Lady Verun came to the Registry Wing the following morning.

This was unusual. Lady Verun did not come to places; places came to her, or rather the people in them did. She worked from the Advisory Council chamber on the first floor of the administrative wing, and those who needed her went there. That she should appear in the Registry Wing at the third bell of the morning, before most of the senior scholars had arrived, carrying her notebook and wearing the expression of a woman conducting an official errand rather than a social call, was sufficiently out of the ordinary to generate a small ripple of attention along the corridor. A copyist dropped a quill. Two junior clerks found urgent business at the far end of the hall.

Naia had slept badly. She had risen at four, bathed her face in cold water, and walked to the Wing in the dark, and she had been at her desk for an hour and a half, rereading a synthesis section she had already read three times, when Lena put her head round the door with the look of someone about to announce an eclipse.

"Lady Verun," said Lena. "On the stairs. She is coming this way."

"Here?"

"Here." Lena's voice dropped to a whisper. "She has not asked for anyone. She is simply walking."

Naia stood. She smoothed her robe. She laid her pen on the blotter at the correct angle, and by the time Lady Verun appeared in the doorway she was standing behind her desk with her hands folded, the composed and slightly severe figure that she had spent eight years learning to present to visitors.

"Scholar Solven." Lady Verun did not sit. That meant it would be short. "You are requested in the Imperial Council chamber. His Majesty is receiving first audiences at the fourth bell."

Naia looked at the synthesis open on her desk. "The council presentation is this afternoon."

"This is a different audience." The tone was not unkind and not warm. It was exact, the voice of someone who delivered information accurately, including the inconvenient parts. "The Commander has also been requested."

"Together?"

"Separately." Lady Verun let the word stand a moment. "I thought it would be better for you each to hear it alone."

She did not elaborate. She turned and went out, and her footsteps retreated down the corridor, unhurried and quite silent, and Naia stood where she was and found that her hands, folded before her, had pressed very tightly together.

"What is it?" Lena asked from the doorway.

"I do not know."

"You do," said Lena. "You just do not want to."

Naia took up her coat.

The Imperial Council chamber was a room designed to communicate what it was while one was still on the approach to it: a high ceiling, a floor of grey stone laid in a great spiral, tall windows on the eastern side that admitted the morning in pillars of pale gold, and, on the wall behind the principal table, the Imperial seal carved into the stone with a permanence that was intended to outlast every occupant of the room. It smelled of beeswax and old paper. Her footsteps rang in it, and she was reminded, absurdly, of the first time she had stood in this room, at twenty-two, to be sworn in as a junior scholar, and had been so afraid of tripping that she had looked at her own feet the entire length of the oath.

She did not look at her feet now.

His Majesty was already seated when she was shown in. He was a man in his middle sixties, with a lean, lined face and the posture of someone who had spent decades in rooms designed to observe posture and had made a deliberate decision about what his would say. His hair was iron grey, his robe plain dark blue without ornament, and the only sign of his office was the thin gold circlet at his brow, which he wore, she thought, the way a man wears a ring he has forgotten to take off. Lady Verun took her place at the right side of the table. She had somehow arrived before Naia, by another stair.

"Scholar Solven," the Emperor said. "Thank you for coming so early."

"Of course, Your Majesty."

"I have been following the progress of your investigation with considerable interest." He indicated the chair across from him, and she sat. "Lady Verun keeps me well informed. So does the Registry's automated record."

Naia looked briefly at Lady Verun. Lady Verun looked at her notebook.

"I am aware of Bond Reference 7741-S," the Emperor said.

It was a statement with a great deal of content in it. The chamber was perfectly still. The pillars of light on the stone floor had moved a little since she had come in, and she watched one of them creep toward the leg of the table.

"I am aware that it is the only Bond in the Registry that has remained wholly intact throughout the Fading," he said, "and that its intensity, by every available measure, has been increasing."

She said nothing, because there was nothing accurate to say that would improve the situation, and several things that would not.

"Auren is watching the Tower," he said. "It has watched it for months. People are frightened, and frightened people need something to believe in before they make decisions that are difficult to reverse." He looked at her with an expression that was both direct and, she thought, genuinely conflicted: the expression of a man asking for something whose cost he understood. "I want to ask you to be, publicly, what the Registry has already determined that you are."

"A Bonded Pair," she said, "with Commander Kairu."

"With the acknowledgment that your Bond represents. With the visible integrity that your Bond demonstrates while every other is failing." He set his hands flat on the table. "I am not asking you to lie. I am asking you to allow a truth to be seen. The Bond exists. The Registry records it. I am asking you to acknowledge it."

"I note, Your Majesty, that you are asking."

"I am."

"Not commanding."

"I am aware that I could." He said it quietly. "Lady Verun has reminded me that I could, and has also reminded me that I should not. I find that I agree with her. It is a rare thing, and I do not wish to waste it."

