Veradis looked up from a sheaf of notes and arched a faint, pale eyebrow. The barest hint of a smile haunted her mouth, but she maintained the fiction. “My lady?”

“I’m sorry,” Isana said, shaking her head. “I was thinking of home. It can be distracting.”

“True enough,” Veradis said, inclining her head. “Which is why I try not to think of mine.”

A spear of bitter grief flashed from the young woman, its base fashioned from guilt, its tip from rage. As quickly as it appeared, the feeling vanished. Veradis applied her furycraft to conceal her emotions from Isana’s acute watercrafting senses. Isana was grateful for the gesture. Without a talent for metalcrafting to balance the empathic sensitivity native to any watercrafter of Isana’s skill, strong emotions could be as startling and painful as a sudden blow to the face.

Not that Isana could blame the young woman for feeling it. Veradis’s father was the High Lord of Ceres. She had seen what happened to her home when the vord came for it.

Nothing human dwelt there now.

“I’m sorry,” Isana said quietly. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“Honestly, my lady,” Veradis said, her voice calm and slightly detached, a telltale sign of the use of metalcrafting to stabilize and conceal emotion. “You’ve got to get over that. If you try to avoid every subject that might remind me of Cer... of my former home, you’ll never speak another word to me. It’s natural for me to be feeling pain right now. You did nothing to cause it.”

Isana reached out to touch Veradis’s hand lightly for a moment, and nodded. “But all the same, child.”

Veradis gave her another small smile. She glanced down at her papers, then back to Isana. The First Lady straightened her spine and shoulders and nodded. “Excuse me. You were saying? Something about rats?”

“We had no idea that they might be carrying the disease,” the young woman said. “But once the security measures were put in place to guard three camps against the vord takers, the rat populations in them were severely reduced. A month later, those same camps had become almost completely free of the sickness.”

Isana nodded. “Then we’ll use the remaining security budget from the Dianic League to begin implementing the same measures in the other camps. Priority will be given to those who are hardest hit by the disease.”

Veradis nodded and withdrew a second paper from her sheaf. She passed it to Isana, along with a quill.

Isana scanned the document and smiled. “If you already knew how I was going to respond in any case, why not proceed without me?”

“Because I am not the First Lady,” Veradis said. “I have no authority to dispense the League’s funds.”

Something in the young woman’s tone of voice or perhaps in her posture raised an alarm in Isana’s mind. She’d felt a similar instinctive suspicion when Tavi had been withholding the truth from her, as a child. A very small child. As Tavi grew, he’d become increasingly capable of avoiding such discoveries. Veradis’s skills of evasion simply did not compare.