Raven’s Fight

DRAGONIS ACADEMY 2ND GENERATION

SERENITY RAYNE

NO AI was used in any parts of this book or cover design.

ALL Human Errors

ALL Human Thought

ALL Human Design.

Copyright © 2026 by Serenity Rayne

Copyright © 2026 Blood Queen Publishing

Copyright © 2026 Eve Graphic Design

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Chapter 1

Raven

Blackhaven breathes differently before the rest of the world wakes up. In the hour before dawn, when the torches have burned to their last and the first cold light hasn’t found the peaks yet, the stone holds the dark like it’s keeping a secret. I’ve noticed this over the past year and I’ve stopped trying to explain it. Some things just are.

I stand at the edge of the upper flight field with my wings half-spread, letting the pre-dawn air move through the membranes. The sensation is somewhere between a shiver and a sigh. Below me the territory stretches in every direction — the warhorse fields to the east where Hemlocke’s foaling program is slowly transforming fallow ground into something extraordinary, the blink hound patrol routes threading through the western tree line where Keir’s pack runs shifts so precise you could set a clock by them, the black unicorn grazing circles marked out in silver rope along the lower slopes. Beyond all of it, the sea.

Ours, my dragoness says, and for once she isn’t being territorial. She’s being accurate.

I tuck my wings and start the circuit. This is what the dominant dragoness does before breakfast — she walks the edges of what she’s built and counts it. Not out of vanity but out of necessity. You can’t protect something you haven’t fully seen, and I make it my business to see everything.

The mountain is still sleeping. Dragons in the upper caverns, blink hound families in the warren of rooms Corvus redesigned last spring, the three new flights who arrived after the Gathering and are still finding where they belong in the rhythm of Blackhaven’s days. I pass their dormitory wing and catch the scent of unfamiliar scales — iron and cedar from the eastern flight, something sweeter from the second, a sharp mineral quality from the third that I still haven’t been able to name. They’ll stop smelling unfamiliar eventually. Everything does.

The stables are the first place that shows life. I hear Titan before I see him — the heavy drum of hooves against packed earth, the low rumble that is the closest thing a warhorse makes to contentment. He’s always awake when I am, which I’ve decided means either we’re bonded in some way Hemlocke hasn’t fully explained, or Titan simply doesn’t sleep much and I’m flattering myself. I lean over the stable door and he turns to look at me with those dark bottomless eyes, making the sound he reserves for my arrival — low and resonant, somewhere between a greeting and an accusation.

“Good morning to you too,” I tell him.

He snorts smoke. The curl of it drifts past my cheek, warm against the cold air. I don’t go in — this is one of Hemlocke’s quiet rules, that the horses set their own terms in the morning and visitors wait to be invited. Titan watches me for another long moment, then turns back to his hay with the deliberate dignity of a creature who has made his point. I take the hint and keep moving.

The eastern perimeter is where Keir’s overnight shift runs. I find two of them near the boundary markers — young males, maybe eighteen months bonded to the pack, who startle when I appear out of the dark and then try very hard to pretend they didn’t. I recognize the smaller one. Dax. He blinked into a wall his first week here and hasn’t quite recovered his confidence around me, though his instincts in the field are sharper than most.

“Anything?” I ask.

“Quiet,” he says, straightening. “Same trail activity on the western line as yesterday. No new signatures.”

“Tell Keir I want the western report at second bell.”

He nods, eager. I keep moving before he can say anything else because the young ones want to talk when you give them the opening, and while I don’t begrudge them that, I have eleven more stops before the mountain wakes fully.

By the time I finish the circuit the sky has shifted from black to that deep pre-dawn blue — the color without a name in any language I know but that every predator recognizes as the last good hunting hour. My boots are damp from the dew on the lower slopes and my wings are cold through the membrane, so I fold them tighter against my back and feel the familiar weight of them settle, the right wing’s healed ridge halfway up the shaft catching briefly as it always does before releasing into its usual position.

I stop at the high point above the flight field and look north. Somewhere in that direction Magnus is building something. Finlay’s last letter put the timeline at six months — forces assembling in the northern mountain passes, supply lines being quietly established through territory that’s technically neutral. The kind of preparation that takes months to notice and seconds to understand once you finally do.

Six months. I filed that number somewhere behind my sternum the night the letter arrived and it hasn’t moved since. It lives there the way old injuries live — constant, specific, mine.

We have time, my dragoness says, and she isn’t wrong. Six months is enough time to finish building what we’ve started, to formalize the alliances, to position Therun’s forces, to find whatever Amadeus is hiding inside Magnus’s court and cut it out before it spreads further.

It’s enough time. I turn away from the north and head inside.

The briefing room on Blackhaven’s second level was Corvus’s idea — practical, not grand. A long table of dark pine with mismatched chairs that accumulated as the flight grew, maps pinned to three of the four walls, a patrol board on the fourth that Keir updates every morning in handwriting so small I’ve told him three times that other people need to read it. He keeps writing small. I’ve stopped arguing.

Hemlocke is already there when I arrive, sitting at the far end with a foaling report spread in front of him and a mug of tea steaming gently in the cold room. He looks up when I come in and something warm moves through his expression before he settles it back into its usual stillness.

“The Aldenmere mare is close,” he says by way of greeting.

“How close?”

“Today. Maybe tomorrow.” He tilts his head in that particular way of his — unhurried, careful, giving the information space to land. “I’d like to be there.”

“Then be there.” I pour myself a mug from the pot on the side table. Hemlocke’s tea, too strong, tasting of pine and something darker I’ve never quite identified. I’ve started to like it, which probably says something about me. “Who covers your morning walk?”

“Charron offered.”

I pause with the mug halfway to my lips. Hemlocke’s expression gives nothing away — years of managing a herd dynamic that operates on its own logic teaches you to hold your face still.

“Isolde is coming to help with the midday feeding,” I say.

“I know.”

“And Charron is covering your morning.”

“Yes.”

I take a slow sip of tea. “Hemlocke.”

“Raven.”

“Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

The corner of his mouth moves, just barely. “She turns eighteen in three months.”

“I’m aware.”

“He’s been respectful.”

“I know. I’ve been watching.” I set the mug down and meet his eyes. The magenta of his irises catches the torchlight in that faint otherworldly way they have, his unicorn nature just beneath the surface. “Leander is going to need time to adjust to the idea.”

“I know that too.”

We look at each other for a moment — the particular communication of two people who’ve shared space and trust long enough that most things don’t require full sentences. Then Hemlocke picks up his foaling report and I unfold the patrol map and we work through the morning briefing in companionable quiet, the way we do most mornings now.

There are fourteen items on the list by the time Keir blinks in at second bell, still carrying the cold of the outside on his skin, his dark hair wind-messed and his eyes bright with the energy he only gets after a long patrol. He drops into the chair beside me and immediately steals the rest of my tea.

“Western report,” he says. “Same rotation as last week. Eight signatures, four-drake shifts. No change in pattern.”

“Still no breach?”

“No breach. But the rotation speed changed. They’re moving faster between positions, less time standing.” He sets the mug down and his expression sharpens into something more serious. “Someone is telling them to stay mobile.”

Someone who understands that stationary watchers are easier to track and eliminate. Someone thinking several moves ahead.

“They know we’re watching the line,” I say.

“Or they assumed we would be.” Keir’s jaw tightens fractionally. “Which is a different problem.”

It is. Assuming surveillance means operating at a level of tactical intelligence I haven’t fully accounted for in my threat assessment. These aren’t opportunists circling Blackhaven hoping for a soft spot in the border — these are soldiers following orders from someone patient enough to run a watching rotation for months without pressing an advantage.

I fold the patrol map slowly, filing the information into the shape I’ve been building since Finlay’s letter arrived. Magnus’s timeline, the supply lines, the western fire drakes, Amadeus’s name sitting at the center of all of it like a stone dropped in still water, the ripples still spreading.

“Increase patrol frequency on the western line,” I say. “Two-blink check-ins instead of three. And I want a scent sample from a new position, farther east than we’ve tried. See if the rotation extends past our markers.”

Keir nods, already running the logistics through his head — not just the speed and range of his shifting, but the geometry of who can be where and when.

My phone buzzes on the table. I glance at the screen.

Leaving at dawn. Be with you by midday. — M

My mother. I set the phone face-down on the table and look at the patrol map again. Three days ago I sent her a detailed message outlining the Eastern Isles mission — what we were looking for, what Queen Giselle’s position was likely to be based on Xero’s recon, and what I specifically needed from her that I couldn’t provide for myself. The political weight of the Marzana Empire’s reigning queen standing beside her daughter in a foreign ruler’s hall. The kind of weight that doesn’t translate through letters or emissaries. She responded in four words: I’ll be there. Obviously.

Good.

Nova wakes up angry. This is not unusual — my daughter came into the world with opinions and has been refining them ever since. This morning the grievance appears to be her sleeping blanket, which has twisted itself around her wings during the night and is now an obstacle requiring immediate destruction.

I hear her from the corridor before I reach the door, not crying because Nova rarely cries, but making the specific low rumble she uses when she has encountered something she finds personally insulting. I push the door open and find her sitting in the center of her nest in human form, the blanket wound around both wings like a particularly aggressive vine, her small face set in an expression of profound offense.

“Good morning,” I say.

She looks up at me with those mismatched eyes — amber, both of them, except for the half-sapphire that splits her left iris like a crack of sky through autumn stone — and holds up the blanket. “Stuck,” she informs me.

“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.”

“I know you will.”

Nova looks up from her bread at the sound of her name, crumbs on her chin, and makes a noise of firm agreement.

Mom arrives exactly when she said she would. I hear her before I see her — a roar that splits the afternoon quiet, high and sharp and carrying that particular edge she uses when she’s announcing herself to a territory that isn’t hers. A courtesy. Letting Blackhaven’s sentinels know the incoming presence is known and welcome.

I’m on the upper flight platform when she clears the mountain peak, her dragoness enormous against the grey autumn sky, green and iron scales catching what little light the cloud cover allows. She’s smaller than me now — we’re both aware of this and neither of us has mentioned it — but she moves through the air with the absolute authority of someone who has never once questioned her right to be in it. It’s in the angle of her wings, the tilt of her skull. My mother doesn’t fly. She presides.

She shifts mid-descent, the transformation flowing through her like water down a fall, and lands in human form on the stone platform with the particular soft impact of someone who has been doing this for centuries and finds the theatrics somewhat beneath her. She’s in her travel leathers — black, close-fitted, her twin swords across her back and her hair pulled severely from her face. She looks, as she almost always looks, like something the world tried to break and gave up on.

“Raven.” She opens her arms.

I step into them and for a moment I am simply her daughter and not any of the other things I am required to be. She smells of flight and cold air and the faint ozone that clings to her lightning breath weapon, and she holds me the way she always has — like something she made herself and intends to keep.

“You’ve grown again,” she says against my hair.

“Have I?”

“Your dragoness. The presence is larger, even in this form.” She pulls back and studies me the way she studies everything — thoroughly, without pretending she isn’t doing it. Her golden eyes move over my face and find whatever she’s looking for. “You look tired.”

“I’m always tired.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.” I turn and we walk together toward the interior of Blackhaven, falling into step the way we always do — shoulder to shoulder, matched pace, her left and my right. “We leave at dawn tomorrow. I want to brief you tonight over dinner.”

“I’ve read your message three times. I know what we’re walking into.”

“I know you do. I want to talk through what we’re not saying in the message — the parts I wasn’t sure how to write.”

She glances at me sideways. “There are parts you weren’t sure how to write?”

“Don’t make something of it.”

The sound she makes carries the same frequency as a laugh without quite being one. “All right. Tonight then. After I’ve seen Nova.”

“She’s been warned you’re coming. She’s been ready since breakfast.”

A real smile crosses my mother’s face — the one she only produces for specific people. Small, genuine, something it costs her nothing to give and that she gives freely to the people who have earned it. “Then let’s not keep her waiting,” she says.

We go inside. Behind us the mountain closes its silence over the flight platform like water over a stone, and somewhere to the north six months continue their quiet count.

Chapter 2

Corvus

She’s still asleep when I wake up, which almost never happens. Raven wakes before the mountain does — before the torches burn low, before the blink hounds finish their last patrol rotation, before anything that breathes has decided the day is worth beginning. I’ve woken beside her for over a year now and I can count on one hand the mornings I’ve opened my eyes first.

I lie still and let myself have it for a moment. The grey pre-dawn light coming through the narrow window, the sound of her breathing slow and deeper than her daytime self ever seems to allow. She’s on her stomach with one wing half-extended across the bed, the black membrane slack in a way it isn’t when she’s conscious. She carries her wings differently when she’s awake — always a fraction tensed, always ready. Like this, in sleep, they look like what they are. Something extraordinary that happens to belong to her.

I don’t move. My pack is already by the door and Thauglor will be on the flight platform at dawn, which is close enough that I should be up and dressed and ready, and I know this, and I stay where I am for another minute anyway.

The scale she placed over my heart pulses faintly the way it does when she’s close — slow and steady, matched to her sleeping rhythm. I’ve gotten used to it the way you get used to a heartbeat, noticed only when it changes, missed immediately when it stops. The thought of two weeks without that proximity makes something in my chest do something I’m not going to examine too closely before a long flight.

I get up carefully. I’m good at not waking her — years of practice, first from a distance and now from beside her, learning the specific architecture of her sleep. She doesn’t stir when I dress, doesn’t move when I buckle my sword harness, doesn’t do anything at all until I’m fully ready and reaching for my pack and she says without opening her eyes: “Two weeks.”

I stop. “Two weeks,” I confirm.

She opens her eyes then, finding me across the room with that immediate unsettling focus she has — the one that makes people forget she can’t hear out of her right ear, because her eyes compensate so completely that the idea of missing anything seems impossible. Sapphire in the half-dark, still soft with sleep but sharpening fast.

“Come here,” she says.

I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed. She pushes herself up and takes my face in both hands the way she does sometimes — the gesture that still catches me off guard three scales and a bond later, because it is so completely hers. Deliberate. Thorough. Like she’s reading something in my face that I haven’t said yet.

“Therun is going to like you,” she says.

“You don’t know that.”

“You’re the only one of my mates he’s hearing about before he meets any of you. Dad will spend the whole journey briefing you on gold dragon customs and you’ll walk in already knowing more about Therun’s court than Therun expects. He’ll respect that.” She tilts her head slightly, the tell she has when she’s arrived at a conclusion she’s pleased with. “Also you’re very difficult not to like. It’s irritating.”

I feel my mouth move. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Don’t push it.”

She kisses me then — unhurried, thorough, tasting of sleep and something warmer underneath, the particular heat that belongs entirely to her and entirely to this. I hold on longer than I planned to and she lets me, her hands shifting from my face to my shoulders, and for a long moment the briefing pack by the door and Thauglor on the platform and the six months counting quietly in the north simply don’t exist. Then they do again.

When we separate she keeps her hands on my shoulders for a moment. The scale pulses warm against my chest, present and steady, her rhythm settling into the spaces between my own heartbeats until it becomes difficult to distinguish which is which. She’s reading my face again and I let her.

“Come back with an ally,” she says.

“I intend to.”

“And come back.”

I press my lips to her forehead. “That one’s not in question.”

She releases me and by the time I reach the door she’s already picked up her phone, already back inside the machinery of her day, already becoming the version of herself that never fully stops working. I watch her for one more second — the line of her shoulders in the grey morning light, the wing half-spread across the pillow relaxed in a way it rarely is. Then I pick up my pack and go.

Thauglor is exactly where I expected him to be, standing at the edge of the upper flight platform in his human form, which is something of a rare sight at this hour. Usually by dawn he’s shifted, because Thauglor in his dragon form is Thauglor most fully himself, the human form a concession to spaces and conversations that require it. Standing here in traveling clothes with his arms crossed and his sapphire eyes fixed on the northern horizon, he looks like a man carrying something heavy in a way he’s long since stopped noticing.

He hears me coming. He always does. “Mourningstar,” he says without turning. “She made you late.”

“She was still asleep when I woke up.”

That gets his attention. He turns to look at me with an expression I can’t fully read — some mixture of surprise and something softer that comes and goes too quickly to name. “She doesn’t sleep past dawn.”

“I know.”

Something shifts in his face and settles. He turns back to the horizon. “Good,” he says quietly, and doesn’t say anything else about it.

I take my position beside him and follow his gaze south. The sea is visible from here on a clear morning — a dark line where the sky meets something older. The Southern Isle sits several hours of flight beyond it, far enough that the journey is its own thing, a space between departure and arrival where the only business is moving.

“Tell me about Therun,” I say.

Thauglor is quiet for long enough that I wonder if he’s going to answer. Then: “Therun of the Southern Isle has ruled his territory for three hundred and twelve years. He’s older than the current Marzana line by four generations and he has never in that time taken a political position he didn’t hold for at least a decade beforehand.” A pause. “He is not impulsive. He is not easily impressed. And he will form his opinion of this mission in the first ten minutes of the meeting regardless of anything we do afterward.”

“So the first ten minutes matter.”

“The first ten minutes are the only thing that matters.”

“What does he respect?”

“Directness. Preparation. Not wasting his time.” Thauglor finally unfolds his arms. “And he will speak to you directly, not to me, because I am the elder here and he’ll want to know what I think of the male my daughter chose. The most honest answer to that question is what you do when he addresses you.”

I look at him. “What do you think of the male your daughter chose?”

The corner of his mouth moves — I’ve catalogued that expression over years of training in their family’s courtyard, the one Thauglor produces when something lands precisely where he didn’t expect it to. “I think,” he says, “that you waited twenty years without being asked to, which is either profound love or profound stubbornness, and that in a male those two things are usually the same thing.”

He steps to the edge of the platform. “We leave now. Stay close on the southern crossing — the sea thermals shift without warning this time of year and I won’t stop to look for you if you fall behind.”

“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.

He stands when we enter, which is either courtesy or assessment. Probably both.

“Thauglor Mrithun.” His voice is deep and unhurried, carrying the particular cadence of someone who chooses every word and means all of them. “It has been forty years.”

“Forty-three,” Thauglor says. “You were managing a territorial dispute with the eastern sea routes.”

“I was. You offered to melt the ships involved.” The faintest thing moves through Therun’s expression. “I declined.”

“They were being unreasonable.”

“They were. I handled it without the melting.” He shifts his gaze to me then and I hold it without looking away, because Thauglor told me this matters and because I know from experience that the males who look away first in a room like this spend the rest of the meeting on the wrong foot. His amber eyes are direct and unhurried and take in a great deal without appearing to. “You are the drake.”

“Corvus Mourningstar.” I don’t elaborate. He has our names from the correspondence and anything I add now is either explanation or padding, and he asked for neither.

A breath passes. “Sit,” Therun says. “Both of you. I’ll pour.”

He does it without calling a servant, which I note and file. The drink is warm and spiced, something I don’t recognize but that hits the back of the throat with a clean heat that chases the residual cold of the flight. I wrap both hands around the mug and let myself feel the warmth of it while Therun settles back into his chair and looks at us across the table with the patience of something that measures time differently than most.

“Magnus sent an envoy four months ago,” he says with no preamble. “You should know that before we discuss anything else.”

Thauglor’s expression doesn’t change. “What did he offer?”

“Alliance against the Marzana Empire, access to the southern shipping lanes, and a seat on whatever governing council he intends to establish after.” Therun takes a slow sip from his mug. “He seemed to believe these things were mine to give.”

“They aren’t?”

“The shipping lanes are jointly managed with three other island kingdoms.” He sets the mug down. “The council seat was particularly optimistic, given that I don’t recognize the authority of whatever structure he’s proposing to build.” A pause. “I declined. He didn’t receive it well.”

“He rarely does,” I say.

Therun looks at me — not a reprimand, something more like recalibration. “Your mate is the heir apparent.”

“She is.”

“And the dominant dragoness of Blackhaven.”

“Also yes.”

“Magnus specifically named her in his proposal. The elimination of her bloodline was presented as a shared strategic objective.” He says it the way you say something that is simply true and should be acknowledged as such, without softening. “I want you to understand that I refused his proposal with full knowledge of its specifics. I am not a neutral party who has not been approached. I am a party who was approached and chose a different answer.”

The room is very quiet for a moment. Something cold moves through my chest and settles — not sharp, not sudden, just present. Magnus named her specifically. I knew he wanted her gone, knew it the way you know something you’ve been told and haven’t yet fully inhabited. Hearing it stated plainly across a table in someone else’s hall, framed as a fact rather than a threat — that’s different. I keep my face still.

“I understand,” I say. “Thank you for telling us directly.”

Therun nods once. “Now, tell me about your mate. Not the titles. Not the political position.” His amber eyes are steady. “Tell me who she is.”

I look at him across the table — this ancient male who has just told me the king to our north wants my mate’s bloodline erased and is now asking me to describe her — and I understand suddenly and completely what this meeting actually is. Not a negotiation. An interview. He wants to know whether she’s worth what he’d be walking into if he pledged his forces to her cause.

I set my mug down.

“She was born into one of the most powerful dragon nests on the continent,” I say, “and the first thing she ever asked for as a hatchling gift was sea glass. Not a weapon, not treasure — sea glass, because she liked the color of it and the smoothness and the way it took time and patience to find.” I hold his gaze. “She runs the morning circuit of Blackhaven before dawn every day so she knows her territory the way she knows her own body. She has a daughter. She is terrified of failing the people who depend on her and she doesn’t let that terror slow her down. She killed a fourth-year green dragon during last year’s Purge to protect her sister, then immediately checked whether her sister’s arm needed binding.”

I stop.

Therun is quiet. Thauglor beside me says nothing — he is giving me this, I realize. He could speak and he knows her better than I can summarize in ten minutes in an unfamiliar room. He’s choosing not to, which means he wants Therun to hear it from me.

“She sounds,” Therun says eventually, “like someone worth the trouble.”

“She is.”

He refills my mug without being asked. “Magnus’s proposal named her specifically,” he says. “Not the Marzana Empire, not Klauth — her. Her bloodline and any offspring. He is afraid of what she can produce. Chimera lines breed strength back into weakened species faster than any other mechanism. He understands this even if he wouldn’t frame it in those terms.” Therun’s amber eyes are steady. “You understand what that means for how this war will be fought.”

“She’s the target. Not the territory.”

“Yes.” He looks at me with something that has moved past assessment into something more considered. “And you are the first line.”

I hold that for a moment. The scale in my chest pulses slow and warm.

“I’m aware,” I say.

Therun nods once. “Then let’s discuss what the support looks like, and what I’ll need from Klauth’s signature before my forces cross open water.”

Thauglor shifts beside me — a small adjustment, barely visible. Satisfied, I think, in the controlled way he allows himself when something arrives where it should. I reach for the mug and the southern warmth settles around the table while we get to work.

The meeting runs three hours. By the time Therun’s guards show us to our quarters for the night the sun is low and the southern light has turned everything the color of old gold. My head is full of shipping lane agreements and wolf tracker logistics and the particular warmth of a negotiation that went better than the intelligence suggested it might. Thauglor seems satisfied in the contained way he expresses it — no outward indication, just a slightly easier set to his shoulders than he carried on the way in.

The guest quarters are well-appointed, warm, smelling of cedar and something sweet from the flowering vines climbing the window. I sit on the edge of the bed and pull out my phone. Raven’s response to my message comes inside two minutes, which means she’s still awake, which given the time difference means she had a long day too.

He pledged the wolf legion and a wing of chromatics. Klauth needs to sign off on the shipping lanes. Coming home in twelve days, not fourteen.

Three dots appear immediately. Then: Good. There are white unicorns here. Giselle’s island. Hemlocke is going to lose his mind.

I feel my mouth move. There are white unicorns at Therun’s too. I’ve been taking notes for him.

A pause, longer than usual. Then: We’re going to need a bigger flight. Sleep well, my love.

I set the phone down and look at the ceiling of Therun’s guest room, at the stone carved smooth over centuries by hands I’ll never know, in a place that didn’t exist in my world six months ago and now does. Twelve days. The scale in my chest pulses once, steady, hers. I close my eyes.

