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Diana came and stood beside him, shoulder against his arm, and the three of them made a shape in the dark she'd spent years being too careful to let herself want.

"This is the part nobody warned me about," she said. "The good part. I spent so long braced for the next loss that I never once planned for what to do if I got to keep something." She rested her head against his shoulder. "I don't know how to do this, Kavren. Be happy. On purpose. Out loud, where the court can see it and use it."

"Then we'll be bad at it together." He said it plainly. "I've never done it either. We'll practice." He was quiet a moment, and then, dry: "You're further along than you think. Three jokes this week, and only one of them was at my expense."

"Give me time."

*** Diana ***

It should have ended there, and for one night, it almost did.

The word came up an hour before dawn, carried by a runner who'd sprinted the length of the lower levels and could barely get it out. Kavren had it before the boy finished. Diana watched his face change, watched the soldier come back into it like a tide, and knew the peace had lasted exactly as long as she'd feared it would.

"Jadirel," Kavren said. "He hit the eastern relay. The one Rodriguez moved up after the collapse."

"Casualties?"

"Two guards down. Not dead. And the relay's gone. Burned, clean and deliberate." His jaw set. "That wasn't a barracks temper. That was a message. He waited for the fleet to land, for everyone to be looking up at the sky and feeling safe, and then he showed us he can reach out and cut the one line that matters whenever he chooses."

Diana was already moving, already reaching for the cold clear part of herself that a year of this planet had honed to an edge. But she stopped at the door. A new voice had come up the corridor behind the runner, dry and unbothered and entirely too amused for the hour.

"So this is the famous consort's rooms. Smaller than the stories. I'm told you're the woman who's going to want my help, and I'm told I'm going to hate agreeing to it."

The speaker leaned in the doorway with the easy insolence of a man who'd never once in his life stood at attention on purpose. Blue-and-yellow scales, dark hair with threads of blue running through it, eyes so dark they read as black, and a grin that was doing a poor job hiding something that wasn't a grin at all.

"Ganneth," Kavren said, and there was history in the single word. "They sent you."

"They sent me. Somebody has to catch a rebel the rest of the guard can't, and I'm the one nobody will miss if it goes badly." Ganneth's black eyes moved to Diana, and the grin sharpened. "And you. The human who turned the Dowager's own blade and lived. I've been dying to meet the person crazy enough to do my job on purpose." He pushed off the doorframe. "Jadirel's mine to hunt now, by the king's order. You're going to want to talk to me about who's arming him. I'd suggest tonight. He's not going to give us a slower one."

Behind him, half a step back and taking it all in with the still, assessing calm of someone cataloguing a new world, stood a woman off the fleet Diana didn't know. Earth-dressed, travel-worn, watching Ganneth with an expression that was equal parts exasperation and reluctant interest. She had the look of a woman who'd already worked out this man was going to be her problem, and hadn't yet decided how she felt about it.

Diana looked past Ganneth to the woman. "And you are?"

"Fiona. Structural engineer, off the lead ship." She had a low, even voice and didn't waste it. "I came down to survey habitat sites and keep your people from freezing on the cold worlds. I did not come down to get drafted into hunting a rebel in my first hour off the ramp, which is apparently what's happening, since your friend here has volunteered me twice already on the walk up."

"I volunteered your expertise," Ganneth said. "Engineers know how things fall down. It's the same knowledge a saboteur has, read from the other side."

"That is not comforting, and I've known you for one hour."

"You'll warm to me." Ganneth said it cheerfully, and the woman's jaw set in a way Diana recognized at once. She'd worn that exact look herself, about a certain purple-scaled guard, not so very long ago.

Diana looked at the burned relay in her mind, at the rebel in the dark, at the two strangers filling her doorway who were so plainly about to become the next fight none of them had asked for. She understood that this ending had only ever been a door.

She looked up at Kavren. He was already watching her, already reading her, already at her back where he'd decided to live.

"Well," she said. She felt the hum steady under her ribs. She picked up her son's blanket from the chair and squared her shoulders, the way she had on three worlds, in two wars, on one dying planet that had, against every price she'd ever set, become home. "Nobody said the good part came free. Let's go to work."

Outside, past the stone, Earth's ships glowed on the dead surface like a fistful of new stars, and the wounded sun climbed toward a morning that, for the first time in a generation, the people of Dobromia were going to be alive to see.

***

He was sent to hunt a dangerous enemy. She was sent to find the trail he left behind. Neither expected the real danger would be losing their hearts…

Continue the Weredragon Mates saga with “Chosen by My Weredragon”.