The other side of the bed was empty when Isaiah awoke. He dropped a hand to Niccola's spot, to find it cold. She'd been gone for some time already. Nobody spoke or moved across the room as he pushed himself up. So Phoebe was out, too, or else still asleep. He hoped she was with Verde or Margaret. She'd been through a lot in the last... well, however long eight moons was in deep-Talakova time, and the couple were excellent at helping people talk through their traumas.

"Phoebe?" he said, then slid his feet out from under the still-sleeping Pekea and crossed the room to check that Niccola's sister really was gone before he started changing. Phoebe's bed was empty. Isaiah returned to his own and found the clothing Verde had left at the foot of it. There were two outfits, side by side. The first was more formal: the kind of thing he'd choose to wear if he were visiting the City Guard first thing. The second was much softer and looser, and probably not publicly presentable. Isaiah switched his night-clothes for the latter and made his way downstairs.

The lower half of the house was a study in quiet domestic noises. Walls clicked in the sunshine, and the kitchen fire crackled in the muffling belly of the stove. Verde didn't seem to be in. Isaiah paused on the stairs to listen for him. The sibilance of sandpaper over softwood and taps of a mallet indicated Margaret was in her workshop with company—either Niccola or Phoebe, though Isaiah had never read Niccola as the kind of person who'd be much into woodcarving. She liked more active things, with fewer small, fiddly components.

He descended the rest of the stairs. Someone shifted on the windowseat.

"You're up," said Niccola, sounding suspiciously cheerful. "You slept like death."

"Good morning to you, too."

Isaiah made his way over to her, grateful to find all the furniture between them still in its proper place, despite the chaos of the evacuation orders that had come very near this street the day before. Niccola shifted to make room on the windowseat. There were pillows at either end of it, with room for two people to cross their legs without bumping knees. Niccola withdrew her feet long enough for Isaiah to sit down, then stretched one out beside him and stuck the other under his knee as he settled himself. Isaiah reciprocated cautiously. Niccola seemed comfortable with their tangle-limbed proximity, and he wasn't complaining. Hearing a person in front of him was one thing. Feeling that they were there was different.

"You're pleased about something," he said. Niccola was buzzing with energy from something she'd yet to disclose.

"Gideon came by this morning." Her grin was audible. "He said the investigators found something in the clearing where... well, where Dinah kept her prisoners."

Isaiah, unfooled, raised a sardonic eyebrow.

"Okay, fine. Where I fought with her the first time."

"There was more than a first time?"

"Participating in your ruse at the end counts."

That was a euphemism for the thing neither of them wanted to acknowledge. Unwilling to see Niccola's good spirits deflated so quickly, Isaiah poked her with his foot. "So what did they find?"

"This."

A light tube landed in Isaiah's lap, followed by something with straps. He picked up the latter first. It was a crow's message-holder, etched along the sides and gritty with a thin dusting of dirt. Setting it aside, he located the first object. This one was a crow-message scroll written on diplomatic paper, its edges dry and uncrinkled. It must have been in the tube when found, then. Isaiah gauged its weight—it had the heft of a lengthy and likely important message—then ran a fingertip over its wax seal. He stopped dead. Niccola was chuckling under her breath.

"This is my family's seal," said Isaiah.

"I didn't open it," said Niccola, "But I did peek in the end, and saw what it's about. You'll like this."

He passed it back to her. Niccola flipped it over. "By the seal of Meribah and Tiras Cantor," she read out loud, then paused for dramatic effect. "To the attention of Abigail Lino de Olíveira."

"What?"

Niccola giggled as Isaiah snatched the letter back and ran a finger over its seal again. Every detail was perfect; if this was a replica, the con artist knew what they were doing. He picked up the message-tube and re-inspected it, too. It was finely made and decorated enough to belong to his family, and a quick check of the tube's bottom revealed the same seal etched into the metal there.

"I told you you'd like this," said Niccola.

Isaiah threw the letter back into her lap. "Read it. I want to be sure."

She broke the seal and peeled open the scroll with little ceremony. "Most respectable lady Lino de Olíveira, it is with gladness that we write to you with an offer of utmost importance regarding the matter about which we and your parents have been corresponding since last year's spring."

Isaiah gave a mirthless laugh. Most respectable was already a euphemism. We was his parents alone; he'd not been told about this communication until less than half a year ago, when the elder daughter of the Lino de Olíveira family turned up for a premeditated courtship visit. She was sent home with Pekea's yellow soiling in the bag she'd brought, ruining several dresses. Her younger sister had seized her opportunity and stepped up to save her family from embarrassment by volunteering in her sister's stead.

Niccola continued reading. "With a recent turn of our son's interests, we would like to re-extend the offer we made you promise of, guaranteed and without rescindment—"

"That's enough."

Niccola let the scroll spring shut again as Isaiah pulled his knees up and hugged them. The words in the letter cut deeper than he'd bargained for, dredging up emotions that had remained interred while he lived in the palace. With every day spent away from it, he became more sure that internment had been self-defense. It was the only way to withstand his parents' emotional battering: the fakeness, the lies, the ulterior motives, the open disregard for his stake in the matters they made up their minds about. He had no more doubt the letter was real. Only his mother could have written in such a manner.

Niccola patted his knee, requesting without words to switch sides of the windowseat. Isaiah moved, and she scooched in beside him. Her arm slipped around his back. Isaiah half-dropped his knees—their feet promptly tangled again—and rested his head on her shoulder. They sat together in silence. Isaiah couldn't stop his throat from pinching, as the unspooling emotions proved impossible to stop once surfaced.