Chapter 3

Raven

The Eastern Isles smell of salt and jasmine and something beneath both of those — something older, mineral-green, the specific scent of land that has been left largely alone for a long time and has come into its own because of it.

We circle twice before landing. Not because the approach is difficult — Xero’s reconnaissance gave us the cliff path precisely, the stone platform cut wide enough for two dragonesses and worn smooth by centuries of visitors who were permitted to arrive — but because I want to look first. I was taught this by every predator in my family: you look before you land, you map the exits, you count the threats.

From above, Queen Giselle’s island has no visible fortifications. No walls, no watchtowers, no defensive line along the cliff edge where I’d position one if this territory were mine. The palace sits at the island’s center, white stone gleaming in the morning light, surrounded by gardens that spill down the hillsides in long terraced rows of green and gold and late-season color. Beyond the palace grounds the island spreads in all directions — fishing villages along the coastline, cultivated fields, what looks like a large open-air healing center near the northern shore.

No defenses, my dragoness observes.

I know. I’m looking.

Not a weakness.

I look again and she’s right. No fortifications, no army, and yet Xero reported that Magnus’s repeated overtures have all been refused, that Giselle has held this island and this position for decades against external pressure. You don’t do that with walls. You do it with something else.

Mom banks left — the signal we agreed on. Landing. I follow her down.

We shift on the stone platform and stand there for a moment in the island morning, both of us reading the air. The habit is so ingrained that neither of us comments on it, we’re just quiet for a few seconds with our nostrils flaring, cataloguing. Salt. Flowers. Warm stone. Cooking from somewhere in the lower grounds. The sweet-sharp scent of an unfamiliar species I can’t identify from here. No predator signatures beyond the two of us.

Mom rolls her shoulders. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

The guards arrive two minutes later — not running, not urgent, measured. Three females, two of whom carry the subtle shimmer of shifted forms held close to the surface, the third wearing the formal marks of a gatekeeper along her forearms. Authority markers, the kind that mean she speaks for the palace. They bow to both of us without apparent preference for rank, which is interesting. Either they know who we are and are making a deliberate diplomatic choice, or they treat every arriving female as an equal by default. I suspect it’s the second.

“Queen Mina, Lady Raven.” The gatekeeper speaks, her accent carrying the eastern lilt I’ve only heard in old recordings of the pre-empire diplomatic sessions — precise and musical. “Queen Giselle welcomes you to the Sanctuary of the Eastern Isles. You are her guests for as long as you wish to remain. If you would follow us.”

Mom glances at me. I give nothing back because I learned from her that the first minute of any diplomatic arrival tells you more than the first hour of any meeting, and I’m still counting. We follow.

The path from the landing platform to the palace takes us through the lower grounds, and what I see there recalibrates something in my assessment of this place. Females everywhere, of every species — fae-touched, mer-descended, shifters of three different kinds I can identify and several I can’t, humans walking beside dragons walking beside beings I have no name for. The variety should feel chaotic but it doesn’t. It feels like a place that has made room for all of it deliberately, over a long time, with considerable intention. The paths are wide enough for wings. The doorways are scaled for multiple species. The gardens are planted in layers — ground-level, climbing, elevated — as if whoever designed them was thinking about who would need to move through at what height.

No one looks at us with fear. That’s the thing I notice after the species variety. We are two of the most powerful dragonesses on the continent walking through foreign territory, and the people we pass look at us with curiosity and the particular alertness of species accustomed to assessing new arrivals, but not fear. Respect in a few faces, interest in most, and no one steps back. On the continent we clear a path just by existing. Here, people simply move around us the way they’d move around anyone.

The omega males move among them and I notice this the way I notice things my dragoness flags before my conscious mind catches up — the slight difference in how they carry themselves, the particular quality of their ease. Not hidden, not apologetic. Moving through the market stalls and garden paths with the simple confidence of people who have learned that this place will not require them to be anything other than what they are. One of them stops to help an elderly fae woman carry something heavy up a set of stone steps. Another is deep in conversation with a healer outside what looks like a treatment building, both of them bent over a collection of dried plants laid out on a low table, the conversation animated and entirely equal.

On the continent, omega males are removed from the record as soon as they’re identified — born into flights and packs and then quietly erased, too soft, too different, incompatible with the hierarchy that most species build around physical dominance. It has always struck me as waste dressed up as tradition. Giselle’s island shelters them, has been sheltering them from what Xero’s report suggested for as long as the island has been a sanctuary.

I file it. All of it. Mom’s hand finds my elbow briefly — the lightest contact, gone before anyone else would clock it. She saw it too. We keep walking.

Queen Giselle receives us in a formal receiving room that manages to feel neither cold nor performative, which is a considerable achievement. The ceilings are high, the windows open to the garden breeze, and the furniture has been arranged to suggest equals across a table rather than a throne and supplicants below it. She is already standing when we enter.

I had built her from Xero’s description — blonde, emerald eyes, a quality of stillness that Xero described as someone who has survived long enough to understand that almost everything presented to her is a test of something. In person the description holds but doesn’t capture the particular precision of her attention. She looks at both of us the way my fathers look at new arrivals to Blackhaven — not hostile but thorough, cataloguing, deciding.

“Queen Mina.” She bows her head with the respect of an equal. “And Lady Raven.” She looks at me directly and holds it for a moment. “Your tressym speaks very highly of you.”

“Xero has undiscriminating loyalty,” I say. “She’d speak highly of anyone who gives her fresh fish.”

Something moves in Giselle’s expression — amusement maybe, or the recalibration of an expectation. “Please sit. Both of you.”

We sit. Tea arrives brought by an omega male who moves with the ease of someone long accustomed to the work, who meets my eyes when he sets the cup in front of me and doesn’t look away first. I nod and he nods back and leaves. Giselle watches this exchange and says nothing about it.

“I understand,” she says, wrapping both hands around her own cup, “that you’ve come to determine whether I am working with Magnus.”

Mom opens her mouth. “I’m not,” Giselle says. “I haven’t been and I won’t be. He’s made four separate approaches in the past three years and I have declined all of them. I want you to have that clearly before we discuss anything else, so we’re not spending the first hour of this conversation circling it.”

I look at her. “Why?”

She tilts her head. “Why am I not working with him, or why am I telling you directly?”

“Both.”

“Because this island exists for one reason.” She sets her cup down. “We take anyone who needs sanctuary. Females who have been broken. Omega males born into flights and packs that would have destroyed them. Species that have no other refuge on the continent. Magnus’s world produces all of those people in considerable quantity.” A pause, precise as a blade’s edge. “He and I have fundamentally incompatible interests.”

The room is quiet for a moment. Outside, wind moves through the garden below the window and I hear something that might be laughter from the lower grounds — light, ordinary, the kind of sound that shouldn’t be remarkable and is, here, deeply so.

“Neutral by design,” Mom says. It isn’t a question.

“Neutral by necessity.” Giselle looks at her. “The moment I take a political position I become a target rather than a sanctuary. The females and males on this island have already survived being targets. I will not make them targets again for the sake of a flag.”

Reasonable. I understand it completely and it changes nothing about the question I have to ask.

“What happens to your neutrality if Magnus marches on the continent?” I say.

Giselle goes quiet — not uncomfortable quiet but the quiet of someone who has already had this thought many times and has not yet arrived at an answer she trusts.

“That,” she says eventually, “is the question I’ve been sitting with for two years.”

“And?”

“And I don’t have a clean answer for you.” She meets my eyes. There’s something in hers that I recognize — the specific exhaustion of a person holding a great deal of weight and not putting it down, not because they can’t but because they’ve looked at what happens if they do and found it worse. “Neutrality protects this island as long as no one makes a move that renders neutrality impossible. If Magnus marches, he makes that move himself.”

“So the alliance exists in principle.”

“The alliance exists in principle,” she agrees carefully, “contingent on the circumstances rendering it necessary.”

Mom is watching me. I can feel it without looking — the particular quality of her attention when she’s letting me run something to see where it goes.

“I can offer you something,” I say. “Not a military pledge and not a political position. Something practical.” Giselle waits. “Blackhaven. If Magnus moves, if the continent becomes unsafe, if the sanctuary here is compromised in any way — Blackhaven is a second refuge. Flight protection, the full weight of the dominant dragoness’s guarantee, and every resource this territory can offer. Anyone who needs to move does so under my protection.”

The silence this time is different in quality. Giselle looks at me for a long moment with those sharp emerald eyes and what’s moving behind them is something I can’t entirely read — assessment yes, but also something more careful, something that has been waiting for a specific thing and is not yet sure whether it has found it.

“That is,” she says slowly, “a considerable offer.”

“I know.”

“May I ask what you want in return?”

“Intelligence,” I say. “What you know about Magnus, what your network has seen. And when the time comes, your diplomatic weight at whatever table determines what comes after. Not a soldier. A voice.”

Another silence. Giselle looks at my mother, who has been quiet long enough that the quiet has become its own kind of statement. Mom gives her nothing. This is mine to negotiate.

“Stay two days,” Giselle says. “There is something I want to show you before you leave, something that may inform whether what you’re building is what you think it is.”

I look at Mom. She gives me the smallest nod — her trust in my read of the room. “Two days,” I say.

Giselle lifts her cup. “Then let me have a room prepared.”

They give us adjoining rooms in the palace’s eastern wing, high-ceilinged and open to the sea breeze, the furnishings simple and good. I stand at the window for a long time after the guard shows us in, looking out at the island spreading below — the gardens, the healing center, the small bright shapes of people moving through their afternoon. The sun is lower now, the light going amber and long, and the island in this light looks like something from a story. Too quiet, too whole, too unlike anything the continent produces.

It is not a story. That’s what’s stopping my breath.

Giselle built this. Over decades, with intention, she built a place where broken things could come and stop being broken. No military, no fortifications, no dominance hierarchy running on fear and force. Just space and safety and the extraordinary ordinary of people moving through their days without looking over their shoulders.

I think about Blackhaven and about what I’m building. I think about whether it looks like this from the outside, or whether it looks like something else entirely — a territory, a power base, a dominant dragoness claiming mountain and flight and calling it protection. Whether there’s a difference between those things, or whether the difference lives entirely in intention, and whether intention is enough.

Mom appears in the doorway between our rooms, leaning against the frame the way she does when she’s thinking — arms loose, weight on one hip, her golden eyes doing the assessment she never fully switches off.

“Well?”

“She’s not lying,” I say. “About any of it.”

“No,” Mom agrees. “She’s not.”

“The contingent alliance is the most we were going to get on a first visit. It’s enough to work from.”

“Also yes.” Mom is quiet for a moment. “You handled it well.”

I turn from the window. She’s looking at me with an expression I don’t see often — not pride exactly, because pride implies something completed and she doesn’t do things by halves, but something more like recognition. Like seeing a shape emerge from stone she’d been working for a long time.

“You offered a refuge,” she says. “Not a strategy, not an alliance with conditions. A refuge.”

“Because that’s what she cares about.”

“Yes.” Mom pushes off the doorframe and crosses to me, taking my face in her hands the same way I took Corvus’s face this morning — the gesture that is apparently something we do in this family when we want someone to understand that we mean a thing entirely. “That’s exactly it. That’s the difference between a ruler who survives and one who builds something that outlasts her.”

She lets me go and goes back to her room. The door between us stays open.

My phone buzzes. He pledged the wolf legion and a wing of chromatics. Klauth needs to sign off on the shipping lanes. Coming home in twelve days, not fourteen.

The relief that moves through me is so specific I almost laugh. Twelve days. Therun’s forces are ours. I send my reply before I’ve fully decided to, because it’s true and because Corvus will understand immediately why I’m telling him — not the diplomacy, not the intelligence value, just the pure unexpected wonder of a myth walking through an afternoon garden.

There are white unicorns here. Giselle’s island. Hemlocke is going to lose his mind.

His reply comes fast. There are white unicorns at Therun’s too. I’ve been taking notes for him.

I stare at this for a moment, then write back: We’re going to need a bigger flight. Sleep well, my love.

I put the phone away and look back out the window. The island is going dark now at the edges, the evening coming in from the sea, and lamps are being lit in the lower grounds — small lights, dozens of them, spreading through the dark like something that refuses to stop being warm. Two days. Something to show us. I watch the lights come on across the Eastern Isles and let myself wonder, for once, what it is.

Chapter 4

Finlay

I have been writing letters for nine hundred years. The first ones were formal — diplomatic correspondence between flock elders, carefully worded petitions to continental authorities, the dense and particular language of institutions more interested in appearances than outcomes. Over the centuries the letters became something else. Reports. Intelligence. The precise, unhurried work of a network assembled one trusted contact at a time, each connection tested against decades of correspondence before I committed to relying on it. One does not rush these things. One does not, if one has survived as long as I have, make the error of trusting quickly.

The letter on my desk this morning has come from a contact I have held for sixty-two years. A phoenix, like me, who chose the northern court for reasons I understood and ultimately could not follow. He and I have exchanged perhaps three hundred letters in that time — careful letters, measured letters, the kind that say precisely what they mean and nothing more, written by a male who understands that correspondence can be intercepted and who has never in sixty-two years given me reason to question his discretion. I read it three times before I set it down. Then I read it again.

Blackhaven without Raven is a subtly different place. The mountain is no less active — the patrols run, the foaling season continues in the lower fields, Keir’s pack maintains the western line with the precision it has maintained since Raven set the parameters. The flight does not slow down because its dominant dragoness is elsewhere. She has built it too well for that.

But the quality of the air changes. It is difficult to articulate to those who have not experienced the particular environmental weight of a powerful dragon presence — the way it saturates a territory, pressing gently against the senses of everything within its range, communicating safety, dominance, home. When she is here Blackhaven carries that pressure constantly, and it is not oppressive. The opposite, actually. The feeling of being inside something that has decided you belong. When she is gone that feeling holds, but the warmth behind it dims.

I notice this more than I would like to. My phoenix manages it better than I do, which is somewhat embarrassing. He simply orients toward the direction she flew and settles into patient waiting, the way we have waited for things across centuries — with the particular equanimity of a creature for whom time moves differently. I have died and been reborn thirty-seven times. I know how to wait. That does not mean I enjoy it.

I pick up the letter again.

The intelligence network I maintain operates through phoenix fire — correspondence sealed with a flame impression that cannot be duplicated, cannot be forged, cannot be opened without the recipient knowing. It is the only reliable seal in existence for this kind of work. Mages have tried to replicate it for three centuries and have not managed it, which I find quietly satisfying.

My contact in Magnus’s court has been careful. His letters have always been careful — they report what he observes, never what he interprets, no speculation, no editorial, nothing that could be used against him if the correspondence were somehow found. This letter is different. He uses the word alarming. In sixty-two years of correspondence he has never used that word. He has described military buildups, political maneuvers, the slow and deliberate consolidation of Magnus’s power over the northern territories — all of it in the level, precise tone of a recorder, not a participant. The word alarming sits in the letter’s second paragraph like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through everything before and after it.

What alarms him is this: Magnus has received representatives. Not envoys, not diplomats — representatives, a specific distinction that my contact makes deliberately, underlining the word in the original. Representatives suggest a principal who prefers not to appear directly, someone with interests in Magnus’s court who has chosen to work through intermediaries rather than attend themselves. The representatives arrived three weeks ago and have been housed in the eastern wing of Magnus’s palace, away from the regular court. They have met with Magnus four times. My contact has not been able to determine what was discussed, but what he has been able to determine — and this is the part that makes my phoenix press hot against the inside of my ribs — is the name they travel under.

Amadeus.

I set the letter down.

I am nine hundred years old. I have lived through the rise and fall of four continental powers, two plague events, and the particular chaos of the post-imperial period when the dragon flights fractured and rebuilt themselves over the course of a century. I have a great deal of history in my head, most of it hard-won. The name Amadeus appears in that history in a specific context — an ancient mage, ancient even by the standards of my early centuries, who was reported dead two hundred and thirty years ago in the collapse of the eastern mage councils. His area of expertise had been binding magic. Specifically, the creation of cursed objects that could contain and suppress powerful beings indefinitely. Specifically, things like cursed eggs.

I have encountered the results of his work without knowing whose work it was. In my fifth century I passed through a territory that held three such eggs in a guarded chamber beneath a monastery. The monks who kept them did not know what was inside, only that the eggs were old and dangerous and that the chamber required a permanent guard rotation — that anyone left alone with the eggs too long became agitated in ways they could not explain. I remember thinking at the time that the working was extraordinary, not in its cruelty, which was considerable, but in its precision. Whoever had made it understood exactly how to confine something that did not want to be confined, understood the nature of the thing imprisoned and built the prison specifically around those weaknesses.

I sit with this for a long moment. Outside the window of my study Blackhaven goes about its morning with the industrious calm of a flight that has work to do. I can hear the horses in the lower field, the distant sound of patrol reports being relayed between blink hounds, the particular resonance of the mountain itself — stone and wind and the deep subterranean warmth of the hot spring far below.

Amadeus was also reportedly the architect of a magical system specifically designed to imprison beings that other more conventional methods could not contain, a system that requires the practitioner to surrender their own life to power the binding. I think about what Solaris told us last winter about the nature of his imprisonment, about the binding that held him for a thousand years and released only for Raven. I think about Raven, currently two days’ flight to the east, walking into a foreign court with her mother and no mates within range. I pick up my pen.

Solaris is in the great hall when I find him, reviewing the patrol logs with the particular focused attention he brings to administrative tasks — reading not just for content but for pattern, for the things that aren’t there as much as the things that are. He has been managing Blackhaven in Raven’s absence with a competence that I suspect surprises people who expect an ancient dragon to find paperwork beneath him. He looks up when I enter and reads my face immediately.

“Sit down,” he says.

“I prefer to stand.”

“Finlay.” The single word carries nine centuries of patience meeting a thousand years of it. “Sit down.”

I sit. I place the letter on the table between us and smooth it flat. He reads it without touching it — a dragon habit I have noted, assessing the physical object before handling it, cataloguing scent and condition before content. When he finishes he reads it again, then looks at me over the top of it with those amber eyes that carry the particular depth of something that has survived more than either of us wants to calculate.

“You know this name,” I say. It is not a question.

He is quiet for a moment that stretches. “I know it,” he says finally, his voice carefully level in the way that is the result of considerable effort. “Not from history. From experience.”

I look at him.

“He was the one who made the egg,” Solaris says. “The binding that held me. I didn’t know his name at the time — you don’t, when you’re inside it. But I know the signature of the working, the particular quality of that kind of imprisonment.” A pause. “I would know his work anywhere.”

The great hall is very quiet. Somewhere outside a horse makes a sound that carries on the mountain wind and then is gone.

“He was reported dead two hundred and thirty years ago,” I say.

“Aye.” Solaris folds his hands on the table, large and worn smooth at the knuckles, carrying the particular stillness of someone who has learned through a thousand years of difficult lessons that panic is a luxury. “And yet.”

“And yet his representatives are in Magnus’s court.”

“Which means either the report was false,” Solaris says, “or the man found a way to survive his own death. Given his area of expertise—” He stops and considers. “Given his area of expertise, the second option is not as impossible as it should be.”

A binding powerful enough to hold Solaris for a thousand years. A practitioner who surrendered his own life to power it. What would it take, I find myself wondering, to redirect that surrender — to use the death not as fuel that burns out but as a foundation that persists? Something cold settles in my chest and my phoenix stirs in response, heat against the cold, uneasy.

“I need to send a response,” I say. “I need everything my contact can find about the nature of these representatives. Descriptions, speech patterns, whether they eat, whether they sleep, whether anyone has seen their eyes in direct light.”

Solaris nods slowly. “I’ll begin pulling what I remember. It will take time — a thousand years of isolation leaves the memory in layers and the older things are harder to reach.”

“Take whatever time you need.”

He looks at me steadily. “Does she know?”

“Not yet. She’s on the Eastern Isles and the diplomatic meeting is today. I won’t pull her out of it for intelligence I don’t yet fully understand.” I pick up the letter. “When she lands I’ll tell her everything.”

Solaris accepts this with a nod that carries the weight of a male who trusts his mate’s judgment and also knows precisely how she will receive news like this. “She’ll want to move immediately.”

“I know. That’s why I intend to have as much information as possible before I tell her. She makes better decisions when she has the full shape of a thing rather than part of it. Giving her half a threat will produce half a response, and half a response against something like this could be⁠—”

“Costly,” Solaris says.

“Quite.”

I write the response in my study as the afternoon light moves across the floor in long slow rectangles, the sun tracking its course above Blackhaven’s peaks. The letter is three paragraphs and it takes me two hours. Every word is chosen for what it conveys and what it conceals. I ask for the descriptions, the physical details, the observed behaviors. I ask whether the representatives have been seen consuming food or water. I ask whether they cast shadows in direct sunlight — a small thing, almost nothing, but shadow behavior can indicate a great deal about the nature of a presence that is not entirely what it appears to be.

I do not write the name Amadeus in my response. Names have weight in correspondence, and if this letter were somehow intercepted — unlikely given the seal but not impossible — I don’t want to give anyone confirmation that we have made the connection.

When the letter is done I fold it precisely, four folds, the way I have folded correspondence for nine centuries. Then I hold my hand above the sealed edge and let the fire come — not the destructive kind, not the heat that burns through stone, but the quieter flame that is specifically mine, the signature that cannot be imitated. It settles into the wax like a brand and the seal glows briefly amber before it cools. No one opens this but my contact. I give the letter to one of Keir’s pack who runs the fastest and trust them to the sky.

Keir finds me at the window an hour later. I hear him before I see him — or rather, I feel the particular displacement of air that accompanies a blink hound moving through space, the infinitesimal pressure change that most species don’t register. I have been alive long enough to register it.

“You have that face,” he says, appearing beside me with the abruptness that will never entirely stop being startling regardless of how many centuries one has had to adjust to it.

“I have a great many faces. You’ll need to be specific.”

“The one where you’re thinking about something bad and deciding how much of it to say out loud.” He leans against the window frame and looks at me sidelong, those dark eyes direct and unbothered. Keir’s particular gift is that he reads people with the accuracy of a species that navigates by scent and instinct — not through analysis but through something more immediate, and consequently more difficult to misdirect.

“Your pack has been reporting unusual scent trails on the western border,” I say.

He straightens, just slightly. “Eight days now. Nothing breaching the boundary, just close. Rotating. Like something walking a patrol line of its own.”

“What species?”

“That’s the part that doesn’t sit right. We can’t place it. It’s not any species native to this territory or any of the neighboring flights. It’s fire-adjacent. Chemical. Like something that produces heat as a byproduct of moving rather than as a deliberate function.”

Fire drakes. The word forms clearly in my mind without being spoken — a species I know only through historical accounts and the secondhand intelligence of phoenixes who have crossed the western passes in previous centuries. Heat as a biological byproduct of their chemistry rather than a controlled breath weapon. That matches.

“Increase your check-in frequency,” I say, “and take a scent sample from a new position, further east. I want to know whether the rotation extends past the current boundary markers.”

He nods and his expression goes to the particular focused calm he carries when something has upgraded from observation to potential threat. “Is this connected to whatever came in the letter?”

I look at him for a moment. “Possibly. I don’t yet have enough to be certain. When I do I’ll tell Raven and she’ll tell all of you at once.”

He accepts this — one of Keir’s other gifts is knowing which battles to pick. “Okay. I’ll run the eastern extension tonight.” He blinks out and the air settles.

I turn back to the window. The sky in the direction she flew is clear, an unbroken expanse of early autumn blue that looks permanent and isn’t. Somewhere beneath it Raven is sitting across a table from Queen Giselle, reading the room with those sapphire eyes, finding the shape of an alliance in the negative space of what isn’t being said. She is very good at that. She is very good at most things. I would prefer she were here.

My phoenix agrees, pressing warm and restless against my ribs, facing east the way he has faced east since she left — with the patient unreasonableness of a creature for whom direction is instinct and instinct is everything.

Two days. She said two days. I count the hours and return to my desk.

