Robb resisted the urge to smirk. It wasn’t every day he got to watch his brother sweat. “So. I’ve got a plan. We sneak in during the party, get the heart where my mother hid it, and leave before Mellifare ever finds out. It’s a long shot, but luckily we excel at those.”

The room was quiet for a moment, and he hoped it was because he had wowed everyone there, but the longer the silence stretched, the more he began to think he simply wasn’t welcome with this harebrained idea and—

Di rubbed his bottom lip in thought and then conceded, “There is a seventy-four-point-seven-eight percent chance that might actually work.”

“That’s a bit low,” Wynn remarked.

“It’s pretty high considering,” said Ana.

The captain was nodding, too. “It might just work—do we have the resources?”

“Over two hundred Valerio militiamen,” Robb volunteered, “and if Wynn pledges her guards, there will be close to three hundred.”

“Not to mention the fleetships,” said Talle, “and the others who’ve pledged themselves—I think it’s a start.”

Siege nodded. “Then a start’s all we need.”

They would still need to solidify the plan, and place people on the ground in Nevaeh in case things went south, and fortify the sanctuary there, and a myriad of other things, but for the moment it felt like this could actually work. That perhaps they could win where no one had before.

Goddess bright, Robb prayed, I hope we get out of this alive.

From across the table, the captain turned her warm gaze to him, and she looked proud in every way his mother never had. She raised her glass to him and mouthed, “You did good.”

And for the first time in what felt like years, he smiled.

Ana

After the meeting adjourned and the room emptied, Ana stared down at her spilled ale and her reflection in it, the murky amber distorting her face in ripples. She didn’t look much like a hero—or the Goddess.

She didn’t look much like an Empress, either.

Robb had asked her, the captain, Talle, Di, and Jax to stay. Xu left to start building codes with Elara to disable Nevaeh’s securities to get the Dossier into the harbor unnoticed. Not only because of the HIVE, but also the Dossier had quite a few docking tickets unpaid, and Siege really didn’t want to deal with that. Robb showed them the Resonance files and the map to where his mother had hidden the heart. It wasn’t on Astoria, and that confused her for a moment.

“Didn’t you say it was—” she began to ask, but her captain put a finger to her own lips, and suddenly she understood. Even in a safe meeting room like this one, Siege didn’t trust the Great Dark not to be listening in.

After they made a few quiet plans, they quickly dispersed so as not to draw attention. Ana put down her drink and began to leave when the captain drew her out of her thoughts. “Darling, can I speak with you?” Siege leaned against the table beside her. They were the last two in the meeting room, and the doors were closed. The captain spoke quietly. “When you left for the Goddess’s tomb, who did you tell?”