The room at the end of the third-floor hallway had no official designation in the Registry Wing's allocation records.

It appeared in the building's ledgers as Storage Room C, which was accurate in the sense that it contained three shelving units and a number of boxes that had been awaiting redistribution for several years, and inaccurate in the sense that it had never, in Naia's memory, been used for storage by anyone who actually had something to store. It was simply the room people ended up in when they needed a room that was on no one's schedule. A clerk had once told her, in a lowered voice, that three Misprint hearings had been conducted in it and a marriage proposal rejected. She had not asked which was the more difficult.

She arrived first. This was intentional. She had come in before the second bell, unlocked the door with the key she had borrowed from the housekeeper on the pretext of a missing ledger, and set about the small rearrangements that were her habit before any conversation of consequence. She had cleared the shelf nearest the door. She had set two chairs on either side of the one small table the room possessed, a plain square thing with a crooked leg, and shimmed the leg with a folded square of paper. She had placed her notebook on the table and her pen at the correct angle to the notebook. She had stood at the window for a moment, looking down at the slice of courtyard visible from this floor, and then decided that standing at the window was not the correct posture for this meeting, and sat.

It was a very small room. When she sat, she could touch the nearest shelf with her left hand and the opposite wall with her right, nearly, if she stretched.

She had not slept. She had given up pretending to, at about three, and risen and made tea and written the list, because writing things down was how she confirmed that they were real and that she had decided them rather than merely considered the possibility of deciding. The list had twelve items. She had crossed out three of them this morning as redundant and renumbered what remained, and the fact that the renumbered list still came to twelve, after the addition of three further points she had thought of on the stair, she found mildly interesting, in the way she found patterns mildly interesting when they appeared where she had not been looking for them.

The council presentation had been the previous afternoon. It had gone well, by all standards. The senior scholars had listened. The mechanism had been put on the table. Daven had spoken for eleven minutes about the operational response, with a clarity that had made two of the magistrates take out their pens. They had both gone through the whole of it as if nothing had happened in the office the day before, and not once had their eyes met.

Lena had been waiting on the stairs that evening, in the half dark, with her knees drawn up and her chin on them like a girl at a gate.

"Tell me," she said.

Naia sat down on the step beside her. She had not meant to. It was a cold stone step, worn into a shallow dish by four hundred years of scholars, and she sat down on it in her good robe like a student and looked at the opposite wall.

"The Emperor has asked us to appear in public as a Bonded Pair," she said. "Commander Kairu and myself. As a demonstration of the Registry's integrity."

"He asked."

"He asked."

"Oh." Lena let out a long breath. "Oh, that is much better than I feared. I thought he would tell you."

"Lady Verun advised him against it."

"Good for Lady Verun." Lena was quiet. Then, with great care, "Are you going to say yes?"

"I think I have already said yes. I do not remember doing it."

"That is how it works," said Lena. "I am told." She leaned her shoulder against Naia's, lightly, the way she might have leaned against a wall. "Will it be hard?"

"It will be a performance. I am not a performer."

"That is not what I asked."

Naia looked at the opposite wall. At the long stain of lamplight on the plaster. "I think it will be very hard," she said, "and I think it will be because it will not feel like one."

Lena said nothing. She put her hand over Naia's, on the cold stone, and kept it there, and neither of them moved until the lamplighter came by and trimmed the sconce above them and went away.

He arrived at the third bell on the stroke.

He had been standing in the corridor for ninety seconds before he came in.

She did not know this. It was a thing she would learn much later, in a different room, from a different mouth. He had arrived early, as he always did, and had stopped at the turn of the passage when he saw the door ajar and the light inside it, and had stood there with his folder against his chest, quite still, in the manner of a man who has reached the edge of something and is measuring the drop.

He had not slept either. He had lain awake and watched the plaster, and gone over the Emperor's request twice and her answer once, in the version he had imagined of it. He had written, in his own hand, three conditions. He had been given to understand, by long habit, that a man made conditions in order to protect himself. These three did not protect him. They protected her. He had noticed this at four in the morning, and had been unable to think of any other kind of condition to write.

He had even, in the small hours, tried the word aloud. Agreed. He had said it to the ceiling, three times, in three tones, in the dark of his quarters, like a man learning a phrase in a language he did not speak. It had sounded, each time, like a thing he would say to a general. He had given it up and lain with his arm across his eyes, and thought of a line of her handwriting, and had not been able to say what the line had said.