Chapter 5

Raven

Giselle doesn't explain what she wants to show us.

She arrives at our rooms before dawn with two cups of tea and the composure of a woman who has been awake for hours and finds the hour unremarkable. She's dressed simply — no court clothing, no jewelry, nothing that reads as performance. She hands me a cup, looks at me with those sharp emerald eyes, and says, "When you're ready."

Mom appears in the doorway between our rooms already dressed, which means she didn't sleep much either. She takes the second cup, meets Giselle's gaze, and nods.

We follow Giselle into the morning.

✦ ✦ ✦

The healing center sits on the northern shore, built into a slope that faces the sea. The long low buildings catch the early light through wide eastern windows.

It doesn't look like what I expected. I had built it in my head from the outside — something institutional, practical, designed around efficiency. What I find instead has been built deliberately not to feel like any of those things.

The entrance path is lined with late flowers in colors I can't name. The doors are wide enough for species that don't walk upright. Inside, the ceilings are high and the floors are warm stone, and the light comes from more sources than I can count at a glance, placed so there are no shadows of the kind that make an enclosed room feel like a trap.

Someone thought carefully about all of it. Every detail is a decision.

Giselle doesn't give us a tour. She simply walks, and we walk beside her, and we see.

A mer-woman in a shallow pool in the first room, her lower body still scaled, her upper wrapped in soft cloth, sleeping the way someone sleeps who has not slept safely in a long time and finally is. A healer sits beside the pool — fae-touched, by the look of her — hands folded, not touching. Present. Available if she's wanted.

Two shifters in the next corridor, both female, both partly shifted the way people are when they aren't yet easy being fully human-formed in a new place. One has her arm braced. The other watches the door with the reflex of someone who learned that a door opening means something bad is coming.

When Giselle passes, the watching one's shoulders come down a fraction.

Just a fraction. She knows Giselle. A door opening means Giselle, and Giselle means safe.

I think about what it takes to build that. Not the stone and the windows and the careful light — the trust. To become the thing that makes a person's shoulders drop when you walk in. You don't buy that. You can't declare it. You earn it with a thousand small consistencies across years: being there when you said you would and gone when going was the kindness, learning the difference between helping and interfering and choosing right every single time.

My dragoness is very still inside me. Not sleeping — present, paying close attention — but still in the way she goes still when she's taking in something she doesn't yet know how to answer.

I let her be still. I let myself be still. I keep walking.

We pass through four more rooms. I count them without meaning to, the way I count everything.

A naga coiled protectively around herself in sleep. Three human women sharing a meal in a small common room, their talk low, their laughter when it comes sounding surprised, as though they've just remembered something they thought was gone. An omega male, young, barely past adolescence, bent over a bench in what looks like a herbalist's room, entirely absorbed, his hands steady, doing work he has clearly been trusted with and has done well.

At the far end of the last corridor a dragoness in human form sits in a garden alcove built into the outer wall, open to the sea wind. She's older — silver through her dark hair, scales along her forearms that she makes no effort to hide. She's reading. The book is well worn, the spine cracked from use.

She looks up as we pass, and her eyes are calm. Not the calm of someone holding something down. The settled calm of a person who has decided she is exactly where she should be and has stopped arguing about it.

Giselle doesn't comment on any of it. She doesn't explain, or provide context, or ask how we feel about what we're seeing. She walks through the place she built the way you walk through your own house — easily, with the familiarity of ten thousand mornings — and lets it speak for itself.

It speaks.

Mom's jaw is set in the way it sets when she's angry and holding it. I know that face. I grew up watching her use it to keep things in until the right moment for letting them out.

I'm not sure what my own face is doing. I'm fairly certain my scales are rising under my clothes — that familiar prickling heat along the spine and shoulders that my dragoness produces when something offends her all the way down.

What offends her is simple. What offends her is that any of these people ever needed somewhere like this to run to.

✦ ✦ ✦

The private meeting room is small and faces the water. Three chairs, a low table, the sound of the sea through an open window.

Giselle closes the door, and for the first time since we arrived, the formal composure shifts. It doesn't break. It loosens at the edges, the way a thing does when it no longer has to be armor.

"How long?" Mom asks. She means the healing center. She means all of it.

"Thirty-one years for this building. The island has been a sanctuary for sixty-two." Giselle sits. "I inherited it from my predecessor, who built the first structure on the southern shore. When she handed it to me there were forty-three residents. There are two hundred and seventeen now."

The number settles into the room.

"Magnus," I say.

"Magnus," she confirms. "He has sent four delegations in three years. Each of them framed differently — welfare checks, repatriation, cultural preservation." The corner of her mouth moves, and it isn't a pleasant movement. "The fourth was explicit. He wants his females back. That was the phrase. His females."

"And you refused."

"I refused, I doubled the watch on the approaches, and I sent him a letter setting out at considerable length the legal basis for sanctuary under continental compact." She looks at me directly. "He sent a fifth two months after that. Not official. They came at night in unmarked boats and tried to take three specific residents by force."

The cold thing that lives in my chest these days sharpens.

"What happened?" Mom asks. Her voice has gone flat. I know that flatness.

"My gate-keepers met them. The residents were unharmed. The delegation went back to northern water in considerably worse condition than it arrived in." Giselle's expression doesn't move. "I have heard nothing formal from Magnus since. I don't take that to mean he's changed his mind."

"It means he's changing his method," I say.

"Yes."

I look at my mother. She's already looking at me. We've had years of practice reading a room from the same angle, and what we're both reading is the same thing.

This matches. Pressure escalating, the shift from official channels to unofficial ones, the willingness to use force when the polite version fails. This is how Magnus works. This is what Finlay's letters have been describing from the other end of the continent.

"What else?" I ask. "What do you know that you haven't told us yet?"

Giselle is quiet a moment. Not hesitating, I think. Deciding how to put it.

"My network is small. It runs through the females and omega males who come here out of the northern territories, and they carry information the way people carry everything they own when they run — not deliberately, not in reports. In what they saw and heard and can't stop remembering." She pauses. "What has come through it consistently for eighteen months is movement. Forces gathering in the northern passes. Supplies going along roads that haven't been used for war in forty years. And a name attached to Magnus's court that I don't know from any recent record on this continent."

She says it.

Amadeus.

Mom goes still. I keep my face where it is through an act of will that costs more than I'd like.

Finlay's letter. The name in Finlay's letter that I haven't had a chance to raise with anyone since it arrived, because I was here, on this island, and the timing wasn't right, and I was still turning it over deciding what it meant.

It means the same thing whether it comes from Finlay or from Giselle. It means this is larger than one king with an appetite for territory.

"You know this name," Giselle says. She's watching us both.

"We're becoming acquainted with it," I say carefully. "Do your sources have anything on how he sits with Magnus? Whether he's advising, directing, or something else?"

"What comes through is impression, not intelligence." She folds her hands on the table. "The impression is that Magnus isn't the one at the top. That whatever Amadeus is, Magnus is working in service of him rather than the reverse."

Mom lets out a breath. It's very controlled and it contains a great deal.

"That fits what we have," I say. I'm looking through the window at the water, the morning light on it, a horizon that looks entirely peaceful from here. "Which means removing Magnus doesn't end this."

"No," Giselle says. "It doesn't."

The three of us sit with that. Outside, the island goes about its morning — the ordinary sounds of two hundred and seventeen people living lives they should never have had to fight for.

"I want to formally accept your offer," Giselle says. "The refuge arrangement. Blackhaven as a second sanctuary."

I look at her.

"And I want to offer you something in return that I didn't mention yesterday." She meets my eyes and holds them. "My bonded mate. His name is Cassius. He has lived on this island eleven years, which makes him the longest-standing exception to our policy on male residents." She pauses, not out of hesitation but to give the information room. "He came to us under circumstances I won't detail without his permission. What I will tell you is that he is the reason the fifth delegation failed. He saw them coming before they reached the shore. He moved every resident they'd come for before the boats landed. Alone, at speed, in the dark, without waking the rest of the island."

The room is quiet.

"What is he?" Mom asks. Her voice has gone careful, the way it goes when she already suspects the answer.

"An omega male." Giselle says it without ceremony. "Which is why Magnus wanted those three residents in particular. They were omega males as well. And it's why Amadeus's name keeps appearing around that attempt rather than Magnus's." She folds her hands. "Cassius believes — and I have come to agree — that Amadeus has an interest in omega males that has nothing to do with Magnus's borders. What that interest is, and why, is what Cassius has spent eleven years trying to understand."

I look at my mother. She is looking at me. We are having the same thought at the same moment and we both know it.

Eleven years. Whatever he's found is almost certainly more exact than anything in Finlay's current reports or anything Solaris carries in his blood.

This is the piece we didn't know we were missing.

"When we return," I say.

Giselle nods. "I'll tell him to expect you."

✦ ✦ ✦

We leave mid-morning, the sun fully up by the time we clear the island cliffs and take the open air.

Mom flies at my left shoulder, her iron-green scales catching the light differently than my black — throwing it back where I take it in. We don't talk for the first hour. The flight is its own thing, the space it makes between what we've seen and what we're going to do about it.

I use the time to think.

The healing center. Thirty-one years of building it and sixty-two years of the island before that, and two hundred and seventeen people in it now. Magnus escalating — official delegations, then unofficial ones, then force. And Amadeus's name arriving in Giselle's network through the scattered memory of people who ran, rather than through anybody's report.

That last part matters. Organized intelligence can be managed and shaped and intercepted. What comes out of the mouths of people who fled is what they actually saw.

They saw the name. They heard it. It matters enough to someone that it's being spoken aloud in Magnus's court without much care for who might carry it out of the room.

Either they don't know refugees talk. Or they don't care.

Neither is comforting.

Eventually Mom says, "Amadeus."

"Finlay's letter mentioned it. Representatives in Magnus's court traveling under the name." I keep my eyes on the horizon. "I didn't tell you before we left because I didn't want it coloring the meeting. I wanted her information clean."

A beat. "Good call," Mom says.

From her, that's considerable.

"We need Solaris." The thought has been forming since the meeting room. "Whatever Finlay has from his own people and whatever Solaris has in memory, we need both of them in the same room before any of us can see the shape of this."

"Agreed." She's quiet a moment, the sound of her wings steady beside me. "The healing center."

I know what she means. I've been sitting with it since we left. "I know."

"Two hundred and seventeen."

"I know, Mom."

She doesn't say anything else. She doesn't need to. We carry the number the same way — not as a figure but as a weight. Two hundred and seventeen people with names and reasons, who crossed a sea to reach a place they had never been because it was safer than the one they came from.

I think about what Blackhaven has to become. Not only a territory. Not only a flight. Something with room in it for people who need room. The warhorse fields and the patrols and the mountain are the structure. What lives inside a structure is a choice.

I already made mine. I made it when I offered Giselle refuge yesterday without anyone asking me to.

But walking through that building put a different weight behind it. Not heavier, exactly. More real. The difference between understanding a thing in principle and understanding it with a face attached.

The continent comes up on the horizon — the dark line of the ranges, the particular shape of the coastal cliffs.

Home. My territory. My flight.

Our flight, my dragoness says.

And for the first time in weeks the word doesn't feel like a claim. It feels like a promise.

I bank right onto the line for Blackhaven and let myself think about all of it at once — Amadeus, Magnus, Cassius, the healing center, two hundred and seventeen, Finlay's letter, the war council that has to happen, Nova waiting with Solaris at Blackhaven, the six months counting down in the north.

There is so much to do.

Good.

I tuck my wings and drop into the descent, the wind pulling water from my eyes and the mountain rising to meet me, and I am already building the agenda by the time my feet touch stone.

Chapter 6

Hemlocke

The Aldenmere mare goes into labor two hours before dawn.

I know before she does, or before she shows it at least. There's a shift in the way a mare holds herself in the last hours, a turning-inward that has nothing to do with distress and everything to do with a body giving its whole attention to one thing. I've learned to read it across years of working with horses of every kind, and I've learned that reading it right means being ready without hovering, which is the harder of the two skills.

I light the lanterns in the foaling stall, put down fresh straw, fill the water bucket, and then sit on the rail and wait. This is the part that looks like doing nothing. It is not nothing. It is being present without being in the way, which horses understand better than most creatures I've met.

Titan appears at the stall door twenty minutes later.

He has no business being here at this hour. His stall is at the far end of the block, I didn't call him, and the Aldenmere mare is not his horse in any sense anyone could put on paper. He simply arrives, the way he does when something is happening that he has decided requires him. He puts his great head over the door and looks at the mare with those dark fathomless eyes, and makes a sound so low it barely counts as sound — more a vibration in the air, the note a very large creature makes when it is being deliberately calm.

The mare's ears turn toward him. Her breathing steadies.

"Thank you," I tell him quietly.

He doesn't look at me. He keeps looking at the mare.

✦ ✦ ✦

The foal arrives at dawn.

It's a straightforward birth, which is never as simple as the phrase makes it sound — there are ninety minutes of hard work between the first real contractions and the moment she hits the straw — but nothing goes wrong, nothing turns, nothing asks for more than my hands and my voice and the particular calm a unicorn can put into a room when he decides to. I've been told it feels like standing beside a very slow, very warm fire. I don't know what it's like from the outside. From in here it's just the thing I do when something needs to let go.

The foal is pitch black.

Not dark brown, not the deep seal-bay that reads black in low light. Actually black — the same matte obsidian as Titan's coat at its darkest, taking light in rather than giving any back. She has four smoke-gray stockings that fade up into her black legs like mist meeting stone, and a small gray star on her forehead that she'll never see and that I'm going to enjoy telling her about once she's old enough to grasp the idea of having a mark.

I dry her with the warm cloths I set out earlier, working from the head down in steady strokes, and she tolerates it with the wobbling indignation of something that has just arrived in the world and hasn't decided yet how it feels about being handled. Her legs are absurd. All of them, at once, too long for the rest of her the way foal legs always are, as though the length turned up before the horse did. She has opinions about this. She expresses them by trying to stand and immediately reconsidering.

The stable fills with the smell of new life — warm straw and the clean animal scent of the mare and something underneath both that I have never managed to name and associate entirely with this one moment, the moment between a thing not existing and existing. It happens every time and it is never ordinary. I have delivered foals in three territories across thirty years and not one of them has been ordinary.

Titan watches the whole of it from the door without moving. When she gets her legs under her for the first time — four separate attempts and one spectacular sideways collapse that puts my heart in my throat before she catches herself — he makes the low vibration again. Approval, I think. Or recognition. Something very old in him answering something very new.

"You did well," I tell the mare. She's already nosing at her foal with the focus of a new mother who has decided this is the most important thing that has ever happened.

She isn't wrong.

✦ ✦ ✦

Isolde arrives an hour after sunrise.

This is her pattern now. She comes every morning, has come every morning for three months, as reliably as the feed schedule and a good deal more cheerful about it. She comes to help, which she does well and without being told what to do, and she comes because she likes it here, which is visible in the way her shoulders drop as she comes through the door — the same drop I see in a horse when something stressful passes and the air goes back to normal.

Isolde is a nightmare, which means she carries shadow even in human form, a faint darkness clinging to her edges in certain lights, the visual equivalent of a low hum. In her father Leander it reads as gravity. As command. In Isolde it reads as depth. She is seventeen — eighteen at the Great Gathering — and already carries more of herself than most people twice that, with the self-possession of someone who has been through something and come out the other side still recognizably herself.

She stops when she sees the foal.

Isolde has her father's eyes, that warm nightmare dark, carrying the depth of a species that lives half in shadow even when it's wearing a person. Those eyes go wide now, and she presses both hands over her mouth, and the sound she makes is the involuntary noise of someone meeting something so unexpectedly good that the body answers before the mind arrives.

"Oh," she says through her hands. "Oh, she's perfect."

"She came this morning. Just before dawn."

Isolde goes to the stall slowly, the way I taught her — nothing sudden, weight low, hands where they can be seen. She learned that quickly. She learns everything quickly, which I suspect comes of growing up among extraordinary people and discovering that paying very close attention was the most reliable way to keep pace. She holds out the back of her hand at the foal's height and waits.

The foal stretches her neck out and sniffs.

Decides. Comes forward on those ridiculous legs and pushes her nose into Isolde's palm with more confidence than ought to be available to something that has been alive ninety minutes.

"Hello," Isolde breathes. The word is barely there.

The foal breathes warm against her palm and doesn't withdraw. Isolde laughs — quietly, so as not to startle her — and the sound is so purely delighted that Titan turns to look at her from his post. He weighs her the way he weighs everything, thoroughly and without hurrying. Then he goes back to watching the foal.

High praise.

I watch all of it from the rail and feel the warmth that isn't mine — the thread I share with Raven, carrying mood and presence across distance, warm when she's well and bright when she's happy. It runs quieter when she's away, the way a fire is quieter when you move back from it and still gives heat.

I think about the last time it ran bright instead of warm.

✦ ✦ ✦

Three weeks ago. Raven's version of a quiet evening, which involves considerably more fire than most people's quiet evenings and which I have come to understand as its own kind of peace.

We had the upper flight field to ourselves. Nova asleep in the nest below, Solaris on watch, the other three occupied elsewhere the way the nest spreads itself out across a large territory. The autumn air was cold enough that her breath misted when she shifted back after her evening flight, and she stood there in the dark with her wings half open and her hair loose and her scales still warm from the change, and she looked at me with those sapphire eyes and said nothing at all.

She doesn't always need words. That's one of the things I've learned about her — that the absence of words isn't absence. It's a different kind of presence, one she gives to very few people, and it carries more than most conversations do.

I crossed the field to her. The grass was cold underfoot and the mountain was very quiet and the stars over Blackhaven were the brilliant undiluted stars you only get this high up.

She reached up and put both hands on my chest, over the place where her scale sits under my shirt, and I felt it warm under her touch — the bond answering her the way it always does, brightness moving through it like sunlight through water. She pressed her forehead into my collarbone. She smelled of the mountain and the cold and the warmth that is only ever hers, the scent that lives in the bond and that I would know in any darkness, without sight or sound.

"Long day?" I asked.

"Long week." A pause. "I'm glad you're here."

Raven doesn't say that easily. She loves deeply and shows it a hundred ways, but the plain statement — I'm glad, I need this — costs her something, and she offers it rarely, and I take it every time as the thing it is. I put my arms around her and felt her breathe out against my chest, and the wings came around us both, and the field was very dark and very quiet and the bond ran very bright.

What came after was hers as much as mine — the warmth of her, the way she turns toward gentleness when she isn't carrying the dominance the flight asks of her, the mix of strength and softness that is entirely Raven and that I still find astonishing, three scales and a bond into knowing her. And underneath it I could feel the others' threads too. Corvus's steadiness. Keir's warmth. Solaris's ancient depth. Finlay's contained fire. All of us in her and her in all of us, and the nest whole.

I think about that night when the work gets heavy. When the fire drake reports come in and the six months count down and the war that's coming lies across everything we've built. It doesn't make the heavy things lighter.

It reminds me what the heavy things are for.

✦ ✦ ✦

Charron arrives at mid-morning.

He has no reason to be here today. Covering my morning rounds was his reason yesterday, after I mentioned — carefully, without weight on it — that Isolde was expected in the stables. Today he has arranged a different one. He carries a report on grass coverage from the western grazing boundaries, a document that could have waited until the afternoon briefing and which he has nonetheless delivered by hand to the stables at precisely the hour Isolde is in them.

I say nothing.

Charron is thirty, which makes him thirteen years older than Isolde and four years younger than me. He has the coloring most of our herd has — the long black hair, the pink eyes that go bright magenta when his unicorn is near the surface — but there's something in him that's only his, quieter than most of the males in the herd and more considered. Our mother used to say he was the one born knowing how to wait. She meant it as observation, not criticism. She was right.

He helps Isolde move clean straw into the next stall while I check the foal's legs and write down her first measurements. He is careful around her — not performing care, actually careful, the attentiveness of a male who knows he is standing near something he doesn't want to frighten. He talks to her the way he talks to the horses. Not much, and when he does, with a warmth that asks nothing back.

Isolde talks back. That isn't nothing. She isn't shy, but she is selective — there are people she expands around and people she contracts around, and the difference is legible if you know what you're looking at. Around Charron she expands. She has, every time, since the first morning he turned up with some reason or another to be in the stables.

I've been watching. Watching very carefully, because what I've known for months — that Charron has scented her, that my brother is as certain about Isolde as I was certain about Raven before I understood what that certainty was going to mean — is something I'm holding with both hands while I work out the timing.

Leander will need time. That much I know as fact. He loves his daughter with the fierce particular love of a father who nearly lost her, and the idea of her finding a mate at eighteen — however good the male, however clear the bond — is going to sit badly before it sits well. So I've been waiting for the situation to do some of the work itself. For Isolde to have had enough time around Charron that she knows him, rather than simply meets him.

I think we're getting close.

Raven will have thoughts about this when I tell her. She'll have them immediately and they'll be in order before I finish the sentence. I've carried it alone long enough — I'll tell her tonight, once she's back from the Eastern Isles and the council business has settled for the evening. It's hers to know. Isolde is her sister in every way that counts.

At the end of the morning, with the foal asleep and the stalls clean and Isolde washing her hands at the trough, Charron appears at her elbow with the careful unconcern of a male who has been working up to something for three hours.

"Can I ask you something?"

Isolde looks at him. "Sure."

"Black unicorns have a bonding tradition. The herd teaches the young ones how the bond works — what it feels like before you know what it is." He pauses. Not nervous. Deliberate. "I could explain it to you. If you wanted. Some of the other species in the flight have been asking."

It is, objectively, a reasonable offer. The flight is mixed, and its bonding traditions are becoming a practical matter as more families settle here. That he has clearly been rehearsing the phrasing since dawn is not visible to anyone who isn't his brother and hasn't known him thirty years.

Isolde considers it — really considers it, not performing the consideration — and nods. "Yeah. I'd like that."

Not I suppose. Not if you're offering.

I'd like that.

I turn back to the foal's stall before either of them can see my face.

She's asleep in the straw, smoke-gray legs folded under her, already entirely at home in a world she has known less than a day. Titan is still at the door, patient as stone, watching her breathe.

I let out a slow breath.

Outside, something begins.

Chapter 7

Corvus

The second day on the Southern Isle begins before the sun does.

I'm on the balcony of the guest quarters watching the horizon go from black to gray to the rose-gold this coast produces at dawn. It's different from Blackhaven's, in ways I find myself cataloging without meaning to. Blackhaven's mornings come in cold and sharp, the mountain light cutting rather than spreading. Here it arrives softly, the sea mist thinning it before it ever reaches the land, turning the edges of the world into something that looks painted — by someone with strong feelings about color and enough time to act on them.

Standing here, I understand why a gold dragon chose this island. Gold dragons lean toward beauty as much as value, and Therun built both into the same place.

I slept four hours, which is barely enough. The shipping agreement is on the table in the room behind me, laid out in Thauglor's handwriting, which is neater than mine. It will need Klauth's signature eventually, and I didn't want it looking like it was written by a man who had flown several hours and met a foreign king on the same day. Which it was. It doesn't need to look like it.

Yesterday's meeting ran three hours and ended with Therun's pledge — wolf trackers and metallic dragons, conditional on Klauth's signature over the shipping lanes. But what I keep turning over isn't the outcome. The outcome was better than anyone had cause to expect from a first meeting. It's the shape of how it happened. That Therun went straight at what Raven is rather than what she represents. That he asked me to describe her as a person rather than a position. That he listened to the sea glass and the Purge in the same breath and said she sounded worth the trouble, with the settled certainty of a man who has used that exact phrase before and meant it every time.

He's going to like her. I think she's going to like him. And I'm glad, in a way I didn't expect to be, that she'll get to reach that judgment herself.

Thauglor finds me on the balcony a quarter past the hour, which means he slept about four as well. In an ancient wyrm that's either entirely normal or a sign the situation is occupying him more than he lets on, and with Thauglor the difference between those two is not always legible.

He leans on the rail beside me and looks at the horizon.

