Late morning sunlight streams in through the shutter cracks on the high set windows, casting golden beams onto the dusty stone floor of the assembly hall. The thunderclouds and gray have broken over Thalassa City and the soldiers take it as a sign. They move through here, meeting and murmuring, pausing every time their gaze flits toward her. Allayria's siege team is here too, taking orders from a grim General Jin, nodding in respectful acknowledgment as they catch her gaze.

Ruben and the Southern Battalion are on their way up; the hawks have carried that news, and while they wait Jin counts and schemes, tallying the living and the dead, taking stock of their stores. Once Ruben is here they will know. Once Ruben is here, they will move.

"When it is time, call the banners and look for me in the sky."

Seated on the dais, Allayria glances up to the half-boarded windows, as if to see Dynast Qui Wren's mark in the atmosphere. He told her he would be there when it was time. He told her he would be her sight.

Am I not what you asked for? she queries silently, bitter salt tainting her mouth as the aftereffects of her nighttime excursion shake in her fingers. They clutch at the armrest, as she sits, fixed, on this battered throne, holding makeshift court over these scattered military plans. Where is your end of the bargain?

Lei shifts at her side, now equally unused to this inertness, and, perhaps, fretting over their muted guest, who still stretches out like a star many floors above them.

Tonight, she promises herself with only a shiver of anxiety. Tonight I try again.

It's something she must do alone; or at least, only with Lei. It is something she must not tell Ruben.

Not anymore, she decides, remembering how the thing gasped and trembled, and what lay waiting in the caverns of its mind.

She can almost feel Ruben's anxious gaze, conjure the way his wide eyes would watch, hawkishly, as she does what must be done.

I will do what it takes to stop the Jarles, she thinks to herself again, an old echo of words once sworn to a man she had thought she knew. I will give up the things I never wanted to.

Ruben's eyes are not clouded with disquiet the next time he sets them on her; instead there's something like a glimmer, a shade of the amusement they once held. Perhaps he's laughing to see her here, so clearly uncomfortable in the space she occupies. Or perhaps he's just glad to see her again.

There's no motley crew behind him though, and this almost disturbs her until he climbs up and says, without prompting: "Kitchen."

Satisfied, she looks away. They can rest a little while longer.

"What news here?" the Skill master asks instead, and Lei gives his report. They're standing in front of her, a meeting of two worlds, and Ruben is telling them about the freeing of the Thalassan noblemen when they hear it.

At the first shout everything goes quiet, and heads turn, almost by magnetic pull toward the hall doors. At the second, weapons are drawn. The noise works its way up Lei's tensing form and then down, to the sharp jut of stone suddenly conjured in his hand.

And then the doors open.

But what stalks inside is not the frozen-faced shadow of a lurking monster, nor the clunking clatter of Jarles soldiers. It's not even Ben, which half of her almost expects.

It's a man.

A man in dirtied but fine clothes, with another pair of wispier, more haggard men flitting behind him. Allayria can spot glimpses of him from between the curtain of Ruben and Lei's clothes. This man marches through here, as if he has a right, as if he is not a civilian in a room full of soldiers.

It's hard to hear what he's saying—he's stopped shouting—but his tone is sharp and curt, and by the way Ruben turns Allayria thinks that he might know the man.

And then the man sees Ruben.

"You!" he shouts, and there's something familiar about this tone, something that rings a bell in the way it carries. Allayria hears the group approach, sees the way Lei shifts suddenly, edging in front of the Skill master. She wonders if she should stand.

"Where is my daughter?" the man demands, and she can hear his feet patter on the stairs. "What have you done? Where is she?"

"Ambass—"

"Did you take her?" He's shouting again and Allayria frowns. Take her? This man thinks Ruben kidnapped someone? Her gaze flits to General Jin, who she can see just around Lei, but the general, a Solveigard native, looks confused too.

"Have you kept her all this time? Where is she?"

And then Ruben steps aside.

It's like looking through the reflection of water, a hazy, green-tinted image that looks familiar but is distorted, rippling and rupturing. And Allayria, set on this moldering throne, in the fractured morning light, looks up and sees a face that looks familiar—similar, but for a change in gender, to the one that she stares at every night in the cloudy mirror.

The room is silent.

"Father," Allayria says.

Ambassador Jon Akalia has grown old. It's like looking at an old painting that moves, an old memory left to rot. He's not the hearty, distracted man she once knew, the one who could put on a charming laugh, but only when he wanted, only toward whom he needed something from.