Reth, passing in the hall, had paused and looked at the folder, and at his face, and said, "You look like a man about to be sentenced," in a tone of deep, tender mockery.

"I am about to be negotiated with."

"That is the same thing, usually."

"Not this time."

Reth had looked at him for a moment, and had said nothing, and had gone on toward the stair, and Daven had stood there with his heart beating in a slow, heavy, unfamiliar rhythm, and then he had taken the last three steps and gone in.

He did not knock, because the door was open and knocking on an open door was a formality neither of them had established. He looked at the room, at the shelving, at the chairs, at the crooked-legged table, at her notebook, and sat down across from her without remark. He had the black cloth of the Oath at his wrist, and a folder under his arm, and a look about him of careful ordinariness, like a man who has dressed with great deliberation to appear that he has not been thinking.

She found this one of the things she had come to appreciate about working with him. He did not require explanation for things that were self-explanatory.

"We need parameters," she said.

"Yes."

She opened her notebook. She turned it so that the list faced him, which was a thing she had not planned, and found that she could not now turn it back without making the gesture a statement.

"Public appearances," she said. "Frequency. I propose once each week in a formal context. More if specific events are identified by the court as requiring our presence. Lady Verun can communicate them."

"Agreed."

"Language, when we are asked about the Bond directly." She had thought about this one longest. "We acknowledge it without elaborating. We do not describe our experience of it in terms that exceed what we can honestly represent."

"Agreed."

"Physical contact in public." She looked at the notebook rather than at him. "What is appropriate at an imperial function is a matter of documented protocol. We operate within the protocol and do not exceed it without prior agreement between us."

"Agreed."

"Questions from Registry colleagues." This was the one she found most complex. She turned her pen over in her fingers. "My colleagues have specialized knowledge of how Bonds function and what the various presentations of Bond behavior indicate. They will ask questions that a general court audience will not. We require a consistent approach that is honest without being more informative than the situation demands."

He was quiet for a moment. "What does honest look like, in that context?"

"It looks like not claiming a level of certainty about the Bond that we do not have." She looked up. "Which means not performing a comfort with each other that we have not established. The colleagues who understand Registry mechanics will see through performance faster than anyone in the building."

"Then we do not perform."

"We present accurately." She made a note. "Which means that what we present has to be true. The public version of us must have something real underneath it, or the people who know what to look for will find the seam."

The observation settled into the room. She had arrived at it analytically, working through the logic of the situation, and the conclusion was sound, and the fact that it had implications she had not fully considered when she began the analysis was a thing she set aside, as one sets aside a letter that will need an answer later.

"There are two people to whom we owe an exception," he said. "Reth, and your assistant."

"Lena."

"Neither of them will accept the public version. I would rather not insult them by trying."

She considered it. "Lena would know in a moment. She is not easily deceived by me."

"Reth is not easily deceived by anyone." The faintest dry note entered his voice. "I have tried."

"Then the exception is permitted. They know the arrangement is an arrangement. They need not know the rest."

"What is the rest?"

She opened her mouth to answer and found that the answer was not there. It was a perfectly clear question. It was the one question on the whole list that she could not have answered with a number or a citation, and they both looked at it, where it lay on the table between them, a thing set down and not picked up.

"That is one for the second page," she said.

"There is no second page."

"There will be."

"My conditions," he said.

She looked at him.

"You tell me before going into unplanned locations during field work. Not permission. Notification. I need to know where you are in order to do my work."

"Reasonable."

"You do not contradict my security assessments in public, in contexts where I have made them on information you do not have. If you disagree, you tell me privately, and we discuss it."

"Also reasonable." She added the lines to the list. "Anything else?"

He looked at the table. Not at the notebook. At the table. The specific quality of his attention when he was deciding whether to say a thing had become familiar to her over the past weeks, the small pause that preceded words considered rather than produced.

"If at any point this arrangement is harming you," he said, "I wish to know. Not because I will necessarily change it. Because I want to understand what is happening."

She looked at him. "That is not a condition. That is a request."

"Yes."

"Why are you making it?"

"Because the arrangement was not your idea and was not something you chose freely, and those are conditions under which harm can occur without being visible from the outside." He met her eyes steadily. "I would like to know if it occurs. That is all."

She wrote it down. Request: notification if the arrangement causes harm. Her hand, she noticed, was not entirely steady, and she took a breath, and it steadied.

"Anything else?"

"No."