"Therun wants to show us the wolf packs this morning," he says. "Before we go."

"How long?"

"Two hours. Maybe three." A pause. "He thinks Raven's mate should see what he's offering before anyone signs anything. He wants you to know what the wolves are, not only what they're worth."

I look at him. "He said that?"

"More or less." The corner of Thauglor's mouth moves. "His exact words were that a female who asks for sea glass instead of weapons deserves a mate who understands the difference between a tool and a life. He wants to know whether you do."

I'm quiet a moment, watching the rose-gold deepen over the water. "He's still testing."

"He will be testing until the day he decides he's finished testing," Thauglor says. "It's how he has lasted three centuries. Don't take offense at it. Take it as information."

"Information about what?"

"That he measures what he's committing to very carefully." Thauglor straightens off the rail. "Which means when he commits, it holds. That's worth a morning."

I go inside and dress.

✦ ✦ ✦

The wolf packs run the western slopes.

Therun has left that half of the island wild while the eastern half is worked and managed, and the line between them is visible from the air — a place where ordered fields give way to something older, the growth thicker and less directed, the land doing what it would do if nobody asked anything of it. I noticed it yesterday from a distance. On foot it's something else. The air changes. It carries more in it. The smell of living things that haven't been arranged.

We walk, Therun leading, two of his guards flanking at a distance that suggests security without suggesting distrust. Thauglor takes his left, which puts me on his right, and I understand that this is another small test — a guest given the right hand is being watched for how he holds it. I hold it quietly. I don't fill silences I wasn't invited into.

We clear the edge of the cultivated land before the trees close in, and I get my first proper look at the white unicorns.

Four of them in the lower pasture at the tree line, two adults and two younger ones, past being foals and not yet grown. Their coats aren't quite white. In direct sun they carry a faint iridescence, the way some feathers do, shifting through white and silver and something almost blue at the edges of movement. Their horns are longer and finer than Hemlocke's. A different line, shaped differently by three hundred years alone in the south, and unmistakably the same creature underneath.

I stop walking. Therun stops beside me and says nothing, which I've come to understand is how he gives a man room to take a thing in.

"Hemlocke is going to need photographs," I say.

"Your mate's bond with the black unicorn herd."

"He runs the warhorses and the grazing and half the practical working of Blackhaven," I say. "And he's never seen one of these. He thought they were gone."

"Most of the continent thinks they're gone." Therun watches the four of them with the comfortable regard of a man for whom this view is ordinary. "I spent forty years finding what was left and convincing them the Southern Isle was safer than wherever they'd scattered to. It was not a short negotiation." A pause. "White unicorns are not easily convinced of anything."

"What changed their minds?"

"Time. And my stopping. I gave up trying to convince them and simply made the island safe. They found their own way here eventually." He looks at me. "Some things can't be negotiated into existence. You build the conditions and you wait."

I think about that. I keep it. We walk on.

The pack finds us rather than the other way around.

I hear them before I see them — nothing as dramatic as howling, only the sound of something large moving through undergrowth with the confidence of something that has no reason to be careful. Then the trees thin and they're there. Eight of them, at the front edge of what I understand is a much larger group. Their coats read black in the morning light, but as they come closer I can see two are deep charcoal and one has silver ticking through hers that catches the low sun in threads.

They are enormous. Not unnaturally so, not the exaggerated scale of a shifted predator, but genuinely large in the way that tells you generations of good feeding, nothing hunting them, and ground that let them become everything their size could be. The largest stands taller than my hip at the shoulder. Their prints in the soft earth are bigger than my hand spread wide.

Therun stops. The pack stops.

"Pack-lord Davan," Therun says to the largest, the one with the silver through her coat. The wolf's amber eyes go from Therun to Thauglor to me, each look separate and unhurried. "This is Thauglor Mrithun and Corvus Mourningstar, of the Marzana Empire and the Blackhaven flight."

Davan looks at me for a long moment. I hold it without moving.

He steps forward, and I understand that he isn't weighing whether I'm a danger. He's weighing something else, and I don't learn what until he turns away, satisfied, and sits.

"He's decided you'll do," Therun says. There's something in his voice that isn't quite amusement but lives on the same street.

"For what?"

"That's between him and the female he intends to pledge to. I don't presume to speak for my pack-lords." Therun starts walking again, and the wolves move with us, some ranging ahead, some flanking, easy about all of it. "What I can tell you is that Davan can hold a trail forty miles in good conditions. His pack covers ground two wings of dragons couldn't cover in the same time. They don't need to see a thing to find it. They need to have smelled it once. Once is enough."

I think about the fire drake rotation on Blackhaven's western border. The scent Keir's pack can't quite name. Forty miles in good conditions.

"How many packs?"

"Three on the southern slopes, two on the northern coast, one that runs the interior, and one that considers itself unaffiliated and reliably turns up anyway whenever there's something worth doing." Therun glances at me sideways. "Two hundred and twelve wolves across all of them. A hundred and eight answer to Davan directly. The rest follow their own pack-lords and accept his word on anything that touches the whole continent."

"And they'd come to Blackhaven."

"Davan will go where the work is. The others follow Davan." Simple. Final. "The metallic wing is a different kind of commitment — those are my own blood and I send them with different weight behind them. The wolves are their own. I'm not pledging them to you. I'm introducing you. What happens after that is between them and your female."

I look at the pack-lord, who is investigating something in the undergrowth with the total attention of a creature for whom the world is full of information.

"I'll tell her," I say.

"Tell her accurately," Therun says. "He'll know if you don't."

I believe him.

✦ ✦ ✦

The evening before we leave, Thauglor and I eat in the guest hall alone.

Therun has withdrawn after the signing, his people providing food without requiring company. The hall is large and warm, lit by that amber southern light, and the silence across the table is the comfortable kind that doesn't need managing. Thauglor eats with the methodical efficiency of a man for whom food is fuel and not pleasure. Three years of sharing meals with his family have taught me that's a Thauglor trait rather than a dragon one — Raven eats with real attention, Mina with decisive enthusiasm.

He sets his fork down and looks across at me.

"He tested you well today," he says.

"Did I pass?"

"The wolves decided you'd do. To Therun, that carries more weight than anything I could have said for you." He picks the fork up again. "Davan has refused two previous delegations. He sat for you."

I think about that amber assessment. The unhurried decision. "What was he looking for?"

Thauglor is quiet a moment. "Someone who wouldn't try to own what he was being shown," he says at last. "You looked at the wolves the way you look at Raven's flight. The way a man looks at something he recognizes rather than something he wants. He noticed." A pause. "Most people look at a thing of value and start calculating immediately. You looked at them and understood what they were. That's rarer than it should be."

I don't know what to say to that, so I eat my dinner.

"She chose well," Thauglor says after a while. Quietly. Not quite to me — more the way a man says a thing he's been carrying a long time and finds he's put it into the air without entirely meaning to. He looks faintly surprised at himself, and on Thauglor that expression is rare enough that it takes me a moment to place it.

"All five of us?"

He looks at me. "All five of you." He picks up his wine. "I expected to hate all five of you, if you want it honestly. I had twenty-one years to work up to it." He drinks and sets the glass down. "I was wrong about most of it."

From Thauglor this is the equivalent of a declaration of deep affection. I take it as one.

We finish in comfortable quiet, and I go to bed feeling better about the morning than I expected to.

✦ ✦ ✦

The signing happens over breakfast. Thauglor's neat hand, Therun's seal, the document folded into my pack with the care I give to things Raven will want to check herself. She'll read the original rather than a summary. She always does. Therun watches me fold it and says nothing, though I have the sense he notices.

He comes out to the landing platform to see us off.

"You'll bring her," he says. Not a question.

"As soon as it can be arranged."

"Tell her to come in dragon form. I want to see her."

"She'll appreciate the directness," Thauglor says.

Therun looks at him. "Most things appreciate directness. They simply don't admit it." He steps back. "Safe flight."

We shift and launch.

The metallic wing escorts us as far as the southern sea boundary — twelve of them in formation, scales taking the noon sun in shades that have no equivalent anywhere I grew up. Copper, bronze, brass, the deep reddish gold of the oldest lines. They fly a drilled pattern, each dragon aware of the others without looking, the whole formation adjusting to thermals and wind shifts without any signal I can catch. I have been flying since I was old enough to shift and I have never flown anything that tight. It comes from decades of practice. Centuries, probably. And it shows in how effortless they make it look — skill gone so deep it stopped needing thought.

I watch them and think about Raven's flight. The blink hounds and the unicorns and the warhorses. The three new dragon families who came after the Gathering and are still finding their rhythm. It isn't this. Not yet. Not three centuries of accumulated precision. But it's real, and it's hers, and it's growing faster than anything I have watched grow before. She builds the way she does everything else. Completely, because she won't let herself do it any other way.

At the boundary the wing peels off, banking back toward the island in a turn so clean it looks rehearsed. I watch them go.

"Satisfied?" Thauglor asks from my left.

"Yes."

"Good." He adjusts his line slightly, angling north. "She'll want to come herself. To meet him properly."

"I know. I'll tell her so plainly."

"He'll want to see her in dragon form." Thauglor is looking at the horizon, his voice carrying the quality it has when he's saying something he has thought about carefully. "She's grown since most of the continent last saw her. Therun is one of the few old enough that her size won't unsettle him. It may in fact be the thing that settles this fully — not the politics, not the shipping lanes. Raven standing on his landing field and letting him look at what she is."

I think about her on Blackhaven's high point, roaring into the dawn. The way the sound carries across the mountain. The way every dragon in the flight answers it.

"That's the easiest thing we will ever ask her to do," I say.

Thauglor makes a sound that might be a laugh. With Thauglor it's difficult to be certain.

We fly north. The sea goes on beneath us, cold and enormous and indifferent. Somewhere ahead is the continent, and beyond it the mountain, and on the mountain the nest, and in the nest everyone I am doing this for.

I count the hours remaining.

They are, for once, the right number.

Chapter 8

Raven

Blackhaven smells like home.

This sounds obvious, and maybe small. But I've been away two days, and the particular combination of mountain air and horse and the mineral warmth of the hot spring below — and the smoke-and-cedar Solaris carries everywhere he goes — has been absent. Now it isn't. My body registers it before my mind does, in the loosening across my chest the moment I clear the peak and the scent reaches me, and that tells me something about what this place has become.

I circle once before landing. Not to check for threats, not this time. Just to look at it.

The fields are green in the late afternoon light. The warhorse rotation moves through the eastern pasture in the unhurried way Hemlocke has trained into them, the patterns so regular they look choreographed from above. The blink hound patrol traces are visible if you know what to look for — the slight disturbances in the tree line at the western edge where the shift happens, the faint shimmer in the air Keir's pack leaves when they move fast. The upper flight field is empty except for two of the younger dragons from the eastern family, who are doing something that looks like racing and is definitely going to end with one of them losing altitude badly before they sort out their wing angles. The lower courtyard is busy with end-of-day movement: kitchen smoke rising from the south building, two of Keir's pack trotting in from the boundary shift, and Charron, small from up here, near the stable entrance doing something that appears to involve an excessive amount of rope.

I've been gone two days, and it runs without me.

That's what I'm looking at from up here. Not the territory itself but the evidence of it working — the proof that what I've built holds its shape when I'm not standing in the middle of it. I'm aware this is supposed to be reassuring, and it is. It's also the particular bittersweetness of a thing you worked very hard for arriving, and turning out to be exactly what you hoped.

I bank into the descent and let myself come home.

✦ ✦ ✦

Nova finds me before I've fully shifted.

She's been told she has to wait until the shift is finished and her mother's feet are on the ground. Solaris told her, because he understands that a hatchling intercepting a parent mid-shift is an excellent way to lose a wing to an involuntary scale-spread. She has interpreted this rule with the creative precision of someone who is very intelligent and very two years old: she stands at the edge of the flight platform, both arms outstretched, both wings vibrating with barely contained urgency, and the moment my human feet touch stone she flings herself across the remaining distance with complete confidence that I'll catch her.

I always catch her.

She wraps her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck and presses her face into my jaw, making the sound she makes when she's been waiting and is done waiting. Not distress — something more like the release of sustained effort, the exhale of a very small person who has been holding herself together and has decided she doesn't have to anymore.

"I was here," she informs me.

"I know. I could see you from the air."

She pulls back to look at me with those amber eyes, the left one with its half-moon of sapphire catching the afternoon light, and subjects me to a thorough inspection. This is what she does when she's been told I'm coming home: she spends the waiting building an expectation, and now she's checking whether I match it.

I apparently match it. She puts her face back against my jaw.

"Solaris made the egg thing," she says.

"Did he save me some?"

"Yes." A pause. "I helped."

"I'm sure you were very helpful."

Solaris appears in the doorway behind her, which means he's been there the whole time and simply let Nova have the first landing. This is a very Solaris thing to do. He looks at me over the top of her head with those amber eyes — the same warm amber as hers, and it still startles me sometimes, the bloodline visible in both of them — and something in his expression eases, in the quiet way things ease when something absent comes back.

"Welcome home, lass," he says.

"Thanks."

✦ ✦ ✦

The war council convenes an hour later in the briefing room.

Mom stays. She came back with me rather than going straight to Sovereign, and she offered without being asked, which is its own kind of thing. The table holds me, Solaris, Finlay, Mom, and Klauth — present through the messenger device of Ziggy's design that carries voice across distance. Klauth uses it with the resigned dignity of someone who finds the technology irritating and the alternative, not being in the room, worse. His voice comes through with a slight echo that makes him sound even more imperious than usual. I've decided this is an accidental improvement.

I brief on Giselle first. The healing center. The two hundred and seventeen. The way Magnus's pressure escalated — official, then unofficial, then force. The conditional alliance. The refuge arrangement. And Cassius, whose existence I summarize carefully: bonded mate of Giselle, an omega male, eleven years on the island, the reason the night boats failed. And, most importantly, someone who has spent over a decade researching Amadeus's specific interest in omega males.

"Cassius," Finlay says when I finish. His voice carries a quality I've come to recognize as him identifying something he isn't ready to name yet — something clicking into place that he's turning over before he commits to it.

"You know the name?"

"I know of an omega male mage who disappeared from the northern records about eleven years ago, under circumstances that were never satisfactorily explained." He's looking at the table. "The name was Cassius Marrowe. He was considered one of the most capable practitioners of his generation, which made the disappearance particularly noted."

The room is quiet.

"Omega male mage," Mom says.

"Yes."

"And Amadeus has a specific interest in omega males."

"Apparently."

I look at Solaris. He's been still since I said the name Amadeus — the stillness that's different from his usual composure, the kind that means something is happening inside him that he's managing rather than burying.

"Tell me what you know," I say. Not a request. He understands the tone.

"I know Amadeus built the cursed egg binding," Solaris says. His voice is level and careful, the Scots lilt more pronounced when he's measuring his words. "I know it because I was one of his first subjects. Not by name at the time — I didn't know whose work I was inside. But the signature of it, the particular quality of that kind of imprisonment—" He pauses. "I would know it anywhere. And what you're describing — a mage who survived a reported death, who works through representatives, who is specifically hunting omega males and chimera bloodlines — matches the way he works. He doesn't improvise. He builds systems. Long, patient systems."

"A system running how long?" Mom asks.

"The binding is older than I am, and I am twelve centuries," Solaris says. "He sealed me a thousand and twenty years ago and I was among the first. Whatever he began, he began it before that." He meets her eyes. "What's newer is this. Dragons have been weakening for three centuries. If that's his hand as well, then he stopped waiting three hundred years ago and started building toward something."

"He's been at this since before I was born," Klauth says through the device, in the flat tone of someone who has just done arithmetic he doesn't like the answer to.

"Yes," Solaris says.

Nova has been sitting in my lap with the focused silence of a hatchling who has learned that talking-around-the-table time means she should be quiet. She reaches up and pats my jaw with one small hand. I cover her hand with mine without looking away from Solaris.

"Strategy," I say. "What do we need before we can move?"

We work through it for the next hour. More allies. Therun's forces are pledged but conditional on my visit, which needs to happen before winter. Cassius's research, which means a return trip to the Eastern Isles — I intend to make it as soon as the academy schedule allows. Finlay's northern network needs to be pointed specifically at anything connecting Amadeus's representatives to the fire drakes on our western border. If that link exists, it changes the threat on our doorstep from opportunistic revenge into one operation with one mind behind it.

Nova shifts in my lap and resettles herself with the unconscious precision of a hatchling who has learned the adults will keep talking for a long time and one may as well be comfortable. I adjust my arm around her without breaking the thread of the conversation.

"The fire drakes aren't here for Mina," I say, when that line of discussion runs out. "They're here because Amadeus sent them."

Nobody argues.

"Which means the academy infiltration wasn't opportunistic either," Finlay says. "The Purge is in six weeks. If they have plants embedded in the student body⁠—"

"They do," I say. "I've already counted them."

Another quiet. Klauth's echoing voice breaks it. "Of course you have."

"Three students. Fire drake bloodline, enrolled through Anipe's office in the last two years. They've stayed away from my siblings, which is discipline rather than accident. They're not here for sport. They're here for one target, during a period when the rules allow killing and the staff are supposed to stay out of it." I hold Finlay's gaze. "Except that Anipe won't stay out of it. Neither will Samara."

"You're certain about Samara?"

"Certain enough." I look at the map spread across the table. "Which means I have six weeks. Six weeks to let all of them believe I don't know they're there, and to prepare for a Purge where the staff is hunting me too."

"You're going to use yourself as bait," Mom says. Flat. Not a question.

"I'm going to be the most obvious target on the grounds. Let every threat converge on me instead of scattering across a hundred students." I look at her. "If they're hunting me, they're not hunting my siblings. And I'm harder to kill than my siblings."

Mom looks at Solaris. Solaris looks at me. Neither of them says anything, which is its own kind of agreement.

I close the council with a list. Finlay re-points the northern network. Solaris keeps pulling at his memory. Keir tightens the watch on the border. And I schedule the Therun visit for three weeks out, the earliest the academy calendar allows.

Mom catches my eye as the council breaks up. She nods once — the nod that means well run, and we'll talk later, and underneath both of those something that has no words but that I've been reading since I was old enough to read faces. Something like you're all right.

I nod back.

✦ ✦ ✦

The briefing room empties slowly.

Finlay takes his notes to his study. Mom phases back to Sovereign with Ziggy, who materialized at some point in the last hour without my noticing, which is a Ziggy specialty. Klauth's device goes dark.

Solaris stays.

Nova is asleep on the bench beside me, curled into a ball with her wings folded over herself like a blanket and one small fist against her cheek. She went under about twenty minutes into the strategy discussion, which is either evidence that she trusts us to handle things or evidence that dragon strategy sessions are deeply boring to a two-year-old. I suspect both.

He looks at me across the table. I look at him.

Two days. The bond between us has been warm the whole time, carrying the steady reassurance of presence even at distance. But warm isn't bright, and the difference lives in the body rather than the mind — a restlessness that strategic planning and diplomatic meetings and the daily weight of the flight do nothing to address. It's been building since the morning I left.

"She's asleep," I say.

"She is," he agrees. "Keir said he'd check on her."

"He did say that."

I stand. Solaris stands. I cross to him and he meets me halfway, the way he does — not waiting to be come to, but moving toward. Because Solaris has a thousand years of patience and spent most of them being still, and has learned this past year that there's a particular pleasure in choosing not to be.

His hands find my face first, the way they always do. Warm and steady. The calluses of ancient combat worn smooth now, carrying instead the particular roughness of hands that have learned a different kind of work. He looks at me the way he looks at old things he values — with the attention of someone for whom time isn't abstract, and whose regard therefore has weight.

"Two days," he says.

"Two very long days," I confirm.

He laughs, low and warm, the sound resonating through his chest where my hands have found it. "Aye. That they were."

He tips his forehead down to mine and we stay there a moment, in the particular still point of two people who have been apart and are now not — the reunion that lives in the breath before anything else. His scent surrounds me, cedar and deep smoke and the mineral warmth of his scales. It's been part of my scent for over a year now, worked into my skin through proximity and bond and the accumulated weight of mornings.

Then he tilts his head, and I tilt mine, and the waiting ends.

The bond runs very bright.

✦ ✦ ✦

Later, the room is dark except for the low glow of the fire in the grate and the silver-blue of moonlight through the high window.

Solaris is asleep. He does it deeply and completely, the way something does that spent a thousand years unable to and has not taken it for granted since. His arm is across my waist, his breathing even.

Nova is on my chest. She arrived at some point in the last hour, delivered by Keir with the quiet efficiency of a blink hound who has learned exactly what wakes people and what doesn't, and she has settled herself with the territorial confidence of a hatchling who has decided this spot belongs to her. Her wings are folded small over her back, her amber eyes closed, the half-sapphire hidden. She's very warm. She smells of the stables, which means she spent the evening with Hemlocke and the new foal, which means he let her into the foaling stall, which means I'm going to have a conversation with Hemlocke about hatchlings and hooves.

But not tonight.

Tonight I lie in the dark with my daughter on my chest and my mate's arm across my waist and the mountain breathing around us, and I think about the war I'm building toward. The shape of it as it stands: Giselle's conditional alliance, Therun's pledged forces, Cassius's eleven years of research, Solaris's recovered memory, Finlay's northern network, Keir's watch on the border, the fire drakes on the western line. The Purge in six weeks. And Amadeus somewhere behind all of it, like a hand holding a dozen threads.

It's a large thing, and it's been building for longer than I've been alive.

Nova shifts in her sleep, her small wings spreading and folding again, some hatchling dream moving through her. I rest my hand on her back, light, just resting, and feel her heartbeat against my palm — fast, the way hatchling hearts are, a quick bright rhythm that has no knowledge yet of the weight of things.

I close my wings around us both.

Tomorrow, the work continues.

Tonight, this is enough.

Chapter 9

Keir

The thing about a scent that doesn't belong is that you can't unsmell it.

Once your nose has cataloged something wrong, it becomes the thing you're always tracking. Something not native to the territory, none of the species you know, sitting in the air with the stubborn wrongness of a thing that was brought here. Background noise you can't tune out. Every patrol run, every check-in, every sweep of the line — there it is. Not stronger, not closer. Just present, and patient.

I've been running the western line for six weeks. My whole pack has been running it, rotating shifts, two or three of us at a time, building the kind of picture single runs can't give you.

The picture is this. Eight distinct signatures, rotating positions, moving faster than a stationary watch would but never crossing the boundary. They know where our line sits, and they stay just outside it. Someone out there is being very careful, and the particular kind of careful they're being tells me they've been briefed on how far a blink hound can track.

That last part bothers me most.

Raven left for the Eastern Isles two days ago, and she's due back tonight. Solaris is running Blackhaven. Finlay is in his study doing whatever Finlay does in his study — based on the volume of outgoing correspondence, either running a spy network or writing a very detailed novel. I have never asked. The answer will be one of those two things and I'm not certain which one I want it to be.

The point is that today I stop mapping and start getting answers. Six weeks of watching is enough. Today we collect something that can be identified.

I find Dax and Maren in the lower courtyard, both mid-shift from their overnight run, fur still carrying the cold of the western tree line. They look up at me with the particular alertness of blink hounds who recognize the face their pack leader makes when something is actually happening.

"Western run," I say. "Now. Bring collection kits."

Dax straightens. Maren is already moving before I finish the sentence, and by the time we clear the courtyard wall the three of us are running the line.

We blink in stages, which is how the pack covers distance — not one long jump but a series of short precise ones, each landing scoped before we commit to it, the space between assessed and cleared in the half-second between leaving and arriving. It's faster than it sounds when you do it right and catastrophic when you do it wrong, which is why I don't let anyone run border jumps until I've watched them blink into a marked space fifty times without misjudging it. Dax can do it cleanly now. Maren has been able to do it since before I met her, and is quietly superior about this in the way she's quietly superior about most things.

The western tree line in autumn smells of rotting leaf litter and cold soil and the sharpness of pine resin reacting to the drop in temperature. All of that is background. Normal. Mine.

And then, threading through it at the boundary, the other thing.

