Page 3 of Raven’s Fight

“I can see that.”

I cross the room and crouch in front of her, working the blanket free from her left wing first. The membrane is warm from sleep, soft in the way it only is first thing in the morning before she’s had time to stretch and flex. She holds very still while I untangle her — a different discipline from the fierce focus she brings to everything else, the particular stillness of a hatchling who has learned that not all problems yield to force. Solaris taught her that. I take absolutely no credit.

“There.” I smooth the blanket across her lap and sit back on my heels. She examines both wings with the thorough suspicion of someone expecting a second ambush. “Did you sleep?”

“Yes.” A deliberate pause. “Grandfather came.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Dad was here last night?”

“He sat.” She demonstrates — puts her back against the wall of her nest and folds both arms across her chest in a precise impression of Thauglor Mrithun at rest, complete with the exact angle of the chin he uses when he’s trying to look as though he wasn’t just worried. The accuracy is unsettling. She is twenty-two months old.

“Of course he did,” I say.

She nods, satisfied this has been properly acknowledged. “He purred.”

“He does that.”

She reaches for me then, both arms out in the universal hatchling demand, and I pick her up and feel her wings fold around my shoulders in the small embrace she’s been practicing for months. The reach of a dragon not yet large enough to fully enclose what she loves but absolutely going to keep trying. She smells of sleep and the mineral warmth of her nest and something that is just Nova, wholly itself, like no other scent in the world.

I hold her and let the morning be only this for a moment. Outside, the first real light of dawn breaks over the peaks, coming in gold and then immediately grey the way it does here in the early weeks of the season, the mountain absorbing the warmth before it can settle anywhere.

Six months, says the number that lives behind my sternum.

Yes, my dragoness agrees. But this is also real.

I tuck my face briefly against Nova’s hair and breathe. “Come on,” I say when I’m ready. “Solaris has been awake since before me and he’s made breakfast. He always makes breakfast.”

Nova pulls back and considers this seriously, as she considers everything, with her head tilted and those amber eyes doing the particular calculation of a creature making sure she’s making the optimal decision. The half-sapphire in her left catches the kitchen light and throws it back like a shard of something older than either of us. Then her wings flutter and we go.

Solaris has, in fact, made breakfast. He has also rearranged the kitchen at some point in the last hour, which I notice because the ceramic pot that usually sits on the left side of the hearth is now on the right and the dried herbs hanging from the ceiling beam are in a different order. This is a Solaris thing — he has a thousand years of accumulated preferences and he applies them whenever he thinks no one is paying attention. I’ve been letting him because the kitchen does actually work better now.

He looks up when we come through the door and his face does the thing it does when he sees Nova — something ancient and vast becoming momentarily, completely uncomplicated. “There she is,” he says in that particular Scots lilt that still catches me sometimes in the chest when I’m not braced for it. He opens one arm without looking away from the pan he’s managing and Nova crosses the kitchen quickly, tucking herself against his side with the familiarity of a small creature who has decided where she belongs.

“Blanket,” she tells him gravely.

“Aye, your mam mentioned.” He glances at me over her head, his amber eyes warm and unhurried in the way they always are in the morning before the day has had time to put its weight on him. “There’s porridge. And the thing with the eggs you like.”

The thing with the eggs is a dish he started making three months ago that I have never been able to fully identify but that tastes of saffron and something smoky and has no equivalent anywhere in my previous experience. I’ve asked him what it is twice. Both times he said something from a long time ago and changed the subject. I’ve stopped asking.

I take a bowl of porridge and settle at the kitchen table — not the briefing room, not the great hall, just the kitchen — and let the morning assemble itself around me. Nova climbs onto the bench beside Solaris when he sits and immediately attempts to steal whatever is on his plate. He lets her take half of it. I note this and say nothing. Pick your battles.

“Mom lands at midday,” I say.

“I know. She sent a message.” Solaris sets a piece of bread in front of Nova without being asked and she accepts it with the solemn gratitude of someone receiving exactly what they needed. “Finlay’s already gone through his correspondence. There’s nothing new from the north, which he says is either reassuring or suspicious.”

“It’s suspicious.”

“That’s what he said too.”

I eat my porridge and think about the Eastern Isles. About Queen Giselle’s face as Xero described it — attentive, careful, the look of a female ruler who has survived long enough to understand that almost everything presented to her is also a test of something. We’ll land on her shores tomorrow morning with no formal guard, no military escort, no display of the kind of power that intimidates first and asks questions later. That’s deliberate. You don’t approach a sanctuary island with a show of force and expect honesty in return.

What we bring instead is the truth of what we are. My mother is the reigning female of the Marzana Empire and one of the most dangerous beings on the continent. I am the dominant dragoness of Blackhaven and the heir apparent to the empire, which means I am either a threat or an opportunity depending entirely on how this conversation goes. We’ll find out which.

She’s not allied with Magnus, my dragoness says, with the certainty she sometimes produces from nowhere, the bone-deep knowing that bypasses logic entirely. I’ve learned to trust it.

“I’ll be back before the Gathering,” I tell Solaris. “Possibly before the end of the week, depending on how the meeting goes.”

“I know.” He’s watching me with that particular quality of attention he has — not worried, not trying to talk me out of anything, just present. He is very good at being with something instead of against it. “Nova and I will hold the mountain.”