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"He's awake," Kavren said, not moving.

"He's been awake a while. He's building up to it. You've got a minute, maybe."

"I'll get him."

"You don't have to keep doing that."

"I know I don't." He was already up and crossing the cold floor. He lifted the boy off the pallet and settled him against the warm plate of his chest, and Plovus grabbed a fistful of purple scale and held on, thrilled with himself. "Good morning, small king. Your mother's about to tell you she'd have been up first."

"I would have."

"You were meant to hear that."

Diana propped herself on an elbow and watched the two of them, the big scarred soldier and the chubby happy baby, and decided that if a single councillor could see the Dowager's finest blade being gummed at by an heir at dawn, half her problems would sort themselves out from the confusion alone.

Then she got up. The morning was kind. The day would not be, and she had work.

* * *

Boradrith had started holding his real sessions in a small warm room off the high chamber with three people at most, the door shut. It told Diana more than any report could. The court had shrunk down to the people who actually did the work, and the people who actually did the work were tired.

He had the Earth relay logs spread across the table when she came in. Varek stood at the far end with his arms folded. That was most of what Varek did in meetings, and usually the most useful part of them.

"Sit," Boradrith said.

She sat. The fight over whether she would sit was three weeks and a collapsed planet ago, and neither of them had the strength to have it again.

"Earth's answer came on the night channel," he said. "Read it yourself. You'll trust it more from your own eyes."

She read it. Then she read it again. The first time, she hadn't quite believed it. A rescue convoy, nine ships, provisioning now. Berths for the settlements first, then the core. Engineers, medics, cold-world habitat frames. Marina's name on the science manifest, coming down herself with the sun models. Sixty days out.

"They're really coming," she said. Her voice wasn't as level as she'd have liked, and she let it not be.

"Athena's sister the scientist Marina put a fleet in the sky in two weeks." Boradrith almost smiled. "I begin to understand why your people are so hard to say no to."

"Marina started this alliance and then flew home to build it a spine. Athena held your Colony together from the inside. I only kept Dobromia breathing long enough for the ships to matter." Diana set the manifest down. "You didn't get one stubborn human, Boradrith. You got three of us, and we write to each other. Athena won't be fit to live with for a week once she hears her sister is on that manifest, and she's earned every hour of it."

"Then I'll brace for it." He set his hand flat on the manifest. "Which brings me to you. I'm not putting you back where you were, Diana. Consort in the shadows, useful and deniable. That version of you is spent. The court knows it, and I'm done pretending otherwise." He looked at her steadily. "I'm making the human seat a real one. A minister of the alliance, with a chair nobody can pull out from under you over a matter of whose bed you sleep in. You'll answer for Earth to this court, and for this court to Earth, in daylight, with your name on it."

Diana was quiet a moment. She'd come down eighteen months ago planning to do good from the shadows and leave. Nobody had ever offered her the daylight.

"You understand what that makes me," she said. "A human with a real seat and a half-human son in your line. Every hawk in the Colony will read it as the humans taking the throne one chair at a time."

"Let them read. The hawks want a clean bloodline on a planet that won't have air in a generation." Boradrith's voice went flat and tired. "I've buried the luxury of a clean bloodline. I want my people alive on some other world, and you're the one holding the door to it. Take the seat."

"I'll take the seat." She held his eyes. "Thank you. For the daylight. I didn't expect it from you. I've thought better of you than most people in this court, so that's saying a fair bit."

"Don't thank me where my mother can hear." He said it dry, but he meant the warning under it. "Which is the other reason you're here."

Varek spoke for the first time, from the end of the table. "The young ones, Jadirel’s people, are organizing. It's past mess-hall grumbling now. They've got a name, a story, and somebody's feeding them a better grade of steel than a mess-hall grumble can buy."

"Feeding them from where?" Diana asked.

"That's the question I can't answer yet," Varek said. "But when frightened men suddenly have good weapons, someone with money and a plan is standing behind them. I'd like to know who before we find out the loud way."

Diana filed it, cold and clear, next to everything else. The sky was falling and the rescue was coming and there was a knife sharpening itself in the dark of her own house. Some days the work was nothing but a running list of new ways people could get hurt.

*** Diana ***