Rene let out a breath from between pursed lips feeling somewhat deflated. Solae was right, creating a vast and unseen conspiracy didn’t make any of their immediate problems or priorities different. He climbed back into bed and resumed holding his fiancee. 
 
“Truthfully, I’m not sure what we can do even about Duke Tan,” he admitted.

“I’m not afraid to… well that is it's my duty to fight to stop him of course, but I’m not going to risk your life in some foolish gesture,” he squeezed her gently as he spoke the words, they were the honest truth if ever he had spoken it. There might well be aristocrats whos support of Tan was half hearted, but they were unlikely to jump ship until something more substantial than a rival claimant to the Duchy appeared.  

“The most we can do right now is keep you out of his hands, which is a huge blow if he is coordinating with conspirators elsewhere in the Empire. Without the PEAs his friends have to be wondering if he really went along with whatever their plan was.” Rene supposed that Tan might have sent messengers on fast ships to inform his co-conspirators of his difficulties, but maybe not, depending on how powerful and ruthless the conspiracy was it might be safer for Tan to keep them guessing. Rene wondered what he might find if he ever got into the Duke’s records. It was unlikely that he kept a list of his conspirators, but there would be enough strings there to start seriously unraveling the rest of it.
 
“Even if the Kalderi helped us in a military way, and from what I have seen of them any kind of large scale military commitment is unlikely, that might hurt even. The Empress is the puppet of the alien scourge who destroyed our ancestors!” Rene parroted in a tone one might hear on one of the holocasts which focused on political punditry. 

“Sorry, I know you're tired,” Rene apologised, falling silent. For a time his thoughts continued to spiral in wild unproductive directions. Then slowly the stress of the previous day and the relief that Solae was all right began to steal over him like a weighted blanket. 
 
“It will all be alright,” he reassured his lover. Intellectually he knew there were huge holes in that statement. What they could, or even should be doing was open to debate. Deep down however Rene really did believe it would be alright. Though he would never admit it, he held a naive belief that if he did his best and his cause was just that things would work out for him. That was nonsense of course, but it had the advantage that he kept looking for a chance long after others would have given up, and because he was looking for one, he generally found one eventually.