“How is it going?” Schmidt asked him.

“Come down here and find out,” Wilson said, around his light. Schmidt demurred.

Every twenty meters or so Wilson would call out to Tuffy, who would bark some times but not others. After close to an hour of crawling, the barks finally began to sound like they were getting closer. After almost exactly an hour, Wilson could hear two things: Schmidt beginning to sweat up on the surface and the scrabbling sounds of a creature moving some distance ahead.

The tunnel suddenly widened and then disappeared into blackness. Wilson carefully approached what was now the lip of the tunnel, took the light out of his mouth and panned it around.

The cave was about ten meters long, four or five meters wide and roughly five meters deep. To the side of the tunnel lip was a pile of scree that formed a steep slope to the floor of the cave; directly in front of the lip, however, was a straight drop. Wilson’s light played across the scree and caught glimpses of dusty paw marks; Tuffy had avoided the drop.

Wilson directed the light to the floor cave, calling out to the dog as he did so. The dog didn’t bark, but Wilson heard the clitter of nails on the floor. Suddenly Tuffy was in the light cone, eyes reflecting green up at Wilson.

“There you are, you little pain in the ass,” Wilson said. The dog was dusty but otherwise seemed unharmed by his little adventure. He had something in his jaws; Wilson peered closely. It looked like a bone of some sort. Apparently, Tuffy wasn’t the first live animal to get sucked down into the fleur du roi after all; something else fell in and escaped down the tunnel behind the tear, just to die in this dead-end cave.

Tuffy got bored of looking into the light and turned to wander off. As he did, Wilson caught a glimpse of something sparkly attached to the dog; he trained his light on the animal as it moved and focused on the sparkly bit. Whatever it was was stuck to Tuffy in some way, encircling one of the dog’s shoulders and riding around to his undercarriage.

“What the hell is that?” Wilson said to himself. He was still following Tuffy with the light, which was why he finally saw the skeleton of the creature the dog had taken his chew toy from. The skeleton was roughly a meter and a half long and mostly intact; it was missing what looked like a rib—which was what Tuffy was now chewing on quite contentedly—and its head. Wilson flicked the light slightly and caught the white flash of something round. Ah,thought Wilson. There’s the head, then.

It took him a few seconds to realize that what he was looking at was the skeleton of an Icheloe adult.

It took another few seconds, and Tuffy wandering through the light cone, sparkling as he did so, before Wilson realized which Icheloe’s skeleton it was likely to be.

“Oh, shit,” Wilson said, out loud.

“Harry?” Schmidt said, suddenly cutting in. “Uh, just so you know, I’m not alone on this end anymore. And we have a bit of a problem here.”

“We have a bit of a problem on this end, too, Hart,” Wilson said.

“I’m guessing your problem isn’t Ambassador Waverly looking for her dog,” Schmidt said.

“No,” Wilson said. “It’s oh so very much larger.”

There was an indignant squawk on the other end of the line; Wilson imagined Schmidt putting his hand over the PDA’s microphone to keep Wilson from hearing ambassadorial venting. “Is it Tuffy? Is Tuffy all right?” More squawking. “Is Tuffy, uh, alive?”

“Tuffy is fine, Tuffy is alive, Tuffy is perfectly good,” Wilson said. “But I’ve found something down here that’s none of those things.”

“What do you mean?” Schmidt said.

“Hart,” Wilson said, “I’m pretty sure I just found the lost king.”

*   *   *

“Do you hear that?” Ambassador Waverly said, pointing out the window of one of the many sitting rooms of the royal palace. The window was open, and in the distance was a rhythmic chittering that reminded Wilson of the cicadas that would fill the midwestern nights with their white noise. These were not cicadas.

“Those are protesters,” Waverly said. “Thousands of Icheloe reactionaries who are here to demand a return to royalty.” She pointed at Wilson. “ Youdid that. More than a year of background work and persuasion and angling to get us a seat at the table—more than a year to line up the dominoes just right for us to position this negotiation as the first step to make a legitimate counter to the Conclave—and you blow it all in two hours. Congratulations, Lieutenant Wilson.”

“Wilson didn’t intend to find the lost king, Philippa,” Ambassador Abumwe said, to her counterpart. She was in the room with Wilson and Waverly. Schmidt was there, too, pulled in because he was, as Waverly put it, an “accomplice” to Wilson’s shenanigans. Tuffy was also present, gnawing on a toy ball volunteered by the palace staff. Wilson had discreetly separated Tuffy from the royal bones long before they both had exited the cave. The crown remained with the dog; it had somehow attached itself and refused to be removed. All five were awaiting the return of Praetor Gunztar, who had been pulled into emergency consultations.

“It doesn’t matter what he intendedto do,” Waverly shot back. “What matters is what he diddo. And what he did was single-handedly disrupt a long-running diplomatic process. Now the Icheloe are back on the verge of civil war and we are to blame.”

“It doesn’t have to be as bad as that,” Abumwe said. “If nothing else, we’ve solved the disappearance of the king, which was the cause of the civil war. The war started because one faction blamed the other for kidnapping and killing him. Now we know that never happened.”

“And that simply doesn’t matter,” Waverly said. “You know as well as I that the disappearance of the king was just the polite fiction the factions needed to go after each other with guns and knives. If it hadn’t been the king going missing, they would have found some other reason to go at each other’s throats. What’s important now is that they wanted to end that fight.” Waverly pointed again at Wilson. “But now he’sdragged up that damn king, giving the hard-liners on both sides a new pointless excuse to go after each other.”

“We don’t know that will be the outcome,” Abumwe said. “You had confidence in the process before. At the end of the day, the Icheloe still want their peace.”

“But will they still want it with us?” Waverly said, looking over. “Now that we’ve unnecessarily disrupted their peace process and added complications to it? That’s the question. I hope you’re right, Ode. I really do. But I have my doubts.” She turned her gaze back to Wilson. “And do you have any thoughts on this subject, Lieutenant Wilson?”

Wilson glanced over to Abumwe, whose face was neutral, and at Schmidt, who had preemptively gone pale. “I’m sorry I unnecessarily disrupted your process, Ambassador,” he said. “I apologize.” In his peripheral vision, Wilson could see Schmidt’s eyes widen. Hart clearly wasn’t expecting deference from his friend.

“You apologize,” Waverly said, walking over to him. “You’re sorry. That’s all you have to say.”

“Yes, I think so, ma’am,” Wilson said. “Unless you think there’s something else I should add.”

“I think your resignation would be in order,” Waverly said.

Wilson smiled at this. “The Colonial Defense Forces isn’t generally keen on resignations, Ambassador Waverly.”

“And that’s your final comment on the matter,” Waverly said, persisting.

Wilson glanced very briefly at Abumwe and caught her almost imperceptible shrug. “Well, except to say that I know what to do the next time something like this happens,” he said.

“And what is that?” Waverly said.

“Let the plant keep the dog,” Wilson said.

Praetor Gunztar opened the door to the room before Waverly had a chance to explode at Wilson. She whirled toward Gunztar instead with such sudden ferocity that even the praetor, who was no great reader of human emotion, could not miss it. “Is everything all right?” he asked.