Page 135 of Raven’s Fight

The two hundred and fifty years before the binding are still mine. I remember them as clearly as anyone remembers a whole life, and they belong to me the way a stranger's life does — an old man looking at the boy who used to wear his name and finding someone else there. Then the thousand years inside it, which I remember the way you remember a long illness, the slow forgetting of what light was even for. And then the release, and Raven, and Blackhaven, and these three bright years.

Inside the binding I had a single division to organize myself around. There was before, and there was now, and before was a life I grew less sure had ever been real. Two poles, and one of them fading.

It has a different shape now — before the binding, and the binding, and since — and it is the since that holds me. Three years, the smallest span of the three by an enormous distance, and it is the one I am always turned toward. Not because it erases the thousand. Because it is the part I would choose again, all of it, the dark included, if the dark were the price of arriving here.

Nova is two, and I have been free a little over three, which means the whole of her life has run inside my freedom. She isn't merely the best thing in my second life. She is very nearly the entire measure of it.

Hemlocke shifts his arm, and she stirs and settles, and I come back from wherever I have been. My eyes find her first. Then they find him.

"I have her," I say. It isn't a question. It is an offer, and a thanks, and a claiming, all in three words, and he hears all three.

He doesn't hand her over the way you hand over a parcel. He gathers her carefully, the fist unknotting from his collar without waking her, and crosses to me and gives her into my arms the way you give a thing back to the one it belongs to. I have watched him do that with foals and with frightened horses and once, early on, with me. It is the truest work there is — tending a thing well and then returning it whole.

She fits against my chest the way she has since the day she was born. Twelve hundred years arrange themselves around the shape of a sleeping two-year-old, and I let them.

I never expected to reach a stretch of life worth a thousand years of dark. I have one now. It is two years old and asleep against my collarbone, and a black unicorn put it there.

That is the other thing I have learned since the release, and I learned it from him. You cannot argue a creature back into trusting the world. Nobody talked me into believing in the light again. Hemlocke kept the room warm and was there every evening and let the trusting rebuild at the speed it rebuilt, and one evening I noticed my body had remembered what warmth was for without my having decided anything at all.

An hour ago my daughter climbed into my lap and asked me why I go quiet when she flies, and I told her the truth, because I always will. That a very big feeling sometimes comes out as quiet instead of loud. And she told me, with the flat certainty of a two-year-old handing down a law, that it is all right to be quiet-happy.

I don't say any of the rest of it to her. She's two. But I think it, holding her now while she sleeps — the whole long life of me arriving at last at this small warm weight, which is the reason it was worth continuing.

Hemlocke settles back into his chair and keeps the room warm and lets me have this, because that is what he is for, and there is nowhere in three years or twelve hundred that I would rather be than here.

Happy is a big feeling.

It's the biggest.

Chapter 48

Raven

The morning the war begins, I fly the circuit one last time.

I know it's the last one. Not because the fighting starts today — it doesn't, not quite. Finlay's letter put the primary incursion six months out, and we're inside the final weeks of that six months, close enough that the shape of what's coming is fixed and far enough that this morning is still mine. I know it's the last one because it's the last ordinary morning. After today the mornings will belong to the war, and I want this one held properly before it goes.

So I fly it slowly. The same path, the same stones in the same order, the same mountain light on the eastern face at the same early hour. I have flown this circuit through three years at the academy and three summers at Blackhaven, and I have never once flown it thinking this is the last of the quiet ones. I fly it that way now, and it changes the way I fly. Everything sharpens at the edges when you know you are seeing it for the last time in the shape it's in.

Nova flies it with me. She has flown the full circuit every morning since the summer she decided it was hers, and she flies it now at my wing, obsidian and burnt orange against the pale early sky, pulling ahead on the downhill stretches the way she has since she got strong enough to. I don't slow for her anymore. I haven't needed to in months. She's two, and she flies like something that was made to, which she was.

I watch her fly and I hold the feel of the last unhurried morning, and I don't tell her what today is, because she's two and today doesn't have to be anything to her yet except a morning she flew with her mother.

✦ ✦ ✦

Blackhaven at dawn is the whole of what I'm protecting, laid out where I can see it.

I come down from the circuit and walk through it, and I let myself do the thing I rarely let myself do, which is look at all of it at once and feel the size of what's at stake. Most mornings I don't. Most mornings the household is a set of moving parts I keep track of and adjust, and not looking at it whole isn't a guardedness I choose on purpose, only the habit of a mind that has learned to hold a great deal at once.

This morning I let the parts be a whole.

The eastern families are settled on the ledges now. The Vreth and Solan clutches came through incubation over the summer, and both sets of hatchlings are out on the shared windbreak Hemlocke's people built, in the warm early light, doing the small fierce business of being young dragons. Those families spent eighteen months frightened and isolated while Amadeus took their people, and now they're here on my mountain with their young ones safe on a ledge behind a windbreak. That is something I did. I let myself feel it this morning, because after today there won't be room to.

Isolde is at the lower field with Charron. She turned nineteen in the fall, and she runs Blackhaven's black unicorn household outright now. She and Charron have the ease of a bonded pair a year into the bond, which isn't a lack of intensity but intensity that has found its shape.

Leander comes to Blackhaven often now. He and I don't speak of the platform above the hatchling parade, but it sits between us as a good thing, the way the best shared moments do.

The war room is quiet at this hour, and the maps are current. The tracks have run their course across the six months: the eastern alliance formalized, Therun's forces positioned, Keir's pack holding the western reports, and Cassius's mapping of the host network finished three weeks ago. That last piece is what makes the simultaneous strike possible. When Magnus moves, we move on Amadeus's net in the same window, and the whole shape of what we've been building for a year becomes the thing it was built to be.