The Knife'd told me his name late one night over two giant bowls of tea, and I'd promptly done everything I could to forget it. Bujold Sidet didn't mesh with the man in my mind. The Knife was the Knife. He'd proved that by stabbing me, not that I held grudges.

  "Didn't know you had one," I said.

  "Or family," Hao added.

  Which was a fair observation for all of us, considering that I didn't know Hao's first name, or last name, if Hao was her first. Or if she had a family. They knew even less about me.

  Served us all fine.

  The Knife's chair scraped against the steel deck plates as he shifted. Some of the Belithain's inhabitants had sprayed their homes with polymer coating. I'd even seen one domicile with genuine wood on the floors.

  I'd left it steel. The Belithain was big and friendly, but it was the Bucket that was home.

  "I have two sons," the Knife said. "Had. Both were in the navy, family tradition. Julien died on Harlan's World, in the Fed intervention debacle. Martens resigned his commission after that. Didn't resign the life."

  Which was a finer way of saying that he'd gone mercenary. Either that, or Syndicate, but the Knife wasn't a man who'd suffer Syndics, family or not.

  "What unit?" I said.

  "Rasczak's Roughnecks," the Knife said. I gave him a quizzical look. Never heard of them. "Small unit. Single ship, four companies of drop infantry. Merit based, not like those crud units that accept purchased commissions. And Martens was good. Made lieutenant in two years. That was the last I heard of him, before Remba."

  Meaning before the fourteen years the Knife had spent fighting for his life in a crudmucking frozen desert.

  "I sent out a contact request once we got the Horse away from Remba. The answer came back yesterday. The Roughnecks are on New Millet."

  I shook my head.

  "Never heard-"

  "Civil war," the Knife interrupted. "Quarantined planet."

  He fell silent, waiting, trying to hide his uncertainty by lifting the big, red tea cup. It had been steaming when I gave it to him, but now only faint wisps snaked from the dark-brown liquid.

  I understood why he'd stopped. Quarantined planets were situations so bad the Federal navy had decided that they couldn't be allowed to spill out into the void to reach other worlds.

  And bad meant bad. The Feds hadn't quarantined the Santa Kylie civil war that had destroyed the lives of most people aboard the Belithain. Nor did they quarantine the Syndicate deathworlds. Whatever was happening on New Millet had to be something extraordinary.

  "I'm listening," I said, and the Knife's shoulders lowered a fraction of a centimeter. "Give me the bad news."

  "It's a mage war," he said.

  Hao whistled, a slow, falling tone.

  "How big?" she said.

  I almost asked the same thing. But any mage war was too big. Mage wars happened when both sides had mages or warders. It was one of the few ways to crack a planet open without ramming asteroids at significant fractions of light speed into it. And if there were combat mages on the losing side, you'd end up with rogue, traumatized combat mages all over the sector. People who could summon serious force didn't mix well with PTSD.

  No wonder the Feds had locked the planet down.

  "Big," the Knife said. "From what I hear, there was a local school."

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  "The houses took sides?" I said. A school where the different houses chose to support different factions was bad. Not unheard of, unfortunately.

  "No," the Knife said.

  "No?"

  "They seem to all have supported a single faction," the Knife said.

  "Wha-" I began. A faction with mages against one without sounded like a quick way to end a war.

  "The losing faction," the Knife said. "The Feds are standing by until the mages are taken into custody."

  Which sounded plain wrong. Either the Knife's information was faulty, or something crudmuckingly weird was happening on New Millet. But that wasn't my concern.

  "And your son?"

  "Also on the losing side." The Knife gave me a small, bitter smile. "Seems to be a family trait."

  He fell silent. Cool air from the ventilation ran down my arms, making me shiver. I considered keying up the temperature, but my handcom was on my bunk and I didn't want to leave the table. The discussion felt like it was about to shatter, jagged pieces flying every which way, like a meteorite drilling through a tempered quartz viewport.

  "I have to go," the Knife said. "I can't leave him."

  "You'll never get down there," I blurted, my mouth moving before I could think of a better, kinder way to say it. One didn't land on a quarantine planet. The Fed blockade fleet would blow any ship coming too close.

