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CHAPTER 7

*** DIANA ***

She went back to the caves the next night, and this time she didn't bring the excuse about the stores.

Kavren was waiting at the low blue seams when she stepped off the last of the stairs. Of course he was. She'd told no one she was coming, which meant he'd guessed, which meant he'd lain awake on the far side of a stone wall and come down to the same place she had.

"You should be asleep," she said.

"So should you."

"I couldn't. I tried. I lay there and did sums about grain and it didn't work, and I've never once had sums fail me before." She stopped an arm's length from him, closer than she'd stood the night in the corridor, and didn't move to fix it. "I'm going to say something now, and I'd like you not to give me the guard's face while I say it. Can you manage that much?"

"I can try."

"I didn't come down for the stores. I came down for you. I've come down for you three nights running and called it inventory, and I'm too old and too tired to keep calling it that." She watched him take it, the way she watched everyone take everything. "There. Now say something back, or send me back up. Your choice. But pick one and mean it."

He was quiet a moment. Not the blank quiet of a man building a report. The other kind.

"I don't have a choice that's any good," he said. "I've been counting them since the corridor. Every one of them costs you something. Costs the boy something."

"I know the costs better than you do. I've been pricing them since the day I landed on this planet." She held his eyes. "I'm asking anyway. That's the part I can't explain, and I've given up trying to. Tell me to go, Kavren. Say it like you'd say a true thing, and I'll climb those stairs and neither of us will ever speak of it."

He didn't tell her to go.

"See, that's the trouble with you," she said, softer now. "You never once lie when it matters. Sillevia trained it into you, and she is going to hate what it grew into."

"Tell me something," he said.

"Anything. That does seem to be the trouble."

"The king. Do you still want him? Any part of you?" He said it flat, but she heard the meaning underneath it, the meaning he was too careful to name.

"No." She gave it to him plain, because he'd given her plain things and she owed him the same. "I liked him once. I told you that and it was true. But it cooled a long while before you ever stood at my back, and what's left is respect and a boy we made and a great deal of shared paperwork. It isn't this. Nothing I've ever had is this. That's what frightens me, if you want the honest answer. Not the Dowager. This."

"It frightens me too," he said.

"Good. Then we're matched." She almost laughed. She didn't. She closed the last of the distance instead.

*** Kavren ***

His hand came up. The last time, in the corridor, it had stopped short of her face. This time it didn't.

"You're sure," he said. Not quite a question.

"I've been sure for a week. I was waiting for you to catch up." She turned her cheek into his palm. His hand was warm, warmer than a human's. It shook, only a little, and that small shake undid him more than any steadiness could have. "There. You're allowed to want, you know. No one is going to write it down."

"You'd be surprised what gets written down."

"Was that a joke? From you, in a cave, with your hand on my face?" She was smiling against his palm now, and he could feel it. "Don't stop doing that. It suits you better than the stillness does."

He'd been built to end things. Twenty years of a body kept for one purpose, and no one had ever once asked it to be gentle and mean it all the way down. She asked it now. She got him out of the chest plate with quick certain hands. He got her out of the consort's careful layers. When there was nothing left between his scales and her skin, he felt himself go still, holding her against the warm stone like a man handed something he was sure to break.

"I won't break," she said, against the corner of his mouth. "I've survived worse than you, Kavren."

"I know. That isn't why I'm slow."

"Then why?"