Isole sat at the table and looked at the household ledger.

She picked it up.

Mara took it out of her hands immediately, without expression, without breaking her stride between the counter and the stove.

"Was that the accounts ledger or the other one?" Isole said.

"The other one," Mara said.

"Am I in it?"

"Sit down."

Isole sat down. She looked at Vane with the mismatched eyes. He looked at his cup. She looked back at Mara. "Since when does a twelve-year-old run an intelligence operation?"

"Since always," Mara said. She set a bowl in front of Isole. "Eat."

Isole looked at the bowl. She ate one bite and then stopped and looked at the bowl again with the expression of someone recalibrating an expectation significantly upward.

"What is in this?"

"Eastern spice blend," Mara said. "Adjusted."

"It’s extraordinary."

"I know." Mara sat down. "The sourcing situation is ongoing."

Isole looked at Vane. He looked at the window. She looked back at her bowl and ate with the focused appreciation of someone who had spent six weeks at the Silver Wood’s formal dining table and had strong feelings about the comparison.

"Tell me about the Silver Wood," he said.

She considered where to begin. "My mother had opinions about my uniform," she said. "Specifically the collar. The second-year modification apparently reads as continental merchant class in the Silver Wood’s formal textile taxonomy." She ate. "She raised this at dinner on the first evening. And the second evening. And the morning of the third day."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her it was the Academy’s standard issue. She told me the Academy’s standards were developed by someone with no appreciation for traditional textile significance. I told her that was entirely possible, excused myself, and went to the library." She paused. "I was in the library for four hours. She was waiting outside when I came out."

"Did she say anything?"

"She said the collar was still wrong." Isole looked at her bowl. "My younger cousin followed me everywhere for the first two weeks. She’s eleven. She told everyone in the estate that I was a famous warrior returning from distant battles and asked me daily to describe every fight I had been in with as much detail as possible."

"What did you tell her?"

"The truth," Isole said. "Mostly." She ate. "The construct wave count in the fourth practical may have doubled in my account. And I may have implied I personally defeated several of them rather than as part of a squad."

"Isole."

"She found it very inspiring," Isole said. "She has decided she wants to attend Zenith Academy. She is currently seven years ahead of the minimum enrollment age and has begun training regardless." She looked at the window with the expression of someone who had made a decision and had zero regrets about it. "I regret nothing."

Mara looked at Isole. "That was tactically sound," she said. "She’ll grow up with a useful model."

"The model is partially fictional," Isole said.

"The useful parts aren’t," Mara said.

Isole looked at Mara for a moment with the mismatched eyes warm at the edges. Then she looked at Vane with the same warmth. "I found two volumes in the Silver Wood’s library that referenced the pre-consolidation eastern script," she said. "I nearly sent you a band message about them at three in the morning."

"Why didn’t you?"

"It was three in the morning," she said. "I have some restraint."

"Some," Mara said.

Isole looked at her. "How long have you been like this?"

"Like what?" Mara said.

"Like this."

"Since I was six," Mara said.

Isole looked at Vane. "I missed this," she said. Not specifying which part — the villa and Mara and the spice blend and him, all of it together in one sentence. The mismatched eyes direct and honest and not performing anything.

The books were on the table between them. She slid them across. He looked at the covers — the Silver Wood’s script on both spines, the specific dense letterforms he had been learning one numeral at a time since September.

"The pre-consolidation references are in the second Chapter of the first volume," she said. "The language is adjacent to what I’ve been teaching you. You’ll be able to read most of it." She paused. "I marked the pages."

He looked at the bookmarks — small strips of Silver Wood fabric in the specific weave pattern he recognized from the pressed flower’s tradition. She had marked them carefully, the fabric placed with the precision she brought to all things she decided mattered.

He looked at her.

"Thank you," he said.

She held his gaze. "Obviously," she said. The corner of her mouth doing the thing. The real version.

The knock came at the ninth hour.

