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"And there he is." Marina's voice changed, went soft and huge. "The boy the court lost its mind over. Hello, small king. Half my fleet is up there because your mother refused to let people like you turn into a line in a report." Plovus took hold of her collar and considered her with Boradrith's gold eyes. "Oh, he's a menace. Good. This planet's going to need a few of those."

*** Diana ***

They gave the humans and the court a single hour in the cool of the upper chamber before the real work swallowed everyone, and Diana spent it watching two worlds' worth of people she loved fill a room that had spent a year being cold.

Marina kept a hand on Athena's arm the entire hour and didn't seem to know she was doing it. Varek stood back with their daughter asleep against his chest, and when Marina finally turned to him, he inclined his head the way he did to very few people.

"You're the exile," Marina said. "The one who fought the arena. Athena's told me. Half of it I didn't believe."

"Believe the half that made me sound foolish," Varek said. "That half is true."

"He's being modest," Athena said. "It's new. I'm encouraging it."

Toren was on the fleet feed from Earth, rose-gold and grinning on a screen, holding the alliance's far end together with the patience Diana had never learned. He and Marina argued across the light-lag about the treaty schedule for a full minute before Diana understood that the arguing was how the two of them said they loved each other, the same as her and Kavren traded threats.

"He'll come with the second convoy," Marina said, when the feed cut. "Somebody has to hold Earth steady, and he's better at governments than I am. I'm better at stars, and your star is the most interesting corpse in the sky right now, so." She shrugged, and under the shrug was a scientist who'd stared down a dying sun for a year to save her sister's adopted world. "I'm staying for a while. I’m staying however long the measuring takes."

"Good," Diana said, and did not trust herself to say more.

Across the room the Dowager sat apart, straight-backed and watchful, taking the measure of every human who came off those ships. Their eyes met once. Sillevia inclined her head a fraction, barely a motion at all, and Diana returned it. It was not warmth. It was two people agreeing on which fire to put out first, and on a day like this one that counted as a kind of peace.

*** Kavren ***

Late, when the chamber had thinned and the two worlds had gone off to argue over berths and timetables, Kavren found Diana at the rail of the observation gallery, looking down at the ships.

"You've been standing watch all day," she said, without turning. "You can stand down now. The fleet's here. Nobody in that room wants me dead tonight. Even your Dowager only wants me useful."

"I don't stand it because you're in danger." He came to the rail beside her. "I stand it because it's where I want to be. I thought we settled that."

"We settled that." She leaned into him, and the hum came up between them, low and easy and by now as familiar as breathing. "I have to ask you something. It's a real question, so give me a real answer."

"Always."

"You gave up everything you had for this. Your house. Your name in the barracks. The only mother you ever knew, sitting downstairs refusing to look at you." She turned to face him. "You did it for a woman you can't marry, on a planet that's ending, with a court that'll never fully stop watching us. I need to know you don't regret it. Not the noble version. The true one."

Kavren looked at her for a long moment. Then he did what he almost never did on purpose. He reached up and put his hand against the side of her face, in front of the ships and the gallery and anyone who cared to see, and let every guard he owned come down at once.

"I spent twenty-six years being the most useful blade in someone else's hand," he said. "I was good at it. I never once, in all that time, chose a single piece of my own life. Not my name. Not my post. Not the woman I was sent to watch." His thumb moved along her cheek. "You are the first choice I ever made, Diana. You and that boy asleep downstairs who grabs my scales like he owns them. I didn't give up a life for you. I got handed one. There's nothing to regret. There's just this, and I'd give it all up again tomorrow to keep it."

Diana was quiet. Then she laughed, unsteady. She put her forehead to his chest, over the hum.

"You're getting alarmingly good at that," she said. "The talking. I liked you better when you only had four words and three of them were tactical."

"You did not."

"No," she admitted. "I didn't."

*** Diana ***

She went to check on Plovus before she let herself sleep, the way she did every night now, and found she wasn't the first one there.

Kavren stood over the pallet in the dark, not touching, only watching the boy breathe, with the particular stillness she'd once mistaken for a soldier's blankness and had long since learned was the opposite of it. Plovus slept with one fist curled around the edge of his blanket and the other flung wide toward the empty air, the way he slept when he felt safe enough to take up room.

"He does that now," Kavren said quietly, not turning. "Sleeps like the floor won't open. He didn't, those first weeks I stood your door. He slept in a tight ball with his back to the wall." He paused. "I knew the shape of it. I slept that way until I was grown."

"And now?"

"Now I sleep like the floor won't open." He looked at her across their son. "I didn't know a person could learn that as late as I did. I'd about decided some of us just weren't going to get to."