Page 8

"The court says you seduced the D'Karr," he said one afternoon. Not an accusation. Just something set down to see what she'd do with it. "I've watched you for three weeks. Seduce isn't the word."

She almost laughed. "No. But it sells better than the truth."

"So what's the truth?"

"I chose him." She said it plainly. "Nobody talked me into anything. I came down with the mission and found a tired old king holding a dying planet together by himself, with a whole court measuring his chair for their own backsides. I thought I could do some good from the seat beside him. So I took it."

"For the good you could do," he said.

"For the good I could do. Children fed. The sky held off a little longer." She walked a few paces before the rest came. "And because I liked him. That's the part I don't say out loud. It ruins everyone's favorite story about me."

"You liked him."

"Still do. It was never a great romance, and I won't pretend it was. But it wasn't cold either, whatever they tell you over dinner." She glanced back at him. "We were two people who saw each other clearly and were decent about it. You can build a life on worse."

"The court says he stopped wanting you."

"The court's right, for once." Her voice stayed even, and it wasn't easy to keep it there. "He cooled the day Plovus was born. The boy was the whole point, to him, and then the boy existed. It stung. I'm not made of ledgers, whatever they think." Then she almost smiled. "Leave that out of your report. The Dowager would enjoy it far too much."

He was quiet behind her. Not the blank quiet of a man filing a report. The other kind, the kind that meant he was actually holding what she'd said and deciding where to put it. She knew, the way she knew most things, that not one word of it was going to reach the Dowager. She'd just handed a spy a knife and watched him set it down.

What she didn't say was that handing him the knife had been a test, and he'd passed it without noticing he was being tested. She'd spent eighteen months learning how much truth every person in this Colony could carry. Most of them, almost none. She'd told this one more in three weeks than she'd told the king she shared a child with, and she couldn't for the life of her explain why it felt like the safest thing she'd done since she landed.

*** Kavren ***

She asked him where he came from a few days later, and to his own surprise, he told her.

He'd meant to give her the flat non-answer he gave everyone. But she asked the way she asked everything, no pity in it and no pressure, like his history was just a stretch of the map she hadn't walked yet and meant to. It undid the habit of a lifetime.

"It happened in the Eastern line of the outer perimeter," he said. “A Drog swarm broke the wall in the third winter of the great shortfall. I was six. My parents were on the wall and didn’t survive"

"I'm sorry."

"It was a long time ago." He'd learned to say it without weight. Weight was something you couldn't carry on a march. "The Dowager's household took in the children the swarm left. There was four of us that winter. I was the one who kept getting up when the captains knocked me down, so they kept me and trained me. Here I am."

"Do you remember them? Your parents."

"No." He gave her the true answer because she'd given him true ones. "There's a sound. My mother had a way of talking I can almost hear and never quite. That's all that's left. Sillevia gave me a name that meant something, a place, a job. That was more than the swarm left me, and I never asked for more."

"That's not a family, Kavren." She said it gently. "That's a posting."

He'd never once put it in those words himself. For twenty years he'd called Sillevia's household a home and mostly believed it. And here was a woman who'd known him three weeks, naming the truth of his whole life in five words, with no cruelty in it at all.

"It was what I had," he said.

"I know." She looked back at him, and there was no pity in her face, which was the only reason he could stand it. Pity he could have turned aside. This was worse. This was being seen. "I've known a lot of people who mixed up what they were handed with what they actually wanted. You wear it better than most. That's not a compliment. It's just true."

He didn't have an answer, and she didn't seem to want one. They walked on. She'd heard what sat under what he'd said, the loneliness he'd folded down so small over so many years that he'd stopped feeling its weight. She hadn't tried to fix it or use it. She'd just seen it, let him know, and left it alone. Nobody had ever done that. He had no drawer to put it in, so he put it in the ledger he wasn't supposed to have.

* * *

The barracks hadn't changed, and that week it started to feel like something was wrong with that.

Dresh dropped onto the bench across from him at the evening meal and shoved a portion of dried Drog meat over to Kavren without being asked. They'd been boys together under the same captains.

"They've got you on the human," Dresh stated. Nothing moved through the barracks that the whole barracks didn't hear about. "How is she? The court says she's got the D'Karr so wrapped he asks her leave to breathe."

"The court says a lot of things." Kavren replied.