Page 48 of Ward

“That is the word I used.”

“Tisha knows?”

“She reviewed the proposal. Removed the clause that assumed she would relocate. Added a six-month review. Then approved it.”

Falkin stared at him. “She redlined your posting request.”

“With unnecessary pleasure.” Aldric shifted. “Second.”

There was business under it. Aldric shifted into the actual briefing voice, and the yard-warmth banked itself on both ends of the line, two professionals of Vorjan House taking up the load.

“The negotiations are stalled past our authority. Formally and in writing now: the counsel has requested consultation at a higher level of the house. That’s verbatim, and it’s not a maneuver; I’ve read the room down to the deck plating. Hargrove’s committee has discovered that obstruction is cheaper than argument. Every framework we agree on gets subpoenaed Earth-side before the ink sets; the counsel’s principals won’t ratify into that wind, and neither would I. The station admin is holding the room open on goodwill and catering.” His mouth twitched despite the cadence. “The catering is formidable. But goodwill doesn’t sign. The structure of it now needs someone whose word binds the house outright — treaty authority, marriage-of-state authority, the full seal. It needs — “

“Darik,” Falkin said.

“It needs Darik.”

The name sat on the line between them with its full generational weight: the duke-equivalent, the elaborate gold, the composure like a fortified position, the man neither of them had ever once seen impressed.

“He’ll come,” Falkin said, slowly, “with a strategy. He’ll have it solved on the transit out. A plan with every variable pinned.” The smile was creeping back into the voice, one degree of foreboding in it, one degree of delight. “You realize what station this is. You realize what this place does to men who arrive with the ending already written.”

Aldric looked around the warm lamplit room. At the drawer. At the plant. At his own boots, off, by her door, beside a pair of kitchen clogs.

“I do,” he said, with immense calm. “I recommend the house prepare itself.”

Re-lee had come to the dining hall two days after the window closed, at the height of the seventh bell, because of course she had.

She’d arrived with an actual, pink-edged certificate — produced by an office that filed everything electronically and understood that paper had weight — and presented it at the pass before the entire dinner service, tears frank in her eyes and antennae at full radiant attention.

“Match confirmed and standing,” she announced, to them, to the hall, to the galaxy at large. “Nine hundred and forty-one.” She pressed the certificate into Tisha’s flour-dusted hands, and then she looked up at Aldric, radiant and wet-eyed and entirely without mercy, and said: “Slow riser. I wrote it in the file on day one. Like bread.” A sniff of pure administrative triumph. “The slow ones keep.”

The hall had applauded.

The Paxian grandfather had said something through two translators about the hospitality debt of the entire line being hereby witnessed.

Tisha had laughed and cried and fed Re-lee’s whole office on the house, and Aldric had stood in the middle of it all with his walls down to the third notch, letting the room’s joy break over him like surf a man had finally learned to stand in.

The certificate hung now on her wall of photographs, crooked, in a frame that matched nothing, right at the height where she could see it from where she sat.

He had straightened it once. She had un-straightened it, on principle. It remained, by treaty, crooked.

She came off shift at the ninth bell carrying a covered dish like a woman smuggling contraband, which — he assessed the posture from the doorway, the specific guarded delight of her — she considered herself to be.

“Sit,” she said. “Floor’s fine, you like the floor. Don’t look at it yet.”

“I haven’t looked at it.”

“You ran a threat assessment on it from the door, I watched your face do the sweep.” She settled cross-legged opposite him, dish between them on the low table she’d built out of a freight crate and defended as furniture, and her nerves reached him on the low-banked loop — a bright flutter under the warmth, rare enough in her that he gave it his entire attention.

She never had nerves.

She had positions, and held them. “Okay. So. This one’s an experiment, and you’re allowed to hate it, but you have to hate it honestly.”

She lifted the cover.

The smell arrived before the sight of it, and the smell reached the back of his skull the way no sensation had reached him through the cuff in eighteen years.

Smokeroot. Hearth-dumplings.