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That was a fair point, Hector supposed. But he wasn't quite satisfied yet. "Alright. Then... what if Morgunov were to say that handing them over wasn't necessary? That we just had to not provide refuge for them, instead?"

The Queen sighed. "Are you just trying to think of how best to paint me into a corner?"

Hector relinquished a sympathetic smile. "Kinda."

She dropped her gaze down to the table and stared at it while she thought. And she kept staring.

Mehlsanz decided to chime in. 'Either way, it would be a major crisis. You can't take Morgunov at his word. Especially after what his men did to this country before.'

The Queen was still thinking, though. Perhaps even she didn't know what she would do in that situation.

Hector kept waiting for an answer, but the silence was growing rather extreme, and he began to feel like he was torturing her. "...Well, on the bright side, I don't actually think that Morgunov is going to show up around here anytime soon."

That made her look up at him again. "I agree, but why do you sound so confident?"

Now there was a sentence he'd never expected to hear. "Ah... I think Morgunov has already gotten what he wanted out of Sair. I kinda get the impression that he's more interested in his... er, 'scientific' experiments, now." Torturing Asad Najir, specifically, but Hector didn't feel like that gruesome little detail was necessary to mention here. The Queen had enough on her mind already, he felt.

"I see," she said with trepidation. "You think he will be preoccupied for a while, then?"

"Morgunov himself, yeah. His goons, maybe not so much. I, uh... er..."

Garovel stepped in now. 'Hector killed the Man of Crows two days ago.'

Mehlsanz's hollow eye sockets bulged. 'He did WHAT?!'