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Varek stood very still. He had built a great many speeches for this out on the surface, alone, talking to the walls of empty caves. None of them were the right size for what the old man had just set down between them.

"You argued," he said. "That was more than anyone else did."

"It wasn't enough. You said that better than I ever could, two years ago, to the same man, and it cost you everything, and you were right." Gorvath unfolded his arms. "You were right about the grain, you were right about the room and you were right about all of it. Being right nearly killed you, and here you are anyway, slow left and all." He put one scarred hand on Varek's shoulder, once, hard, the closest thing to an embrace the old warrior had ever offered a living soul. "Come back to the caverns. You're a disgrace in formation, and I intend to fix it before I'm too dead to enjoy the work."

"I have a great deal of diplomatic business coming."

"You have a lifetime of it coming, from the look of the woman who stood next to you in that chamber. The business will keep. Your left will not fix itself." He was already turning away. "First light. Don't be slow about it."

* * *

A delegation had come up from the settlements for the formalization, six days on the ground for a signature they would not get to hold, and one of them found Varek in the diplomatic wing on the second day.

She was young, a settlement warrior with the dust still in the seams of her scales, and she carried herself with the wary formality of someone sent to do a thing above her rank. She stopped a careful distance off and did not quite meet his eyes.

"You're the commander," she said. "Varek. The one from before."

"I was. I'm not certain what I am now."

"You're the reason my quarter still has its elders." She said it fast, the way people say a thing they've rehearsed and are afraid of losing. "Kesh Hollow. I was nine the winter of the shortfall. I remember the rotation. I remember which nights my grandmother ate and which nights she said she'd eaten earlier." She swallowed. "Sevriss sent me to find you, if you came back. She said to tell you she kept count too, and that you'd know what that meant."

Varek did not trust his voice for a moment, so he did not use it.

"She's well?" he managed.

"She's past ninety, she still runs the water allocation and she terrifies the young ones." The delegate almost smiled. "She said one more thing. She said the plan had your name on it, in her records, in her own hand, and that no council can rewrite what an old woman writes down in the dark. She said somewhere the true version exists, and that you should know it."

She bowed too deep, the way the settlements bowed to rank, and left before he could find anything to say back.

Varek stood in the diplomatic wing for a while after she had gone. The Colony had arranged the history the only way it could hold it, a policy delivered by humans and a crisis quietly survived, with no room in the official version for the exile who did the math. But somewhere six days out, a woman past ninety had written the true account in her own hand and kept it, and that turned out to be enough. It turned out to be more than enough.

* * *

*** Athena ***

The relay from Earth came in that afternoon, and for once the news walked in through the front of the sentence instead of hiding at the back of it.

The senator's hold had broken. Marina had spent three weeks on the Earth side taking the man's objection apart in committee, piece by piece, in the patient way she took everything apart, and the appropriation had cleared. There was more than that. The alliance framework had been formally ratified, the provisional period was over and a full diplomatic mission was being assembled: twenty people, diplomats, scientists and military liaisons, with a departure inside the month and an arrival roughly sixty days out. The convoy was moving again. The grain was coming. Varek's curve would go on feeding the settlements it had been built to feed.

Athena read it twice and felt the thing in her chest that she rarely let herself feel in a working corridor, which was relief without a threat attached to the back of it.

"Marina did this," she said.

"She had help," Varek answered, reading over her shoulder. "You built the floor she stood on. A year of holding this together from the inside is the reason there was anything left to ratify."

"It was everyone's work."

"It was. The fact that you say so instead of taking the credit is one of the reasons I'm going to be difficult to get rid of."

She brought the news to Boradrith herself. The D'Karr received it with the grave satisfaction of a ruler whose worst gamble had come back paying, and he did the political math in front of her without bothering to hide it. Then he made the decision she had half expected, and it was, she had to admit, a good one.

"You and the warrior Varek will meet the mission," Boradrith said. "A bonded pair, human and Weredragon, standing at the gate when Earth's people come down. Let that be the first thing they see of what this alliance makes possible."

Then his gold eyes moved to Varek, and the shrewdness in them sharpened into something more direct.

"And you will not spend your restoration standing decoratively at a gate," Boradrith said. "The surface survey program has been running on two-year-old maps and getting my warriors killed on ground you could have read in your sleep. You will rebuild it. You will train the rotation yourself, and you will brief Earth's military people when they arrive, because they'll be walking a surface that wants them dead and you are the only living authority on how it does it." He paused. "Consider the assignment the Colony admitting, in the only language I have available, that it should have asked you two years ago."

It was not an apology. Boradrith did not apologize. But it was the D'Karr handing an exile back his commission and his worth in the same breath, in open court, and Varek inclined his head and took it for the thing it actually was.