This was, she thought, the kind of thing that didn't have a clean answer. She had spent her career looking for clean answers and finding instead the complicated truth underneath, and the complicated truth here was that she had feelings she hadn't asked for about a person who had an obligation she hadn't known about, and there was no version of that which resolved neatly. What there was, instead, was a choice about what to do with it.
She was good at choices. She made them for a living.
She made this one.
She turned back.
"Thank you for telling me," she said.
"Coreni —"
"I mean it." She turned back. "I do. You could have said nothing. You've been saying nothing for days about things that were harder than this." She met his eyes. "I would rather know."
He looked at her with that unguarded quality still in his face, which was almost worse now than it would have been if he'd closed it off again.
"What do we do," he said, "with this."
It wasn't quite a question.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "I think we keep going. I think there are larger things happening than either of us and we deal with those first and we — figure out the rest later."
"Later," he repeated.
"Later," she confirmed. "When there is one."
She meant it as simple practicality. The way his expression shifted told her he heard the other thing in it too — the acknowledgment that later was not guaranteed, that later was the thing they were both working toward and neither of them could promise.
"Then we keep going," he said.
"Yes."
He nodded. He didn't move toward her again and she didn't move toward him and the kitchen was very quiet around them and the moons moved slowly over the water outside her window.
It was enough, she told herself.
For now, it was enough.
Chapter Thirteen
Coreni
The message came through Edi-Veen, which was the only way it could have come without leaving a trace.
He told her at breakfast, in the quiet voice he used when he was being careful about something. A meeting had been requested. Not in the Collective. Not through any of the usual channels. A tea house two streets from the waterfront, midmorning, a table in the back corner. Someone who wanted to speak with her without the council knowing.
"Who?" she asked.
"Prophet Mother Dremma."
Coreni set down her caffe. She thought about the woman who had sat on the end of her bed and examined her hands and told her that the Fraluma were not the emotionless weapons the government would have her believe. Who had said he could not have hurt you with the particular conviction of someone who knew exactly why.
"Is this sanctioned?" she asked.
"No."
"Is it safe?"
He considered that for a moment with more care than a simple yes would have required. "Dremma has never acted against the interests of our people. In forty years on the council she has never once done a thing that was not — in her estimation — the right thing." A pause. "Whether the council agrees with her estimation has varied."
