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"Was that a joke? Two in one apocalypse. I really have ruined you." She let herself lean, just slightly, into the warm bulk of him, where the crowd couldn't quite see. "We're not safe, you know. Not really. The sun's not done, Jadirel's not done, your Dowager is very much not done. Nothing's finished."

"No." He looked down at her, gray with dust, still standing. "But we're not hunted anymore. And you're out of that room. I'll take the rest of it as it comes."

"Greedy," she said. She closed her eyes for one second and let the hum say the part she was too tired to say herself.

CHAPTER 12

*** DIANA ***

They gave her the old rooms back near dawn, and she used them but refused to let Kavren stand at the door.

"You're not on duty," she said.

"I'm always on duty."

"Not tonight. Tonight, you're a man with a broken shoulder who carried a building for me, and you are going to come inside and let a healer look at you. Or let me. I'll warn you now that I'm worse at it and I don't care." She held the door open. "In. That's not a request. I've had a very educational day about which of my requests you actually obey."

He came in. She'd half expected him to argue it into the ground the way he argued everything. Instead, he came in, and that told her more about the state of him than the shoulder did.

The healer had come, set the joint, strapped the wing and left again in a hurry, because there were forty other broken people that night and only so many hands. So it was Diana who eased him down onto the edge of her bed and wiped the dust off him with a cloth and warm water, one careful stretch of him at a time. It was the strangest tenderness she'd ever performed. She'd spent eighteen months not touching a single soul on this planet on purpose. Now here she was, learning the map of him by lamplight with a wet cloth, and her hands weren't as steady as she'd have liked.

"Hold still."

"I am still."

"You're vibrating. It's very subtle. I've read people for a living since before you could shave. You're vibrating. So hold still and tell me where it hurts."

"Everywhere. It's fine. It's a good kind of hurt."

"There's no good kind of a ceiling."

"There is." His good hand caught her wrist and made her look at him. "It didn't reach you. That's the good kind. I'd carry it again tonight, and every night after. Easiest order I was ever handed."

"You've got scars older than my career," she said, working the cloth along a pale seam under his collarbone. "This one?"

"Drog. Second winter on the line. I was nine."

"This?"

"Training. A captain who didn't care for questions."

"And this?" Her thumb found a long ridge across his ribs.

"I don't remember that one. There were a lot of them by then. You stop keeping count."

"I keep count," she said quietly. "Somebody should have."

He didn't answer. She watched him not answer. He'd been patched up a hundred times by people doing a job, and not once, she'd have bet her life on it, by anyone who was angry on his behalf.

A runner came to the door then, a girl from Athena's wing, with the word Diana had already asked for twice. The boy was asleep in the core, tucked in beside Athena's daughter with a guard on the room. He'd cried for all of five minutes, the girl said, then decided the disaster was beneath his notice.

"Of course he did," Diana said, and something that had clenched in her chest since the first tremor finally eased. "Tell Athena I owe her a life. She'll say I already paid it. Tell her anyway."

The girl went. Diana kept her back to Kavren a moment, getting her face in order, and didn't manage it as smoothly as she usually did.

She set the cloth down in the basin. Her hands had stopped being much use.

"You have to stop talking to me like that," she said. "I'm very tired. I've got almost nothing left holding. And when you say things like that, the last of it goes."