Page 6 of Raven’s Fight

“Encouraging,” I say.

“It’s meant to be informative.”

He shifts — the transformation rolling through him like a tide, human form giving way to the ancient black dragon that Thauglor actually is, enormous and absolute and carrying the particular weight of something that has been alive long enough to have stopped trying to seem less than it is. I shift beside him, my silver-iron drake considerably smaller but no less real for it. My scales catch the dawn light and throw it back in ripples of grey and pewter. I flex my wings once, checking the air, and feel the cold southern currents move through the membrane. Thauglor launches without ceremony and I follow.

We don’t speak much in the air, which surprises me at first. I’d expected the journey to be a briefing, Thauglor using the hours to load me with information about Therun’s court and gold dragon customs and everything I’d need to know before we landed. Instead he flies and I fly beside him and the sea passes below us in long grey swells and the silence is the kind that doesn’t require filling.

I find myself watching the southern view instead — the continent shrinking behind us and the open water expanding ahead, the horizon dissolving into a haze that makes it impossible to tell exactly where sky becomes sea. The scale of it is something I forget when I’m inside Blackhaven’s corridors or the academy’s stone rooms. How much world there is. How much of it I’ve never touched.

Raven is doing this in the other direction right now. East, toward the Eastern Isles, with Mina beside her. Two missions running parallel, the same thread pulling both of them — build the alliance before the six months close. I don’t like that she’s going somewhere I can’t follow. I understand it completely and I don’t like it at all.

Thauglor banks slightly to the right and I adjust to match him. Below us something large and dark moves through the deep water — a whale maybe, or something older. It doesn’t surface. The sea keeps its secrets.

“She briefed you before you left,” Thauglor says without preamble, the wind carrying his voice clearly despite the distance between our wingspans.

“Everything she knew at that point. The fire drake rotation, the western line, the Eastern Isles meeting.” I pause. “Amadeus.”

He’s quiet for a moment while we fly. “She told me about Solaris’s research. What he found about the soul-anchoring.”

“Yes.”

“And she’s not frightened.”

It isn’t quite a question. I answer it anyway. “She’s angry. She files frightened under angry and works from there. You know that.”

Another silence, longer. “She gets that from her mother,” Thauglor says, and there’s something in his voice that isn’t quite pride and isn’t quite grief but sits between the two like the line where the sea meets the sky. “Mina was the same. Still is. Fear as fuel.” A pause that carries weight. “It works until it doesn’t.”

I think about what to say to that. “She has us,” I say eventually. “All five of us. When it stops working there are five of us to hold whatever’s left.”

Thauglor looks at me across the expanse of sky between us. The ancient sapphire eyes that are so precisely Raven’s still catch me sometimes — the same color, the same quality of attention, looking out from a face that has seen twelve centuries more than hers.

“Yes,” he says. “There are.”

He faces forward again and we fly.

The Southern Isle appears on the horizon as a dark mass that resolves slowly into shape — cliffs, then forest, then the gold-lit coastline that gives it its reputation for warmth even in the colder seasons. As we descend I see the details Thauglor described: cultivated fields running in precise lines up the hillsides, horse pastures broad and green, and among them — moving, impossible to miss — the white shapes of unicorns.

I hadn’t entirely believed that part. White unicorns have been extinct on the continent for two centuries, gone so completely that most of what’s written about them reads like mythology. Seeing them now, picking their way through a green field in the southern morning light, is the particular strangeness of a myth becoming simply and quietly true. I’ll tell Hemlocke. He’ll want to know every detail — the coloring, the horn configuration, the way they move. He’ll have questions I don’t know how to answer yet and I’ll do my best to bring him enough to work from.

The wolf packs are visible in the tree line as we circle toward the landing approach. Not hiding but present, deliberate, positioned in a way that suggests patrol rather than fear. I count three separate packs from the air, their dark forms moving in the coordinated rhythm of animals that have been working alongside something intelligent long enough to adopt its logic. Large, even by continental standards. Therun has clearly been letting them develop without interference, which takes either patience or confidence or both.

Then the chromatics. They’re on the eastern cliffs — a full wing of them roosting in the morning sun. I’ve seen chromatic dragons on the continent but nothing like this. These are older bloodlines, the scales carrying a deep saturated metallic quality that the newer continental strains have diluted over centuries. Copper and bronze and brass and iron, their hides catching the light at different angles and producing different colors entirely, like looking at a flame from multiple sides at once. Twelve at minimum from what I can count, probably more further back in the cliff shelters. Thauglor says nothing but I notice he gives the eastern cliffs a wide berth on our approach, and the chromatics watch us pass with the alert professional attention of sentries who have decided we’re not a threat today and reserve the right to revise that opinion.

Raven really needs to see this place.

We land on the coastal platform — wide, stone-cut, worn smooth by generations of visiting species. Two of Therun’s guards are waiting, both gold dragon, their scales carrying that warm metallic undertone even in human form. They bow to Thauglor with the respect due a great wyrm elder and assess me with the calm professional thoroughness of males who do this regularly and have stopped finding it interesting. I pass, apparently, because no weapons are reached for.

We shift. I shake out my shoulders, adjust my harness, and fall into step beside Thauglor as the guards lead us up the stone path. The island smells of salt and warmth and growing things — rich soil, recent rain, the faint sweetness of something in flower that I can’t name. After the cold of the crossing and the mineral sharpness of Blackhaven’s mountain air it’s almost disorienting, the kind of place designed to lower your guard. I don’t lower mine, but I note the warmth.

One of the guards slows at a set of heavy doors and looks at me directly, past Thauglor. “King Therun will receive you in the great hall. He asks that you speak plainly. He has found, in three centuries, that indirectness costs more time than it saves.”

Thauglor glances at me sideways. The expression is brief and contains a great deal.

“Noted,” I say. The doors open.

King Therun of the Southern Isle is not what I expected. I had built him in my head from Thauglor’s descriptions — ancient, formal, measured. What I hadn’t accounted for was the particular quality of stillness he occupies when we enter. He’s seated at the far end of a long table of dark southern timber with a stack of correspondence to one side and a half-finished mug of something steaming to the other, and he looks exactly like a male who has been sitting in this chair for three centuries and intends to sit in it for three more. Not because he lacks the energy to do otherwise but because he has decided this is where he is most useful.

Gold dragon. His coloring shows even in human form — the warm undertone to his skin, the amber light in his eyes, the faintest metallic sheen where the morning light catches the back of his hands. He is not as large as Thauglor in this form but he carries himself as though size is an afterthought and substance is the actual concern.