Page 30

*** Diana ***

That night the three of them were in her rooms, which was becoming a habit she had no intention of breaking.

Plovus had finally surrendered to sleep on the pallet. Kavren was working a stiffness out of the mended wing by the low light, slow and patient, and Diana was reading the Earth manifest for the fifth time. Some part of her still didn't believe the ships were real.

"Sixty days," she said. "In sixty days Marina walks off a landing craft, looks me up and down, and tells me I look tired. And she'll be right, and I'll have missed a woman I've met exactly once."

"You do look tired."

"You're supposed to be on my side."

"I'm on the side of you sleeping." He said it without looking up, and it was as close to worry as he ever let himself get out loud. "You've carried this planet on your back for eighteen months. In sixty days, you get to hand half of it to a woman who put a fleet in the sky out of spite. Let her carry it a while."

Diana set the manifest down. Across the room her son slept in a heap, gold-eyed and half-scaled and impossible, born into a dying world and about to be handed a second one. Beside her the man the Dowager had built into a blade sat mending his own wing so he could stand at her back a while longer. Two weeks ago she'd been in a cell counting the ways she might lose all of it.

"This is going to get worse before it's over," she said quietly. "Jadirel. The evacuation. Sixty days is a long time to hold a planet that's already halfway to the grave."

"It is." Kavren set the wing down and looked at her across the warm room. "But we hold it together now, out loud, with the king's own name on it. And I've stood harder watches for worse reasons than everything I've got left in the world sleeping ten feet away." He almost smiled. "This one I'll enjoy."

"That's three jokes now. I've completely ruined you."

"You have. I'd like it on the record that I let you."

She crossed the room, stepped over the sleeping baby and put herself under his good arm, where she'd decided she was going to keep living. The hum settled low and warm between them, steady on a world that had run out of steady. Outside, past the stone, the wounded sun dragged itself toward another poor morning. There was a fleet coming and a rebel rising and a hard sixty days between here and safe. But that was the next watch. This one was hers, and she stood it gladly. For the first time in eighteen months, she wasn't afraid of how much she had to lose.

CHAPTER 14

*** DIANA ***

The ships came down out of a dead sky on the sixtieth day, and Diana watched them from the surface with her son on her hip and Kavren at her shoulder.

They'd cleared the old landing shelf above the Colony and lined it with everyone who could be spared and a good many who couldn't. The surface was no place to linger now, the heat past bearing for more than an hour even in the failing light, but nobody was going below for this. Nine ships, Earth-gray and ungainly and beautiful, dropping through the brown haze on columns of fire. The gathered Colony became silent, hundreds of them at once, watching a rescue come down that most of them had stopped letting themselves hope for.

"There they are," Kavren said, low, at her shoulder. He had one hand shading his eyes and the other, without either of them remarking on it, resting flat against Plovus's small back. "You did that. You held the planet; the scientist built the fleet. Between the two of you, you put those in a dead sky."

"Marina put them in the sky. I just kept a planet alive long enough to catch them." Diana's voice wasn't steady, and for once, on a surface that had never once been kind to her, she didn't care who saw it. "Sixty days ago, I was in a cell. Now there's a fleet coming down because a human on a dying world told the truth for eighteen months and somebody on Earth finally believed her. I'm allowed to be a wreck about it."

"You are." He said it plainly. "I'll stand between you and anyone who mentions it."

The first ramp came down, and a small furious figure came off it at a near run, dark hair whipping in the hot wind, shoving a startled Earth officer out of her way.

She went straight past Diana. Past the king, past the court, past the gathered Colony, to a point down the line where Athena had stepped out ahead of Varek. The two sisters hit each other hard enough to stagger, and held on. Neither of them said a word that carried. Neither of them needed to.

Diana looked away to give them the moment, and found Kavren already watching her do it.

"You could go and have one of those," he said. "There are people off that ramp who crossed the dark for you too."

"My people are right here." She shifted Plovus higher on her hip and leaned into the warm bulk of him. "I came down alone eighteen months ago, and I meant to leave the same way. Watch me fail at it."

When Marina finally let go of her sister, she came down the line to Diana, wiping her face and not caring who saw. She stopped with the fast, frank appraisal Diana knew from a year of relay letters.

"Diana Montanari." Marina said it like a name she'd carried a long way. "Athena's written me about you for eighteen months, which means I know the half you'd never own to. You held this planet together with your bare hands so my ships would have somewhere to land." She put out her hand, and when Diana took it, she pulled her into a hard, brief embrace instead. "Thank you. I had faith. Faith doesn't feed a settlement. You did that."

"You started it." Diana's voice wasn't steady. "You handed me the far end and flew home to hold the rest. I've wanted to say that to your face since the day you left."

"We met once. An hour, on this same shelf, you coming down and me going up." Marina grinned. "You told me my alliance would come apart inside a year without someone stubborn to hold it. I quoted you to Toren for a week." Then she looked up at Kavren, up and up, and her scientist's eyes did the fast greedy cataloguing Diana knew from the inside. "And you got claimed. By that. Athena's letters undersold the size of him considerably." She was laughing again, wet and delighted. "Toren owes me money. He bet me you'd never let anyone in. I knew better."

Plovus made a lunge for Marina's collar with the sublime confidence of a baby who had never once been dropped.