Page 123 of Raven’s Fight

"The sad room is gone now," I say. "The person who made it sad is somewhere else."

She looks at the door a moment longer, then at me, then at Solaris, who has been holding her through all of it with the particular stillness she reads as confirmation. When Solaris is still, things are as they should be. She takes it in.

"Okay," she says.

We keep walking.

✦ ✦ ✦

Evening in the Malivore suite.

Nova has eaten what she considers an acceptable amount of dinner, which is more than I'd have guessed and less than Solaris offered. She's been here about forty minutes, giving the place the going-over she gives any new space — everything touched, everything examined, everything put through the Nova assessment that ends in approval or measured disapproval with nothing in between. The desk has been rearranged. Xero's windowsill position has been renegotiated. The small box from the inner drawer was held, examined, and put back, which is more careful handling than I expected.

She falls asleep between us, which is also not the plan. The plan was the small nest Solaris brought in his travel pack, the right size for her, set in the corner of the room that holds its warmth best. Nova considered the plan and chose otherwise, and once she has decided a thing like that it is not open to negotiation. She goes down like a dropped stone. Awake, then entirely gone, the way hatchlings sleep, with nothing gradual about it. No drowsy stretch, no slow descent. Present, and then deeply asleep — a small creature who has been fully alive all day and is now fully at rest.

Solaris and I look at each other over her.

"She held the box carefully," he says quietly.

"I noticed."

"She knows it matters."

"She knows a lot of things."

He watches her a moment with the expression I've come to understand as his version of wonder, the look of someone who has been alive twelve hundred years and keeps finding things that are new. "She asked me today what the big mountain's name is. I told her, and she said it back correctly. Not approximately. Correctly — the full Old Dragon pronunciation."

"The ancestral memory."

"Or she is simply extraordinary."

"Both can be true."

We sit in the quiet a while. Nova breathes between us, warm and heavy, all obsidian hair and the faint scale already showing on the backs of her hands — the early edge of what she'll be.

"The war," Solaris says eventually. He sets the word down gently rather than dropping it.

"Yes."

"How long do you think?"

I think about it, and not tactically — that reckoning runs in the background all the time and gives different answers depending on what I weight. I mean how long in the way that matters to the person asleep between us.

"I don't know," I say. "Long enough that she'll understand it when it comes. I want her to understand it when it comes."

"Not be protected from it."

"Not be unprepared for it. Protection that leaves someone unprepared isn't protection. It's delayed exposure. I'd rather she know what things are, in the version she can hold at her age, than be surprised by them at the wrong moment."

"She already knows things we haven't told her," he says.

"I know. The sad room. The way she looked down the administrative corridor this afternoon when we passed the door of Anipe's old office — she didn't say anything, but she looked at it the way she looks at things she has already worked out, as if she got the information somewhere else and came to confirm it in person."

"Ancestral memory works differently in hatchlings. More porous. More immediate. I don't fully understand it."

"You said that about her Old Dragon too."

"I did. She pronounced the MacLeod territorial marker correctly — the tonal variation that separates the northern line from the southern. It hasn't been in common use for three centuries. She shouldn't know it."