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"Yes." He didn't soften it, and she loved that he didn't. Then, quieter, into her hair: "I've got nothing to give you that isn't already promised to someone who wants you gone."

"I know what you've got." She found his hand in the dark and held it, huge and warm and careful under hers. "You lied to the only mother you've ever known, for me, and you still can't say the reason out loud. I'm not going to pretend that's a small thing to hand a person. It's the largest thing anyone has given me since I got on that ship." She paused. "I'll take it. I've paid a great deal more for a great deal less, and been glad of the bargain."

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true."

He turned his head against the stone and looked at her. She watched a man who'd been handed a name and a place and a purpose and never once a choice understand that he'd finally made one, and that the choice was her. Something moved in his face that no amount of discipline was ever going to fold back down.

"Say it," she told him, gently, in the dark where it couldn't hurt them yet. "You couldn't in the corridor. Say it here."

"I'm yours." There was no hesitation this time. "Whatever it costs. However it ends. I stopped being hers weeks ago. I just didn't have the word for where I'd gone until now."

* * *

They dressed in the blue dark and climbed back toward the warm heart of the Colony, and at the mouth of the deep levels they became, between one step and the next, a consort and her guard again. She smoothed the cold correct woman back over herself like a coat she knew too well. He went back to the flat stillness of a blade. Two feet of proper distance opened up between them and held all the way up.

But the hum didn't stop. She could still feel it, faint and low, a warmth with no name that had begun in a cave with no ears to hear it. And she understood, walking her three careful steps ahead of the man who'd just rewritten her life, that there would be no putting this one down. She'd priced every single thing she'd ever touched. This one she couldn't price, and somewhere in the last hour she had stopped wanting to.

She'd come to Dobromia with a clear head and an open mind, and she'd never once been sorry. She wasn't sorry now. She was only, for the first time in eighteen careful months, afraid of exactly how much she suddenly had to lose.

CHAPTER 8

*** DIANA ***

Plovus had learned to grab a fistful of her hair and refuse to give it back, and that morning Diana let him keep it longer than she should have.

She sat on the nursery floor with her son in her lap, her hair caught in his fist, and under all of it the hum. It hadn't stopped since the caves. It ran low and warm behind her ribs, steady as a second pulse, and it got louder when Kavren was near. He was near now. He stood his post at the nursery door, two feet of correct distance and a lifetime of discipline. She could feel him there the way you feel sun on the back of your neck.

"You're going to give me away," she told the baby, in the voice she saved for him and no one else. "You know that? You're the one person in this Colony I can't lie to, and you can't even talk yet."

Plovus blew a bubble and yanked.

"Fair," she said.

She'd run covers before. Three postings, two wars, her life riding on a steady face, and she'd never once slipped. But those covers had hidden a job. This one hid a man, and a man was harder to file away than a job. A job didn't stand at her door and breathe. A job didn't look at her across a council table like she was the one warm room on a cold planet.

She kissed the top of her son's head, handed him back to the nurse, and went to find the only person on Dobromia who'd walked this exact ground and lived.

* * *

Athena kept rooms in the diplomatic wing that were warmer than Diana's by design, and she came to the door with her daughter on one hip.

The little one had Varek's amber eyes and a pair of wing-buds that fluttered when she got excited, and she got excited about everything. She took one look at Diana and shrieked with joy.

"She likes you," Athena said. "Terrible judgment. Comes from her father. Come in."

"You look better than the last time I saw you."

"I look like a woman who hasn't slept since the equinox." Athena set the girl down on the warm stone, where she immediately declared war on a floor cushion. "She's cutting a tooth. Varek's teaching a room of hardened warriors how to hold a baby without dropping her, and half of them are more scared of her than they ever were of a Drog. Sit. We can be wrecks together. It's the only social life I've got left."

Diana sat. She'd come, if she was honest in the way she was only ever honest with herself, because Athena was the one person in the Colony who'd fallen for a Weredragon against every rule, built a life on the far side of it, and lived to tell about it.

"How's Varek?" she asked, which wasn't what she meant.

"Impossible. Wonderful. Underfoot." Athena poured them both something hot and bitter. "Marina sent word on the last relay, since you'll ask that next."

"I was getting to it."