Page 12

*** Sillevia ***

She sat a long while after the door closed.

He'd lied to her. She'd known it by the second sentence, by the small flat note a man gets in his voice when he's building a something instead of remembering it. She'd let the lie stand. She'd even thanked him for it. Now she sat in the amber light and let herself feel it, which she allowed maybe twice a year.

She had made that soldier. She'd fed him at this same table in the third winter of the shortfall, back when he was all elbows and wouldn't stay down no matter how the captains knocked him. She'd watched that stubbornness harden into the cleanest loyalty in her house. She'd counted on it, and she'd pointed it at Diana Montanari like a drawn blade. It had never once crossed her mind that a boy stubborn enough to keep standing up might one day pick what he stood up for.

Now he'd picked, and it wasn't her.

The human had reached him. That was the plain fact under the lie, and it frightened her more than she wanted to admit. Not that Diana could do it. She'd watched the woman turn harder rooms than one quiet soldier. What frightened her was how fast it had happened, and what it meant. If the human could turn the one blade Sillevia had forged with her own hands, she could turn anyone, and the D'Karr's line was thinner tonight than it had been that morning.

She wouldn't call him on it, not yet. She wasn't ready to lose the use of him, and a man who knows he's watched only gets better at hiding. So she'd put her own eyes where his had stopped being honest. A servant, or a guard on a corridor. A thermal log, pulled quietly. It didn't feel like cruelty to her. It felt like the cost of keeping her family's blood where it belonged, and she'd always paid that cost without flinching.

The grief she didn't sit in long. She'd taken a starving child in out of a winter that should have killed him. She'd told herself all along she was raising a weapon and not a son, and a weapon was for using, never for loving. Yet she'd gone and loved the boy anyway, across twenty years, that was the bill landing tonight. She let it land, and then she set it down. She'd learn how far it had gone before she decided what it would cost him. And she caught herself hoping, to her own quiet fury, that the answer was small.

* * *

*** Diana ***

The deep caves were the one place in the Colony with no ears.

She'd wanted to check the lower stores with her own eyes, so she'd taken the long way down and brought her guard. She'd told herself the stores were the reason. They went in the dead hours, when the Colony ran thin and the low levels belonged to the slow blue pulse of the glowing seams. The stores were better stocked than any steward's list admitted, and she noted it with the part of her mind that never stopped working. The rest of her was busy with Kavren in a way she'd run out of ways to manage.

He'd lied to the Dowager for her. He hadn't said so. He didn't have to. She'd seen it that morning when he took his post, in the particular stillness of a man carrying something that could get him killed and carrying it anyway. She'd spent all day pretending not to notice, which was its own kind of lie, and she was tired of lies.

"You went to her last night," she said. Down here her voice didn't echo. "And you came back. So either you gave her nothing, or you gave her me. And you're still standing at my back this morning, so I know which."

"It tells you nothing." His voice was low in the blue dark. "A guard stands where he's assigned."

"Kavren." She turned to face him. Two feet of correct distance, and neither of them moved to keep it. "I've spent my life reading what a choice costs a person. I know what you did last night. I know what it cost. I won't insult you by pretending I don't, and I'm asking you not to insult me either. Just once. Down here, where no one can hear you be honest."

He looked at her a long moment, and she watched him set down something he'd been holding since the day they met.

"I gave her nothing," he said. "I told her you're cold. That your warmth is a coin and your nursery is a performance and there's nothing under it she could use. The one lie I've ever told her, and I built it well." His jaw worked. "And she knew. She let me walk out anyway, so she could follow me to whatever I'm protecting."

"And what are you protecting?"

He didn't answer. The not-answering filled the cave.

"You could still turn it in," she said quietly. "All of it. The nursery, the settlements, the way I am when no one's counting. Walk back into her rooms tonight and hand her the lot and be her blade again. Intact. Forgiven. It would cost you nothing. It would cost me everything." She searched his face. "Tell me why you won't."

"You know why." Barely above the pulse of the seams.

"I want to hear you say it."

"I can't." And that, she understood, was the truest thing he'd given her yet. Truer than any confession. A man who'd lied to the only mother he'd ever had, for her, and couldn't say the reason out loud, because saying it would make it real in the world instead of only in the dark behind his ribs.

She should have stepped back. She knew the price to the last decimal, and she stood there anyway, close enough to feel the higher heat of him, close enough that his breath moved when hers did. His hand came up. It stopped short of her face, hovering where a decision lived, and she saw the war in him in that held hand. Twenty years of discipline against one human woman who'd walked out of a broken ship and made a liar of the best blade in the Dowager's house.

"Diana." He said her name the way he said true things, and it was the first time he'd said it at all.

"I know," she said.

Then she stepped back. She was the one who did it, and he let her. She understood in the stepping that he'd always let her go, that he was a man built to stand between a person and harm even when the harm was him. The two feet came back. It felt now like a wall with a crack running the length of it.

"The stores are fine," she said, and her voice wasn't steady. They both heard it. "Take me up."

He took her up. Neither of them said another word. On two sides of a stone wall, two people who couldn't afford any of this lay awake, and the wall had never in all the history of the Colony felt thinner than it did before that dawn.