Page 139 of Raven’s Fight

Below us the passes empty of the last of Magnus's forces. The wounded are being gathered on both sides, and the smell of the field rises to the ridge — the after-smell, which is worse than anything that came before it, and which nobody warns the young about.

Raven doesn't look away from it. This is something I have come to understand about her: she makes herself see the cost. She will stand here and hold the accurate picture of what today took, the same way she held the accurate picture of the nest that morning, because she has decided that a ruler who looks away from the cost has no business collecting the victory.

"How many did we lose?" she asks quietly.

"The count is still coming. Fewer than the plan allowed for. More than none."

She nods. "More than none," she repeats, and lets the weight of it sit, and doesn't flinch from it.

"We're not done," she says at last.

"No," I agree. "But we have begun well."

The light goes off the western peaks. The field is held. Somewhere to the east a report is forming that will tell us whether the thing under the war is ended or only wounded. She stands beside me and we wait for it, and the first day of the war ends with the passes ours and the dragoness on the high ground where she belongs.

I am twelve hundred years old.

I have never been prouder to hold a ridge.

Chapter 50

Raven

The morning after the first battle, I walk the field.

Not the circuit. The field. There is a difference and I make myself keep it straight. The circuit is what I do to settle myself and think. The field is what I do because a commander who won a battle yesterday owes the ground an accounting of what winning cost. I don't walk it to feel it. I walk it to know it — accurately, in full, the true number and not the one that would be easier to carry.

So I walk the western passes in the gray light, alone except for Xero on my shoulder, and I look at what yesterday took.

The wounded are in the field hospital the eastern flights set up on the high shoulder, theirs and ours both. Blackhaven treats a wounded soldier as a wounded soldier once the fighting stops, and the eastern flights lost people to Amadeus for eighteen months and have decided, as a matter of who they are, not to leave even an enemy's wounded on the cold ground.

There is a fire drake near the entrance, young, one wing bound and burned, watching the healers work on him with the wary stillness of something that expected to be finished and hasn't been. He meets my eyes as I pass. I hold the look and give him nothing to fear in mine, because a wounded soldier under my protection is under my protection whatever flag he came up the pass under, and he needs to see that I know it.

I walk through it. I don't perform the walk. I don't stop at every pallet and lay a hand on every brow, because that would be a show, and the wounded can tell a show from the real thing. I walk it the way you walk a thing you mean to carry — slowly, seeing each face, letting the count be a set of people and not a number on a report.

The dead are under cover at the north end. Ours have their names already.

Therun lost four of the six metallics he sent. Four of the first of his pledge to stand in a real line, the gold dragon's own people, who dropped onto Magnus's flank with months of waiting behind them and won't fly home. The eastern flights lost eleven. My own forces lost more than I want to write down and exactly as many as I make myself write down, because the writing is the point. A ruler who rounds her own dead down has lied to herself about the cost and will make worse decisions for it.

One of ours is a young dragoness from the reef flight named Sela. She presented herself to me in the receiving line at the Gathering and asked, in careful continental common, whether the Marzana line would truly stand between her people and the thing that was taking them. I told her it would. She believed me enough to come to Blackhaven, and to stand in the northern line yesterday, and she is under cover at the north end this morning because she believed me.

I make myself hold that too. Not as guilt — guilt would make her death about my feelings — but as fact. She asked. I answered. She came. She died holding the line I promised her. The promise was worth making, and the answer was true, and she is still dead, and all of that is the weight I carry away from the north end.

I stand there a while. I don't say anything. There is nothing to say to the covered dead that isn't really for the living, and the living aren't here yet. I stand in the gray light and let the weight be the accurate weight. Not crushing, which would be a kind of indulgence. Not light, which would be a lie. The true weight. The exact price of the passes held.

Then I go to hear the report.

✦ ✦ ✦

Cassius's report comes in at the second hour, through the eastern channel, in the short form we use for the things that change everything.

I read it standing.

The strike went in on the mark, in the same window as the fighting, while every eye on both sides was fixed on the western passes. It landed. The host network was hit across its entire span at once, the mage-blood practitioners Amadeus recruited through Magnus cut off in the same coordinated moment, before he could turn any of them to the war. That part worked completely. Fourteen practitioners, and the network's hold on every one of them broken inside the window we built for exactly that.

The eggs are the other half, and the other half is where the honesty is.

Cassius's people hit every egg they had mapped — forty-one of an estimated forty-seven to sixty-three. Forty-one destroyed simultaneously, which is something nobody has managed against a distributed binding in the thousand years Amadeus has existed.