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Auren told him the rest of it. The convoy stopped on Earth by one man's speech. The second sun cut to twelve cycles in the same night's reading. Boradrith frightened and cornered, demanding coordinates Athena did not have and could not produce, because Marina had stripped them from her before she left. Kaydren standing at the D'Karr's shoulder with a season's worth of small observations assembled into a case. The detention dressed up as a surety, with no natural end to it, because the price of her freedom was a thing nobody in reach could pay.

Varek listened to all of it without moving. When Auren finished, the surface was quiet except for the wind working along the ridge.

"You've tried the reasonable doors," Varek said.

"Every one of them. I argued with Boradrith for two hours. He told me my judgment about her cannot be relied on, which is his courteous way of saying he knows I love her, and closed the matter." Auren said it flat, without flinching from it, and Varek respected him more for the not-flinching than he would have for any performance of pain. "The channels are shut. So I walked out here to the one man who is not a channel."

"You want me to challenge the arena."

Auren went still. "You know the law."

"I've had two years and a great deal of discarded court record to read out here. The proving challenge is older than the banishment code by six hundred cycles. The original text lets any Weredragon present himself before the D'Karr, in his own body and his own voice, and invoke it. It does not restrict by citizenship, because when it was written, citizenship was not a thing anyone had yet thought to invent." He looked down toward the gate. "The banishment stripped my rank, my quarters, and my right of entry. It did not touch the arena, because nobody drafting a banishment ever imagined an exile would live long enough to want it."

"If you win, she goes free and your banishment lifts. If you lose, the judgment stands as final, and Boradrith's champion will not be fighting to make a point. He will be fighting to end you."

"I know what losing costs."

"Then you know I am asking you to bet your life on a single morning, for a woman I love and cannot have." Auren made himself say the last of it, because they were past the place where either of them got to be careful. "I want to be honest about what I am handing you and why."

Varek looked at him for a long moment.

"You walked across a killing ground on foot to hand the woman you love to the man she chose," he said, "because it was the right thing, and you refused to leave it undone. I know exactly one other person who does that. She's in a cell three levels down." He turned back toward the gate. "I'm not doing this to be noble. I spent two years surviving for no reason, on pure stubbornness, and stubbornness is a reflex, not a reason. She is a reason. The first real one I've had. I would rather spend a life on a reason than keep one out of habit."

Auren was quiet. The wind moved along the ridge.

"Come to the gate at midday," he said at last. "I'll have the perimeter guards told to let you pass. Present the challenge to the D'Karr in his own hall." He turned to go, then paused, not looking back. "She does not eat enough. She trains before she eats, works through meals and checks on her people without eating. She will deny it if you ask her, so don’t. Just see that she does it. I spent a year failing to change that pattern. Perhaps you will have better luck."

Then he started back down toward the gate, carrying a broken thing with a dignity Varek recognized as the hardest kind of courage. Not the courage of a fight, which is loud and over quickly, but the courage of continuing.

* * *

He walked through the surface gate at midday for the first time in two years, and the Colony swallowed him whole.

The warmth reached him first. Not the hostile heat of the surface but the low, breathing warmth of a place built to be lived in, pressing against his scales like a thing he had told himself he did not miss. The bioluminescent panels pulsed their slow amber rhythm along the walls. The floor was smooth under his feet. The air carried mineral water and the faint organic sweetness of the growing caverns. Under it, everywhere, was the smell of his own people, which he had not breathed in so long that it stopped him for half a step before he made his feet keep moving.

He knew these corridors. He knew every turning, the shortcut between the second and fourth levels that only the older residents remembered, the alcove where he had once stood to receive a commendation. He had walked this exact stretch two years ago, between two guards, going the other way. Going out. Now he was going in, flanked by guards again, and the only thing that had changed was the direction.

Warriors stopped in the corridors to watch him pass. He felt the weight of it, the recognition, the memory and the legend that had grown up in his absence and did not much resemble him. Some had served under him. Some knew him only as a story. The whispers moved ahead of him through the passages the way wind moves through a cave system. Varek. The exile. He's inside the walls. He invoked the arena.

He carried the attention without answering it. Two years alone had stripped the social reflexes off him. There was no nod, greeting or acknowledgment. He walked, and he looked forward. He let the Colony close around him like a memory he had stopped letting himself have.

There was the audience chamber, the obsidian walls and the amber light on black stone. And Boradrith at the head of the table, waiting.

The D'Karr had aged. Varek saw it at once. The gold scales that had been brilliant two years ago were duller now, carrying the patina of a man who had been frightened for a long time and had run out of places to put the fear. The lines around his eyes had cut deeper. He looked like a ruler who had spent every day of two years discovering that careful was not the same thing as safe.

They looked at each other across the length of the chamber, the D'Karr and the exile, and the silence between them was not empty. It was full of a council chamber, supply manifests, the names of dead children, a sentence pronounced, and a man who had refused to die of it.

"Speak," Boradrith said.

"I invoke the proving challenge." Varek's voice was steady. He had rehearsed it on the surface, shouting it into the wind where nobody could hear, wearing it smooth until it carried nothing it did not need. "Against the detention of Athena Livingstone, ambassador to this Colony. And against my own banishment. I will fight any champion you name. If I win, she goes free and my banishment ends. If I lose, your judgment stands as final, and I will accept whatever follows."

Boradrith was quiet for a long moment. The silence had a considered quality to it. He was not deciding. He had already decided. He was letting the moment carry its own weight.

"You survived the surface for two years," he said. "No Weredragon before you lasted one. How?"

"I declined to cooperate with the expectation, D'Karr."

"That has always been your most reliable quality. And your most inconvenient." Something moved behind the gold eyes. It was not warmth, and it was not quite sympathy. It was recognition, the look of a man reconsidering an old accounting. "Khrelan. You will fight Khrelan, in the proving arena, at dawn."