Time cut through the picture glass.

Or the Jarles—if his attire and matted hair are any indication, Allayria's father's fortunes have dimmed somewhat since she last spied him through a windowed set of gold doors. It seems warmongers have no use for diplomats.

It's funny; in that, she and the Jarles are in perfect alignment.

For all his silver-tongue talents Jon Akalia only gapes now, struck dumb by finding exactly what he was looking for.

She doesn't know what he expected—some weak, trembling thing, all acquiescence and no spine, or perhaps that quiet, inquisitive twelve year old that disappeared so long ago.

Her father finds neither.

And once the strangeness has worn off, the shock of something old and dead having resurrected itself, Allayria finds she feels nothing but annoyed.

This, she decides as her father gawks, is unnecessary delay.

Half of her wants to say it, but of course, she was raised better than that.

"General Jin," she says instead, and his stare is broken, fliting quizzically toward the gray-haired woman only a few paces away. "Would one of your men be so kind as to show the ambassador to some lodgings and food? It appears that he and his men are in need."

And then she stands, the dark red armor glinting in the morning light.

"Skill master," she says, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Ruben start. "Walk with Lieutenant Lei and me for a moment."

" 'Llayria," her father croaks, more a breath than anything else, because his mouth doesn't move.

" 'Llayria," he once huffed, an unwilling flush staining his cheeks as he stood, next to a woman clothed in gold, glaring down at his daughter's mud-caked bare feet. "Put away that ridiculous toy and wash yourself. We're not heathens."

Allayria turns to Lei, who still seems fixed in his place.

"Lieutenant?" she queries, and she raises an eyebrow.

They follow her wordlessly into the hall, all three acutely aware of the hundreds of stares leveled at their backs and she weaves, leading them through this tangle of people and out to quieter spaces. This crumbling ruin of a courtyard is not, perhaps, wholly safe from prying eyes, but it is safe at least from eavesdropping.

"Allayria—" Ruben begins, but she knows this tone of voice, low and smooth, lifting with that fine veneer of sympathy. Pity.

"We move out tomorrow at noon," she cuts in and the Skill master starts. "Arrange it with General Jin. A few troops can be spared to stabilize the city but they will need to bear the brunt themselves or ask for Fae's help."

"We can't move yet," he protests. "None of the supply lines have been set up, no city guard—"

"We move out tomorrow," Allayria repeats. "We stop at the main base at the Jarles border and then move forward. We have waited too long."

Ruben halts, staring. He remains silent for a long stretch of time and then, blue eyes narrowed in the bright sunlight, asks: "Did you find anything in the tower?"

Allayria blinks and stares back, face held blank.

"No."

They stand like that for a heartbeat, then two, and then Ruben says, in a quiet but clear voice: "You can't keep running from the things you fear, Allayria."

It's like ice, razor-thin and sharply cold, freezing up in splinters in her chest, but she doesn't let it show in her face, and only her lips move when she says, in an even, almost light tone:

"Careful, Skill master."

She doesn't need any of her Skills to feel the taut, livewire energy pulsing from the one mute, stationary man next to her. It's in the details, the glimpses pieced together out of the corner of her eye. Lei doesn't move, much less say anything until the slowly trudging form of the Skill master disappears behind the open archway, fading back into the hotel. She half expects a fight, a quiet fierce hiss about the abruptness, the lying, but this is not what he focuses on.

Instead he says: "That was your father."

Allayria blinks again, the wheels, the quickly forming answers, stuttering.

"Yes," she just says.

Lei doesn't follow up with anything after that; his head turns back in the direction of the hallway, back to the last place they had seen the ambassador.

"He seemed nice," he finally answers, and his voice is quiet.

He was an ass who cared more about how I made him look than how I felt, she wants to snap. He never cared. He never—

But she looks at Lei's face, looks at the long line of his neck, the seam of his jacket, and the pale, pink edge of a scar peeking up from underneath its collar. She wonders, for one, still second, what kind of man fathered children with Abadi Chaudri. Whether he cared about how his children felt, and what happened to him if he did.

Jon Akalia cared enough to barge into a military compound, a voice that sounds a lot like Lei's says in her head. Jon Akalia cared enough to wildly accuse an influential noble of abduction in a room full of generals.

She looks away from Lei.