It isn't a smell I can name cleanly. The closest I can get is heat as a chemical process rather than a breath weapon — not the ozone and sulfur of what a dragon exhales, not the clean burn of a phoenix, nothing I've cataloged in six years of fieldwork. It smells the way a reaction smells. Not the thing itself but the leftovers of it: the by-product of something that makes warmth as a side effect of moving rather than as something it aims and controls. Like something that runs hot from the inside out.

I crouch at the newest position marker — a notch I cut in a pine trunk at eye level last week — and breathe slowly. The scent is fresh, inside the last two hours. The rotation has been here and moved on.

"Here," I tell Dax quietly.

He crouches beside me, nose working. I watch his face: the concentration, then the slight widening that means he's caught it.

"Yeah," he says, as quiet as I am. Out here the quiet matters. "Same as yesterday, but stronger. Like there were more of them."

That's new.

"How many more?"

He works his nose again, sorting through it with the focused efficiency of a blink hound in his element. "Two yesterday, maybe three. Today, four, possibly five. The layering's harder to separate."

"Get a sample. Whole branch, if the bark has held it."

While Dax works, I blink east along the line — twenty feet, check, blink, check, blink — mapping the freshest traces. The rotation moved northwest to southeast, the same general direction as the last three runs. They have a preferred track, and that's useful, because predictable things are manageable things. They can be expected, planned around, and if it comes to it, intercepted.

Maren appears at my elbow from the south position. "Same signature down there. Maybe three hours older."

"So the southeast end finishes first and the northwest end catches up."

"That's the pattern."

I look at the tree line. Quiet now, empty, nothing moving. Whatever is out there is either very good at stillness or has pulled back far enough that even my nose loses the thread. Probably both.

"How many separate signatures on the southeast side?"

Maren thinks for a second, her dark eyes going slightly unfocused the way they do when she's pulling scent layers apart. "Two clear ones. Maybe a third — it's layered, like one is covering the other's tracks."

"They're trail-covering."

She nods and doesn't say anything else, because she doesn't need to. Trail-covering means they know about scent tracking, which means whoever is running this watch knows enough about blink hounds to be actively working against us.

That isn't improvised. That's briefed.

I crouch in the leaves and let myself think a moment — the cold of the ground coming through my trousers, the damp smell of the soil up close. The bond with Raven sits warm at the edge of my awareness. She's alive and well and somewhere over the eastern sea, exactly where she should be. At distance the bond is less like a presence and more like a temperature, and I've learned to read it the way you read any kind of weather: not precise, but directional. She's fine. She's working. She'll be back.

And she's going to want to know everything, which means I need to understand what I know before I tell her.

Eight signatures at minimum. Rotating. Briefed on how we track. Covering trails. Not crossing the line. Patient. And growing — two or three yesterday, four or five today.

They're building toward something.

"Get everything you can," I say. "I want samples from every fresh position on this line before we go back."

We work the line until midday and come home with eleven sealed samples between the three of us. I don't stop at the courtyard. I take them straight up to the study.

Finlay opens the door before I knock.

This is a Finlay thing. Whatever a phoenix uses to sense an approach makes doors somewhat redundant around him. He stands in the doorway of his study in his shirtsleeves, which is the most informal I have ever seen him, a pen still in his hand and ink on two fingers. He takes one look at Dax behind me with the collection kit and steps back to let us in.

The study smells of old paper and something burning that isn't burning — the trace of phoenix fire that clings to surfaces in a room he uses regularly. His desk is covered in correspondence in a way that suggests either a very organized system or complete chaos. I cannot tell which. I've decided not to ask. Some things are better as mysteries.

"Tell me," he says.

I give him the whole report. The rotation. The trail-covering. The fact that they've been briefed on blink hound tracking. Eight signatures minimum, and more today than yesterday. The timeline that ends at the Purge.

He listens with his arms folded and his head slightly tilted, the pen still in his hand, making no notes. He doesn't need to. Nine hundred years of intelligence work means he's filing this faster than I can say it. I've watched him do it before — the way information goes into him and gets sorted as it lands, invisible, but readable in the quality of his attention.

When I finish he unfolds one arm and holds out his hand for the kit. Dax passes it over. Finlay opens it with practiced efficiency, lifts out the sealed bark sample, and breathes across it slowly. Not dramatically. Clinically, the way you breathe across something when you want the scent undiluted and are taking your time with it.

His expression doesn't change. But the pen stops moving in his hand.

"Fire drake," he says. "The non-shifting kind."

"You're sure?"

"The musk is specific. Fire drakes make heat through a chemical process in the respiratory system, and the by-product carries a compound that doesn't appear in any other species' scent. It's been documented since the third century, in the field notes of phoenixes who crossed the western passes." He sets the sample down carefully, with the particular care of someone handling a thing he doesn't want to contaminate. "The interior fire drakes haven't been seen east of those passes in two hundred years. They can't make the crossing on their own. The open water is cold enough that their chemistry stops working properly — they'd lose heat faster than their bodies could replace it."

"Which means someone brought them."

"Which means someone transported them," he corrects, precise as always. "Across open water. Which takes resources, planning, and a vessel able to handle a species that runs hot." He looks at me. "This is not somebody taking an opportunity. Somebody spent real money and real planning on this."

"Someone with resources and a reason."

"And someone who knows exactly where Blackhaven's line sits," he says. "Which means either they scouted this territory thoroughly before setting the watch, or somebody told them."

The room is quiet a moment. Outside, somewhere in the lower courtyard, I can hear two of my pack running a drill — the fast stacked blinks we use for fighting up close, the displaced air carrying even through the study window.

"Write it up," Finlay says before I can say anything else. "All of it. The full patrol record, the position maps, where each sample came from, today's increase in numbers. When Raven lands she gets the complete picture. Nothing summarized."

"Already done. Maren's logging it now."

Something moves in his expression. Not quite approval — the slight easing of a man who has just had one worry taken off him.

"Good." He picks up his pen again. "She'll need it tonight. Before she sleeps. Give her time to hold it overnight before the next thing wants her attention."

I look at him. "You know her schedule better than she does."

The corner of his mouth twitches. "I've had nine centuries of practice learning what the people I care about need. Some habits are useful." He turns back to his desk. "Thank you, Keir."

I take the dismissal. It's a good one.

✦ ✦ ✦

Raven lands at dusk.

I'm on the upper flight platform when she clears the peak. She banks into her descent with her wings angled for speed rather than display, which means she's thinking rather than presenting, and she lands and shifts in one practiced sequence. Nova hits her in roughly two seconds, because Nova has been watching the landing approach for twenty minutes and refusing to be distracted by anything, including me offering her the dried fruit she likes.

I give them the reunion. This matters. You give the nest its reunions before you give the flight its reports.

The war council that follows runs an hour. I listen to Raven brief on Giselle, on Cassius, on the eastern intelligence. I watch her take in Finlay's Amadeus update and Solaris's confirmation, and she absorbs all of it the way she does — not flinching, not reacting, just filing, building the picture. Her face goes still and her eyes become the most active thing about her, moving through the information like she's reading a map.

When it comes to me, I give it clean. Eight signatures. Fire drake musk confirmed by Finlay. Trail-covering. Six weeks to the Purge.

She's very still for a moment. "How many?"

"At least eight on the rotation. Could be more sitting further back from the line."

She nods once. "Don't engage. Keep watching. I want the position maps updated every forty-eight hours."

"Already set up."

Another nod, and the council moves on.

I watch her for the rest of the meeting. The way she holds six separate threads at once and keeps them straight. The way she asks the question that cuts to what matters. The way she eats exactly one piece of bread the entire hour because she keeps forgetting about it. The way she never once lets the weight of any of it show.

That last one worries me.

Not the competence. The competence is extraordinary, and I know it, and I trust it completely. What worries me is the not-showing — the thing that doesn't quite have a name, that I've felt through the bond at the edges when she thinks everyone is asleep. The particular frequency of someone carrying something very heavy and making certain no one can tell.

✦ ✦ ✦

After the council clears, I find her in the kitchen.

She's making tea with the focused attention of someone doing one simple thing and grateful for it. The kettle is loud on the stove. The light is warm. Nova is already asleep in the next room. Raven stands in front of the stove in her bare feet, wings slightly spread for balance, hair still damp from the flight.

I sit at the kitchen table. She looks at me over her shoulder.

"Tea?"

"Yeah."

She makes two cups, sets one in front of me, and sits across from me with both hands wrapped around hers, looking at the steam coming off it.

We don't talk for a while, and that's fine. Blink hounds are comfortable with silence. We're a species that navigates partly by sound, and we know better than most the difference between the silence that needs filling and the silence that's doing something.

This one is doing something. Specifically, it's letting her be a person instead of the dominant dragoness and the heir apparent and the chair of a war council and the target, and every other thing she spent the last hour being.

"The fire drakes," she says eventually. Not a question. Just naming it.

"Yeah."

"Amadeus sent them."

"That's what the pattern says."

She nods slowly and drinks her tea. "I need them to stay where they are for six more weeks. If they move before the Purge, the whole thing changes."

"I know. That's what the forty-eight-hour updates are for. If the pattern breaks, you'll know inside two days."

"Good." She looks up at me. Her eyes in the kitchen light are very blue and very tired — the particular tired that comes from holding a lot of things at once for a long stretch. "Thank you, Keir. For the tracking, for the samples, for giving it to me straight."

"Always," I say.

She almost smiles. Almost.

"You came here to check on me."

"I came here for tea," I say. "The checking on you is incidental."

Now she smiles. Small and real, the kind that reaches tired eyes. She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, warm from the cup.

"Okay," she says.

We finish our tea. The mountain settles around us. Outside, the western border keeps its patient silence.

And inside, for a few minutes, nothing is required of either of us.

It's enough.

Chapter 10

Raven

The first thing I do when I arrive at Dragonis Academy is put my contacts in.

I do it on the landing platform, in full view of the incoming students, because I'm done hiding that I wear them and I'm done pretending Samara is a problem I haven't already solved. The lenses are pale green, tinted to turn back whatever it is in a gorgon's stare that turns living things to stone. Over sapphire they read as almost nothing — you'd have to be close enough to count my lashes to catch the shift. Balor made them for me. He spent three months on it. The first two didn't work and the third one does, and I've been wearing them in private for six weeks to get used to the feel of them.

The feel of them is nothing. The light sits a hair differently in my eyes. That's all.

Samara's gaze won't reach me through that.

I blink twice to settle them and pick up my pack. The mountain air at Dragonis carries the old familiar mix of cold stone and pine and the particular weight of a place that has spent two centuries teaching predators how to be predators. I know this air. I grew up coming here, my parents on faculty, the academy running underneath my childhood like a note held so long you stop hearing it.

Year One I arrived afraid. Year Two I arrived knowing more. Year Three I arrive knowing exactly what I'm walking into.

I walk through the gates.

Anipe runs registration out of the administrative wing on the east side of the main building. I know this because I've made it my business to know where Anipe is at any hour of any day, a habit I started in the last two weeks of summer, and it has given me a pattern I could set a clock by.

She processes the Year Three registrations between the second and fourth hour of the first morning. I have a form to hand in — Flight Management added to my load at Thauglor's arrangement — which puts me in that corridor at the third hour without needing to invent a reason.

I get there early enough to watch her for six minutes before she knows I'm there.

Anipe at work is composed and quick and careful, and the care looks like ordinary administrative neatness until you notice what's underneath it. She's paying attention to more than one thing. Part of her is on the forms and part of her is on the corridor, and I notice because I do the same thing and I know the shape of it when I see it.

She's watching for something. Or someone.

When I hand over my form she takes it without any change in her face, works through it with the speed of a woman who has done this ten thousand times, and passes back my receipt without quite meeting my eyes. That last part is interesting. Staff don't avoid a student's gaze. There's no reason to, unless the student is something to you beyond a name on a page.

I am something to Anipe beyond a name on a page.

"Thank you," I say pleasantly, and take my receipt and go. She watches me leave. I feel it between my shoulder blades, that particular weight of being followed by someone's attention, and I don't look back.

I set the pattern down beside the three fire drake students and move on.

✦ ✦ ✦

My siblings find me at lunch.

Or rather, Orpheus appears at my shoulder in the lunch queue the way he has always appeared at my shoulder, with the silence of a basilisk who was told as a boy not to startle the horses and applied the lesson to every relationship he's had since. Bella comes in from the other direction, which means they coordinated, which is typical. Azalea is already at a table holding more seats than one person can reasonably hold, and the students nearby are giving the empty chairs the careful distance people give to things that might belong to someone they'd rather not inconvenience.

"Well," Orpheus says, sliding his tray beside mine. "You'll be up on the platform."

"I will."

"How do you feel about that?"

"High up. Good sightlines."

He makes the sound that passes for his laugh, short and dry and contained, the laugh of a man who finds things funny and has never once felt the need to prove it. We walk to the table, where Bella drops into the chair next to me with the flair that is entirely her own, managing to look graceful and like a slow-motion disaster at the same time.

"You'll have frightened half the Year Ones before Klauth finishes his first sentence," she says. "Well done in advance."

"I haven't done anything yet."

"You're going to sit at Klauth's right hand," Azalea says. "For a Year One, that's plenty." She hands me a bread roll with the easy efficiency of a woman who has been feeding siblings since she was a child herself. "How's Nova?"

"Enormous. She's started using whole sentences when she wants something and one word when she doesn't."

"That's you," Bella says.

"It isn't."

"It's so you."

I eat the roll. Orpheus has produced a schedule from somewhere and is reading it with the attention of someone who memorized it days ago and checks anyway, because checking is how you confirm you memorized it right. He turns to the back page, taps it once, and slides it across to me without a word.

I look. He's circled the date of the Purge in red, and underneath it, in that small precise hand of his: I know. Tell me when.

I pocket the schedule and we don't talk about it, because we don't have to. That's twenty-three years of shared language, the shorthand of two people taught by the same parents who learned the same way to fold what matters into as little space as possible.

Bella launches into a long account of something that happened on the summer flight circuit involving Azalea, a failed harness, and an extremely patient gryphon instructor. I eat my lunch and listen and laugh in the right places, and I feel the plain uncomplicated warmth of sitting with people who knew me before I was anything except Raven, their sister, who had opinions about everything and could hold her breath underwater longer than any of them.

It doesn't last long. It doesn't need to. It's enough to carry into the afternoon.

✦ ✦ ✦

The welcome ceremony is different this year.

I don't stand with the student line. Klauth's office sent instructions three weeks ago: I'm to be seated on the platform with the faculty, at his right hand rather than in the crowd looking up at him. It isn't a preference. It's a rule. The heir apparent of the Marzana Empire does not sit below the throne she's going to inherit.

I knew this was coming, and I still feel it when I take the platform — the way the whole courtyard shifts key. I watch it happen. The first row notices, and then it travels backward through the gathered years as people lean into each other, she's not with the students this year moving through the crowd the way water finds its level. Some of the faces are easy to read. Year Ones who have heard the name Raven Mrithun and haven't had time to attach it to a person yet. Year Twos who remember me from last year and are visibly working out what it means that I've moved. Year Threes who have been here long enough to know exactly what the heir apparent at Klauth's right hand means for the year in front of them.

I keep my shoulders easy and my eyes forward and I let them look.

Samara is in the front row of faculty.

I know it before I look, because I know her habits — the same seat at every ceremony, right side of the row, two in from the end. She has done it for eleven years, long enough that it's habit now rather than strategy. Old habits are useful things to know about a person.

I look at her directly, and she looks back. Her eyes hold mine for a full three seconds, and the lenses do their quiet work, and I feel nothing. I see nothing except Samara's face, carefully blank in the way of someone who has just met a target's eyes and is deciding whether the target knows what she is.

She doesn't know about the contacts.

After three seconds I look back at Klauth. Natural, unforced, the way you look away from a room you've finished reading.

Something settles behind my sternum. It works. It's real, the Purge is six weeks out, and I am not afraid of Samara.

Klauth opens the welcome address in the voice of a man who has given it many times and still finds something new to mean each year. He talks about challenge, about the weight of the coming months, about what Year Three asks of a student in ways the first two years never do. He isn't wrong. Year Three asks for the Purge. Year Three asks you to survive it or not, and to understand that the not-surviving is an outcome this place has already made peace with.

I listen and watch the students at the same time, and what I'm watching for is narrow. Three fire drake plants, standing in the Year Two section now that they have a year behind them. I find the first two quickly, tracking their scent more than their faces — that faint burnt-metal heat Keir picked up on the western border, carried in here among the press of bodies in the courtyard. It's thinner in the open air, cut by distance and mountain wind. But it's there.

The third one takes longer. He's good at disappearing, keeping taller students between us, never turning his face toward the platform. That he's working this hard to stay out of my attention tells me he either knows I'm aware of him or has been told to assume it.

I find him at the back of the Year Two section, wedged between two students who are both broader and taller than he is. Deliberate cover.

I don't look straight at him. I look a few degrees to his left and hold it long enough for the edge of my vision to finish the job — height, build, the way he carries his weight, which hand he leads with when he shifts. All of it stored away.

Six weeks to the Purge.

The courses lay out cleanly.

Tactics and Warfare with Callan in the east tower. He's already pinned a scenario to the board when I arrive five minutes early, which tells me this year is going to move faster than last. Good. The Year Two problems had started to feel like exercises I was solving rather than problems I was working, and I learn better when I can't see the shape of what I'm meant to be learning. Today's board is a war on two fronts with a compromised source feeding one of them, which is not an academic question for me and is going to make for an interesting class.

Advanced Shadowcarve with Balor on the training grounds. The advanced track is small — fourteen students drawn from Year Two and Year Three, chosen by Balor and nobody else. No appeals, no exceptions. I know every one of them, have trained against most of them, and have a working read on all of them. Balor looks around the group that first afternoon like a male who has decided this is a good year and has no intention of saying so, because saying so would make them soft.

Flight Management with Thauglor, a new course built for this year, which my father is treating with the intensity he saves for things he invented himself. Twelve of us, ranging from dragon to blink hound to black unicorn — exactly the mix that makes up Blackhaven's flight. He didn't design it for the academy. He designed it for me and then offered it to the academy, because the knowledge is useful and he is constitutionally incapable of making something useful and keeping it to himself.

I told him so once. He didn't deny it.

And Royal Protocol with Finlay.

That one deserves its own consideration.

Finlay in a classroom is a different creature from Finlay at home. I understood that in theory and lived it in Year Two, but Year Three is going to test it in a new way, because I'm no longer only his student. I'm the woman whose conduct will shape how the continent gets along for the next hundred years, and he will mark me accordingly. I've already decided to give him nothing to mark down and everything to mark precisely, and to make sure he knows I'm doing it on purpose.

I think he'll find that entertaining.

I think I'll find it entertaining.

The rest of the day runs through all four. By the last bell I've found three holes in my own tactical thinking that Callan's scenario opened up, marked two students at Shadowcarve I didn't know were there and want to watch for different reasons, and set aside a question about Thauglor's flight teaching that I intend to ask him in private. I may also have caught Finlay being precisely as professional as he set out to be and answered him in kind, which produced the most technically correct diplomatic exercise I have ever taken part in and a look on his face that I plan to revisit in detail later.

✦ ✦ ✦

My rooms at Malivore are the same rooms.

The same ones Mom had in Year One. The paintings of her mates are still on the far wall, my father's face rendered in the brushstrokes of someone who was in love while she painted it. I stand in the doorway a moment and look at them the way I look at them every time I come back — the faces, the love worked into the detail of them, the reminder of what it looks like when someone builds a thing that lasts.

I unpack quickly, change into something comfortable, and sit down at the desk.

The paper I take out is blank. I write in clean columns, the way Finlay taught me to lay out what you know when the list of names is short and the time is not.

Anipe. What I know. What I've seen. The pattern of her watching, the small tells, the timing in the corridor, the shape of her attention, the way she wouldn't meet my eyes.

Samara. What a gorgon can do. Her access to the archives. The lenses that close off her stare. What Callan told me about where she goes in the hours she isn't teaching. And what the lenses don't cover, because they stop the stone and nothing else, and I've spent time listing the rest of her separately.

The three fire drake students. Names, year, the courses I traced through the enrollment records. Where they'll be during the Purge, if they hold to the way students of their standing usually move.

I read it back once, fold it once, and put it in the hollow behind the desk's back panel that I cut in Year Two and that nobody knows about except Corvus.

Then I take out a second sheet and write one thing on it.

The date of the Purge.

I look at it for a moment. The number sits on the page the way it has been sitting behind my sternum for six months — exact, real, mine. I circle it, put it away, and close the desk.

Year Three has begun.

Chapter 11

Finlay

I have taught Royal Protocol and Diplomatic Conduct at Dragonis Academy for six years, and I am a professional.

I find it necessary to remind myself of this roughly once every four minutes during the first class of Year Three, because Raven is sitting in the third row.

This is new. In Year Two she sat back left — clear line to every entrance, solid wall behind her, the natural seat of a girl whose mother taught her to know her exits before she needs them. This year she is third row, center, which is the seat that says I am not hiding. I can see everything from here and I am choosing to be seen. It's a different way of reading a room than the back-left corner. Subtler. More confident. Also, from where I stand at the front, considerably more present.

She is watching me with the expression she uses when she is paying close attention and would rather I didn't notice — the soft focus that reads as a relaxed student, and underneath it that faint stillness that means she is taking in every word. I know this expression well, having been on the receiving end of it for some time now. It is what her face does when she is thinking hard and would prefer to keep the thinking private.

I have been on the other end of that look for over a year, and I remain susceptible to it in ways that are entirely unreasonable for a nine-hundred-year-old phoenix. I note this for the record. It changes nothing.

I begin the class.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first unit of Year Three Royal Protocol covers forms of address in mixed-species settings — how you address a visiting dignitary whose title has no clean equivalent in Marzana Imperial custom. It is, objectively, vital material. It is also material most of the class finds immediately tedious, which is fair enough. Diplomatic protocol is exactly as thrilling as a very exact, very consequential examination that nobody ever grades and that you sit every day for the rest of your political life.

I say as much to the class.

Most of them write it down.

Raven doesn't write it down. She doesn't write down a word of the lecture. She sits in the third row with her hands folded on the desk and her eyes on me and takes it in directly, which is what a person does when she trusts her memory enough to skip the middle step. She has been doing it since Year Two and I have been pretending not to notice for just as long, because acknowledging that one student's memory makes note-taking unnecessary would require me to explain to the room why she has that memory. Then we would be discussing Raven instead of forms of address, and this is my class.

The students around her are doing a creditable job of staying with the material. Two of them are genuinely disciplined about it — a young gryphon in the second row who writes with both hands at once, which I find honestly impressive, and a dragon in the fourth row whose notes are already fuller than most of what I'll collect at the end of the unit. The rest sit in the respectable middle of students who are trying, which is all I can ask and most of what I get.

And then there is the matter of the third row.

I have taught here six years and elsewhere on this continent for a great deal longer. I have taught war councils and court officials and heads of state who arrived certain there was nothing left to learn. I have held my composure through all of it without much trouble.

I am finding the third row more difficult than usual.

It is not, I should be clear, anything she is doing. She sits perfectly still, listens perfectly well, and looks at me with the face of a student properly engaged with her studies. Everything visible about her conduct is entirely correct. The trouble is that I know the difference between her being correct and her performing correct, and this is both at once. She is genuinely interested in the material and she is also playing at interest in a key aimed squarely at me, and nine hundred years doesn't make that easier to manage. It only makes it easier to see.

We reach the practical exercise at the forty-minute mark. I hand out the scenario cards — a reception with four visiting representatives, three of them with conflicting expectations about address, and a fourth the student must work out ranks above the others from what's around him rather than from any stated title — and I give the class twenty minutes.

Raven finishes in eleven.

I know because I can see her from the front of the room without looking directly at her, and at eleven minutes she sets down her pen, folds her hands again, and goes back to watching me. The quality of the watching has changed. It is still attention. It is also something that would be difficult to describe as entirely professional, and she knows it, and I am a professional and I intend to ignore it completely and with considerable dignity.

