I woke early, from habit rather than fear. The villa felt safe. Almost like home. There was no sound I recognized as danger, no mallet, no assembly bell, only a fountain running somewhere below for the simple pleasure of the sound. Bastien was already sitting against the door.
"One thing," I told him. "I only want one thing today."
He didn't ask what. He'd have wanted the same, in my place.
I had been trying to reconstruct the math of our time here. A Carthian courier had stood at the edge of the crowd the morning I rode out through Heliqar's gate, marking the strength of the convoy, marking me. They'd started their countdown the moment they watched me leave, and nothing that had happened to me since had done anything to slow their count. Weeks in the fortress I'd stopped tallying somewhere in the middle, because tallying only sharpened the fear. Eleven days on the plateau road, each direction. I knew, in general terms, how long a season ran, and that I had half of one before the contract closed over Heliqar. I tried three different ways to account for the time and got three different answers. I didn't indulge myself in a fourth attempt.
The treaty with Spartova was now impossible. Ruvuk had dangled hope but my treaty was evaporating with the smoke of civil war outside the windows.
I had learned, since leaving home, to treat every obstacle as a person with a want, and every want as a keyhole I could eventually find the key to. Ruvuk wanted control kept clean. Xotok wanted his ledgers left closed. Kramov wanted his own authority left unquestioned. Even the Legate, like any Helot, just wanted to avoid being caught deciding anything. I had learned to cut keys for all of them, and yet I didn't know the key for how to get a message through the Imperial Relay Network to my parents.
"I only need one thing to go right today," I told Bastien.
He didn't ask what. He probably guessed.
A servant had left clean tunics folded outside the door, Imperial cut, soft wool, nothing like the wraps I'd been sponging down in a basin of cold water and calling clean since the fortress. There had been plenty of nights where we would be grateful for a basin and a rag and I hadn't asked Bastien how it had been for him, but I didn't want to hear the answer. Cold water never really lifts sweat out of wool anyway. Bastien held his new tunic up to the light before he put it on. "Well," he said. "One thing in this house doesn't need a form filled out first." I almost laughed. It was the first genuinely clean thing either of us had worn in longer than I cared to add up.
I found the gray-stubbled centurion from the plaza on duty at the Villa's inner door and put the request to him directly, since he was the one face in that compound I already had some history with, even without a name for it.
He heard me out, arms crossed. "Not mine to authorize," he said. "But there's a man at the Needle who'll hear you out properly. I'll take you myself."
He walked me to the Needle. I told the operator at the console what actually waited on the other end of my silence, since it seemed only fair he understood what four lines were worth before he decided how much wire they deserved: that if word didn't reach Heliqar before a deadline I could no longer precisely count down, my mother and father might spend the rest of their lives believing that I was dead, and that I had simply failed to come home in time. He heard all of it. It didn't make any difference.
"The Relay carries what the Legions need to keep from losing a war," he said. "Troop movements. Garrison status. Do you think that every officer in every outpost doesn't have his own 'emergency' that requires the use of the Relay? There's a queue, and everything ahead of you in it is somebody's actual crisis."
"This is four lines. A minute, maybe less."
"It would take a lot longer than that to justify bumping someone else's minute." He said it without any satisfaction in being right. "A garrison commander two days from being overrun outranks a message to your parents. I can log the request. I can't make room that isn't there."
I tried anyway, the way I'd tried with every closed door since I'd left Heliqar. I offered to keep it shorter than four lines. I pointed out what a Prince of Heliqar's safety, once known, might be worth to the Legate's own account of this mess. None of it changed anything, because there was nothing in the man to move. He agreed with every word. He simply had no time on the machine to spare, and no rank that let him invent any.
I turned the Truth Stone on him anyway, quietly. Bad habit, I guess. What came back was almost nothing. He had the plain, settled certainty of a bureaucrat, matching everything he'd already told me aloud, no hidden allotment he was withholding, no fear of me hiding behind procedure. All else being equal, he would have preferred to help, but his own preferences didn't matter. There was no capacity to help with. The stone does not invent Relay bandwidth that doesn't exist, and it cannot make a deadline hold still while I looked for one.
Once again, there was no happy outcome waiting for me to find it. My four lines were nowhere near the top of the list of whose message mattered today.
I asked the Legate himself, before the day was out, whether his own signature could buy space on the wire that an operator's couldn't. I told him everything. He looked tired enough that I believed he'd have granted it if granting it had meant anything.
"There's no rank above triage," he said. "Not mine, not the Emperor's, until the fighting in that city thins the traffic out. I'm sorry for it. I mean that." He didn't sound like a man protecting himself this time. I think he was telling the truth for once because there was nothing else left to offer me.
Bastien found me still sitting with the stones in my hand, long after the sun had gone down. He didn't ask how the day had gone. He could read it off my face well enough without a stone of his own.
I turned the white stone over once before I put it away. The power to find the truth of the intention of anyone that I pointed it at was superhuman. Yet with all that power, I still had no way to get a few words to my parents.