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"Last night. The same hour as the convoy notice." Auren's jaw was tight. "He was told his second sun has twelve cycles left and his grain has stopped coming, in the same reading, before breakfast. Athena, I have watched that man be frightened for a year. I have never watched him be frightened and cornered on the same morning."

"Then this is the morning we find out what he does with both hands held to the fire at once."

They found out at the eighth hour. A warrior from the D'Karr's own detail arrived at her office door, not Kaydren's people but Boradrith's, and informed her with stiff formality that the D'Karr required her in the private chamber. Not the council hall. The private chamber. She had been on Dobromia long enough to know exactly what that difference was worth.

"I'll walk you," Auren said.

"You'll walk me to the door. Past the door is mine."

* * *

The private audience chamber had the mirror-polished obsidian walls that threw the amber light back at you in dark, moving shapes. It was built for the delivery of things a room full of witnesses was not meant to hear. Boradrith sat at the head of the stone table. Sillevia sat at his left, composed as a closed door. Kaydren stood at his right shoulder, and the standing was the tell, because Kaydren did not stand in rooms where he was only a participant. He stood in rooms he had built.

Athena sat where she was told and put both hands flat on the table where everyone could see them.

"You have heard about the convoy," Boradrith said.

"An hour ago. Not through official channels, which I'll want to discuss when this is over."

"We are past channels." He did not raise his voice. She had never once heard him raise it. His authority lived in the quality of his attention, the way a room turned toward him the way a plant turns toward light. "Twelve cycles, Ambassador. My scientists put a number on it last night. This morning your Earth tells me the grain that number makes essential has been stopped by one person I have never met, for reasons I am not permitted to understand, with no date on its return. I have run this Colony for thirty years on one principle. I do not gamble with the center. You have asked me, for a year, to gamble the whole planet on a species I cannot see, cannot reach, and cannot hold to a single promise it has made me."

"Earth has kept every promise it has made you. The convoy is delayed by a political fight, not a decision to walk away from Dobromia. I can have the specifics through the relay in fourteen days."

"Fourteen days. You have said fourteen days in this building more often than any other sentence." Something moved under the calm, and it was not cruelty. It was fear wearing calm like a coat that had stopped fitting. "Here is what I require, and I require it today. The coordinates. Earth's location. The navigational data your sister carried off this planet the day she left."

There it was. She had known it was coming from the moment the detail warrior appeared at her door, and the knowing had not made it any lighter.

"I don't have them," Athena said.

"You are Marina Livingstone's sister and her ambassador on this planet."

"I'm both of those, and I still don't have them, because Marina made certain I wouldn't." She kept her voice level, which cost more than she let show. "She stripped the coordinates before she left. Not from you. From me. She knew there would be a morning exactly like this one, a morning where Dobromia was frightened enough to ask, and she made sure the person you would ask couldn't answer under any pressure a court could bring. It was not bad faith. It was a diplomat pulling the one lever that could break the alliance before the alliance was strong enough to survive it."

"How convenient." Sillevia spoke for the first time, and her voice was as pleasant as a cool room on a hot day. "The single piece of information this council has ever truly needed is the one piece the ambassador cannot produce. And we are asked to accept, on her word, that this is foresight and not refusal."

"You're asked to accept it because it's true."

"We are asked to accept a great deal on the ambassador's word." Kaydren spoke at last, and he spoke gently, which was the most dangerous register he owned. "I want to be careful, because the ambassador and I have a professional respect I would rather not lose. But this council is being asked to weigh her word at the exact moment her judgment is in question, and it would be a failure of my duty not to say so plainly."

"Say it plainly, then. You've been building to it for a season. Don't get shy at the finish."

He inclined his head, as though she had complimented him.

"The ambassador manages this body. She told us so herself, in open council, a matter of weeks ago. She filed a contact in writing rather than reporting it aloud, so that she could control when and how this council learned a thing she had decided we could not be trusted to handle. That is a matter of record. She has passed out through the surface gate alone on eleven evenings this season, at last light, facing north, toward a banished commander this D'Karr removed for calling him a coward. That is also a matter of record. I make no claim about the nature of the contact. I do not need to. I only observe that we are asked to take, entirely on faith, the word of an ambassador who has shown she decides for herself which truths this council is fit to hold, and who has formed an attachment to the one living Weredragon with the strongest possible reason to want this D'Karr weakened."

The chamber went quiet. Athena let it stay quiet, because rushing to fill a silence was how you told a room you were afraid of it.

"That's a good speech. It has the shape of a true thing." She turned from Kaydren to Boradrith, because Kaydren was not the one who decided things. He was only the one who arranged the room. "So, here's the actual true thing to set beside it. Every claim he just made, I put into the record myself. The council-managing, I conceded to Khrelan on my feet, out loud, because he was right. The surface trips, I filed a two-page proposal about on Monday, addressed to you, copied to Kaydren by name, asking to make them official. I have hidden none of it. He knows that, because he got all of it from documents I signed." She kept her eyes on the D'Karr. "I don't have the coordinates. Detaining me will not change that, because a fact does not turn into a different fact under pressure. But I understand that you're frightened, and frightened men need to be seen to act, so I'll spare you the work of dressing it up. You're going to hold me until Earth gives you something. Say it in the open, where I can watch it coming, and let's not both pretend it's protection."

Something crossed Boradrith's face that, in a smaller man on a better morning, might have been shame.

"You will be moved to secured quarters," he said. "The lower levels. Guarded. Your relay access reviewed by the council before transmission. This is not punishment, Ambassador. It is a surety, held until Earth demonstrates that this alliance is a thing I can rely on rather than a thing I am asked to trust."

"It's a hostage with better manners. But you knew that when you sat down." She stood before the guards reached her, because she would leave the room on her own feet or not at all. "I'll go quietly. Making your warriors carry me out is theater, and I don't do theater. Put one thing in your own record, though, for the morning this turns around. I told you the truth in this room on a day it cost me my freedom to tell it, and I did it anyway. You've met one other person who does that. You put him on the surface three years ago."

Boradrith did not answer. At his shoulder, Kaydren watched her with the still, reassessing attention of a man discovering that a piece he had spent a season moving had turned in a direction he never drew on his board.

* * *