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"No," she agreed. "I don't suppose they did."

* * *

"Let me save us both some time, Kavren." She kept her voice easy, the way she did for the hardest conversations. She wanted him to see, straight off, that he didn't frighten her. "You've been sent to watch me. You'll follow me everywhere I'm allowed to go. You'll note who I speak to and what I want. And every night you'll carry it back to the woman who wants my son out of the royal line and me on the next ship home. I know all of it. I knew it before you told me your name."

He didn't flinch. If anything, the violet eyes sharpened.

"So here are the only rules that matter." She started walking, and he fell in. "Keep your distance through my day, and I'll pretend I've forgotten you exist. We both do our jobs. You watch, I work, you report what you see. Frankly I'd rather Sillevia get her information from someone who can count than from the amateurs she usually sends. And keep up. I walk fast, and I'm late for a great many things that won't wait for either of us."

She expected silence at her back. A well-trained spy takes the opening and says nothing.

"You didn't ask what I'll report," Kavren said.

Diana stopped.

It was a small question, and it stopped her where she stood. She'd had watchers before, more than she could count, and every one of them had promised, one way or another, to be loyal eyes for whoever was paying. Not one had ever asked her what he ought to write down, as if the two of them might decide it together.

She turned back. He was looking at her the way she looked at other people, and she found she had no ready answer for a man who looked at her like that.

"No," she said slowly. "I didn't."

"You should." He said it without weight, the way she'd learn he said everything true. "You read a room better than anyone in it. So you already know a report is written by a person, and people are never as simple as the ones who send them."

For a moment neither of them spoke. The corridor hummed with the slow pulse of the light panels.

"You're going to be a problem," she said. It came out more honest than she'd meant.

"I'm your guard." The corner of his mouth again, the almost and not-quite. "Problems are what I'm here to prevent."

"That," Diana said, turning for the council chamber with her pulse doing something inconvenient behind her ribs, "is not the kind of problem I meant."

She walked, and he fell in behind her at the correct distance. She promised herself she'd have him read down to the studs by the end of the week. She was very good at reading people down to the studs. She did not let herself consider, that first morning, that a man could be read all the way down and still turn out to be the one person she hadn't planned for.

She'd have plenty of time to consider it later. For now, there was a council to win, a son to protect, and a watchful stranger three steps behind her who had just done what nobody in this court ever did.

He'd told her the truth.

CHAPTER 2

*** KAVREN ***

Kavren had been a soldier for twenty years, and he'd never once been handed an assignment he understood less by the hour.

The orders were simple. The Dowager gave them the way she gave everything, in that flat even voice that never had to rise to be obeyed. Watch the human. Learn how she worked, who she leaned on, what she was really after. Find the one weakness that could be used against her, and bring it home.

"You're not to move against her," Sillevia had said. "I want you to see her. Clearly. Clarity is the only weapon that has ever won anything in this court."

"Understood."

It was the only word a soldier of her house ever gave her. He'd been six years old when a Drog swarm broke the wall of his settlement and took his parents with it, and the Dowager's household took him in. She fed him, named him, and drilled him into the sharpest blade in her guard. Loyalty to Sillevia wasn't something he'd weighed and chosen. It was the floor he'd learned to stand on before he knew there were other floors.

He hadn't asked what would happen to Diana Montanari once the seeing was done. It wasn't his question. A blade doesn't ask where the arm means to swing it. Watch, report, hold his post. He told himself that all the way to her door. It kept being true, and it kept not being enough.

So he watched the human. Simple, on paper. By the second corridor he'd stopped trying to guess where she'd go next. He just followed, which bothered him less than it should have.

* * *

He'd grown up in these tunnels. But he'd grown up in the parts that belonged to Sillevia's household, and Diana went where he'd never had reason to walk.