Page 97 of Raven’s Fight

"Cassius has the new direction."

"Yes."

"Finlay is moving."

"Yes."

She isn't reassuring herself that the pieces are in place. She knows they are. This is what she does when she needs to put something down — she names the things that are moving, confirms they are moving, and then allows herself to stop holding them.

"Nova's in the upper field," I say.

She looks at me.

"Isolde has the morning feeding. Nova's up there with Xero, working on her approach angles."

Something in her face does what it does when word of the ordinary arrives after a long interruption. "She's working approaches already."

"She's been at it since you left for the Purge. She decided the morning routine would not be suspended in your absence."

Raven is quiet a moment. Then: "Let's go up to her."

"Yes," I say.

We go up.

Chapter 33

Raven

I land in the upper courtyard at the second hour of the afternoon.

Solaris comes down beside me, his wyrm form settling with the unhurried weight of something very old that has never once made a landing in a hurry. We flew up from the great hall rather than walking it, because after four hours at that table both of us wanted air.

I shift.

The cold hits first — the thin high cold that belongs to this mountain and no other, carrying the mineral edge of the rock. Under it, the warmth of the place I live. Hearths that have been running without pause. The heat a building holds when it is occupied and well kept. And the faint trace of Xero in every room she has claimed, which is all of them.

I take a breath.

Something lets go in my chest that I didn't know was still held. Not the tactical focus of the Purge — I put that down when the bell rang. The thing underneath it. The low steady hum of sustained risk that runs through a body at a pitch too quiet to notice while it's happening.

It goes. I stand in the courtyard and feel it go.

Nova comes out of the upper corridor at speed.

She was told, I learn later, to wait inside until I had landed and shifted. Solaris's caution, and a reasonable one — a two-year-old running flat out onto a platform occupied by two wyrms in the middle of a shift is a problem waiting to happen. She waited. She waited roughly four seconds after I shifted, at which point waiting became physically impossible.

She is moving the way she moves when she has been holding something large for longer than she can comfortably hold it. Flat out, her obsidian hair streaming behind her, her small feet making more noise on the stone than anything that size should manage. She does not slow down as she gets close.

She hits me at about knee height.

I catch her. Both arms, her face pressed into my sternum. She runs warm even in human form — the dragon in her showing up as temperature — and she is always warmer than the air around her in a way I've learned means she is well and content. Her hands are fisted in my jacket.

She isn't making a sound.

I shift just enough to get my wings out. They come around her, obsidian leather closing over the small warm weight of her, the membrane holding the heat in between us.

We stay like that in the courtyard a long time.