"I don't want to go back," he whispered. Niccola rubbed his shoulder, freeing further words he would never have imagined speaking even half a moon ago. "I can't even stand in my room without reliving all the times she locked me in there. Here is more home than anywhere in that palace. But I can't stay here forever."

"Why not?" said Niccola. "It's common in Varna. Adults living together. I don't know about here."

"Here, too. But that's not the thing. I'm..." There were so many things he had no idea how to articulate. "It's hard to explain."

"Take your time."

It felt almost surreal to be telling her things so easily that he had never told Verde or Margaret. He would have to have this same conversation with them eventually, but that felt so much more like taking up their time than sitting here with Niccola, who was making it clear they had all the time in the world. And just as well. Even identifying his thoughts and feelings felt like prying them from a wooden box shot through with nails. Putting words to the mess was only slightly easier.

"My younger self lives here." It wasn't the clearest feeling to lead with, but it was the strongest. "Margaret and Verde are wonderful, and I would happily stay here if they were just people I knew, but..."

Talaks, this was hard.

"Too many memories?" offered Niccola, and put into words exactly the piece he'd been searching for.

Isaiah nodded, throat too tight all of a sudden to repeat it back out loud.

You ungrateful brat.

You should be glad to have a roof over your head.

Is this how you treat the people who raised you?

"That's valid," said Niccola. "Did you run away here often?"

Do you realize what it says about your father and I, when the crown prince runs off to hide with commoners?

"You don't have to answer that," murmured Niccola, in response to his silence. "Sorry. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

There was no easy answer. Both staying here and leaving twisted him up in different ways. Isaiah closed his eyes and turned his forehead into Niccola's shoulder. This was the only safe space right now. The only one that made sense, and wasn't haunted by years of words that hurt worse than the blows that sometimes accompanied them. If those words were right, his mother was right... but she'd been wrong on how to handle Dinah. Or maybe she was right about that, too. The political fallout was one of many things he would need to return to today.

"Would you want to come back to Varna with me?" said Niccola.

It was an unexpected intrusion into the familiar downhill slide. Two thoughts smacked into Isaiah at first reaction: a wholehearted yes and a desperate wish not to abandon his people.

Niccola continued, "If you hold onto power here, and the other realms acknowledge you, we and Phoebe could rule both realms together. They're both small enough. And I don't know if you knew, but the Varnic palace is just over the forest-top from the Calisian one. It's an hour's ride on a good day. It's only our lowlands that are farther apart."

There was a catch somewhere. There had to be. Madeira wouldn't acknowledge him, or his parents would seize power back again after he'd been such an upstart to deal with Dinah. This current state of affairs couldn't possibly last.

"We could leave your parents in charge of the Calisian palace but, I don't know, let them sign off on imports and exports or something. Make them feel useful. From what you've told me, they make you or their courtiers do all the real work already anyway, and with the whole Dinah thing hanging over their heads, they'll think twice about playing political games with Madeira or Drevo. Especially if we negotiate amnesty on their behalf. They'll owe it to us."

"You think that will work?"

"I mean, I'm sure it won't go as smoothly as the ideal scenario because this is politics we're talking about, but I don't see why it wouldn't. Your parents owe you so much right now, Isaiah. And we're the only thing currently stopping them from getting their asses roasted over the fire at the next inter-realm council." She paused. "Well, they'll still get roasted and I look forward to seeing it. But if we play this right, Calis as a whole won't take the brunt of it. Madeira gets to point fingers, cuts formal correspondence with your parents, and boom, we're in charge. And if your parents ever try to buck that, you've got all the blackmail in the world. And all the public support, I might add."

Your parents have blackmail against you, too. You've fooled everyone else, but they know you're a fraud.

"My head's not in a good space right now," murmured Isaiah. His own voice sounded distant over the malevolent one that kept interrupting what he knew, logically, were rational arguments. "Can we take this up later?"

"Yes. But promise me you won't let your mother dismiss it."

The voice in his head was his mother's.

"I'll try."

"You can talk to me about anything you want. You know I'm always happy to roast your parents, too. Or tell you how good you are at people and politics, because you are."

"You've never seen me in politics."

"Nope, but you told me exactly what you wanted out of an alliance with Varna when we first talked in private, and you'd thought all that through. I also came back from facing down Dinah to find a realm you'd confiscated from your parents while they sat quietly under the care of the Palace Guard, watching you consult with the City Guard, evacuate the lowlands, and write letters to their worst enemies to start damage control. Given that we haven't been invaded yet, I'd hazard a guess it worked."

The malevolent voice fought back against that argument, attempting to dismantle it as flattery, but it was all true. Even if he tried to push the whole evacuation and associated activities into the hands of the City Guard, he'd still written the letters. And Niccola didn't know it, but Madeira had sent a favorable first response even before Isaiah had followed Niccola into the forest. He'd have to write them again as soon as possible.

"We should get working, hey?" said Niccola, squeezing the arm she still had draped about his shoulders. "Gideon can't handle everything alone forever."

"Can we go back to that forest spot when this is all over?"

"Afternoon picnic in a quiet place? I support this." Niccola pulled him up as the cushions ate his attempts to leave. "Sounds like something that will keep my head on my shoulders when I want to send your mother for dentures at the tender age of whatever age she is when we have to talk."

Isaiah grimaced. A long, grueling sit-down with his parents was inevitable before this matter was through. For that—as for everything, but especially for that—he was dearly glad to have Niccola at his side.

"More important things first, though," said Niccola, reading precisely what the grimace was for. She'd probably seen him make the same one a dozen times before. "We'll worry about your parents later."