There are half-moons etched into her palm when she marches down to different quarters that night. Jin had set the ambassador up in one of the nicer suites, down away from the rabble. Away from the planning rooms. Allayria doesn't know what working with Sinfui would have been like, but she finds coordination with General Jin remarkably easy.

It takes a moment for her to knock, but when she does the door opens quickly. It's not the ambassador, but another man—a valet or servant or something. She doesn't recognize his wiry face, but the man is whiter than a sheet when he sees her.

"Your Excellence," he gasps, bowing. "My, I— Come in, come in please. Please have a seat. Sit, sit here and I will get the ambassador—"

"There's no need," she cuts in and she marches toward the door opposite of the visiting room. "I will go see my father myself."

The man is protesting, shuffling behind her, when the door opens before she can grasp it, and her father starts from the other side, taken aback, once more, by the sight of his daughter.

"Ambassador—"

"Go get some tea, Jeof," Jon Akalia orders, his gaze still fixed on her face.

This is where she is unmoored—at the sound of the door clicking shut, the emptiness of room with just them in it.

He breaks the silence first, his gaze flitting from her face to the armor then back to her face.

"You look..." he hesitates. "Well."

It's a lie. He's forgotten she knows how to spy his.

"The Skill master," he pushes on. "He treated you well?"

He nursed me back from death alongside a pair of cave creatures after I mangled his friend's hand and tried to kill him, she thinks. He's had my back against the Jarles, against Feuilles, and against Ben.

"Yes."

But he's afraid of me.

Her father glances at her. He's measuring what to say and, after a minute it tumbles out.

"I'm glad to hear he was decent, though of course, not decent enough to not abduct a twelve year-old girl only to let her surface when she is of age, beyond parental control—"

"Ruben did not know who I was until a year ago," Allayria interjects bluntly. "He only found out and came to my aid after I was gravely hurt. No one kidnapped me."

When his brows remain knitted she just says it:

"I ran away."

He stares at her for a long minute.

"But he has been overseeing your affairs since then," he recovers. "Managing them. Convenient of him—convenient you are debuted by Commander Beinsho, a favorite of his, and not in your home country, as you should have been—"

It takes a moment for his words to sink in and then something hot and tight seems to clasp over her throat, constricting it, and all at once she doesn't know what she had expected. How she thought this would end any differently, how she could ever be so stupid as to think he would focus on something other than this, other than the scheming and the leveraging.

How reliable of you, Father, she thinks, eyes pricking as her mouth quavers into a hard, flat line.

"I'll take it under advisement," she interjects into the long stream of arrangements he's already concocting, and the words that follow are clipped. "Good to see you."

She's nearly at the door when he tries it again.

"'Llayria," he says, sounding lost and confused, and he even wears the expression convincingly on his face when she looks back. "I— Your mother—"

"Extend her my best wishes too," she advises him. "After all, my formative years with you were certainly informative."

She yanks open the door, feeling a breeze pass across her face.

"Almost as informative," she adds, "as all that happened after."

She holds the first war council in the bright, sunlit atrium of the hotel. She holds it and only lets the soldiers in. And when the suns have set and the night has crept in, she creeps too and when she next stands over the stretched creature in the mask she feels no fear, no simmering anxiety. She's all cold anger now, all sharp purpose.

Lei doesn't want her to do this; that much is evident from the subtle shifts in his expression. He doesn't want her to try again, but this is the only option left to them, the only clear path ahead.

He stands behind her this time, as if to set a watch, but she is traveling to a place he cannot see, to a space he cannot reach, and his hands twist and flex with it, curling and unfurling in quiet nerves.

It's time to go to a place that has no space, to find a monster with no mask. There's only one tremor when she sets her hand out to press fingers against the plastic face, one second of waiting, and then she is inside.

And Isati is waiting.

A/N: Father, dearest... you too were not missed. A surprise appearance from our hereto unseen patriarch who proves a leopard never quite changes its spots.

Lots of readers had been asking about mom & pop, so I was excited to at least partially sate that curiosity. I figured they wouldn't put two-and-two together about our girl until "The Ride" toward the end of Partisan, or at the very latest gossip from the ball, and would definitely take note of Ruben's involvement. Then with the Jarles seizing Thalassa they would be a bit preoccupied, but when they would hear the Skill master was back in town....

Well, I hope you liked the peek into the machinations of the Akalias. Allayria certainly didn't and neither, I think, did Ruben. I'm sensing a certain... tension between the two? Time to tread lightly...