"A thin offering."

"Thicker than anything you have set down tonight."

"You measure generously, so long as the scale is weighing your own portion."

Moses brought his eyes back to him. "I will give you this much, and only because it costs me nothing. What he ordered was not what I rode out expecting. When our lord cut us loose, I took it for the usual work — a border burned back, a rebel house unmade, some buried ruin emptied of whatever had crawled into it. Noise enough to justify the First Squadron. It was none of that."

Caelum took it in without a flicker. "And still it held you three years."

"It held my boys with me. Every last blade of them."

"Then you have given away more than you meant to. Few tasks demand the whole First Squadron and three years out of the world, and fewer end with their captain home and refusing to name them."

Moses’s mouth curled. "Keep tugging. You were always at your happiest with a thread caught in your teeth."

Caelum’s gloved fingers stayed laced at the small of his back. "If our lord meant for me to know before that door opened, he would have said so. I am content to learn it on his timing."

"Spoken like the perfect hound."

"Spoken like a man who has watched impatience get better servants killed. Call it obedience if it suits you. I would call it knowing the difference between a question worth asking now and one worth living long enough to ask later."

"Obedience and survival are not the same animal."

"In House Morgain they share a den more often than anyone down here cares to admit. You above all should know which of the two walks back out."

Something in Moses’s face closed, and for the first time it had nothing of the game left in it. "Easy words from the man whose obedience bought him silk corridors and orders whispered in private rooms. For me it means marching into places no map will own, putting down whatever I am pointed at, and crawling home years later to find soft-handed servants standing nearer our patriarch than the soldiers who put his enemies in the ground."

Caelum turned his head until his golden eyes found Moses again. "No one has ever questioned your strength. Not our lord. Least of all me."

"Strength was never the complaint."

"I know. The complaint is that strength was not enough to keep you at his side. That is a heavier thing to carry than any blade, and you have hauled it three years up a frozen mountain."

The cold in the chamber pressed in a degree closer.

Moses closed another step. The floor moaned under the freight of armor and demon-heavy bone, and now he loomed over Caelum near enough that the gap between them could have been read in violence rather than height.

"You have always carried a reckless mouth," he said, "for a man I could open from throat to belt before that door finished swinging wide."

"I have never pretended otherwise." Caelum did not crane upward like a man being threatened. He regarded Moses the way he might regard a ledger already balanced — a sum entered, checked, set aside. That, more than any defiance, scraped at the warrior. "You could kill me. In a straight contest of bodies, no walls to turn to my use, no warning to spend beforehand, you would win it, and likely faster than you let yourself imagine. I have never argued the point."

"And you lay it out for me," Moses said, "as though you were reading the frost off the walls."

"Because that is all it amounts to. A condition of the room. Dressing the truth in fear would not make it any truer, and it would only waste our breath. You want me to flinch. I buried the habit a long way back. It served no purpose at our lord’s side, and it would serve even less against you."

Moses’s fingers folded shut, the plates rasping. "You are an insufferable bastard."

"The verdict has been handed down before, though seldom by anyone who could make good on the grudge." Something that was almost dry amusement crossed him. "You hold the rare distinction of meaning it and being able to act on it. Most who find me unbearable lack one or the other."

Moses loosed a laugh with more bite than warmth in it. "There he is. The household shadow. Pressed, unhurried, already standing nearer that door than any of us, exactly as you have stood your whole service."

Caelum turned his eyes back to the door. "If our lord wanted nothing but strength at his side, Moses, you would be the one standing where I stand, and I would be three years up some mountain in your place."

The line went in without resistance, the way a thin blade does.

Moses did not move for several breaths, his purple eyes pinned to the line of Caelum’s profile. The chamber stripped away everything they usually put between themselves and a reckoning — the crowds, the noise of war, the ranks of soldiers. What it left was the door, the mountain’s weight overhead, and a wound the two of them had carried under the same wolf far longer than should have made them strangers to each other.

"You take a certain pleasure in saying things like that," Moses said at last.

"You keep mistaking the tool for the hand that swings it. There is no pleasure in any of it. I say what the moment asks of me and nothing it does not, and the moment asked for that."

Moses’s eyes thinned. "Convenient, how the moment forever asks for the cruelest thing in your mouth."

"The cruelest thing is most often the truest. I did not build the arrangement between us. I only decline to stand here and pretend it is otherwise."

He turned his stare back to the door, jaw drawn tight. "I have wondered more than once what our lord truly sees when he looks at you."

"Use. A blade not yet gone dull, kept somewhere he can reach it. Nothing warmer than that, and I have never asked it to be."