Different quality from Isole’s knock. Precise. Two measured beats, the knock of someone who had sent a message first and confirmed the visit and arrived at the exact time she said she would arrive because Valerica Sol did not arrive at any other time.

He opened the door.

She was in her second-year uniform, immaculate, the dark hair up, the composure running at standard output. Under one arm a bottle of wine. Under the other two glasses wrapped carefully in cloth.

She looked at him. She looked past him at Isole on the settee. The dark eyes taking in the arrangement with the calm assessment she brought to rooms she was entering for the first time and calibrating against expectations.

A beat.

"I should have sent a second message," she said.

"No," he said. "Come in."

She came in.

Mara appeared in the kitchen doorway, looked at Valerica, looked at the wine, looked at the two glasses, and looked at the three of them with the flat systematic attention of someone updating multiple ledger entries simultaneously.

"I’ll get a third glass," she said.

Something in Valerica’s expression did the small real thing. "Thank you, Mara."

"Don’t break anything," Mara said, and went back to the kitchen.

Valerica set the bottle on the table. She unwrapped the glasses — proper ones, the right weight and shape, nothing like the functional Academy-issue things he had produced the last time. She set them down with the care of someone who had thought about this specific moment for six weeks and had decided the glasses were the correct response to six weeks of thinking about it.

Isole looked at the glasses. She looked at Vane. She said nothing, which was its own form of commentary.

"You had the wrong ones," Valerica said to him.

"I know," he said.

"I thought about it for six weeks." She sat at the table. "The correct response to thinking about something for six weeks is to do something about it."

Isole, mildly: "What were you thinking about specifically?"

Valerica looked at her. "The glasses," she said.

"Right," Isole said.

Mara returned with a third glass and set it down and poured for all three of them with the efficiency of someone who had clearly been following the conversation from the kitchen and had timed the return correctly. She set the bottle back down and went to the counter and opened the other ledger.

Valerica watched her do this. "She’s writing about us," she said quietly.

"She writes about everything," Vane said.

"I don’t mind," Valerica said. Not quickly. After a genuine moment of consideration. "She’ll be accurate. That’s all I’d want."

The wine was good. Not the Sol estate’s formal vintage — something Valerica had chosen herself, which was visible in how she held the glass, the specific ease of someone presenting something personal rather than institutional.

She told him about the estate. Her father’s intelligence briefings on the breach, thorough and detailed and approximately forty percent accurate. His opinions on the eastern compound’s crisis response, which she delivered in the flat precise register that made them considerably funnier than they had any right to be. A diplomatic visit from a northern house that had gone badly wrong in a specific social way that had been excruciating in real time and was now, with sufficient distance, genuinely comedic.

"How wrong?" Isole said.

"The delegation head addressed my father by the wrong title for the entirety of the first dinner," Valerica said. "Not a small error. A difference of three formal ranks. My father corrected it once, gently, at the beginning of the second course." She looked at her glass. "The delegation head continued using the incorrect title for the remainder of the meal. My father corrected it again at the end of dessert."

"What happened?" Vane said.

"The delegation head thanked him for the correction and used the wrong title again immediately." She drank her wine. "My father spent the rest of the evening answering to it with complete composure. I have never admired him more."

Isole laughed. The real version. Valerica looked at her with the dark eyes and the corner of her mouth doing its thing, and something settled between the two of them in the specific way things settled when two people found the same thing funny and neither of them had expected the other to.

At some point Valerica moved from the chair to the settee beside him. Natural, unhurried, the ease of someone who had decided six weeks ago where she would sit in this villa and was now simply doing it. Isole was on his other side, close, the two books between them on the cushion.

Mara looked at this arrangement from the kitchen doorway. She looked at the other ledger. She looked back at them.

"Tell them about the east," she said to Vane. She went back to the kitchen.

The three of them on the settee. The wine warm between them. The lamp burning at its evening setting.

So he told them about the east.