Cygnus Point's gate opened for Sertorius before we got there. A watch officer read his signal from the wall, said something down to a man I couldn't see, and the gate swung open. Seeing his rank was all that was sufficient.
Marcus was handed off at the gate. Sertorius went straight to the relay without stopping to eat or sit. Within the hour, the whole garrison's noise changed pitch. It calmed. They had just been told the thing they feared most this week, having to invade the Hegemony and get to Spartova, was no longer going to happen.
I don't remember deciding to sleep. All I remember was a cot and a door that locked from the inside for the first time since Heliqar. Then I remembered nothing at all until well past morning.
The Legate found me alone, which I understood afterwards had been deliberate. He filled the doorway. It was much too narrow for a man his size to use gracefully. He held a single sheet of paper he had clearly already decided he wasn't going to need.
"I have orders regarding your situation." He sounded flat and over-rehearsed. "Not just yours. Your men saw what you did in that hall the same as mine did. You already know exactly what you are, and so does every one of them. I have orders to keep it from going any further than it's already gone. There's a process for that. It's intended to reach everyone who was in that room and understood what they were watching."
I understood him a half-second too slowly, and I have never once, before or since, been more grateful for a delay in my own understanding. The delay meant he watched my face before I'd had the chance to control it. Bastien. Davan. The rest of the eleven who had followed me into that hall and back out of it again. All of them, apparently, now had the same problem I did.
"I don't relish it," he said, before I'd found anything to ask him. "I have men of my own I'd have to answer for."
I had known the Legate's desire from the day I met him, when Olen was killed. He wasn't cruel. What he wanted, more completely than nearly anyone I had read since leaving Heliqar, was to never become the man some later inquiry pointed at and asked why he'd decided something. He wouldn't have gotten to the position he was in if the Empire hadn't made him extremely good at not being that man. For once, that want and my own ran in exactly the same direction, because neither of us wanted the thing his orders were asking him to do.
"You said you have no authority to let us go," I said. "I believe you. I'm not asking you to find authority you don't have. I'm asking if you want to find a way to avoid an incident."
He waited.
"Heliqar is a sovereign kingdom. I am its heir, and those are its representatives. A kingdom informed that its prince and his household survived a war would naturally wish to express its gratitude to the Empire for their safe return, all of them together. That's a courtesy between two governments. It requires no one to write down what any of us saw, only who we are. Someone has to be standing here to receive it, and it happens to be you."
"You think this is a matter of paperwork," he said. Something in his face was working now. "It's a standing order. It doesn't matter whether your men are dangerous. Or trustworthy. It's that these questions can't be answered correctly. Nobody bothers asking. Every witness who qualifies gets sent up without exception. It isn't a courtesy I have standing to substitute for the directive."
Bastien had been standing just outside the door the whole time. He'd heard every word. At some signal I hadn't consciously given, he came in. He worked his fingers into the lining of a pack he'd carried the whole time. He took out a small, heavy pouch and put it down on the table between us.
"Since the relay errand," he said to me. "Figured it'd travel safer in my kit than yours. Nobody searches the man carrying everyone else's water."
I knew it before I'd touched it. My father had put this exact bag into my hand before I left Heliqar and told me not to bring it back to him. I had not seen any use for it at all, let alone buying back my men.
I opened it far enough for the Legate to see what was inside, not far enough to count it. "This is Heliqar's gift, offered in gratitude for the Empire's protection of its prince and his household during the unrest in Spartova. You'll want it entered as exactly that, in whatever ledger receives this kind of thing. Generously. A courtesy gift is one entry, Legate. Whatever you believe you're required to send up about the rest of us is a different one, sent through a different door. Nothing forces you to write both just because they happened to arrive in the same week."
He picked the pouch up, testing its weight. I don't think he doubted for a moment that it was real.
"You told me yourself a moment ago that nobody in this compound is even supposed to know this process exists," I said. "If that's true, then whatever your men think they saw was just an artifact of the chaos. The record shows a chaotic night in a burning hall. Secondhand fear from soldiers who were fighting for their own lives at the time. Nothing confirmed by anyone with the standing to confirm it. You'd simply be declining to manufacture something official out of a confused story."
He set the pouch back down without having opened his hand around it. He'd already decided he wanted it before he'd finished framing his next objection. "Your proposal solves only half the problem," he said. "The report I send upward can be shaped. But my men cannot."
He looked at Bastien, then at me.
"They don't know the directive exists. They don't know what the Empire does with Stone Wielders. But they know what they saw in that hall. And soldiers talk. They talk when they're drunk, when they're bored, when they're frightened, when they're proud. They talk to wives, to quartermasters, to men they served with ten years ago. And if even one of them repeats the wrong detail to the wrong ear, the Empire will ask why I did not report it. If they ask, I will not survive the answer."
He folded his arms.
"You're asking me to trust that a dozen men will keep silent about something they don't understand, something that will gnaw at them until they speak it aloud. I cannot guarantee their silence. And if I cannot guarantee their silence, then your courtesy gift buys me nothing."
He paused.
"Secrets are dangerous, Prince. They rot. They leak. And this one is lethal."
I didn't look away from him.
"Legate," I said, "your men will keep this secret because they do not understand it."
He frowned, but he listened.
"What they saw in that hall was chaos. Smoke. Fire. A tribunal collapsing around them. A stone flashing in a room full of shouting Hoplites. They saw a thing they cannot describe cleanly, cannot explain, cannot repeat. And men do not gossip about things they cannot explain. They bury them."
I stepped closer.
"And my men will keep the secret because they understand exactly what it costs if they don't. Bastien has carried water for every one of them. Davan has patched their wounds. The others followed me across the Red Sand Sea and into Spartova knowing they might never see home again. They will not speak a word that endangers each other."
I let that settle.
"You're imagining a secret that spreads because it is interesting. But this one is not interesting. It is terrifying. It is confusing. It is the kind of thing soldiers decide never happened at all. And if you need more than trust, then take this: you will discharge your men from Cygnus Point before they ever reach a tavern or a barracks where their story might matter. Rotate them. Reassign them. Scatter them across postings where no one knows what happened in Spartova and no one cares."
I gestured to the pouch.
"You have the authority to do that. You have the authority to shape your garrison's memory. And you have the authority to decide that the safest version of the truth is the one in which nothing happened worth repeating."
I held his eyes.
"You don't need silence forever. You need silence long enough for the Empire to move on to the next problem, and you know as well as I do that will happen quickly."
"Diplomatic courtesy," he said finally, mostly to himself, testing the shape of it out loud before he committed to saying it to anyone else. "The whole household. Recorded appropriately. I'll have the papers drawn before any of you reach the gate."
Sertorius found me at the gate the next morning.
"You're all cleared," he said, which was as close to congratulations as I ever heard out of him. "Papers are in order, every name on your roster."
We left through the same gate he'd walked us in through, though not on foot this time. The Legate made good on the rest of it before we reached the gate: a dozen tuspaks from his own stores, two wagons for whichever of us the road had already worn past walking, and a squad of his own soldiers to see us clear to the Red Sand Sea. It had cost the Legate one afternoon of paperwork instead of one afternoon of conscience.
Bastien fell in beside me the way he always had. Davan and the rest fell in behind us the way they always had, and behind them, for the first time on this journey, came men who answered to nobody I'd have to argue with again. Past the Sea's edge the soldiers would turn back, and the rest of the crossing would be mine to lead. It would be a shorter trip going home than it had been coming, though with Imperial maps instead of Heliqar's, for what that was worth.