Tavin came to the base before the light had finished arriving.

He came alone, on foot, walking slow and even, the way a man walks when he has already decided what to say and is done rehearsing it.

Sera arrived twenty minutes after, on a borrowed horse, restless, since she had decided nothing yet and meant to do all of it inside the room.

Alistair watched both of them from the window, and he was quietly amused.

’They have not been told a single thing yet,’ he thought, ’and somehow they already know it is something they will hate.’

Elara set a kettle on the iron stove in the corner. Due sat at the table with three documents spread in front of him, and a fourth one face-down beneath his left hand. That last one was meant for Tavin, not Sera.

Silas was somewhere in the base, the way he always was when a meeting did not need him, and none of them could say where.

Tavin sat first. Sera sat second, slower, after a glance that counted four chairs and noticed only three had been offered to the people walking in.

"You did not invite us together," she said.

"You arrived together," Due replied, adjusting his collar.

"We arrived twenty minutes apart."

"That is together, by my measurement. Close enough that I am not standing back up for a second pot."

Sera looked at Tavin, and Tavin did not look back at her.

Alistair took the chair across from the two of them, and he was very direct.

"I am leaving the Oasis for some time," he said. "Not days. Longer. Frument will not be told where I am going, and Frument will not be told why. You will be told only that I am coming back, that Due holds this place while I am gone, and that anything arriving at your door in the meantime, marked or unmarked, gets handled the way we already put in writing."

Tavin took the words without moving a muscle, and he did not ask a single question.

Sera received it differently.

"You are telling us less than half of what is happening," she said.

"Yes."

"Why." 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

"Because what you do not know cannot be pulled out of you later."

Sera was obviously unhappy with that, and did not pretend otherwise.

"Tavin," she said, without turning toward him, "tell me you are at least going to push back on this."

"I am not," said Tavin.

"Of course you are not."

"Sera."

"No, finish the thought, Tavin. Tell me Frument is comfortable being kept blind by the only people who have ever been honest with it. Tell me honesty keeps hours now, and that today it happens to be closed."

"Sera."

"I am asking a question," she said, and at that moment her voice pulled tighter than a sentence before. "I am not refusing. I am asking, and someone in this room owes me an answer that is not the one Tavin would hand me if he ran Frument alone."

Alistair looked at her for a long moment.

"You are right that we are telling you less than half," he said. "You are right that it is unfair to Frument. And you are right that we are doing it regardless. The reason we are doing it regardless is the one thing I am not going to give you."

"That is the worst possible shape an answer can take, Alistair."

"Even so, it is the only shape I have for you today."

Sera closed her mouth. Her jaw tightened, and she shook her head slightly. Then she lifted the kettle off the stove and poured tea into three cups, her hands perfectly steady. Over the months, Alistair had learned that the steady hands were what she did instead of throwing something.

Tavin spoke then, for the first time in five minutes.

"I have one question," he said. "Answer it, and I will not ask anything else."

"Ask."

"Are you leaving us under terms we can survive."

Alistair was quiet for a breath.

Underneath the conversation the Equalizer kept running its slow correction, that off-tune note he had taught himself to hear past. Out of habit he pushed the scan once across the room. Sera read as iron, the way she always did. Tavin read as something quieter, harder to place. Due read lower than two months ago, and would not climb back, and Alistair adjusted for it without letting it reach his face.

"You will not be touched while I am gone," he said. "Due is here. Silas is here. Elara is here. Frument has thirty-one obligations Due is holding open right now. If anything goes wrong, every one of them closes in your favor, in the same hour. You will not have to ask, and you will not have to send a runner. The system knows before you do."

Tavin nodded once, slowly.

"That is more than I came expecting to hear."

"It is more than I should be handing you."

"I know."

Tavin stood. Sera rose half a beat behind him, wearing the look of someone who had not been given enough, yet had been given enough to work with.

Due slid the face-down document across the table. Tavin took it without glancing down, knowing it would be read in a room Sera was not in. That was its own quiet cruelty, and Sera knew it too, yet she did not make a scene over a thing she had already accepted was coming.

They walked toward the door, Tavin going first.

Sera stopped at the threshold and turned slowly to look at Alistair.

"If you do not come back from wherever it is you will not name," she said, very calmly, "then Frument will be the second faction to fall after Sun Harvest. I want you hearing me say it before you walk out that door, so you know exactly what we are betting on you. Carry it the whole time you are gone."

Tavin gave her a look, and she did not back down from it.

Alistair held her gaze.

"I know," he said.

Sera’s mouth did something complicated for half a second, then settled into something that was not a smile and not quite anything else.

"Then come back," she said, and walked out before he could answer.

Tavin lingered in the doorway one beat past polite. He looked at Due, then at Alistair, and his face nearly let an emotion out before he put it back where it lived. Then he was gone.

Due exhaled.

"That went better than I budgeted for," he said.

"It did not feel better."

"Better is not a feeling, Alistair. Better is what it costs you."

Elara had not spoken once during the meeting, a choice she made an hour before it started. She turned from the window now.

"Alistair."

He looked at her.

"The dispatch bird is here," she said. "Earlier than yesterday’s. By a lot."

She pointed.

Outside, on the windowsill, the parchment was already curling at the edges where the morning air had begun dissolving it. The wing pattern stamped into it was the fast one, and the Record’s bird had not even waited for a reply.

It had come, and it had gone, and whatever it left behind was reading itself out to no one on the cold stone in the early light.