I collect the papers when time is called.

I mark them that evening, in the order they were handed to me, without moving hers. It comes up third.

It is perfect. Not high-scoring. Perfect. Every cue caught, every question of address resolved correctly, the fourth representative identified and handled with exactly the care you give a man whose rank is unclear and whose power is not. She has also written three additional circumstances in the margin that the scenario didn't include, each one with a short note on how it would change the answer.

I grade it. Full marks and nothing else. I don't comment on the margins, because the margins were not part of the assignment.

I do read them three more times.

I hand the papers back at the start of the next class. Hers comes back to her in the order it was collected.

She looks at the mark. Then at me. The expression she wears when she knows precisely what I'm doing and has decided to find it funny rather than take issue with it is very particular. I have cataloged it with some attention over the past year. I am looking at it now. I am a professional.

"Any questions on the grading?" I say, to the room.

"None," Raven says.

Her tone is entirely appropriate.

✦ ✦ ✦

After class, the others clear out at the speed of young people who have somewhere better to be and have been sitting still for two hours. The last one out closes the door behind her. The room goes quiet.

Raven doesn't move from the third row. I don't move from the front.

For perhaps three seconds we simply look at each other across the empty classroom, and then the discipline of the last two hours — the careful distance, the scrupulous register, the management of every glance and every inch of my own face — lets go all at once, the way a held breath lets go. Not gradually. Completely.

She's at the front of the room before I have finished deciding to move toward her. It is one of the things I have come to love in her, that there is nothing at all between the decision and the doing.

Her hands find my lapels. Mine find her waist. What distance is left closes.

"Full marks," she says, against my jaw.

"You earned them."

"You didn't write a comment."

"There was nothing to correct."

She makes a sound against my skin that lands somewhere between a laugh and a purr, the one she makes when she's pleased and isn't bothering to hide it. I feel it through my collar and my shirt and whatever space is left between us, which is not much.

"The margin notes," she says.

"Were correctly observed."

"You didn't grade them."

"They weren't part of the assignment." I pull back enough to look at her properly. Her sapphire eyes are bright with the particular delight she saves for things she finds truly funny, which is rarer than she lets on, and which I have decided to spend a sizable portion of my remaining centuries trying to cause as often as possible. "If you want extra credit, write them up formally and submit them."

"Or," she says, "I could do this instead."

The kiss she gives me has no interest whatsoever in protocol. It tastes of the tea she had between classes and of cold mountain air and of something under both that is only her, and two hours of discipline goes to nothing, and I stop thinking about anything that isn't this.

My phoenix is extremely pleased with all of it.

When we part, her hands are still on my lapels, and I keep mine at her waist because taking them away is not something I'm prepared to do just yet. She looks up at me with that expression.

"Same time Thursday," she says.

"Royal Protocol meets Tuesday and Thursday," I confirm.

"That's what I said."

She straightens my lapels — which she disarranged herself, which she knows — with two precise movements, picks up her bag, and walks out of my classroom with the unhurried composure of a woman entirely in command of herself and always has been.

I stand at the front of the room a moment after the door closes.

Professional.

✦ ✦ ✦

The letter arrives before dinner.

My contact uses a route that goes nowhere near the academy's messengers, a phoenix-fire method I won't describe here, because describing it makes it possible to copy and copying it defeats the point. The letter shows up on my desk in the Shadowcarve faculty wing the way all my correspondence shows up: waiting when I come back to the room, seal unbroken, still warm from the fire that carried it.

I read it standing.

Last month he wrote that Amadeus's representatives were meeting Magnus privately in the eastern wing, away from the court proper. Hidden. Handled with the discretion of men who understand that what they're doing does not benefit from witnesses.

This letter says something else.

The representatives are no longer in the eastern wing. They are in the throne room. At court, at formal sessions, seated at Magnus's right hand through the last three audiences. Nothing hidden about it. Nothing discreet.

An open alliance. Publicly, visibly, deliberately, in front of every visiting dignitary and every man in Magnus's court.

I read it twice, then fold it and seal it into the phoenix-fire archive I keep, which holds correspondence safe from rot and from anyone I haven't allowed near it, and which I have been adding to for two hundred years.

Then I sit down in my chair and think.

I have spent the better part of my life inside one intelligence network or another. I have watched regimes announce their intentions before they were ready to act on them, and I have watched regimes hide their intentions until the blow landed. What I have rarely seen is a change of mind halfway through — the moment an operation that was running quiet and careful simply stops caring who sees it.

There are two explanations. Either the timeline has moved, the quiet work is finished, and being seen is now worth more than being hidden because it shows strength to anyone watching. Or something has gone wrong inside, hiding has become impossible or useless, and the open alliance is a response to pressure rather than a choice.

Neither explanation gives us more time than we thought we had.

Both explanations mean that whatever Amadeus's men said to Magnus in the eastern wing, Magnus has now agreed to it in front of witnesses. A public alliance is far harder to walk back than a private one. Whatever comes next, he has no graceful way out of it.

I think about what that means for Raven, and for the rest of us.

An enemy who can't retreat has two choices: advance or collapse. Magnus's army is built for the first. And Amadeus, from everything Solaris has dragged back out of his memory, has never once let one of his proxies collapse. He moves to a new one before the old one falls.

The question is whether he intends to let Magnus carry this all the way through, or whether the open alliance is itself a feint — a way to pull our eyes north while the real weight comes from somewhere else.

I don't know. I know enough to know that I don't.

I add the letter to the archive and go to find Raven.

She's at dinner in the hall beside the Shadowcarve training grounds, eating with Orpheus and two of the Shadowcarve third-years, the talk at the table carrying the easy rhythm of people who have worked alongside each other long enough to drop the polite padding.

I take the seat across from her. She looks up from her food and reads my face as fast as she reads everything.

"After," I say quietly.

She nods and goes back to her meal.

We eat. The conversation moves around us. Orpheus is describing something that went badly wrong in a training exercise with the dry precision that passes for his version of a funny story, and the third-years are reacting with suitable horror, and Raven answers in the right places without ever losing the thread of whatever she's already turning over.

I know that quality of her attention. She's preparing.

After dinner I take her out to the small courtyard off the south corridor, where the torches don't quite reach and the cold keeps the space to ourselves, and I give her the letter's contents. Not summarized. Exactly as written. The representatives are in the throne room. Open alliance. Nothing hidden.

She's quiet a moment.

"Good," she says.

I look at her.

"The more openly he moves, the easier he is to find." She's watching the dark above the courtyard, the first stars coming out along the edge of the mountain. "A hidden threat makes you go looking. A visible one comes to you."

"That is a remarkably cheerful reading of a report that says our time is shorter than we thought."

"Yes." She looks back at me, and the corners of her mouth move in the way that means she knows the argument is provoking and has chosen it anyway. "Is your contact safe?"

The turn from strategy to the man himself is so like her that it nearly makes me laugh. Nearly. "For now. I've told him to stay away from the throne room sessions. What we'd learn isn't worth what it would cost him."

"Good." She puts her hand on my arm, briefly, the way she does when she's reassuring and being reassured in the same motion. "We'll take the timeline to the next council. Bring the letter."

"I will."

She squeezes once and lets go, and steps back with the composure of a woman who has put something dangerous where it belongs and returned to the evening.

"Thursday," she says.

It takes me a moment. "Royal Protocol meets Thursday," I confirm.

"That's what I said."

She goes back inside.

I stay in the courtyard and look at the stars coming out over the mountain and think about visible threats, and about what it means when a thing stops hiding.

My phoenix presses warm against my ribs, turned toward the door she went through.

Nine hundred years, and I have never met anyone who could unsettle every settled thing in me and be, at the same time, the thing that settles me again.

It is entirely unreasonable.

I go inside.

Chapter 12

Raven

Callan's east tower classroom smells of chalk and old iron and the faint residue of a hundred tactical arguments that soaked into the stone over the years and never quite left. I like that about it. Some rooms build up a weight when the same kind of thinking happens in them often enough — not atmosphere exactly, more that the walls have learned to take the work seriously.

The scenario is already on the board when I arrive.

Callan writes his scenarios in a shorthand I learned at the end of Year Two, a set of marks and abbreviations that lets him lay out a whole situation in less room than a paragraph would take. Half the class is still working through it when I finish reading. I don't have to translate anymore. The symbols simply mean what they mean, the way a language stops being a language once you've lived inside it long enough.

What the board says is this. A territory with fixed borders. A confirmed threat already inside it, capability known, current position unknown. At the same time, pressure from outside — numbers unknown, direction unstated, timing unclear.

I read it twice. Then I look at Callan, who is leaning against the edge of his desk with his arms folded and his one eye on me, and I know from the way he's watching that he wrote this for this class and expects at least one student in the room to understand why.

This is my life.

Not a version of it. Not something that rhymes with it at a comfortable academic distance. This is the exact situation I am currently managing. A territory with a threat inside it whose position I don't know, pressure from outside in the shape of fire drakes, four weeks to the Purge and counting. He could have copied this straight off my own reports and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

I write nothing down. I think.

✦ ✦ ✦

Callan gives us thirty minutes.

"Work the problem however comes naturally to you," he says, which is his idea of instructions. "I want your reasoning, not your conclusions. Show me how you think."

The class sets to it with varying degrees of confidence. The standard approach, which I can watch being applied in the rows around me, is to start with the outside threat, build a line against it, and treat the one already inside as a second concern. That's what the textbooks say. In most real situations it's also exactly backward.

The outside threat is visible. You know it's coming. The one inside is invisible, is already past your border, and holds the better ground. Spend everything on the outside and the inside acts precisely when you're most distracted and most committed. The outside threat stops being the danger and becomes the cover the danger was waiting for.

So you don't meet the outside first.

You find the one inside and end it, completely, and then you turn to face what's coming with your whole attention and nothing open at your back.

The complication — and there's always a complication, Callan doesn't write them any other way — is that you don't know where the inside threat is. You can't end what you can't find. And while you're looking, what's outside keeps getting closer.

So the real question is this. How do you find the one inside fast enough to deal with him before the outside arrives, without pouring so much into the search that your border stands empty?

I work it through in the shorthand, building each layer before I put the next one on top. What I have is what I have. I can't make more of it, I can only decide where it goes. Every man on the border is a man not searching. Every man searching is a man the border doesn't have. The answer takes me seven minutes to be sure of and three more to say cleanly, and the answer is that you don't commit fully to either job.

You split, but not evenly. You put the smallest force on the border that can still see trouble coming and slow it down, and you put the rest of it into something that isn't a search at all.

The threat inside has one advantage over you: he knows where he is. Which means your best tool for finding him isn't hunting. It's drawing. You build the conditions where he has to move, at a time you choose, in a place you choose.

You don't hunt him.

You make him come to you.

How you do that depends on what he wants. If he wants what the outside threat wants — if the two of them are working together — then he wants the outside to succeed, which means he'll act when the outside gives him the best opening. And that moment is predictable. Your border fully committed, your attention everywhere else, noise and movement in every direction.

So you build him that moment. You show the outside a border that looks stretched to its limit. You show the man inside an opening that looks perfect. And you stand at the center of both pictures, in the one place he has to come if he's coming at all.

Then you wait.

You are the bait. You are also the trap.

The trick is making sure you're more trap than bait.

I write the last of it down, set my pen aside, and look up.

Callan is watching me. So, I realize, is most of the class. I've been at this for — I check the clock — twenty-two minutes. Eight left. Around me most of the papers still have a good deal of white on them. The boy at the end of the second row who takes careful notes has more written than most, but his pen has slowed, which means he's hit the same wall the rest of them hit: the outside-first instinct the textbook rewards and this scenario was built to expose.

I don't react to being watched. I fold my hands and wait out the thirty minutes.

✦ ✦ ✦

The debrief takes the rest of the session.

Callan works around the room, asking each student to lay out their approach in two minutes or less. Most of them built everything around the outside threat — the predictable mistake, the textbook answer, the one that feels right because it's the danger you can see. Callan listens to every version without correcting a word of it. He asks one follow-up question each, and every question walks the student right up to the edge of their own blind spot and leaves them standing there. He's been doing this thirty years, and it works, because a gap a student finds is a gap that student closes, while a gap an instructor points out is a gap the student argues with.

Two of them tried to handle both threats at once. It works on paper. In practice it costs more than either single approach, because splitting your own attention makes you worse at both jobs instead of better at one. Callan asks the second of them to walk through her numbers. She gets to the problem herself, three-quarters of the way down. He nods. The gap is hers now.

One student — a third-year, older than most, who sits very still and misses nothing — came to an inside-first answer like mine, but got there through deception instead of construction. He'd feed false word to the man inside through the channels he's assumed to be listening on. It's elegant. It also breaks badly if the man inside checks what he's told and doesn't believe it. But the thinking underneath is sound. Inside first, draw instead of hunt, the enemy's own mind as the lever.

I file that away. The still one is better than his seat suggests. Worth watching, for reasons that have nothing to do with fire drakes.

When Callan gets to me, he doesn't ask me to present. He says, "Tell me what you'd change about your answer."

The room goes quiet in a particular way. It isn't a criticism. It's the harder question, the one that takes for granted that the answer is already good and asks what the person who wrote it can see past it. Some of the students who didn't get that question look relieved. Some of them look like they're rethinking the relief.

"The draw only works if he's waiting for an opening," I say. "If he's on a schedule of his own, if he's going to move whether or not the moment looks good, then building him a window does nothing. You've bet everything on him thinking a way he isn't thinking." I pause. "In that case you drop the draw and go back to hunting. But you can afford to, because you never spent those men on the border in the first place. You were already holding them for this."

"What makes you think this one has a schedule of his own?"

"I don't. I'm describing how it fails. If I'm wrong about him waiting for an opening, that's what breaks it."

"And if you're wrong?"

"Then I change the plan. The plan changes, but I still have my men and the thinking still holds." I meet his eye and hold it. "You can't get rid of not knowing. You can stand where being wrong costs you less."

Callan looks at me for a moment. Then he turns to the class. "That," he says, "is what this course is about."

The session ends. The class files out.

I stay where I am, because Callan hasn't dismissed me, not in so many words, and because he isn't packing up his things. When a one-eyed tactics instructor who has been one of your mother's mates since before you could walk doesn't pack up his things after a session, it means something.

The last student goes. The door shuts.

Callan moves to the window and looks out over the east grounds for a while, the training fields below, students from other sessions working through their afternoon. His profile in the light has the particular set of a man deciding how to start.

"Your report on the western border," he says. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Eight scents. Fire drake musk. A rotating watch."

"Yes."

"Keir found eight." He turns from the window. His one eye carries the look it gets when he's about to hand over something he'd rather not have to. "I've found one more. And mine isn't on the border."

I go still.

"It's here. On academy ground, and it doesn't match the others."

The stillness turns into a different kind of stillness, the kind I hold when I'm running a great many possibilities very fast and need everything else in me to stay where it is.

"A student," I say.

"A third-year." He crosses to his desk, picks up a sealed note, and holds it out. "I've had the scent two weeks. It's faint. He's either very good at burying it or he came in quietly and recently. What it isn't is anything native to this range. Northern fire drake, not western — they run hotter, and you can smell the difference." He shrugs one shoulder. "I spent a week making sure before I said a word to anyone."

"The registration records," I say.

"Say he transferred out of a northern school that closed last year. On paper it's all in order." He meets my eye. "It's in order because someone was careful. But that school closed because a Blackhaven border survey named it for what it was, and nobody has gone back to tidy the paperwork."

"Keir's pack," I say.

"Ran that survey six months ago, yes." He nods slightly. "Which means this one came in after the place had served its purpose, wearing its papers. Whoever put him here was planning a long way ahead."

I take the note.

"The name is confirmed against four separate sources," Callan says. "I wouldn't bring you anything less."

"I know." I look down at the seal, his own mark, a small gryphon, impossible to copy without standing in his study. "Thank you."

He nods and turns back to the window, giving me room to leave without making anything of it, which is the most useful thing he can do for me right now.

I leave.

I open it on the tower stair, out of the light of the doorway.

I read the name.

Then I stand there longer than I need to, because I heard that name twenty minutes ago. In the debrief. Attached to the third-year who sits very still and misses nothing, who came to an inside-first answer by a different road than mine and got there clean, whose thinking I liked well enough to file him.

Worth watching, for reasons that have nothing to do with fire drakes.

It had everything to do with fire drakes.

I was in a room with him for two hours. I watched him work. He gave the second-best answer in that room and he gave it in front of me, which means either he doesn't know what I am to this or he is confident enough to sit two rows away and think out loud while I listen.

I fold the note.

That is the useful part and I make myself take it instead of the other part. He is good. Not adequate. Not competent. Good enough that I marked him before I had any reason to. Whoever put him here did not send a soldier.

✦ ✦ ✦

Orpheus is in the south corridor when I come down from the east tower. This is not a coincidence. He knows my Tactics schedule and he knows what I do after a session, and he has been my clutch-sibling for twenty-three years, which is long enough to know that when I have something that can't wait, I take a route between the east tower and the main building that's longer than it needs to be.

He falls into step beside me without a word.

We walk. The corridor is busy enough to require care and empty enough to give us room. I wait until we pass beneath the south window, where the noise coming up from the training grounds fills the air and swallows anything said close.

Then I start the hand signs.

The language is ours. Not formal Shadowcarve code, though it borrows from it. Mom built the bones of it before we were five and kept adding as we grew, and Orpheus and I have been extending it between ourselves ever since. It can say in three movements what a whole sentence would take, and to anyone who doesn't know it, it looks like nothing more than two people who talk with their hands when they're thinking.

I give him the name.

His jaw tightens. Barely. He's very good at holding his face still, and the jaw is the only thing that has ever given him away, which I know because I've been watching him work at it since we were eight.

He gives me one sign back. Understood.

Then he peels off at the next junction toward the east dormitory wing, and I go on to the main building, and we don't speak again until dinner, and over dinner we talk about nothing at all.

The name is in his head now. The name is in mine.

Three fire drakes on these grounds became four while I stood in that classroom. Eight on the western line, and now a ninth scent that never went near it. The fourth came in on papers built for him out of a school that was already a lie, and he has spent this afternoon two rows from me arguing tactics, and he is very likely watching me the way I watched the other three at the opening ceremony — sideways, patiently, three degrees off center.

The problem I solved on Callan's board an hour ago just got harder. Four of them inside means four places this can start during the Purge instead of three. It means the men on my western line and the students in my classrooms are woven together more tightly than we thought. It means whoever built this was two moves ahead of us before we started counting.

I stop in the corridor and breathe for one full second.

Then I set it into the shape I've been building. The fire drakes on the border are a watch. The four students are the hands. The teachers, Anipe and Samara, are steering something. The Purge is the window — the moment the four move and the watch comes in, if it comes at all, if this is the schedule they're keeping and not a longer one.

Unless I'm wrong about the Purge being the window. Unless there's another day coming that I haven't found yet.

Unless the draw doesn't work here at all, because the man inside is keeping a schedule of his own.

I think about my own answer on the board. The way it fails.

I walk to my next class.

Four weeks.

Chapter 13

Solaris

The memory lives in the blood.

This is not a figure of speech. Dragon ancestral knowledge is not stored in the mind the way most creatures store what they know, in something that can be struck, or clouded, or simply worn away by years. It lives in the body. It runs down the bloodline, passed from parent to child not by teaching but by inheritance. The older the line, the deeper the well. The deeper the well, the harder it is to find your way down it.

Twelve centuries and more of my own to draw on, a thousand and twenty of them spent in the dark. Beneath that sits something far older — everything known by every dragon in my direct line, running back to the founding of it, centuries before I hatched. That older store is not memory and does not behave like memory. I cannot simply call it up. I have to go down after it, and going down is slow work, and what I bring back is not always what I went looking for.

I have been looking for three weeks.

The room I've taken in the Blackhaven archives is a modest thing by the standards of what I once kept — a table, good light from the high window, whatever histories I've been able to pull from the academy library and from Finlay's considerable private shelves, and the quiet this kind of work requires. The going-down itself happens somewhere between meditation and deep thought. Not sleep. Not quite waking either. It takes practice to hold, and I can hold it now for perhaps four hours before the effort demands I stop.

I was two hundred and fifty years old when they sealed me in, and I had a thousand and twenty years in the dark to get good at it. I am choosing not to think too closely about what that means.

Nova is with Hemlocke today, which means she is in the stables, which means she is very happy and will come back smelling of horse and hay and wanting to tell me everything she has learned, in a mixture of Old Dragon and the common tongue and the gestures she invents when neither will do. I am looking forward to it. The looking-forward sits in a part of my chest I had no use of for all those centuries in the shell and am still, carefully, learning the shape of.

I go back to the work.

✦ ✦ ✦

The trouble with the old blood is that it does not answer a question directly.

When I go down after something particular — a name, an event, a working of a certain kind — what comes back is not a record. It's a palimpsest. Layers. The same stretch of years seen through a dozen sets of eyes across a dozen lifetimes, each account bent a little by what that dragon knew and understood and feared. To find what actually happened I have to look for what stays the same across the layers, and treat the differences as a description of the witnesses rather than the event.

I have been working the years, near three centuries back, when the bloodlines began to fail.

What the layers agree on is that something changed. Lines that had bred strong for generations started throwing weak young — scales that never fully hardened, breath weaker than the parents', full-grown bodies that came up short of what the line should have produced. It came on slowly, spread over decades, and at the time it was read as ordinary drift. The kind of wandering any population does if you watch it long enough.

What the layers disagree on is why. Some say sickness. Some blame the waters, the minerals in the hot springs changing as the mountains changed. Some blame the mixing that came after the war, when flight territories opened up and lines that had been kept apart for centuries stopped being kept apart.

Not one of the layers I have found so far suggests that anyone did it on purpose.

Which tells me something in itself. If the weakening was made rather than suffered, it was made to look exactly like nature taking its course to every dragon alive to watch it happen. Whoever did it understood us well enough to counterfeit our own slow changes. Which means he had been studying us a long while before he ever lifted a hand.

I make a note and go back down.

The name Amadeus surfaces in the forty-seventh layer.

Not as an actor. As a mention. It comes in the account of a dragon elder who went to a mage council during the worst of the alarm about the failing bloodlines. He wanted expertise. Among the mages who answered him was one called Amadeus, set down in this account as a specialist in binding and preservation — a man whose particular study was holding great power in one place for a very long time.

I read the passage three times.

The elder describes him as helpful. Learned. Deeply interested in how a dragon's body actually works. He asked questions, the elder notes, that were thorough and exact — not the questions of a clever man trying to understand a problem, but the questions of a man who already understood it and was checking his own work.

Then the account ends. The elder asked, received his answer — ordinary drift, nothing to be done, patience and time — and went home content.

I sit back from the table.

Ordinary drift. Nothing to be done. An expert soothing a worried old dragon who did not know enough to hear that the expert had his own reasons for asking.

And underneath that, the thing the elder could not have known and I do. By the time he sat across from the man calling himself Amadeus, Amadeus had been dead for centuries.

I go deeper.

What waits down there is worse.

Not more surprising — by the sixtieth layer I have stopped being surprised by anything. Worse in that it is more complete, and more detailed, and harder to hold once you have it.

The binding is older than I am, and it did not start as a prison. It started as a question. More than a thousand years ago the first working was built to hold and study great power in a place where it could be watched — to answer what becomes of a mighty thing when its might is given nowhere to go for a very long time. What gathers. What changes. Whether holding a thing still makes it into something more concentrated than it was.

I know the answer to that question. I was the answer to it for a thousand and twenty years.

The one who built the working gave his own life to fuel it. That much is ordinary for a working of that size. You cannot hold something as strong as an old dragon for an age on borrowed strength alone. It needs a source inside itself, and the practitioner's life becomes the fire.

But the sixty-third layer — the account of a dragon who sat on the mage council's oversight body in the years just after — has in it something the written histories never recorded.

