Page 20

Then they took her down to the lower levels. The door closed from the wrong side. Diana Montanari sat on the edge of a strange bed in a cold room and did not cry. Crying was for when there was someone to see it and be moved. There was no one. So she sat. She breathed. And out of pure unbreakable habit, she started to work the problem.

*** Kavren ***

Word reached the barracks before the middle of the night, the way word always did.

Dresh found him on his bunk, not sleeping. He sat down on the edge of it without being asked, which he hadn't done since they were boys.

"They've taken the consort," Dresh said quietly. "Confined her. Lower levels. Half the barracks is saying she had a man and the Dowager caught them." He paused. "They're not saying who the man is. Yet."

"They will."

"Kavren." Dresh's voice dropped. "Tell me it wasn't you. Tell me and I'll believe you. I'll go back to my bunk and we'll never speak of it again."

Kavren looked at his oldest friend in the dark, and found he was done spending lies on the people he loved. He'd spent his one good lie already, and she was two levels down behind a door that opened the wrong way.

"I can't tell you that," he said.

Dresh shut his eyes. For a moment he looked like a man who'd been handed a grief he'd have paid a great deal to refuse. Then he opened them, and what was in them wasn't judgment.

"Then you'd better think faster than you've ever thought in your life," Dresh said. "Because the Dowager's going to want your denunciation by morning, loud and public, and the second you give it, that woman loses the last shield standing between her boy and the people who want him gone. And the second you don't, you're a traitor in the Dowager's own house." He gripped Kavren's shoulder once, hard. "I don't see the move, brother. I've been looking since I heard. I don't see it."

"There's one." Kavren was already sitting up, already somewhere cold and clear and past fear. "You won't like it. Neither will she."

"Tell me."

"Better you don't carry it. Go back to your bunk, Dresh. If anyone asks, I was asleep and said nothing, and you're the man who checked." He met his friend's eyes. "You've been the one good part of that barracks for twenty years. Let me keep you clean of this one."

Dresh held his gaze a long moment. Then he stood, squeezed his shoulder once and went. There was nothing left to say, and he was soldier enough to know it.

Kavren sat alone in the dark and turned the board one more time, looking for the flaw. There wasn't one. There was only the move that worked because it cost him everything and asked the king for nothing but sense. He'd learned to think this way from a woman two levels down who priced every move on the board and had never once been able to account for him.

He would go to the king at first light. He would not go to Sillevia. And whatever it cost him, Plovus would keep his mother. Diana would keep her son. That would have to be enough to have been for.

CHAPTER 10

*** KAVREN ***

He didn't sleep, and somewhere in the black middle of the night he stopped pretending to.

He lay in the barracks among men whose loyalty had never once been questioned, and he worked the board the way she'd taught him without meaning to. Not a soldier's math. He knew that kind cold. He could name the strength of the guard, the ways out of the Colony, the odds of one blade against the men who'd come for him at dawn. That math was simple and it ended the same way every time he ran it. So he ran the other kind instead. What each move cost, and what it saved. Not his pride. Her. The boy. The alliance she'd given eighteen months to hold together.

The Dowager wanted a denunciation, loud and public. Give it, and he kept his life, his name and his post. Diana lost the last shield between her son and the people who wanted the boy gone. Refuse, and he lost everything he'd ever been handed. Diana kept nothing either, because a guard's silence was no kind of wall.

There was one move on the board that protected her, and it did not protect him. He'd found it hours ago. He'd spent the time since looking for the flaw, walking the edges of it the way he'd walk a perimeter for the gap a raider would use. There wasn't one. Only one move worked, and it worked because it cost him everything and asked the king for nothing but good sense.

He would go to the king at first light. Until then there was nothing to do but lie in the dark and not sleep, which he was good at.

*** Diana ***

The cell had a bed, a basin and a lamp that someone had left burning, which she chose to read as a small mercy and not an oversight.

She'd been in worse rooms. She told herself so in the dark, more than once, until it almost helped. Worse rooms, worse odds, and she'd walked out of all of them. But she'd never once been locked in a room while her son slept two levels up in another woman's arms, and that was the wall she kept walking into. Not the door. The distance from the door to the nursery.

The hum hadn't stopped. That surprised her. She'd half expected it to go quiet with Kavren out of reach, and instead it sat low behind her ribs, faint, warm and stubborn, exactly where it had been in the cave. She put her hand over it in the dark and found, to her own irritation, that it steadied her.

"You're not helping," she told it. "You know that. Whatever you are. You're making all of this harder."

It hummed on, unbothered. She almost laughed, alone in a cell, at an argument she was losing to her own chest.