Page 106 of Raven’s Fight

The outer courtyard held, at that moment, representatives of forty-three flights.

All of them stopped.

I heard about it from Keir, who blinked to me roughly eight seconds after it happened, which is the response time of a hound who has just seen something unexpected and is delivering it while the situation is still live. His face was doing the thing Keir's face does when he is trying very hard not to find something funny and not entirely succeeding.

"Nova," he said.

"I gathered."

I went to the outer courtyard. She was in the middle of it, still in dragon form, wings spread, looking at the assembled representatives of forty-three flights with the expression she wears when she is weighing something and hasn't decided yet what she thinks of it. Forty-three flight representatives looked back at her.

I didn't shield her.

I stood at the edge of the courtyard and looked at my daughter in the middle of it and let them look.

Let them see the obsidian and burnt orange, the mismatched eyes, the scale pattern that appears in no flight's recorded heritage because it is hers and has never existed before. Let them register that she is already large for her age, that her wings are already long for her body, that she holds herself in dragon form the way she holds herself in everything — without apology, filling all the room available.

She looked at me across the courtyard.

I gave her the nod. The particular one. You are correct. Continue.

She produced the flight voice again, shorter this time, the version she uses when she has decided something about a situation and wants it known that she has decided it. Then she shifted back, walked to Solaris, and climbed him with the efficient confidence of a two-year-old who considers enormous ancient wyrms to be personal climbing equipment.

Forty-three flight representatives watched all of it.

Good.

✦ ✦ ✦

The formal opening convenes at mid-morning.

I stand at Klauth's right, which is the heir apparent's position. This is the first Gathering since I became heir apparent. The placement is exact: slightly behind him and to the right, visible from the whole floor, in the eyeline of every flight leader in the hall without being the thing they're looking at. It says succession without saying displacement. I am here, I am next, and Klauth is still king.

Klauth reads the declaration.

It's the second of the three versions I know Mina drafted. The language admits the changed ground without naming it — the phrase in a season of renewed pressure upon continental stability is doing a great deal of work in the second paragraph. Every flight leader here knows exactly what it refers to. It gives them the acknowledgment without putting anything into the permanent record that would amount to a provocation before we're ready to make one.

Mina's drafting. Nineteen years of second drafts, each one calibrated to the inch.

I listen, and I watch the room.

The assembled flights study me with different eyes than they would have used a year ago. I can feel it without reading any single face — the quality collective attention takes on once it has been changed by information. They've heard about the Purge. About the fire drakes, about Anipe, about the dragon's-bane bolt and the contacts and what happened against the east wall with Samara. It has been moving through the Gathering's own channels for four weeks, since the first formal accounts went out of the Marzana office.

What they're looking at isn't the heir apparent in the abstract.

It's the heir apparent who ran the Purge and walked out.

I stand at Klauth's right in the formal position and I let them look, the same way I let them look at Nova in the courtyard. Let the looking produce whatever it produces. There is nothing useful in managing what people see when they look at you. The useful part is managing what you see when you look back.

I look back.

I start filing.

✦ ✦ ✦

The reception line begins at the second hour.

Three hundred and forty-seven flights, each entitled to present formally to the heir apparent — the traditional first-day obligation, the thing that guarantees every attending flight direct contact with the Marzana succession. In practice not all of them will ask for it. Roughly two hundred will. The rest will look for informal contact during the social events, which is a different conversation and wants handling differently.