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Diana let them go at it. Kavren noticed that first. She didn't jump in to smooth it. She let the old researcher say something ugly about humans who came to a dying world to measure it like a corpse. She let the scientist fire back that a corpse was exactly what the Colony would be without Earth's instruments. She watched it all heat up and never once looked worried. Then, when both sides had finally said everything they'd come to say, she reached in and pulled the one thread that held all of it together.

"You both want the same measurement," she said. "You just can't stand the idea of the other one's hand on the instrument." She turned a schematic so both tables could see it. "Weredragon eyes read this band of the spectrum. Earth's array reads that one. Neither of you can model the collapse alone. You've been pretending you can so you don't have to say out loud that you need each other." She sat back. "The sun doesn't care who's proud. It's dying on a schedule, and right now the schedule's the only thing in this room with any authority."

Nobody spoke for a moment. Then the old researcher grunted, which from him was practically a treaty.

By the end of the hour there was a plan on the table that hadn't existed when Kavren walked in, and both sides had signed it like it had been their idea all along. She hadn't beaten anyone. She'd made losing unnecessary, which was harder, and a great deal more dangerous in a court that ran on people beating each other.

He carried that out of the caverns and couldn't put it down. Where Kavren came from, power was a chair with room for one. Every gain was somebody's loss. Diana didn't seem to believe that. She acted like the pie could get bigger, like two enemies could both walk out holding more than they came in with. The maddening part was he'd just watched her prove it. A soldier had no drill for an enemy who won by making everyone win. He only had the growing feeling that the Dowager had sent him to break the one person actually keeping the Colony alive.

* * *

That night he made his first report to the Dowager. Every word of it was true, and none of it was the truth.

He told her the consort had brokered a research deal between Earth and the Colony. Politically able. Effective in a mixed room. Methods that leaned on numbers instead of charm. All of it would survive any test Sillevia could put to it.

He left out the rest. The way the old researcher's arms had come uncrossed. The silence Diana let build before she spoke. The plain fact that he'd watched a human woman do something he couldn't do, and had felt something he had no business feeling about it, which was close to admiration.

Impressions weren't intelligence, he told himself. Facts were. He'd given her the facts.

He didn't look too hard, that night, at why he'd needed to say that to himself.

*** Sillevia ***

Sillevia read the report twice, which was one time more than it deserved, and set it down unsatisfied.

It was a good report. That was the trouble. It was clean, precise and completely useless. A research deal. Politically able. Effective in a mixed room. She'd read a hundred reports shaped just like it in her long life, and every one had been written by a soldier handing her the shape of something while carefully leaving out the middle.

She knew Kavren. She'd made him, out of a starving child in the third winter of the shortfall, into the finest blade in her guard, and she knew the exact sound of his honesty. This didn't have it. It had the sound of a man being careful. Not lying. Careful. He'd told her what Diana did and skipped how she did it, and the how was the only part Sillevia had any use for.

You couldn't hang a schemer on a list of her competencies. You hung her on the warmth. The small human softness a clever enemy could dress up as manipulation. Those were the pieces she'd sent him to bring back. The clean report didn't hold a single one.

She thought about the boy he'd been. The one who kept standing up after her captains knocked him down. She'd built her whole plan on that stubbornness. It hadn't occurred to her, until tonight, that a will strong enough to keep getting up was also a will strong enough to pick its own direction.

She wouldn't confront him. A blade that knew it was watched learned to hide its edge, and she wasn't ready to lose the use of him. She'd put her own eyes on the gaps instead. A servant here. A guard there. A quiet look at the thermal logs.

She filed the report, and she made one note in the ledger she kept where no report could reach: the soldier she'd raised had started standing between her and the truth. She'd need to know why before it cost her something she couldn't get back.

CHAPTER 4

*** DIANA ***

It started with corridors, which was safe. You could say a lot inside a corridor and pretend you'd said nothing at all.

Diana thought out loud when she walked, and a guard who walked behind her all day made a decent audience whether he wanted to or not. She started practical.

"Which way would you take me to the council if you had a choice?" she asked.

"The long eastern passage."

"It's four minutes slower."

"It's got one blind junction. The short way has three." He said it flat, like a man reading a supply list. "I'll trade you four minutes for two fewer places a knife could be waiting."

She adjusted her schedule to his routes and didn't tell him why. Good sense was good sense, even when it came out of a spy the Dowager had planted at her back.

That was how it began. It didn't stay there.

By the second week the questions had drifted off security, the way they do between two people who spend all day inside arm's reach of each other. He asked her something that had nothing to do with her safety, and she answered it. Afterward she noticed she'd told him the truth.