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Kavren had no answer he could say out loud, and the not-saying was answer enough. The king, who'd once loved nothing and married for a treaty, knew the look of a man ready to spend himself for someone else. He saw it plainly, and he didn't need the word.

Boradrith didn't rule. He looked at the soldier a long moment, then turned his eyes to the black window and the dead sky past it. When he spoke, he sounded tired.

"Go back to your barracks. Say nothing. Do nothing. Denounce no one." After a pause, he continued, "You'll have my answer when I've made it, and not before."

It wasn't a pardon. It wasn't a sentence either. No punishment, not yet, and Kavren was soldier enough to know that meant the king hadn't decided against him. He bowed his head, turned and walked out into the corridor.

Sillevia was waiting in it.

*** Kavren ***

She'd known he would come here. Of course she had. She'd known where he'd go the moment he walked out of her house, and she'd come to wait for him herself.

They looked at each other. Neither of them said anything at first. They didn't need to. She read him, and he let her.

She saw it in his face. The choice, made and paid for and past the point where any word of hers could call it back. He wasn't her blade anymore. He'd walked into the king's chamber without her leave and offered his own life to shield a human woman, and there was no version of the soldier she'd raised who did that. It meant the soldier she'd raised was gone. She'd watched it happen and hadn't been able to stop it.

Kavren braced for the fury. It didn't come. What crossed the Dowager's face in the gray corridor wasn't anger. It was the grief of a woman who'd buried a great deal across nine generations and had just been handed one more.

"I fed you at my table," she said. Almost too quiet to hear.

"You did." He didn't soften it and he didn't sharpen it. "I've never stopped being grateful, Dowager. I've only stopped being yours."

For a moment he thought she might strike him, or call the guards who ended her problems the way they usually ended. She did neither. She looked at him with the pale eyes that had watched him grow from a starving child into the best blade in her house, and then watched the blade turn in her hand. Whatever she felt, she folded it down and away with the discipline she'd spent a lifetime perfecting. He'd learned that discipline at her side. He recognized it now, aimed at him, and understood for the first time what it had always cost her to wear it.

"You were the best of them," she said. "That was the trouble. I should have kept you a little duller. A man who can think for himself will, sooner or later, and I made certain you could. My own doing."

"You raised me to think for myself, Dowager. You can't be too surprised that one day I did."

Her mouth moved, not quite a smile, more than nothing. "Don't quote my own lessons back to me on the worst day of my year, soldier."

"Then I won't." He paused. "For what it's worth, and I know it isn't much, I hope the boy grows up nothing like either of us. I hope he grows up like her."

She didn't answer. There was no answer that didn't cost her more than she had left to spend. She turned and walked back into her wing with her spine straight and her composure intact, an old queen who'd lost a soldier and would not let the corridor see it.

Kavren stood alone in the gray. He'd just cut the one tie that had ever held him, and he kept waiting to feel sick about it. He didn't. He felt free instead, and the freedom scared him worse than the guards at dawn ever could.

He didn't go back to the barracks. There was nothing there for him now. No bunk that was his, no brotherhood that would look at him the same once the word got out, and the word always got out. He went instead to the one place a reassigned guard had no business going, the corridor outside the consort's confinement. He stood at the far end of it in the gray before dawn, where the stranger on her door couldn't quite see him, and he kept the only watch he had left to keep.

It wasn't his post. It would never be his post again. He stood it anyway, a soldier with no orders and no house and no one left to guard but a woman he wasn't allowed to reach. It was the only place in the Colony he wanted to be.

Somewhere past the stone, the dying sun climbed toward a horizon it wouldn't hold much longer. The answer Boradrith hadn't given yet hung over all of them. And two levels down, in a cold room, Diana sat awake and made her plans, and didn't yet know that the guard she'd never quite been able to predict had just handed away everything he owned to keep her.

CHAPTER 11

*** DIANA ***

The sun broke its promise on the third night, and it broke it all at once.

Diana felt it before she understood it. The stone under her bare feet, warm since they'd put her down here, went hot. Not warm. Hot, like a pan somebody had left on the flame too long. She stood up from the bed and put her hand flat to the wall and pulled it back fast.

"That's not good," she said, to no one at all. Saying the obvious out loud kept her hands steady. It was an old habit and it still worked.

Then the tremor came.

It started somewhere far below her and rolled up through the rock, a deep grinding she felt in her teeth before she heard it. The lamp jumped off its hook and smashed. Dust sifted down from a ceiling that had held for a thousand years and had apparently decided tonight was different. Down the corridor a man was shouting, and then a lot of men were shouting. Under all of it was a sound she'd heard exactly once before, on a burning ship falling out of the sky. It was the sound of a structure deciding it was finished.

She went to the door and hit it with the flat of her hand. "Hey. The one on the door. Whatever your name is. This level is coming down and I am not dying in a locked room because your Dowager's feelings got hurt. Open it."