Page 112 of Raven’s Fight

We stand there together. The parade goes on below us. Nova's intermittent performances. The crowd's responses. The warm ambient noise of three hundred and forty-seven flights on day four, when the whole thing has finally relaxed into itself. Neither of us is paying attention to any of it.

"She's going to be all right," I say.

His hand tightens slightly.

"Charron is the best of his herd. I've known him his whole life through Hemlocke, and I've watched him handle this — handle knowing about her before she knew — with more care than most grown men would manage. He waited the better part of a year. He came to places she would be and kept the distance that gave her room, and he didn't push and he didn't pursue. I would not have let him near her if I didn't trust him completely."

Leander exhales.

"She's eighteen," he says. Quietly.

"She's eighteen, and she's making a choice that is entirely hers to make, and one I believe she'll make carefully, on her own schedule, the way Isolde does everything. With more thought than she shows."

He's quiet a moment. Then: "How long did he know?"

"Since the spring. He went to Hemlocke first. Hemlocke brought it to me in the autumn."

"And you let him stay close."

"I watched how he handled being close. What he did with knowing, and with waiting. Months of evidence. That's why I trust him."

Below us, Isolde and Charron haven't moved from where they arrived. His head is still slightly bowed. Her hand is still against his face. The crowd flows around them — people who have no idea what they're looking at, giving them room without knowing why.

"She's my daughter," Leander says. Three words holding everything, and he knows it, so he doesn't add to them.

"Mine too," I say. "A little. In the way she'd let me be."

He looks at me a long moment. The careful stillness is back in his face, but sitting differently now, over something that has moved underneath it.

"Thank you," he says. Quietly. "For watching."

I don't answer. The watching is what I do. He knows that.

Below us, Nova finally runs out of performance, shifts back, and climbs Solaris with the satisfied efficiency of a two-year-old who has accomplished everything she came here to accomplish. The crowd applauds that too. The parade draws toward its end.

Leander doesn't let go of my hand.

I don't either.

The parade ends. The crowd disperses in the particular way three hundred and forty-seven flights disperse after something that wasn't diplomacy — warm, unhurried, the kind of scattering that carries conversation rather than agenda. Flight leaders who have been positioning carefully for four days are talking to people they hadn't needed to talk to until now, because the parade cracked open something the formal sessions keep shut.

Isolde and Charron have moved.

Not far. To the edge of the grounds, out of the flow, into the shade of the eastern colonnade. They're talking now. Or rather, he is listening and she is talking, which is the correct order for the first conversation after a bond-snap — the one who has been waiting lets the one who just arrived speak first, and gives them the whole of the first words. I can't hear any of it from the platform. I can see her face, the animation in it, the look of someone who has been carrying an unexplained feeling all day and now has in front of her the person who explains it.

"She looks all right," Leander says quietly.

"She does. She looks like herself. That's the best possible thing."

He watches his daughter a moment longer. Then he lets go of my hand — not abruptly, with the deliberateness of a man deciding to release something he was holding for support and trusting himself to stand without it. He straightens.

"I should find Mina," he says. "She'll want to know."

"She already knows. She's been watching from the south platform. You'll see it in her face when you find her."

Something that might be the beginning of a smile crosses his. "Nineteen years of these and she still looks like that?"

"She has very good children," I say. "It produces that expression fairly regularly."