of it was plain enough on his face that she stopped needing to hear it. The space between them was two feet of cold Colony air, the correct distance between a consort and her guard. What was between them had never been correct at all. In the quiet after her question, it stopped pretending.

She wasn't sure who moved. She was never sure after, and she replayed it enough to know she never would be. Her hand came up, or his did. She felt the higher heat of him, close now. She heard his breath change and heard her own catch. For one held second the two feet were gone, and there was nothing between them but a decision neither of them had let themselves make.

Then one of them stepped back. She thought, after, that it had been her, and that he'd let her, being a man who would always let go of whatever wanted to leave. The distance snapped back. He went to the flat stillness of a guard. She smoothed the consort over herself with hands that weren't quite steady.

She knew the price of this to the last decimal. A consort who took her son's protector as a lover handed the Dowager the exact weapon the whole court had been digging for. She stood in her cold room and added it all up, and for the first time in eighteen months she caught herself wondering whether something could be worth a price like that. The wondering scared her more than the price did.

But the line was drawn now, out in the open where they could both see it, and there was no drawing it back. She went inside. He took his post. On two sides of a stone wall, two people who couldn't afford any of this lay awake, and neither of them slept much before the gray came.

CHAPTER 6

*** KAVREN ***

The summons came at the end of the twelfth day, and Kavren knew what it meant before the messenger finished the sentence. The Dowager didn't call a guard off an assignment to ask about his posture.

He'd known it was coming. His last few reports had gone thin, careful in a way Sillevia would feel even if she couldn't name it, and she read a report the way other people read a face. And there was the boy. He'd curled his tail-guard away from Plovus's small reaching hand in the nursery, and a guard on that corridor had watched him do it. Every eye in this Colony carried what it saw back to her. He'd handed her two reasons to call him in, and she wasn't a woman who left reasons lying around. She'd trained him too well for him to even resent the net closing. He walked the familiar tunnels toward her wing and made himself ready the way a soldier readies for a wound he's seen coming and can't dodge. He didn't know yet which answer he'd give. He only knew he was afraid, and he hadn't been truly afraid of anything since he was six years old in the snow with the swarm at the wall.

Sillevia sat where she always sat, in the low amber light with a cup of dark water she wouldn't drink, and she let him stand in the doorway a moment before she spoke. She did that to men she meant to unsettle. He'd watched her do it to councillors and captains. He'd never thought she'd do it to him.

"Sit," she said.

He sat. A guard didn't sit in the Dowager's presence unless she made him, and making him was its own message. She wanted him close enough to read.

"Your reports are good," she said. "Clean. Precise. I've read every one." She turned the cup a slow half-circle on the stone. "They're also empty. I'd like to know why."

"I've given you what I saw, Dowager."

"You've given me what a clerk sees." Her voice stayed even, and the evenness was the danger in it. "A grain measure. A research deal. Who spoke and what passed. I didn't raise you from a starving child into the best blade in my guard to hand me the minutes of a meeting." Her eyes came up to his. "I sent you to see her. So tell me what I haven't read. When she holds the child, what's her face doing? When she talks about my son, what's underneath it? The nursery. The women's quarters. The rooms where she thinks no one who matters is watching. Describe those to me."

There it was. She'd named the very thing he'd been keeping back, and she'd named it because she already knew it was there.

"There's nothing underneath it," he said. "The nursery visits are short. She holds the boy the way any consort holds an heir, as long as the court wants and no longer. Her warmth with the women is a coin and she spends it on purpose. I've watched for softness, Dowager. I haven't found any she wasn't being paid for."

The lie came out level and complete. He'd learned the shape of a true report at her own table, and he built this one to match it exactly. She let the silence stretch. It was a trick he'd watched her work on stronger men than him, the held quiet that made a person fill it with something truer than they meant to. He'd been drilled against it. He held.

"The child reaches for your tail-guard," she said at last. "A guard on the nursery corridor tells me the boy put his hand to the spikes and you wouldn't let him cut it. That's a kindness, Kavren. I didn't think you had one. Where did you learn it?"

Soft-edged trap. He stepped around it the only way left. "A dead heir is a failed assignment. I'd have done the same for a councillor's hound."

"I see." She let that sit. "If there were a weakness in her, you'd have brought it to me."

"I would have."

"I believe you would." She said it gently, and the gentleness was worse than any shout. "Go back to your post. She wakes early."

He rose and made it to the door before her voice caught him again, quiet, without weight.

"Kavren. You've never lied to me. I'd know the sound of it." A pause. "See that I never have to."

He didn't answer. There was no answer that didn't damn him further. He walked out with his pulse loud in his own ears. He'd stepped through a door she counted. She'd let him do it on purpose, so she could watch where it led.

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