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"It was true." Her voice wasn't as steady as she wanted. "It still is. I never gave you a false word, Boradrith. I'm not giving you one now."

"I know." And that was the terrible part. "That's why you're going to tell me you understand what happens next."

"I understand what your mother wants to happen next. They aren't the same, and you know it better than I do."

"They aren't." He rubbed a hand over his face. "But she's right about the danger, and being right is the only weapon she's ever needed. If the court sees the consort take a lover and keep her seat, then the seat means nothing, the line means nothing, and every hawk who wants Earth stripped to the bone gets to say the humans can't even keep their own house. I can't hand them that. Not this cycle. Not with the sky doing what it's doing."

"I'm not asking you to." She took a breath and set down the one point that mattered. "I'm not going to beg for the seat. I don't care about the seat. I came here to do some good and I've done what I could, and if it's finished it's finished. But Plovus is not a piece on your mother's board, and I need you to promise me he stays off it. Whatever you do to me. He's yours. He has your eyes. Don't let her raise my son into a weapon the way she raised that soldier."

Something moved behind his face at that, and she couldn't name it.

"You'd give up the seat and not fight me," he said, "but you'll fight me over the boy."

"The boy is the one person in this Colony I've ever truly wanted to keep." She held his eyes. "Everything else was the job."

"And the guard." Boradrith watched her carefully now. "Kavren. My mother wants him made an example of. Loudly, so the barracks learns the lesson."

"Then your mother's wrong about him, and she's rarely wrong about anyone." Diana's voice sharpened for the first time all night. "He didn't seduce a consort. He was the one honest man in her house, and I'm the one who reached, not the other way round. If you have to break someone tonight, break me. I've been broken on harder worlds and lived. Leave him at his post. He's worth more to you standing there than he'll ever be as a warning."

"You'd spend your last minutes in this room defending your own guard."

"I'd spend them telling you the truth. I've apparently picked up the habit." She held his eyes. "He's the most loyal man your mother ever made. She pointed him at me like a blade, and he still chose right. You don't make an example of a man like that. You keep him, and you thank whatever's left of your luck that he's yours."

Boradrith was quiet a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had gone gentler than she'd heard it in a year.

"I haven't decided what happens to you, Diana. I want you to know that, because my mother will tell you it's already carved and it isn't. But I can't leave you where you are while I decide. You understand that much."

"I do." She almost smiled. "You're a better man than this planet lets you be. I've always thought so. Leave that out of your account of tonight. She'd never forgive you for it."

He went to the door. He stopped there, his back to her.

"He's mine," Boradrith said. "The boy. Whatever else. He stays mine, and no one raises him into a blade. You have that, at least."

Then he was gone, and she stood in the middle of the room she'd made a life in and understood that the walking-to-you king had just given her the one promise she'd asked for and nothing else.

*** Diana ***

The guards came within the hour.

Two of them, and a woman from the household to carry what little she was allowed. She knew the drill of it from the inside, having ordered it done to other people on other worlds. Comfortable detention. No chains, no cruelty, a room with a bed and clean water and a door that only opened from the wrong side. It was the polite way a powerful house said we can't kill you yet without saying it aloud.

She kept her face flat the way she'd kept it flat through three postings and two wars, right up until they walked her past the nursery.

The nurse stood in the doorway with Plovus on her hip. Someone had told her to, or she was simply kind. The baby saw Diana and made the delighted rising sound he made for her and only her, and reached out with both fists.

"Let me hold him," Diana said. "One minute. You can count it out loud."

The senior guard hesitated, and she watched him weigh a lifetime of orders against what stood in front of him.

"A minute," he said.

She took her son and put her face in his hair and told him three quiet truths she'd deny to her grave she'd said to anyone. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and hung on. For once she was grateful he wouldn't remember any of it. For once she wished with everything in her that he would.

"Time," the guard said, not unkindly.

"I know." She handed him back. It was harder than anything her hands had done in eighteen months, and her hands had set a dislocated shoulder on a burning ship. "Be good for her, little king. I'll see you soon."

She didn't believe it. She said it well enough that the baby smiled.