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She'd known the Dowager would make a move. She just hadn't expected it this morning, and she found out the way she found out most of what mattered: from a small detail nobody else would have caught.

The nursery attendant wouldn't meet her eyes.

The woman had been friendly for six months, careful with the baby the way people are careful with someone who might matter someday. This morning, she took Plovus back with her gaze fixed anywhere but on Diana's face.

"He ate well," she said, to the child, to the floor. "No trouble at all."

"He never is." Diana kept it easy. "You'd tell me if that changed. Wouldn't you."

The attendant's hands went still on the blanket. "Of course, my lady."

"Did someone speak to you this week? About him? About me?"

"No, my lady." She replied too fast, and they both heard it. "Nobody at all."

"Good." Diana smiled, warm and complete, and let her off the hook, because there was nothing to gain by frightening a frightened woman further. "Thank you for keeping him safe."

She walked the length of the corridor turning the small wrongness over like a stone she meant to name. Someone had gotten to that woman overnight. Someone with the reach to make a royal attendant afraid to be seen talking to the consort. There was exactly one person in the Colony with that reach and that grudge, and she was the king's mother.

Diana didn't slow down. She adjusted, the way she always adjusted, and by the time she reached the royal wing she'd stopped being surprised and started being ready.

* * *

Diana knew what her son was to the court. It had nothing to do with what he was to her.

She heard the whispers. Some she was meant to catch and some she wasn't, and she'd trained herself to catch both. A councillor dropped his voice as she passed and didn't quite drop it far enough. A steward looked at the baby half a second too long, running her same math and landing somewhere colder. Two nights ago, she'd passed a knot of old-blood warriors, the ones who called the alliance a leash, and one of them said a word she'd been carrying ever since like a stone in her shoe.

"Contamination," he'd said, of a six-month-old. "That's what they've let into the line."

Half the Colony looked at her son and saw a bridge, living proof two peoples could share a future. The other half looked at the same baby and saw a wound in a nine-generation bloodline, gold eyes in the wrong face, every fear they had about the humans made small and warm and impossible to argue with. Both halves discussed him like a policy. Diana had made her peace with being discussed that way years ago. She would never make her peace with it landing on a child who couldn't hold his own head up yet, and she'd stopped trying to.

That was the fear she buried deepest, deeper even than the love, and really, they were the same fear. If anyone ever understood how far she would go for this child, they would own her. Threaten Plovus and she'd do anything they asked. So, she kept it hidden and went on appearing cold and useful and necessary, because as long as the court needed her, the court would leave her son alone.

* * *

The guard was waiting outside her quarters.

She saw him from thirty feet off and knew what he was before she could make out his face. A soldier standing at that exact distance from her door, in that exact stillness, hadn't wandered there by accident. He'd been posted. And only one person in the Colony would post a soldier at the consort's door and expect her to be pleased about it.

"Well," she said, under her breath, to no one. "There it is."

She didn't slow down, and she used the walk to read him, because it was the only free intelligence she'd get. The Dowager had sent something better than a thug, which was itself a piece of news. He was tall, built like a blade that had seen hard use. His scales were a deep iridescent purple that ran to blue where the light caught them, dark and matte across the shoulders. His hair was black and unruly, falling into eyes that were a startling violet, the kind of color that would have gotten him noticed on any world she'd worked. A spiked tail hung behind his legs in a line so disciplined it read as a statement.

That was the tell. Sillevia hadn't sent a man who would fumble the job. She'd sent one who'd do it beautifully, and a beautiful job is far more dangerous than a clumsy one.

She stopped in front of him. He met her eyes and held them, which most of them didn't.

"You're new," she said.

"Kavren." His voice sounded lower than she'd expected, level and dry. "Assigned to your protection. Effective at dawn."

"My protection." She turned the word over and handed it back with all the amusement it deserved. "How thoughtful of the Dowager. I hadn't realized I was in danger. Do you know something about my morning that I don't?"

The corner of his mouth moved and didn't quite become anything. "I know you're late for a council session. I know you already know who sent me, and why." He tipped his head a precise degree. "Nobody told me you'd need either one explained."

Diana looked at him properly then, and revised him upward, which she did not enjoy.

She'd expected a watcher. Watchers were easy. You perform for them, feed them exactly what you want carried home, and let them believe they're the ones doing the watching. But this one's stillness wasn't the blank patience of a man storing facts. It was attention, the real kind, the kind that reads what you don't say as clearly as what you do. Attention was the one skill Diana had never managed to fake, and she disliked meeting it in her enemy's soldier at dawn on an empty stomach.