Page 47 of Ward

On her counter, under a cover, waited the meal he had made after watching her forget her own dinner three nights running: eggs, greens, and bread toasted to the exact shade she preferred and had never once specified.

The first time he had done it, she had opened her mouth to object. He had told her the station chef required feeding and assigned himself the post.

She had sat down and eaten.

It was, he thought, the most trust she had given him yet.

The line caught. Falkin’s face resolved — training yard behind him, Vorjan’s purple going down into evening — and Aldric watched his oldest friend conduct the half-second audit: the lamplight, the photographs, the manifest un-greyness of everything behind him.

The smile arrived in the voice first, as always. “Well,” Falkin said.

“Report,” Aldric said, flatly. “Since you’ll extract it regardless and I’d sooner control the sequence.”

“By all means. Sequence away.”

“The window closed on schedule. Nothing was filed.” He kept it in briefing cadence, which fooled no one, which was the point of using it. “The match stands. The chef and I have —” he considered the available vocabulary, and discarded all of it, and used hers “— an arrangement about dinners. Standing. Permanent. She’s assigned me a drawer.”

“A drawer,” Falkin repeated, with the reverence of a man who understood exactly what he’d just been told, because he had a wall of mismatched frames and had once been undone by a crooked drawing.

“A drawer.”

“You’re calling from her quarters.”

“I am.”

“You, Aldric of Vorjan House, are sitting on a floor, in lamplight, in a room with a plant in it, telling me you did not file.”

“I’m aware of the tactical picture, Falkin.”

Then Falkin laughed — not the needling laugh but the yard-laugh, twenty years old and unarmored.

Aldric sat on the floor of the one warm room in near-Earth space and let his oldest friend be openly, catastrophically happy at him across the void.

He bore it with dignity and did not entirely fight the almost-smile, which had stopped responding to discipline.

“Say it,” Aldric said, when the laugh banked. “You’ve earned it and I’d rather have it over.”

“I won’t say it.” Falkin’s voice had gone warm all the way through, the smugness only a glaze on it now. “I made the wager to get you up the ramp, not to collect on it. There’s nothing to collect. The galaxy did the collecting.”

A pause, and then, quieter, older, Falkin continued. “I told you once I’d stood where you were standing. I’ll tell you the other half now. The night you comm’d me after Brooklyn — when I told you I’d won, and you said you’d come, and you looked at me with that face like a man reading his own sentence — I went and stood in the dark of my own quarters for an hour, afraid I’d done you a harm. That I’d pried open a door you had every right to keep welded, for a bet, because I missed you and I couldn’t reach you any other way.” His jaw worked, once. “So. For the record, between us, as House Vorjan breathes: I’m sorry for the method. And I have never once in twenty years been gladder to be right.”

The line held that for a moment, purple evening and lamplight, twenty years of it.

“She’d have gotten through regardless,” Aldric said, finally, which was as near as the language came. “You only arranged the deployment. The campaign was entirely hers. I never — “ the almost-smile surfaced, rueful, all the way “ — I never had a wall rated for being treated like a Tuesday.”

“No one does,” Falkin said. “That’s the discovery. It’s not in any manual. It should be.”

“I remember who opened the door,” Aldric said. The old words, the cold ones, delivered a season of dread ago across this same void — and he watched Falkin recognize them, and brace, and then hear them land as what they had, against every forecast, become. “I expect to spend a great many years remembering it. Don’t embroider it, don’t quote it at Brooklyn, and don’t” — with feeling — “tell Re-lee, she’ll put it in the conversation topics.”

“She’d cry.”

“She cried at the compatibility file. She informed us of this at the announcement. Publicly.”

“Of course she did,” Falkin said, fondly. “Now. You didn’t sequence this call for the drawer report. There’s business under it — I can hear it. Go.”

“First,” Aldric said, “file my request for permanent assignment as house liaison to Libra Station. Security and treaty support.”

Falkin’s smile went still. “Permanent.”