Page 103 of Raven’s Fight

I go down to the morning circuit.

Chapter 35

Mina

The Great Gathering opens tomorrow.

I've been at Sovereign ten days getting it ready, which is the least any adequate preparation takes for the largest convening on the continent, and which produces the particular tiredness that comes of doing organizational work at scale. Not physical. The mental kind — ten days of logistics and protocol and accommodation assignments, catering for three hundred and forty-seven flights, and the exact choreography of arrival order so that historical enemies don't put down in adjacent fields and open the Gathering with an incident before the formal opening has convened.

I do this every year. I have done it every year for nineteen years.

I am better at it than anyone else alive.

I still find it exhausting.

Klauth is in the east wing going over the declaration with his scribes — the opening statement, the same words in shape that have been used since the first Gathering three hundred years ago, altered each year to suit where the continent actually stands. This year's alterations want care. Nothing about the climate is neutral. Every flight leader arriving tomorrow knows about the fire drake faction, about the academy, about what Raven did during the Purge. The declaration has to acknowledge the changed ground without tipping into language that would amount to declaring hostility before we're ready to declare it.

I drafted three versions. Klauth chose the second. That is typical. The first is always what I actually think, the third is too careful, and the second is what I write when I'm holding honesty and diplomacy against each other and splitting the difference. He has been choosing the second for nineteen years. I stopped being surprised a long time ago.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first arrivals came three days ago.

Early arrivals are always the flights with the longest way to travel — the island flights, the far eastern territories, the northern coastal communities whose geography doesn't allow a quick crossing. We take them in with the standard protocol: formal greeting at the landing fields, accommodation, and the orientation that walks first-time flight leaders through Sovereign's layout and the schedule.

I run the orientations myself, as I do every year.

They serve a purpose that isn't on the official agenda. Twenty minutes of orientation is the first chance I get to take the temperature of an arriving flight before anything formal begins. In twenty minutes I can read a room — the postures, the small signals that tell me which flight leaders have come with something other than what they wrote on their attendance papers.

What I read this year is more fear than usual in the middle of the field. The small and medium communities without the resources to hold their own ground, the ones who depend on the continental alliance for their safety. They arrive with the look of people who have been watching something come apart from what they hoped was a safe distance and are beginning to wonder whether the distance is still safe.

That is useful.

Frightened flights are flights that need something from a Gathering. Flights that need something can be offered something. And what Raven means to offer them — what we settled at the war council at Blackhaven — is precisely what a frightened flight needs most: a place inside a structure large enough to shelter it.

I make notes. I pass them to Klauth's advisor.

The Gathering hasn't begun and we are already working it.

✦ ✦ ✦

Raven arrives the evening before the opening.

I know her flight path. I know all of them — I coordinated them — but I know hers because I plotted it myself instead of handing it to the protocol team. Her approach from the east, her arrival window, the position on the fields that puts her descent in view of the greatest possible number of flight leaders already here without requiring any of them to turn and look for it. Finlay's protocol, worked through my logistics, and what it produces is a landing that is — the word is legible. The heir apparent arrives, everyone who is going to see it sees it, and what they see is a dragoness who flew from Dragonis with her whole nest and her hatchling daughter and her tressym, and who lands the way she does everything, without apology and without performance.

She is in her dragoness when she clears the eastern ridge.

I am on the upper observation platform, which is where I told my coordinator I would be conducting a final review of the landing fields. This is true in the sense that I have papers in my hand.

I am also watching my daughter arrive.

The skull marking carries from altitude — the bone-white of her face against the matte black of the rest of her, the coloring that is specifically hers, that is the Mrithun and the wyrm and twenty-three years of her life written into scale. She is large. She has been growing since the submission at the end of Year Two, the wyrm in her doing whatever it had apparently been waiting for permission to do, and she is visibly bigger than she was six months ago. She moves through the air with the unhurried authority of something that has accepted its own size and stopped negotiating with the space around it.

I watch her.

I have been watching her since she was born — the particular watching of a mother who is also a queen, who knows the shape of power in a dragon's body because she carries it herself and can therefore read it in someone else without laying her own over it. What I read in Raven above Sovereign is not performance and it is not ceremony. It's simply a dragoness who came through the Purge and walked out of that gate and ran a war council and sent her people north and spent four weeks teaching a two-year-old approach angles, and who has arrived at the Great Gathering carrying all of it as ordinary weight, because it has become ordinary to her.

This is the thing I submitted to at the end of Year Two.