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"You walked eleven days of grain," Khrelan said. "I have read the same inventory you have. Eleven days is not a reserve. Eleven days is a delay."

"Eleven days is what we had. A year ago, we had four."

"A year ago, we were starving, and I am not ungrateful, and you know that I am not." He leaned back. "I am not opposing the alliance, Ambassador. I signed it. I am asking whether we have built a bridge or a rope."

It was a good question and she knew she didn't have a good answer, which was not something she was going to say out loud in a room containing Sillevia.

The D'Sharr had not spoken all session. She sat at Boradrith's left in her usual arrangement of silver-blue stillness, and when she finally moved it was only to tilt her head half a degree toward Athena.

"Perhaps the ambassador would prepare a contingency plan," Sillevia said. "For the council's consideration. In the event of a failure she does not anticipate."

There it was.

The trap was elegant, and Athena walked into it with her eyes open because there wasn't a door on the other side. Present a contingency and confirm that the alliance's own ambassador expects it to fail. Refuse and confirm arrogance. Sillevia never pushed. She opened a hole in the floor and waited for you to decide which way to fall.

"I'll have it for the next session," Athena said.

"How reassuring," Sillevia replied, and looked away, and that was the end of Athena's afternoon.

Kaydren was in the corridor outside when she left.

He wasn't waiting for her. He was never waiting for her. He was simply where she was going to be. Red scales polished, hands folded, and a nod so precisely calibrated to protocol that it carried no information at all.

"Ambassador."

"Kaydren."

He held the nod one half-second past correct. Then he was gone down the corridor. Athena stood there with the certainty she'd been carrying for four months sitting in her chest like something swallowed wrong.

That man was building a file on her. She had no proof. She had twenty-two years of reading people and a security clearance she no longer technically held, and both of them were saying the same thing.

* * *

Auren showed up at her office with tea, which was how she knew it had been a bad session.

"You looked like you were going to hit Khrelan," he said, folding himself into her guest chair. He was too big for it. He'd been too big for it for a year and had never once sat anywhere else.

"I was going to hit Khrelan."

"With the staff or with your hands?"

"With the table."

"Ambitious." He handed her the cup. "Drink that. Melessra swears by it. She says it sharpens focus, and I say it tastes like a hot rock, and we've agreed to disagree."

Athena drank it. It tasted like a hot rock. "It's not bad."

"It's terrible. You're being polite, which is how I know the session was worse than I thought." Auren's gray scales caught the corridor light through the doorway, and his braid had slipped over one shoulder the way it did when he'd been moving fast. "Sillevia met with Kaydren this morning in her chambers for forty minutes with the door closed."

Athena set the cup down. "About what?"

"I don't know. That's the part I don't like." He was quiet for a beat, and the performance dropped out of his voice. The charm was real. It was also a coat, and he took it off when it mattered. "Sillevia doesn't meet with anyone for forty minutes. She holds court for six and dismisses people. Forty minutes means she was listening."

"To Kaydren."

"To Kaydren."

Neither of them said the rest of it. Athena picked the cup back up so she'd have something to do with her hands.