“Progress, then.” Zuri permitted herself a little smile. “Whoever would have thought the Union would have a big heart.”

“How are the children?” asked Savine, stepping towards the tall door to the nursery, decorated with the sun of the Union in gold leaf.

“They are well, but…” Zuri put a gentle hand on Savine’s arm. “You should know they have a visitor.” And she eased the door open.

Savine’s mother stood beside the cots, rocking her tiny namesake with practised carelessness, pulling faces while the baby gurgled happily.

“Savine!” she said, prancing over. “It’s so good to see you!” Quite as if they were an ordinary mother and daughter and it had been an ordinary few days since they last spoke, rather than six terrifying months in which Savine had nearly died, given birth, nearly died again, then taken control of a nation.

She leaned forwards to kiss Savine’s cheek and gave her a noseful of that familiar, heady mix of perfume and alcohol. The smell of her childhood. The smell of being cared for, in an offhand, slightly lazy way. Savine felt herself caught on uncertain ground between fury at being abandoned and sappy relief that her mother was alive and had danced into her life again.

“You look… well,” she managed to say. Sickening banality, considering. But her mother did look very well. As if she had been on a well-earned holiday these past few months, somewhere sunny, while Adua shivered through the bitterest winter on record, in more ways than one.

“All the better for seeing these little darlings of yours. By the Fates, Leo’s a fine-looking man, but these children are positively beautiful.” She leaned over Harod’s cot, the monstrous diamond on her wedding band flashing as she waggled a finger at its occupant, speaking in a baby-voice Savine found intensely enraging. “Aren’t you, you little beauties, so very beautiful.”

“Mother?”

“Yes?”

“Are you really going fuss over my children… as if nothing has happened?”

“Honestly, I was rather hoping to.”

Savine kept her voice under control with some difficulty. “For six months, while the world was burning down around us, I’ve had no idea where you were. Not a letter. Not a word. Not a whisper.”

“I know, I know.” She seemed, almost, a little impatient. “And I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t sound it.”

“But you can understand we had to keep our heads down. Savine, please, I’m not the enemy—”

“What are you, exactly?”

She sank into a chair with a rustling of expensive skirts, sitting Harod on her knee so she could look deep into his eyes. “I still feel very much like the same sarcastic drunk I was at seventeen. But now I’m a grandmother, apparently. And to a king, would you believe?”

“Let’s not pretend this is the first time you’ve had a future monarch in your lap.”

“Really, that would’ve been beneath you at twelve. It’s certainly beneath you now you’re the Lady Regent of the Union.”

She was right, of course, but that did not help, of course. “You can’t just… turn up, Mother.”