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satisfied.
    “Now, Derian, you’ve mentioned how the Dragon Speaker can be voted in and out of office,” he said, “but you don’t seem to understand the implications of this. Our informants are members of what might be termed the opposition to the current Dragon Speaker—Apheros, I think his name is.”
    Derian nodded and the king went on.
    “This opposition views it to be to their advantage to keep us informed about the intimate details of New Kelvin’s governmental workings—hoping, doubtless, that we will become unhappy with some aspect of it and that our unhappiness will unsettle Apheros’s government and ready the way for their own.”
    “Seems an odd way to run a nation,” Shad commented, “until I think about what Father has been writing from Bright Bay. I think every government—except possibly the cruelest—relies on consensus and compromise…and on alliances.”
    Derian nodded. At any other time, he would have probed for more information on just how King Allister was doing with establishing his regime in Bright Bay, but right now he was more concerned about what King Tedric had said.
    “Sire, Prince Shad said we ‘have had’ observers in New Kelvin. Don’t we anymore?”
    “Sharp as a sword that boy,” the king chuckled. “Shad, now that Derian has finished proving he knows how New Kelvin’s government works, why don’t you return to the point you were about to raise.”
    Shad steepled his fingers and stared into them. Then, seeming to realize that this was a less than dignified posture, he straightened and looked Derian in the eye.
    “You’ve hit the problem on the head, Counselor,” he said. “We have had and maybe we still have an embassy in New Kelvin and observers within the Earth Spires; the problem is, we haven’t heard anything from them. News of Melina’s remarriage should have reached us long before the White Water River subsided. It didn’t. That raises concerns. If the news has been kept so quiet that not one among our spies—informants, I mean—heard of it, then how did the man who came to the Kestrels hear of it? If it has begun to leak out, then how have our observers failed to hear?”
    “Twisty, huh?” Sapphire commented.
    Derian nodded, wondering what they expected him to do. King Tedric coughed into his hand, looked suddenly weary, then pushed ahead.
    “Since you’re asking your parents for rumors, see if they have heard any about changes in the ranks of New Kelvin’s Primes as well. I don’t suppose you heard anything?”
    “Nothing, Sire,” Derian replied.
    “That’s worrisome,” King Tedric said. “But perhaps we’re troubling over nothing. Our ambassador could have caught pneumonia. The carrier pigeons could have all died from cold. Our informants—who tend to be among the more highly placed—might not have caught servants’-hall gossip.”
    The king tried to sound confident, but Derian wasn’t fooled. Shad changed the subject then, so abruptly that Derian didn’t have the nerve to press.
    “There is another matter we’d like to raise with you—using you, as it were, as a touchstone for our common people.”
    Shad said that last without a trace of condescension or the faintest shadow of a sneer, simply with an acknowledgment that the people of Hawk Haven fell into two classes: those with titles and those without.
    Derian nodded. “I would be honored, Prince Shad.”
    “Once again,” the king added, rousing somewhat from his tiredness, a twinkle brightening his faded eyes, “we will be trusting you with a state secret, though this one, by its very nature, cannot be kept secret forever.”
    Derian nodded again, slightly puzzled. Then the king glanced over at Sapphire and Shad. Something in the young couple’s bearing gave Derian a hint of what this secret must be.
    By mutual consent, Shad spoke for them both.
    “Sapphire is carrying our child,” he said, managing to look both proud and embarrassed all at once. “She is two months in