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The Dowager sent for her three days later, which Diana had been expecting since the night Boradrith freed her.

She went alone. She left Kavren at the turn of the corridor, over his objection. Whatever this was, it would only go worse with the Dowager's lost blade standing in the room where she'd have to look at him.

Sillevia sat where she always sat, in the low amber light, the cup of dark water she never drank turning a slow half-circle under her hand. She did not offer Diana a chair. Diana took one anyway and sat, and watched the old woman note it and decide to let it pass.

"You won," Sillevia said. No preamble. "I want to say it plainly, once, so neither of us has to pretend I'm still playing a game I've lost. You took my blade, my son's marriage and half my court. You did it in eighteen months with a baby on your hip. I've watched clever people all my life. You're the most dangerous one I've had in this room."

"That's not how I'd tell it," Diana said. "I didn't take Kavren. I stopped lying to him, and it turned out nobody ever had. That's not a weapon. That's just what you did to him first."

Something moved in the old woman's face, brief and gone. "You think you understand what I did to him."

"I think you took a starving child and turned him into the best man in your house, and I think you called him a weapon every day so you'd never have to call him a son." Diana kept her voice even, without heat. "I'm not here to punish you for it. I'm raising one of my own. I know exactly how easy it is to call a child a weapon so you never have to feel what it costs to call him a son. I just stopped sooner than you did."

Sillevia was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its edge. What was under the edge was worse. It was honest.

"He was six years old and he wouldn't stay down," she said. "I have wanted very little in my life as much as I wanted that child to live. And I taught myself not to want it, every day, for twenty years, and I was proud of the lesson." She looked at Diana. "You undid it in a season. I don't forgive you. But I've stopped needing you gone. For me those have always been the same sentence, so hear how much it costs me to say them apart."

"I hear it." And Diana did. "So where does that leave us?"

"On the same side of exactly one matter, and it's a large one." Sillevia set the cup down. "Jadirel. You think he's a barracks problem. He's not. Men like him have always been here. The dying sun didn't make them. It just handed them the best argument they've had in nine generations, and Jadirel is clever enough to spend it well. He is not coming for me, or for the king. He's coming for the alliance, which means he's coming for your ships, your treaty and that boy in your rooms who is half of what he hates. I have spent a lifetime learning where the knives come from. I would rather point that lifetime at him than waste it on you." She met Diana's eyes. "That is not friendship. Don't mistake it for friendship. It's two people agreeing on which fire to put out first."

"I've built alliances on a great deal less," Diana said. "And been glad of them."

"Yes." The ghost of something almost like respect crossed the Dowager's face. "I imagine you have." She turned the cup once more, then stopped. "The child. Plovus. I'll not move against him again. Not because I've grown soft. Because a boy with your mind and my son's blood may be the most useful child this line has bred in three generations, and I did not survive nine of them by breaking my own good tools." She paused a moment, and said, "Raise him warm. It's the one advantage I couldn't give the other one. See that this one has it."

Diana stood. At the door she stopped, and looked back at the old woman alone in the amber light, formidable and grieving and not wrong about the knife in the dark.

"He asks after you," Diana said. "Kavren. He'd never say it. But he does. You were as close to a mother as he ever got, and he grieves you the way you grieve him, in a locked drawer where nobody can see it." She opened the door. "You raised him too well to hate you. I thought you'd want to know it, even if neither of you will ever do anything about it."

She left before the Dowager could arrange her face, which was the only mercy either of them had room for that day.

*** Kavren ***

The barracks didn't know what to do with him, so mostly they did nothing, which suited Kavren fine.

He came to collect the last of his kit on a gray afternoon, and the room became quiet when he stepped through the door. Every man in it knew the story, or some version of it. None of them had worked out what to say to it. He'd expected that. He hadn't expected Dresh to be sitting on his old bunk, waiting, turning a strip of dried meat over in his hands and not eating it.

"So," Dresh said. "The consort's guard. Or her something. Nobody's settled on the word yet, and you never did make anything easy to file."

"Her protection detail. By the king's order." Kavren rolled his spare shirts into his pack. "You can say it plainer than that. You've earned it."

"Fine. You fell for the human, lied to the Dowager, took a ceiling for her and walked into the king's own chamber to trade your neck for hers." Dresh finally bit the meat. "I've been telling it as a warning to the young ones. Half of them think you're a traitor. The other half think you're the best story to come out of this barracks in twenty years." He chewed. "I haven't decided which of them is right, and I've known you since we were nine."

"Both," Kavren said. "That's usually how it goes."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be." He sat down on the bunk beside his oldest friend. It might be the last time he'd have the standing to. "I need you to hear me out, Dresh. Then I'll go and stop making your bunkmates nervous. The young ones you're worried about. Jadirel's got more of them than the captains think, and he's got them better armed than a mess-hall temper pays for. If you're still the kind of man who tells me the truth even when it's a bad idea, I need you to be my eyes in here. Not for the Dowager. Not even for the king. For the forty children on that nursery corridor when Jadirel decides the sun's given him permission."

Dresh stopped chewing. He looked at Kavren for a long moment, and the ease went out of his face and left something older and steadier behind it.

"You're serious."

"I've been serious since the night they took her down to that cell and I watched a barracks I'd bled for decide it didn't much care." Kavren held his gaze. "I'm not asking you to spy. I'm asking you to notice, and to come find me when you do. You've got a conscience that never once learned to keep its mouth shut. It's why you're the one part of this barracks I'm sorry to leave."

Dresh was quiet. Then he stuck out his hand, forearm to forearm, the old grip from the training yard.

"I'll notice," he said. "You watch your human's back, and I'll watch the dark for the knife. And Kavren." He tightened the grip. "For what it's worth from a man half your barracks thinks you betrayed. I'd have done the same for the right person. I just never met one worth the trade. I'm glad you did."