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She was a very good liar. She could not, it turned out, fool herself worth a damn.

* * *

She wrote the report in her office with the door open, and it took two hours, which was three times what it should have taken, because she wrote it twice.

The first version was clean and complete. Patrol composition, route, contact time, enemy count, her own routing error stated flat with no cushion under it, Korvath's injury and prognosis, charge expenditure, and the intervention of an unidentified third party who had engaged and killed two adult Drogs before the patrol could re-form.

She read it back, deleted that last line, and wrote it again with his name in it. Then she sat there and had a short, unpleasant conversation with herself about what exactly she thought she was doing.

She was hiding an asset from her own reporting chain. That was the honest name for it, and she'd done it twice before in her career, and both times there had been a written justification under seal inside a day, and both times she could have told you exactly why. She couldn't tell you exactly why this time. That was the part that itched.

So, she put the honest version back, name and all. If Boradrith wanted to make something of it, he could make something of it out in the open, where she could watch it coming.

Then she went to find Auren, because she had questions, and Auren was the answer to most of them.

* * *

He was in the communal hall with a cup of something and four junior warriors for an audience, in the middle of a story that needed both his hands.

He saw her face over their heads and wrapped it up in about nine seconds.

"That was fast," she said, when he reached her.

"You have a face you make. There are six of them, I know all six, and this is the one that means somebody bled." He steered her out into the corridor, toward the quieter stretch near the administrative level. "Who?"

"Korvath. He has a wing tear, but he'll knit."

"Drogs?"

"Seven of them, in the neck of the eastern canyon."

Auren stopped walking. "The canyon."

"The canyon."

"That has been clean for a year."

"It was clean eleven times, and then it wasn't." She leaned against the corridor wall. "Auren, we had help out there."

"From what?"

"From a Weredragon exile who came off the south ridge at two hundred feet, killed two adults in seven seconds, and then stood there like he was waiting for someone to put him in chains." She watched his face while she said the next part. "His name is Varek."

Auren didn't say anything for three full seconds, which for Auren was roughly the same as another man sitting down hard in a chair.

"Varek," he said.

"You know him."

"Everyone over the age of twenty knows him. Yes, I know him." He ran a hand down the plates of his jaw. "Sit down. This is a sitting-down conversation, and you are going to want a chair for it."

* * *

They ended up back in her office with the door shut and Auren folded into the guest chair that had never once been the right size for him.

"Commander Varek ran the outer settlement patrols for six years," he said. "Gorvath trained him. Gorvath has trained four hundred warriors in this Colony, and there are two he'll talk about without being asked, and Varek is one of the two."

"He's that good."