Lady Verun's pen did not stop moving, but something in the line of her shoulders eased by a single degree.

Naia had her arguments prepared. She had spent the larger part of a sleepless night assembling them, and they were good: sound, scholarly, and addressed to every epistemic problem with drawing public conclusions from a Bond whose mechanism was not yet understood and whose significance was not yet established beyond the statistical. She made them. She made them clearly and thoroughly, because she had not come to her position in the Wing by abandoning her analytical standards under social pressure, not even the pressure of an imperial audience.

She said that the Bond had not been verified by any independent party. She said that a public acknowledgment would turn a scientific uncertainty into a political fact, and that political facts, once made, could not be unmade by later evidence. She said that the proposal made her private life an instrument of state, and that she did not believe it was possible to make a thing true by declaring it so. She said, at the last, with a quiet that surprised her, that she was afraid it would damage the very mechanism it was meant to demonstrate.

"Say more," said the Emperor.

"If the acknowledgment must be chosen to work," she said, "then a performed acknowledgment may be worse than none. The Registry may know the difference."

It was the first time she had said it aloud to anyone outside the Wing. She felt the words go out into the room and sit there.

The Emperor was quiet for a long time. He was, she noticed, a genuinely attentive listener, whether by nature or by long practice. He listened to all of it. When she had finished, he did not answer at once. He looked at the window, where the pale gold of the morning had begun to warm toward white, and his hands on the table did not move.

"I understand your reservations," he said at last. "They are sound. They are, in fact, the first reservations I have heard in this chamber in a year that were not about someone's career." He looked back at her. "I am asking you to proceed anyway."

"Your Majesty."

"I am asking, Scholar. I will not command it. If you refuse, I will not compel you." He drew a breath. "But I would ask you to consider that you may be the only person in the empire who understands what the performance would cost. And the only person in a position to do it with care."

She looked at the table. At the grain of the dark wood, and the faint pale ring where some long-ago cup had stood.

She said, "I will need to speak with Commander Kairu."

"He is being asked the same question this morning." Lady Verun's voice, from the right. "Separately."

"Then I will wait for his answer."

"You will not be asked to give yours until you have heard it," said the Emperor.

She was shown out.

Commander Kairu had been received an hour earlier, in the smaller audience room beyond the Emperor's study, a bare chamber with a table and two chairs and a single window onto the inner garden. He had been told to expect a matter of security. He had stood, at attention, in the dark uniform, and the Emperor had sat, and Lady Verun had remained in the doorway, and for the first minute no one had said anything.

"Be seated, Commander," the Emperor said.

"I would prefer to stand, Your Majesty."

"Then stand." There was a flicker of dry humor in the lined face. "I am about to ask something of you that is not within your duties, and I would rather you did not feel it as an order. I find it hard to tell, with soldiers."

Daven said nothing.

"You are aware of the Registry's present condition."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"You are aware of Bond Reference 7741-S."

A pause. It was very short. He had not, until this moment, known the number. He had known that there was a Bond; he had understood the investigation to be about the Bond's significance; he had been told, by Reth, at some point in the last fortnight, in the offhand tone of a man not saying what he was saying, that the Scholar's name might be on the Registry's list of anomalies. He had not asked. He had not looked. It had seemed to him, he realized, standing in the bare chamber, a matter of courtesy, a thing between her and the Registry, not his to examine.

"I am aware that the investigation has identified an anomaly," he said.

"It is not an anomaly." The Emperor's voice was gentle. "It is the one Bond in Auren that has not faded. And it is yours."

The window was very bright. He thought of a name he had not looked at, wound under black cloth for ten years. He thought of the way a woman's hand had moved over a page, writing, in the margin of her notes, a sentence he had said at midnight.

"I see," he said. His voice did not change.

"I will not command you. I wish you to understand that." The Emperor leaned forward a little. "I am asking whether you will stand beside her, in public, and allow the empire to see what the Registry has seen. Only that. I do not ask you to claim more than is true. I ask you to claim no less."

It was a skilled sentence. He recognized it as such. He recognized also that it was, as far as he could judge, honest.

"I will need to consider the terms," he said.

"Of course."

"With her."

"Of course." The Emperor sat back. "She is being asked in the next room. I would not have you answer before you have spoken."

He bowed. He went out. He had not yet said yes. He had not said no. And as he passed Lady Verun in the doorway, she looked at him with eyes the color of pewter, and said in a voice so low that it might have been the draught from the garden, "Commander. For what it is worth. I did not choose the name on your wrist."

"No," he said. "I would not have thought so."

"I only wished you to know that I did not look at it first."

He went out into the corridor. It was a thing he would think about later, when the day was done: that she had said first, and that he had understood what she meant.