The one who built the binding did not simply die. He built the working so that what he was — his self, his knowing, everything he had gathered — would be kept inside the binding rather than snuffed out with the body. Spread through the whole net of cursed eggs instead of ending. Able to remain. Able to watch. Able to act through any host with enough mage-blood in him, for as long as the net held.

For as long as the eggs exist.

They have been broken one by one down the centuries. Some by the mates of the ones inside them. Some by other means. But there are always more, and there are always more because as long as he remains in the net he can have new ones made. He cannot make them himself, having no hands. But mage-blooded men can be steered. And a thing that has lain spread across that net for more than a thousand years has had time enough to learn how to steer them.

Amadeus is not dead.

Amadeus has never been dead. He is the binding. He is the net. He is in every place an egg exists and every place a mage-blooded creature carries his influence, and he has been building this quietly for more than a thousand years, because patience is the one thing a creature with no body and nothing left to lose has in unlimited supply.

I sit a long while with that.

The autumn wind moves through Blackhaven above me and the mountain settles the way it does, that particular creak of something very old making its adjustments to a change of season. I know the sound now. I have been here a year and I know this mountain's vocabulary, the way I knew the vocabulary of the southern continent before they put me in the dark. You live somewhere long enough and it stops being background. It becomes the quiet you think inside of.

I let the mountain's quiet do its work. Then I pick up my pen.

✦ ✦ ✦

The report takes two hours.

I write it for Raven, which means I write it exactly and completely and soften nothing. She has told me plainly, more than once, that she decides better with the whole shape of a thing than with a tidied version of it. I believe her. I also believe some things are heavy enough that the reader wants her feet under her first, and this is one of those.

I put in all of it. How the old blood is read, so she can weigh how far to trust it. Which layers I drew from, where they agree and where they don't. The elder who asked Amadeus for help and was given an answer built to keep him calm rather than to tell him anything true. What the sixty-third layer says about how the binding was actually made. And what follows from that: as long as one cursed egg exists anywhere, so does he.

I write that last line and hold the pen above it a moment.

It is not a small thing to write. It means killing Amadeus is not a matter of finding a body or cutting down a host. It means ending the whole net — every cursed egg, everywhere, all at once, or else one after another while keeping him from making more. The first way requires knowing where every egg lies, which we do not. The second requires holding back his reach into mage-blooded men long enough to close each shell in turn, which means either ending every host or finding some way to cut what he has become away from what holds him.

Cassius. Eleven years of study. The reason the night boats failed.

So I write: I believe Queen Giselle's mate may hold something we need. His work on why Amadeus wants omega males may have shown him how a scattered thing stays one thing. The Eastern Isles visit should include a long conversation with Cassius before anything else is decided. I underline before anything else. She will understand.

At the top I write: Read this when you have time to think. Not before a class, not before a council. She will understand that too.

I seal it with the fold she taught me — four folds, in order, the corners squared — and set it on the desk where it will wait for her weekend visit.

Then I put on my coat and go outside.

✦ ✦ ✦

Nova is in the lower flight field.

Hemlocke's voice carries from the direction of the stables, which means she removed herself from his care sometime in the last hour and has been pursuing business of her own, which is entirely in character. She stands at the far edge of the field on her two human legs, wings half open in the autumn wind, her face turned up to the sky with the look she wears when something has her whole interest.

She hears me coming. She has her mother's ears.

"Solaris," she says, without looking down. Not a greeting. She is telling me she knows I'm here and intends to keep looking at the sky.

"What are you looking at, wee one?"

"Wind." She opens her wings a fraction wider. The autumn air catches the membrane and she corrects for it without thinking, the way a body does when it already half knows what wings are for. "It goes up here."

"Aye. It's the mountain. The stone warms the air and the warm air climbs."

She turns that over. I can watch her do it — the small drawing-together of her brow, the stillness that means a thing is being put somewhere rather than thrown away. She has her mother's memory too. She will ask me about it again in three days, having worked the whole of it out in between.

"Can we fly?"

"Not today, wee one. Your wings want more time before they're ready for a climb like that."

She considers this with the grave care of a hatchling too young to argue well and old enough to know that not arguing is sometimes the cleverer road. "When?"

"Soon." I crouch to her level, and she turns to look at me with those mismatched eyes, amber in both and the half-moon of sapphire in the left catching the afternoon and throwing it back at me like a small fierce star. "Tell me what it feels like."

She looks at her wings. Thinks. "Like pulling," she says. "The wind pulls."

"Aye. That pull is the whole of it. You'll learn to pull back."

She looks at the sky again and opens her wings to their full small span, and the rising air catches them and lifts her heels a hair off the ground. Not flight. The edge of it. She makes a sound that isn't quite a word and isn't quite a rumble. Something between.

I shift.

The change takes me from crouching man to old wyrm in the time it takes the wind to gust and settle. I try to be careful about coming down — a great wyrm landing in a field tends to leave the field remembering it — but I get low and fold myself down until I am more a feature of the land than a danger, my head resting on my forelegs, one wing stretched out like an invitation.

Nova stares at me.

Then she runs at me with both arms wide and both wings beating, hits my foreleg, bounces off it, and starts climbing with the cheerful conviction of a creature who has decided the mountain is climbable and is right about it. She finds her grip on the ridges of my scales and goes hand over hand, her wings helping with small enthusiastic beats that lift nothing at all and are plainly practice.

She reaches my shoulder. Then, hand over hand along the ridge of my neck, she works her way forward to the broad flat place between my horns, which she decided some while ago and entirely on her own is where she belongs when I wear this shape.

She sits.

She wraps both small hands around the base of my left horn and turns her face into the wind my wings make when I beat them once, slowly, building her the very thing she was studying.

"Solaris," she says, into the wind.

"Aye."

"Again."

I beat my wings again. She leans forward into it. The pull takes her wings and lifts her a fraction — that same not-quite-flying from the field, but larger now, stronger, made by something heavy enough to move real air.

She makes the sound again. Not a word, not a rumble. Something between. Something that might, with years and practice, become a roar.

I hold very still while she finds out what wind feels like when it means it.

In my chest, between the cold weight of what I found in the archive this morning and the particular warmth that is only ever Nova, there is a place that holds both at once. This is not, I have decided, a contradiction. It is only what it is to be alive in a complicated world with people you love in it.

I beat my wings again.

She leans in.

Soon.

Chapter 14

Raven

*

Balor runs his night exercises the way he runs everything — no announcement, no preamble, and with the particular enthusiasm of a basilisk who finds daylight adequate for his needs and honestly prefers the dark.

The instruction arrives as a single note pushed under the door of every Advanced Shadowcarve student at ten in the evening, when most of us are in some state of being done with the day. It says: Grounds. Shadowcarve. Now. Bring nothing you wouldn't carry into a real fight.

I am already dressed.

I've been dressed since the end of dinner, because I've been doing this long enough to know that Balor runs his night exercise in the third week of term, every year, on the theory that complacency is a slow poison and the third week is exactly when it starts to settle. The first week everyone is sharp. The second week the sharpness holds because everything is still new. By the third, the body begins to assume nothing unexpected is coming, because nothing unexpected has come yet.

That is when Balor makes something unexpected happen.

I lace my boots, pick up my pack, and go.

✦ ✦ ✦

The Shadowcarve grounds at night feel different from the rest of the academy. Older. Heavier. The stone worn in ways that suggest generations of students practicing for things they would actually need to live through. The torches in the main courtyard are the only steady light. Everything past them is managed dark, the kind a place develops when it has been used for this long enough that the buildings themselves cooperate — walls without ledges to catch the moon, paths that are level underfoot and impossible to read by eye. The whole of it built to make you rely on something other than sight.

Balor is in the courtyard when we arrive, fourteen of us, assembled in the time it takes a note under a door to be read and acted on. He looks us over the way he does when he's judging readiness. Not approval. Not disapproval. Just taking the measure of what he has.

"Tracking and evasion," he says. "The grounds are the field. You have two hours. Five of you are hunters. The other nine are prey. Prey get a three-minute start. Any prey still free at the end gets full marks. Any hunter who doesn't make a single tag reports for extra work. Questions?"

Nobody asks questions. That is the correct answer.

He divides us. I'm prey. Orpheus is prey. The still third-year from Callan's class — the one who would have fed his enemy false word rather than hunt him — is on the hunters' side, and I have to work not to look at him, because his is the name that was inside Callan's sealed note.

I set that down carefully and leave it where I can reach it.

Balor put him on hunters. That might mean Balor judged him better suited to chasing than to hiding. It might mean Balor wanted his tracking tested against mine. Balor teaches in layers, and his assignments usually mean at least two things.

The three-minute start begins. Orpheus and I don't discuss it. We move.

✦ ✦ ✦

The advantage I have in night exercises is one I've never advertised.

My right ear is deaf. My left has been making up the difference since I was a hatchling, the way a body will pour everything it has into one side when the other side is gone. In the dark, with nothing much for my eyes to do, my left ear is worth about three of anyone else's. On stone, at night, I can follow footsteps at distances most creatures couldn't manage with every sense they own working properly. I can pull apart overlapping sounds the way a good musician pulls single instruments out of a crowded piece — not deliberately, not with effort. It simply arrives already sorted.

Orpheus knows. He's known since we were eight and I told him during an exercise where he needed to know, and he has held it since with the reliability of a basilisk who treats anything about family as belonging to the family and to nobody else. He angles left, drawing attention toward the outer grounds, making noise — not obvious noise, not clumsy noise, just enough that a tracker following him will feel like he's on something real. He's the decoy. I'm the ghost.

I take a different line through the inner grounds, close to the wall where stone swallows a footfall differently than open path does. My boots are the shadowblade leather Mom drilled into all of us, silent by design, the soles treated so they don't whisper against stone, the uppers cut close so the leather doesn't sigh when you move fast. I keep count of what my left ear brings me. Two hunters heading northeast after Orpheus's trail. One sweeping the western edge in a pattern that's a search grid rather than real tracking. Two more I haven't placed.

Three placed, two still loose. Five hunters against nine prey — long odds for the hunters, which is the point. Balor doesn't set fair problems, he sets instructive ones. The ones most likely to fail are the ones walking grids — that's what you do when you have no scent and no sound and are hoping to blunder into somebody. It works eventually. It doesn't work inside two hours against people trained specifically to make it not work.

I find a place in the lee of the inner archive building, where the historical records are kept — open to senior faculty, closed to students — and settle into stillness. Stillness is a skill. Mom taught it by example. She's the only person I've ever watched be completely still and completely present at once, not the stillness of somebody gone somewhere else but the stillness of something that has stopped spending anything on being seen. It took me years. It comes easier now.

I wait.

And then I hear it.

✦ ✦ ✦

Footsteps inside the archive building.

That isn't possible tonight. Students aren't permitted in the archive at any hour, and no part of this exercise touches the inside of any Shadowcarve building — the grounds are the field, Balor said so. These aren't a hunter cutting through. These belong to someone who has a reason to be in a restricted archive that has nothing to do with what's happening outside.

My left ear places them exactly. One floor up, moving slowly, the rhythm of somebody reading spines in the dark or working from memory rather than heading anywhere in particular. Searching.

I know this walk.

I go to the side door — locked to students, not to faculty — and test it. Locked. I test the window above it, which is not, because nobody keeps up the latches on the archive's second floor. Students aren't supposed to be up there and faculty don't come in through windows. I'm on the ledge and inside in eleven seconds without a sound.

The second level is a long corridor of shelved records, the spines marked in the ordering system Balor handed out at the start of term. The torches in here are cold. My dragon's sight makes nothing of that — the shelves come to me as warmth and its absence, the markers faintly luminous, and the clear warm shape of a person working along the far wall. Pulling files. Reading. Putting them back.

Samara.

She shouldn't be here. She's faculty and faculty may use the archive, but the exercise is running on the grounds outside and the hour is well past anything ordinary, and there is no academic reason for a gorgon to be standing in the institutional records at this time of night.

I stay still. I watch.

She takes a file from the far left section, the oldest shelves, the ones holding the institution's own records rather than students'. She opens it and reads with the efficiency of a woman who knows what she came for and has found it. Then she photographs it — two pages, quick, the phone held flat and steady above the paper, the screen throwing a small cold light up onto her face. She replaces the file, moves three shelves right, and does it again.

I read what she's pulling by the markers, which my sight can just make out at this range. The first is coded to the founding documents — the original charter records from Shadowcarve's establishment. The second carries an annual review code and a year I'd need longer to read exactly, but the decade mark is old. Very old.

She's reading the original Purge documents.

The founding rules. Not the current ones. The rules as they were first written, before decades of revision softened some things and clarified others. Whatever the founders originally permitted and forbade, which the version we all study may or may not have carried forward honestly.

She's looking for what the rules actually allow.

She photographs a third page, replaces the file, and starts for the door with the unhurried composure of a woman working through a plan she made some time ago. I'm out the window and onto the ledge before she reaches the corridor, down to the ground without sound, moving off along the wall before she comes out.

I put distance between us and stop.

What she was reading: the founding charter of the Purge provision, and review records from the institution's earliest decades. The founding charter would hold the original language — what was allowed, what was forbidden, and what fell into the gaps the drafters never thought to close, because the situations they imagined were narrow and the situations that have actually happened across two centuries are not.

Institutions grow their rules over time. Readings pile up. Precedents get set. And sometimes the current version of a rule and the original version differ enough that knowing both gives you room that knowing one does not.

Samara is a gorgon. She has taught here eleven years. She knows the current rules by heart. She already knows exactly what they permit and forbid.

What she was photographing is what the old rules permitted that the current ones may not.

A gap. An old precedent. Something the founders wrote in that has since been quietly ignored or deliberately edited out, but that still stands in the original charter, and that a clever argument could claim was never formally struck down and therefore still holds.

The Purge permits students to kill students. Faculty are not supposed to take part.

What Samara is hunting for is the original language on faculty conduct during the Purge — whether that prohibition was written in at the founding, or added later, or whether the founding documents say nothing about it at all.

If they say nothing, and she can argue that silence isn't prohibition, and she can find someone in this institution willing to read it her way⁠—

I file all of it and go to find Orpheus.

✦ ✦ ✦

I find him forty minutes later in the north end of the outer grounds, crouched behind a stone formation with the patience of a basilisk who has been there long enough to have become part of it. Two hunters already gave up on this stretch. He watched them go. When I come up beside him he doesn't startle, because he knows my approach the way I know his.

I crouch. My hands move.

Samara. Archive building. Copied the founding Purge rules.

He goes very still. His eyes shift sideways, which is what he does when he's working rather than reacting. Then his hands move.

Looking for what's permitted. A statement, not a question. He got there on his own.

Yes, I sign. Then: Nothing yet. Let her look. I'm looking too.

He studies me a moment. Then he signs one more thing.

She doesn't know about the contacts.

No, I sign. And she won't. Then: The stone gaze is dead to me. Whatever she found in those papers doesn't change that.

His exhale is barely a movement at all. For Orpheus, that's considerable relief.

We spend the last hour in the outer grounds, slipping the hunters with the ease of two people raised by the same people who trained them. At the two-hour mark, when Balor calls it, five of the nine prey are still free. I'm one. Orpheus is another.

Balor takes that in without expression and tells the two hunters who made no tags to be on the grounds at six in the morning. We're dismissed.

✦ ✦ ✦

Malivore is quiet when I reach my rooms. I'm still carrying the night in my body — that sharp alertness a long stretch of careful thinking leaves behind, not quite the rush itself but the state on either side of it, where every surface feels a little more present than it should.

My door is open.

I stop. Then I catch him: bread and smoke and the warm-metal note of silver scale, familiar enough now that my body knows before my mind does. The alertness changes key. Not a threat. The opposite.

Corvus is in the chair by the window in his shirtsleeves, one of the books from my desk open in his lap, the moonlight turning his silver hair into something with no equivalent in any natural material.

He looks up. "Instructor duties," he says. "As of this morning. Balor asked me to run the fourth-year combat assessment this week."

"He didn't mention it."

"He mentioned it to me." Corvus closes the book. "I thought I'd let you find out the good way."

I look at him in the moonlight, in my rooms, in the entirely unreasonable comfort of finding someone you wanted there already there. The exercise is still in my body. Samara is filed. What Solaris found about Amadeus sits at the back of my mind like a stone dropped in still water, everything else rippling around it.

And Corvus is here.

I drop my pack and cross the room, and his arms open and I fold into them, and the scale in my chest pulses warm where his answers it, the bond running bright the way it does when nearness settles an absence. For a moment I'm not thinking about Samara or Amadeus or the count of weeks or any of the rest of it.

"How was the exercise?" he asks, against my hair.

"Informative."

He hears the weight in the word. He always does. His arms tighten. "Tell me later."

"Later," I agree.

His hand moves to the back of my neck, warm and grounding, the steadiness that is entirely his. The scale in my chest pulses once, matched to his. The bond settles into a warmth that is nothing like the tension of the exercise and nothing like the cold of what I watched in the archive and nothing like the rest of what today has been.

Just this. Just him.

The moonlight through the window dims as a cloud crosses it and the room goes briefly darker, and neither of us moves.

Later covers a great deal of ground.

Chapter 15

Hemlocke

Hosting a foreign king is, underneath everything else, a hospitality problem.

You can call it other things — a diplomatic exercise, a strategic opening, a test of how the flight presents itself — but the actual work stays the same. You need to make someone comfortable enough to be honest with you, in a space that is yours and not his, without letting the space make him feel smaller. That's hospitality. I'm good at hospitality.

What I know of Therun of the Southern Isle I know from Corvus, whose accounts are always what his accounts always are: ordered, exact, attentive to what matters and uninterested in what doesn't. Gold dragon. Three centuries of rule. Values directness, preparation, and the absence of wasted time. Was reassured by the way Corvus looked at the wolves and the white unicorns — as things to be recognized rather than acquired. Found the sea glass story interesting in a way that suggested it told him something he'd wanted to know.

Gold dragons run toward warmth and abundance. Not wealth for its own sake — the purely greedy gold dragon is a popular fiction — but the look of things cared for and thriving, the visible proof that a place has been attended to. They find neglect offensive where most creatures find it merely unfortunate.

Blackhaven is not neglected. But it is, in certain respects, austere.

None of this was supposed to happen here. Raven was to fly south to him within the month, which is how these things are ordinarily done — the younger party crosses the water to the older one, and the older one decides afterward whether the crossing was worth his while. Then word came that Therun had chosen to come himself, and to come early, and three weeks became three days.

Raven read the message twice and said only that it changed the meaning of the meeting. She's right. A king of three centuries does not cross to a northern mountain to be impressed. He crosses because he has already decided something and wants to stand next to it before he says so out loud.

So I have three days.

✦ ✦ ✦

The great hall is the right room. It's the largest interior space in Blackhaven, built for the mountain's original occupants at full scale, and its proportions carry a grandeur that furnishing it for people on two legs never quite takes away. High ceilings. Stone that holds the heat from deep in the mountain. Windows along the eastern wall that catch the afternoon and do something worthwhile with it.

The trouble is that the great hall, as it stands on any ordinary day, looks like exactly what it is — a working room in a working flight. Long tables worn smooth. Chairs in various states of matching. The patrol board on the south wall that Keir updates every morning in his small tidy hand. A stack of paperwork Raven has been meaning to deal with for a week.

I clear the paperwork. I move the tables. I send to the lower fields for flowers — the late-season varieties my foraging team has been growing on purpose ever since Raven mentioned once that she missed the smell of growing things indoors — and I set them through the hall so they read as abundance rather than effort. Everywhere at once, and nowhere placed.

The candles matter most. Gold dragons answer warm light the way cold-blooded creatures answer actual warmth. It tells them they're safe and comfortable and working at their best. Not a weakness. A nature. I take beeswax from the flight's stores and set them in groups along every surface, twenty-seven of them, each turned so its light falls toward the central table rather than the walls. Lit all together, the effect is that the table sits inside a warmth that seems to come from everywhere and from nowhere in particular.

The flowers go in three arrangements, large and middling and small, spread so the room looks like it grows things rather than like someone dressed it for an occasion. That takes longer than the candles. I rebuild the largest one three times before it sits right.

Finlay finds me adjusting the third.

He stands in the doorway a moment, looking the hall over with the attention he gives things that genuinely interest him — not idle, not social, the full weight of a man whose nine hundred years have given him a great deal to measure against. "Impressive," he says.

"It's adequate. I'd have liked more time."

"Most people would have ordered more chairs and called it done." He crosses to where I'm standing and considers the arrangement I've been fighting with. "Raven's flight is fortunate in who's in it."

I look at him. He means it. With Finlay, sincerity is always easy to spot, because it sounds exactly like his teaching voice and the whole difference lies in what he chooses to say with it.

"She chose us well," I say.

"She chose us at all," he says. "Which in her position was not required, and in her nature was not an accident." He takes in the hall again — the candles, the flowers, the patrol board left where it is. "This is good work, Hemlocke. The board was the right call."

He goes. I finish with the flowers.

✦ ✦ ✦

Therun arrives at the third hour of the afternoon.

He comes with a small escort: four metallics in human form, the sheen still showing on them even in Blackhaven's indoor light, and the pack-lord Davan, who appears at the edge of the landing platform with the unhurried presence of something that has decided to be here and intends to take its time about establishing that. Davan brought six wolves. They move through the lower grounds with the alertness of a species that has arrived in somebody else's territory and is taking a careful inventory of it. They aren't threatening. They're simply very much here.

Therun himself lands in gold dragon form and shifts on the platform, which is an interesting choice. He could have come in already shifted and kept the whole arrival quiet. Instead he chose to be seen, at full size, by everyone on the mountain who happened to be looking. A statement about what he is, and an acknowledgment that Blackhaven is worth the full version of himself.

I note that and file it as favorable.

He is exactly what Corvus described. Ancient, sharp-eyed, three centuries of rule carried in the way he stands without any of the borrowed gravity smaller creatures use to cover for authority they don't quite have. The amber eyes take in the courtyard, the mountain above it, the flight moving through its ordinary afternoon, all of it read in the few seconds it takes him to reach me.

"Hemlocke," he says, with a slight inclination of the head. Not a bow. A real acknowledgment, the greeting of an equal meeting an equal on the other's ground. He has done his preparation too. He knows my name and my work and opens by treating both as real.

"King Therun." I match the gesture exactly. "Welcome to Blackhaven. Lady Raven is on her way from the academy and sends her respects — she'll join us within the hour. If you'll allow me to show you the hall."

He looks at me a moment. I've learned to let that happen without flinching, because it's how old things orient themselves to new ones, and because minding it would only suggest I had something to hide. Then he nods.

We walk.

He approves of the hall.

He doesn't say so. But when he comes through the door and sees the candles and the late flowers and the proportions the preparation has brought out rather than covered over, something in him settles the way things settle when an expectation has been exceeded instead of merely met. I know that response from the horses — the same ease in an animal that has been treated exactly as well as it needed, no more and no less, and in precisely the right way.

We don't go straight to the table. He moves through the hall slowly, stopping at particular things: the windows and the angle of the light, the patrol board I deliberately left on the south wall, the mountain stone that shows generations of use without showing neglect. He touches nothing. He simply looks, with the attention of someone who reads rooms the way other people read faces.

"You left the patrol board," he says, pausing in front of it.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because taking it down would have suggested we're something other than what we are. Blackhaven is a working flight, and you know it. Hiding the evidence would have insulted your intelligence."

He glances sideways at me. Something in his face might be satisfaction. "Corvus mentioned you."

"Did he."

"He said the practical running of this flight rests on three people. You, the blink hound pack-lord, and Lady Raven herself." He turns from the board. "He said it without qualifying it."

I don't know what to do with that, so I do what I always do when I don't know what to do, which is to reach for the next task. "Shall I show you the stables before we sit? The foaling season has gone well this year, and I understand your southern herds have an interest in the warhorse lines."

He looks at me a moment longer. Then: "Yes. Show me the stables."

The stable corridor smells the way it always smells, hay and warm horse and the mineral of the stone that no amount of mucking out will ever get rid of. I find it steadying. Therun walks the length of it without comment, looking into each stall as we pass with the attention of a man genuinely reading what he sees rather than performing interest in it.

