"Well, that's good," Magnus says lightly, because the sudden hesitation hasn't gone unnoticed and it also answers a few of his unasked questions about what had been keeping Frank up at night.

He'll happily transition to the new topic and get some venting out at the same time. "I don't exactly play by the rules when the rules are forced on me," he says, as if everything about him doesn't point to that. "I've been through regimes a few times before now, and I don't know what prompted this one but someone ought to find out." And then they can all decide what to do about it.