Page 104 of Raven’s Fight

Not the strength alone. This.

Behind her: Solaris, enormous and warm. Corvus in drake form, silver-iron scales taking the late afternoon light. Keir trailing the group in the pattern he holds when he's covering an approach, there and not there and there again. Hemlocke in black unicorn form. And Nova — tiny against Solaris's scale, obsidian and burnt orange, flying her approach angles with the total concentration of a two-year-old who has decided to master something.

I watch Nova fly.

Then I watch Raven watch Nova fly, which is the more interesting of the two. The particular quality of Raven watching her daughter do a thing correctly — the careful pride of someone who will not show it fully because showing it fully would embarrass them both, running directly against her complete inability to suppress it. I know that expression. I have been wearing a version of it for the past twenty minutes.

She shifts to human form on the landing field.

I am there by the time she lands. Not running — I don't run in the formal spaces unless something is on fire — but walking at the pace that covers the distance in the least acceptable time. She sees me coming. She doesn't speed up to meet me. She waits, which is correct: the dominant dragoness doesn't move toward the submitted queen. The submitted queen moves toward her. We worked that out between us over the summer, the choreography of how we read in public now that the private truth of it has changed.

In private, the truth is: she is my daughter, and she is twenty-three, and I am forty-five, and I have been the most powerful female dragon on this continent for fifteen years. I submitted to her at the end of Year Two because she was stronger and the submission was correct, and I would make the same choice again. The power and the love are two separate things. Both are real. Occasionally they are complicated.

In public: she is the dominant dragoness. I am her mother. The choreography says the first of those, and everyone watching can see it.

I reach her.

She looks at me with Thauglor's sapphire sitting in her face, which still does something specific to me every time, because those eyes have always been hers and his at once and both of those carry weight.

"The shoulder," I say.

She tilts it slightly — an offer to look, not a flinch. The scar shows above her collar. Narrow, pale, the scale around it still a little raised. "Healed," she says.

"I know. Balor sent me the training assessment."

Something moves in her face. "He didn't tell me he was reporting to you."

"He didn't tell me either. He simply sent it."

She turns that over — a woman adjusting her understanding of what Balor considers to be his business. "Of course he did," she says.

"Of course," I agree.

We stand a moment in the Sovereign landing field with the whole machinery of the Gathering running around us and the nest coming down behind her and the early-arrival flight leaders watching from a careful but entirely unmistakable distance, and what passes between us doesn't require language.

She is here. She is whole. She ran the Purge and came out the far side and is standing in front of me on the eve of the Great Gathering with the scar showing and her shoulders square and her eyes perfectly level.

I am her mother.

What I feel about that right now is very large, and it is mine to manage.

✦ ✦ ✦

That evening the flight leaders who have already arrived gather in the great hall for the pre-opening dinner.

This is tradition — the night before the Gathering opens, the early arrivals eat together in a setting that is technically social and functionally diplomatic. I host it. I have hosted it nineteen times. I know every person in that room by name, by flight, by their history with the Marzana line, by what has brought them here, by where they prefer to sit and whether they drink the northern vintage or the southern.

This year I also know something I have never known in any previous year: my daughter is at the far end of the hall receiving a line of flight leaders who have asked to present themselves to her before the formal opening, and watching her do it is producing a feeling I have no sufficient word for.

Proud isn't enough. Proud implies surprise, and I am not surprised. The word I keep arriving at is confirmed. What I believed about her is being confirmed, in front of the leadership of three hundred and forty-seven flights, and the confirmation has a weight I have been walking toward for twenty-three years.

What I watch: she remembers every name she is given without appearing to work at it. She asks specific questions — the real questions of someone who has read the background and is genuinely interested in the answers, not the pleasantries of someone getting through an obligation. She gives away nothing about the war planning, the intelligence, or the name Finlay is carrying north. She takes each flight leader's offered presence with the attention that says I see you and I am keeping this without ever saying I am assessing you, though she is assessing every single one of them.

She is doing all of this while tracking Nova across the room. I know because every fourth or fifth leader, her attention shifts a fraction to the left — toward where Solaris is standing with Nova in his arms — and comes back. It costs her nothing in the conversation. The flight leader never notices. I notice, because I know her, and because I did the same thing with my own children for twenty years and I know exactly what it looks like to keep hold of a hatchling in a crowded room without appearing to.

This is Finlay's Royal Protocol.

It is also simply her — everything she has been taught running alongside everything she already was, at the same time, invisibly.