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"I fought beside Earth's people," he said. "One of them carried me off a battlefield half dead when leaving me would have been the smart choice. You don't strip a house you mean to keep living in." Four sentences. It bought Diana the opening she needed, and she caught his eye across the chamber and gave him the smallest nod.

Then she argued the other way, and she argued it knowing she might lose, which was a feeling she hadn't had in this chamber in a year.

"You don't empty a well because you're thirsty," she said. "Earth isn't a mine. It's a partner, and a partner gives you exactly as much as it trusts you with, no more. Grab at Earth and Earth closes its hand. Frighten it and it's gone, and then we're a dying rock with no friends and no sky. Yes, the sun is failing faster. That's the reason to hold the alliance, not spend it in a panic. Slow isn't weakness. Slow is the only speed that survives this."

"Fine words," Khrelan said. "The settlements can't eat fine words. Neither can the boys in my barracks."

"No," Diana said. "They can eat the grain that's still coming down because Earth trusts the hand it's shaking. Break that hand and the grain stops inside a cycle. Then your boys keep their pride and go to bed with nothing in the bowl. I've seen pride and an empty bowl in the same room before. Pride loses."

Khrelan didn't answer. He'd wanted her rattled and she wasn't. He sat back and let it go, and she marked it as one more day bought.

Boradrith didn't rule that day. He sent them off to fight it again in the morning, which meant it was close, which meant she could lose. She walked out with the taste of an unfinished fight in her mouth, and for once she didn't have the strength to mind the two feet of distance between herself and the man who fell in at her back.

*** Boradrith ***

The king sat alone with the data after the chamber emptied, and let himself feel, for a moment, the weight of the part he couldn't say out loud.

His planet was dying, and the only rope out of the dark was a human alliance his own mother would burn to the waterline to keep the blood of the D'Karr clean. He was tired in a way that had stopped being a mood and become a climate.

He thought of Diana with something between gratitude and respect. She'd given him a son, a steadier court and the sharpest counsel on the planet. He'd given her a seat, cover and the freedom of his own honesty about what they were. Whatever had warmed between them had cooled a long time ago, and neither of them had ever lied to the other about it, which he'd come to value more than he expected to. By the plain measure of a dying world, it had been a good arrangement and a decent one, and he did not take her for granted even when the court did.

He thought, once, of his other son. Toren on Earth with his human scientist, running an alliance from the far side of the sky, happier by every account than Boradrith had managed in a lifetime of ruling. His mother called it the ruin of the line. Alone with the data and the dead sky, Boradrith wasn't always certain she was right.

He didn't know what was happening in the deep caves. He'd have said, if anyone had asked, that Diana Montanari was the last soul in his court with time to spare for that kind of foolishness. He signed the order for the morning and went to bed alone, and above the black sky the dying sun did what it did, indifferent to kings.

*** Diana ***

They walked the eastern passage back, the one with the single blind junction, and she was tired in a way she didn't let people see. She let him see it.

"They'll reach for the extraction," she said. "Not because they're cruel. They're scared. Scared men don't listen. They grab. I've watched frightened men burn down the one rope that would have saved them, on more worlds than this one, and I am so tired of watching it that I could put my head against this wall and leave it there a year."

It was more unguarded than anything she'd said to a soul on Dobromia who wasn't Athena. She heard it leave her and didn't call it back.

"They won't reach for it," Kavren said.

She looked at him. He wasn't a man who handed out comfort. He handed out assessments, and he'd handed her this one as an assessment.

"Why not?"

"Because you'll be in the room." He said it plainly. "I've watched you turn that council for weeks. You'll turn this one too. They'll shout tomorrow, and then they'll do what you tell them, because a frightened king still can't eat his pride. You said that to me once."

"I did."

"It was true then. It's true now."

He'd answered without weighing it first. She could hear that he had, in the absence of the careful measuring that governed every word a soldier of Sillevia's house was supposed to speak. It had simply come out of him, a true word offered to steady her, and they both heard it land and change the air between them.

Neither of them named it. She didn't thank him. He didn't take it back. They walked the rest of the passage in a quiet that wasn't empty. At a turn in the corridor, they came around a corner too close together, closer than protocol allowed, and a servant with an armful of linens looked up and saw them standing there.

Half a second. They were already apart, already the consort and her guard, already flawless. The woman lowered her eyes and hurried on with her linens and her errand.

Diana watched her go, and she couldn't tell. The not being able to tell was worse than any certainty. She went in and shut her door. Kavren took his post. Somewhere in the Colony a servant carried an armful of linens and, maybe, a half-second she'd caught by accident and didn't yet know what to do with. Diana lay awake and understood that a cover held only as long as no single thread got pulled. And a thread had just, maybe, been touched.

CHAPTER 9

*** SILLEVIA ***

She brought it to her son herself, which she almost never did. Most problems she solved two levels down before they ever reached his chair. This one she wanted him to hear from her mouth and no other.