  Or trying to leave. I should know. I'd been in that position myself.

  "Riina gave me envoy status," the Knife said.

  Now my eyebrows shot up, mirroring Hao. We would have made a great scene in a humor vid. The Belithain's captain kept surprising me.

  "I didn't know she had that power," I said, once I recovered.

  An envoy was a cross between a Federal marshal, a planetary diplomat, and a high-priced troubleshooter. In theory, envoys could board a Fed carrier, walk through a war-zone unmolested, and settle legal claims in the billion tons of helion range. They were also appointed by planetary governments, not captains of rogue ships.

  The Knife sipped his cooling tea. I did the same, letting the bitter taste wash over me, then enjoying the sweet, smoky aftertaste.

  The one that stayed on the tongue once the tea was gone. What would remain of the Knife, once he was gone?

  "She doesn't," he said. "But she has a valid envoy code. One of her people escaped Santa Kylie with it. She offered it to me."

  Which would get him down. Might not get him back into space though. And he'd be searched. If he brought his son, the envoy code wouldn't protect them both.

  But envoy codes weren't genetically encoded. They were passports offered to planets that might need to use them for singular officials. As long as the number of people matched the number of envoy codes, who the people were didn't matter.

  One person went down, one person came back up. The Knife was going to trade his life for his son's.

  My unsteady hands made rings appear in my tea cup. Small shakes, small rings. I could put it down to the cold.

  But I knew myself. I'd have done the same thing in his stead. Had done it, protecting the hatchling. The Knife would go.

  The Star Horse would rip itself to pieces, the diggers and scavs preyed upon by the bloods, or the bloods driving it into civil war.

  A civil war contained in a kilometers-long tube of steel, with nothing but thin walls protecting the people inside from the void surrounding it.

  The Horse needed the Knife. And the Knife needed his son.

  It was a no-win situation. Either the Knife left, and the people aboard the Horse destroyed themselves. Or the Knife stayed, and destroyed himself.

  In a no-win situation, the smartest move is not to play but the Knife was already in the game. If I wanted to save him, save the Star Horse, I needed to change the rules.

  I needed to change the setup.

  "I'll go," I said.

  "Can't ask you to do that," the Knife said.

  "I'm not waiting for you to ask," I said. "I'm going. And I'm pretty sure I could get Riina to give that envoy code to me instead."

  "I'm going, too," Hao said. "Captain."

  I gave her a lop-sided smile. I'd known she'd back me up, and this time it wouldn't put her in danger. Because an envoy code was for one. She'd remain on the Bucket until I came back.

  The Knife stared at us.

  "I can't let you," he said. "It's my life to trade."

  My smile spread into a grin.

  "I'm not trading," I said. "The Bucket's got some of the best wards in the galaxy. I can hide your son."

  "Even from a blockade fleet?" the Knife said. "They'll have chem-sniffers, carbon dioxide analyzers, and mage dowsers. Marine dowsers, with Marines operating them. Not something you can fool or bribe."

  "And I'll have me," I said. "I can tune the wards as they dowse, without them noticing. I've run contraband before."

  I said it calmly, without bragging. The Knife scratched his chin, pursed his lips. Scritch, scritch, scritch. I guessed he remembered how I'd cracked the engine housing on a ship in orbit with my wards. Then he nodded once, sharply, and raised his cup.

  I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  "Those are real tea leaves," I said. "Planet grown. Let me heat it before you waste them drinking it cold."

  He didn't pull back, didn't relinquish his cup. Just looked at me, an old, unshaven man, ravaged by a hard life.

  "Thanks," he said, his voice rough, his eyes glistering. "You'll need this."

  He dug around inside his shirt, pulling out a pendant on a simple chain. Looked like silver. Tarnished, with the flat surfaces polished to a shine where they'd rested against his skin. Two triangles, forming a star. He handed it to me, still warm. There was writing on one side, in an alphabet I didn't know.

  "He'll recognize that," the Knife said.

  After that, we didn't say anything more about him going or me taking over the Horse, and that was all right. He trusted me.

  Now all I had to do was find a way to not betray that trust.