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"I know how to stand two feet from you." His voice warmed against her hair. "I did it for six weeks and it very nearly killed me. I can do it again now. It's easier, knowing what's underneath it."

"Underneath it," she repeated, and moved her hand to lie flat over the hum, over both their chests at once. "That's a good name for it. Underneath it. I can live with that."

"What happens tomorrow?" she said, after a while. "Really. You're a guard with no house, and I'm a consort who just got uncaged in front of the court. That's not a small mess. The Dowager doesn't lose. She reloads."

"Then we give her nothing to reload with." His voice was slow, thinking it through. "You go back to that council and you make yourself so useful to the survival of this planet that pulling you would cost the king more than keeping you. You're already most of the way there. You did it tonight in a corridor with a baby on your hip."

"And you?"

"I keep the post the king gave me, and I keep it so clean she can't find a seam to pull. Give her no fault to point at and she can't have me thrown out." He paused a moment. "You taught me that. Make yourself too expensive to spend. It works on Dowagers as well as it works on kings."

"Look at you. Playing the long game."

"I learned from the best. She's asleep on my shoulder, ruining my concentration."

"Can I ask you something, and you answer it straight," she said, "since we're apparently doing that now."

"Always."

"Plovus. Wherever this goes, whatever we manage to hold onto out there, he comes with it. He's not a complication I'll quietly set aside to make your life simpler. If you're in this, you're in it with a son who isn't yours. There's a king who'll always be his father. There's a family tree nobody on two planets has a name for yet."

Kavren was quiet a moment. Not the weighing quiet. The other one.

"I was a boy nobody wanted, once," he said. "The Dowager took me in to make a weapon, not a son, and she never let me forget which. I know exactly what it feels like to be measured for whether you're worth the keeping." His arm wrapped careful around her. "I'm not going to do that to a child. If he'll have me, I'm his. However the tree gets drawn."

Diana didn't answer right away. She couldn't have kept her voice level and she knew it. For once, she let him hear the reason.

"Okay," she managed. "Okay. Good."

"That's twice tonight I've made the unshakeable Diana Montanari lose her words. I'm keeping count."

"You keep your count," she said, wet with tears and laughing. "Just this once, I'll allow it."

He felt her lean heavy against him, sliding toward sleep at last. Then she surfaced one more time. She said what he'd learn later she had never once said aloud to another soul on this planet, or maybe on any of them.

"I love you. For the record. And since it's apparently already decided, I want it noted that I got there on my own, before anybody's hum had a vote."

"For the record," he said, and she felt him smile against her hair. "So did I. Weeks ago. In a cave. I just didn't have the word for it yet."

"You have it now."

"I have it now." He tightened his good arm around her, careful and sure. "Sleep, Diana. I've got the watch."

"You always say that."

"It's always been true. You only just found out it wasn't about the door."

She laughed, low and tired and warm. She let the sound of it fold down into the hum, and slept. And Kavren lay awake in the lamplight a while longer, not from duty and not from fear, but because the room was warm and the woman was breathing against his chest and he wanted, for once in his life, to stay awake inside something good instead of bracing for whatever came next.

Outside, past the stone, the wounded sun climbed toward a broken morning. There was a ruined planet to save, a Dowager to answer and a long hard road none of them could see the end of. But that was tomorrow's watch. Tonight, he held her, and the hum held them both. It was enough. It was his. And for the first time in twenty-six years, he was exactly where he wanted to be.

CHAPTER 13

*** DIANA ***

Two weeks after the sky finished falling, Diana woke up warm, and she lay still a moment to be sure of it.

Kavren was a furnace at her back, one arm heavy across her, the strapped wing long since freed and healing clean. Across the room, on the low pallet they'd moved in beside her bed, Plovus was making the small conversational noises he made before he decided to cry. He was not crying yet. Just telling the ceiling he had opinions.