Page 24

They settled in the way people settle when the only available action is waiting. The warriors found positions along the walls and went into the flat, patient stillness that Weredragon soldiers can produce on command. Chen fell asleep in about ninety seconds with her back against the stone, which Varek recognized as a professional skill and admired accordingly.

The chamber had a colony of glowing rock-moss on the ceiling that he'd hauled down from a deeper system a year and a half ago, and it put out a low blue-green light that made everything in the cave look like it was underwater.

Athena sat against the wall across from him, her forearms wrapped in wet cloth.

"You built this," she said.

"I found it and improved it. There were three other emergency shelters like it along the main corridors."

"Three others."

"Four total. North, west, east, and one south of the vent fields that I don't trust." He shrugged. "Superstorms come up in four minutes. A man alone with four minutes needs somewhere he can be inside of two."

"You built a shelter network for one person."

"Yes."

"And today it held seven."

Varek hadn't thought of it that way, and didn't have anything to say about it. He looked at the floor of the cave instead.

"Tell me," Athena said.

"Tell you what."

"The whole thing. Not Auren's version, not the version the warriors whisper to each other. Yours." She shifted against the wall. "We've got six hours in here, and I would rather spend them on that than on anything else on offer."

He looked around the chamber. The warriors were arranged along the walls with their eyes shut, the way Weredragon warriors shut their eyes when they are not remotely asleep.

"There's an audience," he said.

"There's always an audience. That's the job." She held his eyes. "Say it anyway."

* * *

So he told her.

He started with the third winter, because that was where it actually started, and not with the council chamber, which was where everyone else always started it.

"Kesh Hollow was the worst of them. Four hundred and eleven people, six days from the capital on the ground, running on half rations by midwinter, and the capital's core reserve sitting full the whole time." He turned a chip of basalt over in his fingers while he talked. "You want to know what half rations look like when it goes on for a whole season. It doesn't look like people going hungry. It looks like people making arrangements."

"What kind of arrangements."

"The elders stop eating. Never all at once, and never anywhere you can see them do it. If you ask them straight out they'll tell you they ate earlier. There was a woman there, Sevriss, who ran the settlement's water allocation. Ninety-one years old. She'd worked out a rotation with four other elders, so that on any given day at least one of them was visibly eating in the common room, and the other four were not." He set the chip down. "So that the young ones wouldn't notice. They had worked out a schedule for it."

Athena didn't say anything.

"I filed that. In those words. I wrote, the elders of Kesh Hollow have organized a rotating fast to hide the shortfall from their children, and I put their names in it, and I sent it up the chain." He looked at his hands. "There was no response. Not a rejection. No response at all. It was received and filed, and it went into the archive, and nothing happened, because there was nothing in the system that knew what to do with a sentence like that one."

"So you built the plan."

"So I built the plan in three months. I pulled every agricultural projection for the last forty years, and I found the redistribution curve that moved the surplus without dropping the capital under its own margin. I had two logistics coordinators and a settlement agronomist check the math behind me." There was no pride anywhere in his voice. "It worked. That's the part I've had two years to be certain about. It wasn't a passionate document. It was a boring document, full of tables, and it would have fed Kesh Hollow through the winter without costing the capital a single day of its reserve."

"And Boradrith said no."

"Boradrith listened to me for an hour. That's the part nobody believes when I tell it. He read the tables. He asked four good questions, and one of them was better than anything my own people had thought to ask." Varek let out a breath. "And then he said the capital's stability was the foundation of everything and could not be risked for the periphery, and that was the end of the meeting, and he was courteous to me about it the whole way through."

"Periphery."