In the corridor outside the council chamber, the palace's morning had begun in earnest. The sounds of an institution getting under way rose around her, footsteps, voices, the clatter of a cart in the lower hall, a bell in the east tower striking the fourth quarter. A page boy ran past with a bundle of dispatches. A senior magistrate nodded to her with a face carefully empty of curiosity.

She went to the window at the end of the hall and stood in the light.

It was an east window, and it admitted the morning at the angle that made the stone walls the particular gold she had begun to associate with this building. She looked at her hands. They were quite steady. She was surprised.

She thought: a performance. She thought: I will have to stand beside him. She thought: they are going to look at us, and what they are going to see is not a performance, and I do not know what I am going to do.

She heard footsteps she recognized.

She did not turn. She did not need to. She had not set out to learn the sound of his tread, and she had no memory of deciding it, but pattern recognition operated without permission, and she had been in enough spaces where those footsteps were present that her ear had filed them. Even, unhurried, with the faint ring of the metal-shod heel. They came along the east passage from the direction of the military wing, and she heard them check, very slightly, at the turn of the corridor, and then resume.

He stopped some six paces from her.

She looked round.

He stood in the morning light with his hands at his sides. He looked as he always looked: the dark uniform, the closed collar, the straight spine. But there was something in the set of his jaw that she had seen yesterday for three seconds and had not expected to see again so soon, a held quality, like a man carrying a full cup across a room.

"You were in with His Majesty," she said.

"Yes."

"He made a request."

"Yes."

"You agreed." It was not a question. She had seen his face.

"I was asked." He chose the words with care. "In the Guard, being asked by the Emperor and receiving an order are not entirely different things."

"They are different."

"Yes." A pause. "They are different. I said so. He said he knew."

She looked at the window. The morning light continued its work on the stone. The sounds of the palace going about its day surrounded them without touching this particular stretch of corridor, which had acquired the quality that certain places acquire when the people in them are having a conversation that keeps the rest of the world at a slight remove.

"You did not refuse," she said.

"I stated the security and operational concerns that attach to a public acknowledgment of this kind. His Majesty considered them. The question remained."

"And you find it acceptable."

He was quiet for a moment. She looked at him. He was looking at a point somewhere between the floor and the middle distance, which was not his operational attention and not his listening attention but something in between.

"I find it," he said, and stopped. Began again. "I find it within the class of things I can agree to without every variable being resolved in advance." He looked at her then, directly. "You do not."

"I require more certainty than this situation offers."

"I know." He regarded her with the expression she was still working to classify, the one that did not fit any of the available drawers. "What certainty would be sufficient?"

It was a genuine question. It was asked with the quality of attention he brought to questions he actually wanted answered, and it fell into the corridor between them and stayed there.

She looked at it. At the question. At him.

"I do not know yet," she said. "I am still working on that."

The silence that followed was brief and enormous.

"All right," he said.

"All right?"

"Then we work on it together." He said it quietly. "In the meantime, His Majesty has asked us for something, and we can decline it or we can attempt it. If we attempt it, we must agree on terms." He met her eyes. "What terms do you need?"

She looked at him, and at the morning light on the stone, and at the corridor that was about to become a before-point, in the way certain corridors do, when the conversations that happen in them change the shape of what comes after.

She was aware, distinctly, of yesterday's silence in her office. She was aware that neither of them had mentioned it. She was aware that the thing they were about to attempt would require them to stand beside each other in public and to be looked at, and that the thing they had not mentioned would be standing there too, in the room, unaccounted for, a third party to the arrangement.

"Clear limits," she said. Her voice was steady. She was very grateful for it. "On what we acknowledge and what we do not. Joint control of the narrative, where possible. Continued independence on the investigation, which is not a performance and is not a political instrument." She paused. "And honesty. Between us. Not the public version. The real one."

"Agreed," he said.

He said it without hesitation. It was immediate, as though it were not a new condition he was accepting but a confirmation of one already in place.

She looked at him.

"I mean it," he said. "Those are reasonable terms. I accept all of them."

There was something in his expression that she did not know. It was not the formal face of his professional setting. It was not the listening face, nor the three-second face of the afternoon before. It was a thing she had no drawer for, and she noted it, and filed it, and kept it.

"We should write them down," she said.

"Tomorrow. Where?"

"The Wing has a room at the end of the third-floor hall. It is not on anyone's schedule."

"I will find it."

"Tomorrow morning, then. At the third bell."

"At the third bell."

They went in their separate directions. She walked back toward the Registry Wing and he walked toward the military section, and the corridor returned to its ordinary function of connecting places, and the morning went on. She did not stop. She did not look back.

But she was aware, for the full length of the corridor and the whole of the stair, of the word that sat at the edge of everything they had just agreed to. It was the word that was now both the frame of their arrangement and the most dangerous thing in it, and she turned it over as she climbed, and it did not become any lighter.

Fake.

She understood, reaching the landing, that the danger was not that the word was wrong.

The danger was that she was becoming increasingly uncertain that it was right.