She looked through the whole list. Nine points of her own, three of his conditions, and the request. Twelve items again, which she found more interesting than she wished to.

"There is one more," she said. "Not a condition. An agreement."

He waited.

"Honesty between us." She looked at the notebook. "Not the public version. What we present to the court, to Lady Verun, to the colleagues who are watching, that version has constraints that the real version does not have. Between us, the real version only." She paused. "I find it difficult to maintain honesty with external parties when I am not maintaining it internally. It creates inconsistencies that compound over time."

"Agreed," he said, without hesitation. Without the small pause that preceded his considered statements. Immediately, as though it were not a condition that required deliberation.

She looked at him.

The quality of the immediate agreement was different from his other agreements, each of which had come with the specific weight of someone who had evaluated a thing and decided it was acceptable. This came with a different weight. As if it were not a new term that he was agreeing to but the confirmation of something that was already in place.

She added it to the list. She closed the notebook.

"There is also the matter of yesterday," she said.

She had not meant to say it. She heard it leave her mouth, level and clear, in the very small room, and felt the whole of her go still.

He did not move. His eyes did not leave her face. "Yes."

"In my office."

"Yes."

"I would like to say that it did not happen. I find that I cannot." She kept her voice precisely even. "I would also like to say that it should not happen again, and I find that I cannot say that either. I do not know what I should say. It does not seem to me to be a matter that can be placed on a list."

"No."

"I would prefer not to pretend that I do not remember it."

"Nor I."

A silence. Not an uncomfortable one. It had the quality of two people standing on either side of a narrow, deep, clear stream, looking down.

"Then we will remember it," she said. "And we will not mention it unless one of us wishes to."

"That is a fair arrangement."

"It is not on the list."

"It does not need to be."

He said it gently. She thought that if she looked at him now, she would see something she could not undo seeing, and so she looked at the notebook, and then at the wall, where an old water stain had spread across the plaster in the shape of an island.

"The first appearance is tomorrow," she said. "The formal lunch."

"I know."

He stood. She stood. The table between them held the closed notebook, with its twelve-item list, and the pen at the correct angle, and the particular quality of something that had been established between two people who were both more careful than was strictly necessary about the things they agreed to, and who had agreed to this anyway.

They went out together into the hall.

Reth was in the corridor when she came out, which she registered and did not comment on. He was arranging something against the wall with the focused attention of a man who had found a task to perform in a place he had not planned to be. He looked up when she passed. She nodded. He nodded. She turned toward her office.

Behind her, she heard Daven come out of the storage room, and Reth make a quiet sound that was not quite a remark, and Daven say nothing, which was also a kind of remark.

She did not slow her pace.

The notebook in her hand held twelve items and a list of parameters to govern an arrangement she had not chosen and had agreed to regardless. Beneath those twelve items was the knowledge that the most important one, the one about the real version, had been agreed to without any hesitation at all, and she was not going to examine what that meant tonight.

She had a statement to prepare for tomorrow's lunch, and preparation was the correct use of the time available, and she was going to prepare.

She spent the afternoon preparing. There was a statement to compose, and a short list of answers to the questions she expected, and she wrote them out in her careful clear hand, and read them aloud to the empty office, at first stiffly and then with more ease, until they began to sound like a person's words instead of a document's.

We acknowledge the Bond. We are working together on the investigation. The Bond is a fact. What it means is not yet a fact, and we do not claim to know.

She read it again. It was accurate. It was entirely accurate. It was the first time in her life that she had written a true thing so carefully that it felt like a lie.

Lena came and went with pots of tea. At the fifth bell she appeared with a small folded square of cloth and set it on the desk. It was a hair ribbon, a deep indigo silk, plain, with a narrow silver thread at the hem.

"For tomorrow," she said.

"I do not wear ribbons."

"You do not wear anything that has not been selected for function." Lena smoothed it with a fingertip. "It is a very functional ribbon. It keeps one's hair out of one's face. I thought it might be helpful during questions."

Naia looked at the ribbon. At the dark clear blue of it, the shade of old ink. She picked it up and held it, and said nothing, and Lena, having expected nothing, went out again.

She put the ribbon in the drawer with the smoked-glass ring, and closed it, and then, after a moment, opened it again and moved the ribbon to the top.

In the corridor behind her, the door of Storage Room C stood open on its small, bare, unscheduled room, with the two chairs still pulled up to the table and the paper under the crooked leg beginning, very slightly, to slip.