We reach the Aldenmere mare's stall. She looks up from her hay with the mild interest of a horse who has been here long enough to find visitors unremarkable. Her foal — three weeks old now, coal-black with smoke-gray stockings, the star on her forehead barely showing in the warm light — presses herself against her mother's shoulder and regards Therun with the deep suspicion of something small that knows it's small.

Therun stops. He looks at the foal for a long moment. She stares back. Then he puts out one hand, palm up, the way a man does when he knows how to meet a young horse and doesn't need telling. Patience without performance.

The foal takes three seconds to decide. Then she stretches her neck and touches her nose to his palm.

"A black unicorn running warhorses," Therun says, without looking away from her. "How does that work?"

"I find horses easier to talk with than most people. They're clever in ways that get underestimated because their cleverness doesn't look like ours. Treat one like a tool and you'll get a tool. Treat one like a partner and you get something a good deal more useful."

He glances at me sideways. "And your dominant dragoness. Does she understand the difference?"

"Raven has been asking Titan's permission to ride him since the day they met. He chose her before she chose him."

Something in Therun's face shifts, the particular movement of a very old creature meeting a fact that changes the shape of what he thought he knew. He takes his hand back from the foal, who watches it go with the mild offense of something whose investigation has been cut short. "Tell me about the flight," he says.

I do.

We walk back toward the hall while I explain. The patrol lines, Keir's pack and their two-day sweeps of the scent trails, the three new dragon families still finding their rhythm, what this year's foals mean for how far and how fast we'll be able to move a generation from now. The way the blink hounds' work fits against the unicorns' watch on the territory. The way different species' ranges overlap without friction, because somebody sat down and thought about the overlaps instead of assuming they'd sort themselves out.

He listens without interrupting, which in a three-hundred-year-old king is itself worth noting. He isn't waiting for a gap to steer through. He's actually taking it in.

"You understand what you've built here," he says, when I finish.

"We understand what she's built here. We're part of it."

He nods slowly. "There's a difference between a flight and an institution. Most dominant dragonesses build a flight. What you're describing is something else."

"Yes," I say. "I think so too."

We come back to the hall. The candles are still burning well.

✦ ✦ ✦

The sound reaches me before she does.

Raven's step on stone has a particular quality, and I've had a year of sharing a territory with her to learn it — the difference between the way she walks when she's working, which is not at all, and the way she walks when she isn't. What comes down the corridor is the second kind. She's done working for the moment and is letting herself arrive.

She comes through the east door in her Shadowcarve leathers, which is not what she'd have worn if she'd had time to change and which she wore anyway, on purpose, because changing would have meant pretending she hadn't come straight from a day of training and assessment. Raven doesn't pretend to be something else for a visitor's comfort. Her hair has come loose from whatever held it, one pin escaped, a strand across her left eye that she pushes back without breaking stride.

She looks at Therun. Therun looks at her.

I watch them both. The old dragon and the young dragoness taking each other's measure the way ancient things measure new ones — slowly, completely, without looking away. His three centuries against her twenty-three years. His gold against her black. The southern island against the northern mountain.

I think about what Corvus told me when he came back from the Southern Isle. That Therun wanted to see her. Not a representative of the Marzana line, not the heir in court dress. The person. The one who asked for sea glass instead of weapons. The one who checked whether her sister's arm needed binding after a kill. He decided from those two things alone that she was worth the trouble. And now he's standing in her hall, on her mountain, and she has walked in wearing training leathers with her hair half down, and he is looking at her the way he looked at the foal in the stable — with the complete attention of something that has decided to actually see what's in front of it.

Raven bows. The dominant dragoness's bow to an ancient equal, a fraction lower than she'd give a peer her own age, judged exactly right without anyone ever having taught her the judgment.

Therun inclines his head. Deeper than he gave me. The difference is small and deliberate and everything.

"You're larger than Corvus led me to expect," Therun says.

Raven blinks. Once. "Corvus is very tactful."

The sound Therun makes isn't quite a laugh, but it has the shape of one — a real response to something that caught him off guard. "Sit," he says. "I have questions."

"I have answers." She crosses to the table and sits.

I withdraw to the far end of the hall, to the post I'll hold for the rest of the meeting: within reach if I'm wanted, and otherwise present without taking up room. The candles throw their warm light across the table. The flowers put something green and living into the air. Therun leans forward in his chair and Raven comes to meet him, and the conversation begins.

I watch my mate work — the day still sitting in her shoulders, the leathers a choice rather than an oversight, everything she is present and visible and offered without apology — and I feel what I always feel watching her do this.

The pride is the size of the mountain.

It barely fits.

Chapter 16

Raven

Therun studies me a long while before he speaks.

It doesn't bother me. I've been studied by things considerably more frightening than an old gold dragon, and I've learned that the quality of a person's attention during a silence tells you more than whatever he says at the end of it. What Therun's tells me is this: thorough, unhurried, genuinely curious rather than performing curiosity, and carrying the weight of someone who has been making decisions that matter for three centuries and has made enough wrong ones to take his time over the right ones.

Solaris is on my left. Finlay is on my right. Both hold a stillness that isn't the stillness of men waiting. It's the stillness of men already working, even when the working looks like nothing at all. Solaris has been watching Therun since he sat down with the calm of a great wyrm who has known creatures this old and isn't unsettled by them. Finlay has been looking at the table with the inward expression he wears when he's setting what he's hearing against what he already knows.

Therun's four metallic guards stand at the hall's four corners, covering every door, leaving no blind angle. He came prepared. I don't react, because the same is true of my own hall: Keir's pack has been sweeping the approaches since before dawn, and two of the hounds are phased near the platform in case this meeting needs an answer in a hurry.

Across the table, Mom's familiar holds both projections steady in the window alcove — Mom's own face relayed from Sovereign, Klauth's from the capital. Iris has been extending her range since the spring, and she's carrying two at once now without visible strain, which means she's been practicing between nests. I'll ask her about it later.

"You're bigger than your mother," Therun says at last.

From the projection, Mom laughs — full and unguarded, the laugh she gives when something is actually funny rather than merely amusing. It's a good sound. I've been working to hear it more often.

"So I've been told," I say.

"I know Mina Ragnar by reputation." Therun turns toward the projection with the inclined head he'd offer any formidable dragoness. "She was formidable when she founded the Sovereign nest. I imagine she's more so now."

"She submitted dominance to her daughter last year," Mom says, the laughter still in her voice. "I have thoughts about that decision."

"No you don't," I say.

"No I don't," she agrees.

Therun looks between us, and something in his face settles — the settling of a man who has just learned something about the shape of a relationship that no briefing would have given him. He turns back to me.

"Tell me about Magnus," he says. "Not what the reports say. What you know."

✦ ✦ ✦

I tell him.

I give him the whole of it. The fire drake watch on the western border, eight scents when Keir first counted them and twelve at his last. The four planted students at the academy, where we first thought three. Anipe in the administrative wing, half her attention on the corridor, never quite meeting my eyes. Samara in the archive during Balor's night exercise, photographing the founding Purge documents, hunting for what the original language allowed that the current version may not. The alliance between Magnus and Amadeus's men, no longer tucked away in the eastern wing but sitting openly in the throne room.

Then the deeper layer. Solaris's blood-memory, three weeks of careful work, and the picture of Amadeus that comes clear once you line the layers up. Not a dead mage. A man who gave up his body more than a thousand years ago to fuel a binding so large it needed a fire burning inside it, and who built that binding to keep his own self intact within the net instead of ending with the flesh. Scattered. No single body to kill. Survivable only by breaking every egg at once, or by cutting the net off from the mage-blooded men it reaches through.

"You've confirmed this out of the ancestral record," Therun says. Not skeptical. Weighing the source.

"Solaris was one of Amadeus's first," I say. "He knows the working's signature because he was inside it. His account isn't history. It's memory."

Therun is quiet a moment. He looks at Solaris, who holds the look with the patience of a dragon who has had a thousand years to make peace with what was done to him and has mostly managed it.

"How many eggs remain?" Therun asks.

"We don't know. Three destroyed in the last two years that we're certain of. How many exist, or where, we have no idea. Cassius has eleven years of work on this. It's the main reason I have to get back to the Eastern Isles."

"Before the Purge," Therun says.

"The academy calendar gives me a window in two weeks. I intend to use it."

He nods and drinks from his cup. He's been listening twenty minutes and hasn't asked a single question designed to display what he already knows rather than learn what I do, which is rarer than it should be in rooms full of powerful creatures.

"I know of Cassius," Therun says.

I look at him.

"An omega male mage. He came to my court about eight years before he vanished from the records, carrying word about the omega males being moved out of Magnus's territories — which families were being pressed, through which offices, and what paperwork was being used to cover it." He sets the cup down. "He knew things he had no business knowing. He'd already been at it for years before he ever reached me. I tried to keep the thread. He went quiet, and when I went looking I found nothing."

"He went to the Eastern Isles."

"Clearly." Something moves behind his face — the long weight of a search that never closed. "If he has spent eleven years on this one question, what he carries may be the most complete account anywhere of how the net holds together and how it can be broken."

"Which is exactly why Amadeus sent boats for him."

"Yes." He meets my eyes. "Reach him before Amadeus finds another way to."

Then: "There's something else you should know. It concerns the omega males Magnus has been trying to take off the Eastern Isles."

"Three of them," I say. "Giselle told me."

"I know who they were." He holds my gaze. "They weren't chosen at random. Two had shown early signs of very strong mage-blood. The third was the son of a mage council member who defected out of Magnus's territories six years ago." A pause. "Magnus — or Amadeus — is building something that needs omega males with strong blood in them. The net needs mage-blooded men to hold what he became. And if what he became is thinning as the eggs are broken one by one⁠—"

"He needs stronger ones to hold it," Finlay says from my right. His voice goes level and careful the way it does when something has just confirmed a thing he'd been hoping was wrong. "Strong enough blood could carry more of him without fraying."

The room goes quiet.

"Cassius," Mom says from the projection. Quietly. Understanding it.

"Cassius is an omega male mage," I say. "With eleven years of studying exactly this."

"And Amadeus knows he exists." Klauth's voice through Iris carries the flatness of a man who has followed the line to its end and dislikes where it goes. "The night boats weren't a general sweep. They were sent for him."

The candles burn. Outside, the mountain does what mountains do.

"I need to go back to the Eastern Isles," I say. "Soon."

"Yes," Therun says. "You do."

✦ ✦ ✦

The pledge comes in larger than the shape Corvus described. A hundred and eight of Davan's own pack, and forty-two more out of the others, who asked to come after word of the first discussions reached them. A hundred and fifty wolf trackers in all, under Davan's command. And twelve grown metallic fighters out of Therun's own wing.

Therun mentions the extra forty-two the way a man mentions the weather. It isn't weather. Wolves don't ask to join somebody else's war unless a pack-lord they trust has already made up his mind where he's going. The terms are clean: they answer to me directly, not to Klauth or Thauglor or anyone else in the Marzana structure. Therun says so without apologizing for it and I accept without conditions, because it's the right structure. A pledged force that answers to a chain above the dragoness they've pledged to is a liability in any fight that moves fast.

Klauth has something to say about that. I can hear it in the shape of his silence through Iris's projection — the silence of a man who holds a view and is deciding whether this is the room for it. He decides it isn't. I'll raise it with him later, in private, where he can be blunt and so can I and we can end up somewhere neither of us started.

Then I welcome Therun's people formally into the Blackhaven flight. The full declaration, in the words the Marzana line has used for this since it began. What the words mean is: you are of this flight now, your safety is mine to guarantee, your honor is mine to keep. Not merely allied. Not attached for a season. It is a binding of a kind that carries weight.

Davan has been at the edge of the hall since we sat down. When I finish speaking, he moves. He crosses to the table, and not to a chair — to the floor beside mine, where he settles with the unhurried certainty of something that has made a decision and is beginning to live inside it.

The metallic guards at the corners straighten a fraction. Recognition. Their pack-lord has placed himself.

Therun watches it happen. "He chose you before I pledged him."

"I'll try to be worth it."

"You already are." He says it plainly. "Or he wouldn't be sitting there."

✦ ✦ ✦

After.

The table is cleared. Mom and Klauth have gone from Iris's projection. Solaris and Finlay have withdrawn to the far end of the hall to give the meeting its closing room. It's Therun and me and candles burning low, the flowers still holding their color in the warm light.

"I'd like to see your daughter," Therun says.

I look at him a moment, reading his face for what sits behind the asking, and what I find is honest. Curiosity, but the kind that wishes its subject well. Old creatures aren't always good with young ones. Some of them, the ones who have lived long enough to lose nearly everything to time, find youth hard to look at. Therun doesn't look like that.

"All right."

Nova arrives the way she always arrives when she's been told someone is coming and has been made to wait — at a controlled trot that is not quite a run, her own compromise between the dignity she has been told to have and the urgency she actually feels. She stops in the doorway and looks at Therun. He looks at her.

She's carrying her obsidian and burnt-orange coloring in human form today, scales showing along her arms and shoulders, which means her dragoness is close to the surface and paying attention. Her mismatched eyes settle on him with the careful assessment of a hatchling who has learned that large unfamiliar creatures want evaluating before anything else happens.

Therun crouches.

A three-hundred-year-old gold dragon lowering himself to the height of a two-year-old is its own thing to watch. Unhurried. Deliberate. The gesture of someone who understands that size is a fact and what you do with it in front of something small is a choice.

He says something in Old Dragon.

The language is ancient, older than the common tongue by centuries, kept now for formal declarations and very old ceremony and by creatures old enough to have spoken it when it was simply how you talked. I know perhaps thirty phrases of it. Finlay knows more. Solaris speaks it as a first language, and Therun speaks it the same way — not for ceremony, but as something still living in his mouth.

What he says, as near as I can follow, is a greeting and a question. Something about what she sees when she looks at the mountain.

Nova is quiet a long moment. Her head tilts, the particular tilt she gives when she's reaching for something, which Solaris tells me is what blood-memory looks like in a hatchling. Not searching. Closer to listening.

Then she answers.

Her Old Dragon comes in pieces. She finds the words in stages, pausing the way you pause reaching for a shape that's nearly there, working from a grammar no living person has taught her. But the grammar is right. The words are correctly built. And the answer, in a two-year-old's small vocabulary, is a real answer to what he asked.

She says the mountain is home. Then one more word I don't quite catch, which might mean safe and might mean whole.

Therun looks up at me. "Where did she learn that?"

"She was born knowing it."

He looks at Nova a long moment. She looks back with the patient confidence of someone who has said the correct thing and is waiting for the next part. Then he does something I don't expect: he reaches into an inner pocket and brings out a small disc of gold, worn smooth, very old, and holds it out flat on his palm.

Nova looks at the disc. Looks at him. Then takes it, carefully, with both hands.

"A gift, in the old way," Therun says, to me. "When you meet a hatchling carrying ancestral speech in the blood, tradition says you give her something that has been spoken over. Something that holds weight."

I don't know what to say to that, so I let the quiet be what it is.

"She was born knowing it," Therun says again, more quietly. Not a question. Something else — the weight of a piece dropping into a pattern he has been working a long time. "I suspected. When Corvus described her eyes. The sapphire marking inside the amber. That pairing has a precedent in the Old Dragon bloodline records. I wanted to know whether the speech had come with it."

"And now?"

"Now I know more than I suspected." He meets my eyes. "I'll send you the records. The precedent matters. It changes what she is and what she'll become, and you should understand it before anyone else does."

"Tell me now."

"I don't hand over half a thing," he says. "When I have all of it, so will you."

He says something else in Old Dragon to Nova. She tilts her head, considers, and answers in two words.

Therun stands. He turns to me with an expression I still can't read all the way down — recognition, and something more careful under it, and under both of those something that looks, on a three-century-old king, remarkably like wonder.

"I'll come myself," he says. "When war is declared. Not only the trackers and the fighters. Myself."

I hold his gaze. "I'll hold you to it."

"I expect you to." He looks at Nova once more. She has found the disc entirely absorbing, turning it over, studying the faded markings. Therun makes the sound that might be a laugh. "Keep her safe."

"That isn't negotiable."

"No," he agrees. "I didn't think it was."

He takes his leave. The metallics and Davan and the six wolves gather at the platform. He shifts and launches into the afternoon, the gold of him catching the mountain light and throwing it back until the air around him looks briefly like something that has never existed in ordinary daylight.

Nova watches him go.

"Old," she says, in the common tongue.

"Very," I agree.

"Nice," she says.

I crouch down beside her and we watch the gold shape shrink toward the southern sky, and I think about Old Dragon in a hatchling's mouth, arriving with no one having put it there, and what it means that Therun heard it and his face did what it did.

I file it next to everything else.

The light is going amber when I pick her up and carry her inside.

Chapter 17

Keir

Ten weeks of watching makes a map.

Not a figure of speech. An actual one, drawn on the heavy paper Finlay keeps in his study for letters that have to survive a journey. I've been at it three days. The pack's patrol logs went in first — every scent hit, every marker, every hour, set against the western boundary in the shorthand Finlay uses for this kind of record. I've been learning it because it's faster than writing everything out, and he was willing to teach me on the condition that I never tell anyone he did. He called it a professional standard rather than a favor. Both things are true.

The map is exact. Twelve fire drakes, and I can tell them apart now. Each body burns a little differently, and the difference shows in the scent the way one hand's writing differs from another's writing the same letters. Look at enough handwriting and the hands separate themselves. It went the same way with these once I'd smelled enough of them side by side.

Twelve. Shifts of four, turning over on a cycle of roughly six hours. The northwest and southeast ends of the rotation overlap for about forty minutes, and in that window I can hold eight of them in my nose at once and name each one. The other four are on the far side of the circuit while that's happening, which is how I know the number is twelve and not eight. You count what you can smell, then you count what's missing from what you can smell, and the gap tells you the rest.

It took four weeks of sampling before I'd stake a number on it. Dax checked me — ran the same samples without seeing what I'd found, came out at the same twelve. When two hounds reach the same count separately, the count is right.

Three of those twelve also turn up at the academy.

I found all three myself, setting the border samples against traces I've been collecting on academy ground these past four weeks. The method is simple enough. Blink hounds leave a mark when we phase, and I can lay something down on a surface we've touched without anyone knowing it's there. I've done it every visit, once a week, working the corridors and training grounds a section at a time. Slow work. The kind that doesn't feel like anything until it suddenly does.

Three on the border, three inside the walls, the same three, matched across four weeks of sampling.

The fourth one — Callan's third-year transfer, the name in the sealed note — doesn't show up in my rotation at all. Either he isn't part of the border operation, or he came in some other way, or he's good enough at burying his scent that I haven't caught him in the overlap. I have a notion about which. I'm not taking it to Raven yet, because a notion wants another week of testing before I'll call it anything.

What I am ready to tell her is this. What's happening outside the boundary and what's happening inside the academy are the same operation. Three men are holding a place in the border watch and a seat in a classroom at the same time, and that takes more than nerve. Somebody is keeping the schedule. Somebody is carrying the messages. Somebody is making the paper look right — which means somebody inside that institution knows its workings well enough to enroll a student on invented papers, and has been doing it long enough that nothing about it reads as strange.

Anipe.

I don't have her scent on anything yet. But the pattern fits the notion and the notion fits the pattern, and the week I said I needed for the fourth plant I'm also going to spend starting on her. When I bring them to Raven they'll arrive connected instead of separate. She thinks better when the picture is whole.

I fold the map and take it to her.

✦ ✦ ✦

The academy in the fourth week of term feels different from the first. That first week everybody is performing adjustment — the version of themselves that handles new places and new expectations, pitched to look capable and to settle any question of belonging before someone thinks to ask it out loud. By now the performance has worn off. What's underneath is showing. Some students are harder than they looked. Some are softer. The ones who are exactly what they were in week one are usually the most interesting, because they were already telling the truth when it was harder to.

I blink in to the Shadowcarve landing in the late afternoon, which is the way Raven and I agreed on at the start of term. No main gate, no signing in, nothing that runs through Anipe's office. The pack seal she arranged with Balor reads as an ordinary faculty visitor's mark. It's legitimate. It's also quieter than a normal one, because Balor put it through the training-adjunct list rather than the general visitor list, and those are kept in different books.

Raven thinks of these things early. She thought of this one before I asked.

She's in the east corridor when I get there, coming down from Callan's tower with her jacket half done up and a sheen at her temples from drill. She sees me and changes direction without breaking stride, which is as close to a greeting as either of us needs — she comes toward me instead of waiting, which means she's glad I'm here and doesn't have to say so.

I fall into step. "Map's done."

"How many?"

"Twelve. Shifts of four, six hours to the cycle. Three of them match scents inside the academy."

She's quiet for a few paces. We move through the inner corridor, student traffic thin at this hour, the afternoon light coming through the high windows at the angle that means the day is going amber outside.

"The fourth one," she says.

"Doesn't show in the rotation. I've got a theory. It needs another week."

"Keep going."

"Always."

She stops at a junction. I stop with her. She holds out her hand and I give her the map.

She unrolls it against the wall and reads it the way she reads everything, fast on the first pass and slower on the second, her eyes running the same route twice to confirm what the first pass caught. Forty seconds. Then she rolls it and tucks it inside her jacket with the care of something she means to sit down with later.

"Good work," she says.

Two words. Also the two words that mean it landed whole and it was what she needed.

"Stay for dinner. Corvus is in. I think Orpheus is coming for notes, which means he's coming for dinner and the notes are the excuse he picked."

"I know. I heard him tell himself the notes reason. He believes it."

She almost smiles. "Stay anyway."

"Obviously."

✦ ✦ ✦

Her rooms at Malivore hold four people the way a good camp holds four people — not comfortable because there's room to spare, comfortable because they're the right four and the space fits them. Corvus has the chair by the window. Orpheus has the floor, his back against the desk, legs stretched out in the manner of a man who has decided the floor is the better option and is correct. I take the far end of the desk. Raven sits on the bed with her legs crossed and a plate balanced on one knee and Xero draped across her shoulders like an opinionated scarf.

The food is Corvus's doing. He cooks when he's at the academy, because the academy kitchen turns out adequate food and Corvus considers adequate food a standing grievance to be answered with action rather than complaint. Tonight it's bread rolls and something with cheese that crisps at the edges, and the dark braised thing he makes with wine and root vegetables that I have asked him to name three times. Three times he has told me and three times I've lost it immediately, because the name doesn't stick the way the taste does.

It's good. I eat more than my share of the rolls and nobody says anything, because we've been sharing meals long enough that everyone's territory of appetite is settled.

Xero says something into Raven's left ear in the voice only Raven can hear. Raven says "no" to whatever it was. Xero rearranges herself across Raven's shoulders with the pointed dignity of a tressym who has been refused and is choosing not to press the matter at this time.

Orpheus is telling us about the thing that went wrong in his Advanced Shadowcarve session this week — a scenario, a mistimed step, and a second-year who turned out to have more experience with the technique than anybody had accounted for, the second-year included. It takes him three minutes in that dry exact voice of his and produces the particular laughter that comes from recognizing a mess you've been in yourself, handed back to you as somebody else's. Relief as much as amusement.

Raven laughs. It reaches her eyes.

I watch that and feel the bond go warm — not the sharp bright warmth, the slower kind that comes off something simply good being allowed to be good. This is what I want more of for her. Evenings that ask nothing of her except that she be in them. Laughter that doesn't arrive at the end of something heavy but just arrives, because Orpheus said a thing that was funny.

She gets fewer of those than she should. A good deal fewer, lately.

After a while Orpheus takes his notes and his empty plate and goes, with the quiet efficiency of a man who has timed his departure right. Corvus clears the rest of the plates onto the small table by the door where Raven puts things she intends to deal with later, then settles back into his chair with a book and a cup of something warm and the complete presence of a male who has decided this is where he is and needs nothing from the room to confirm it.

I stay where I am.

The three of us are good at this. Corvus and I found our balance around Raven in the first six months of the nest and it's been settling ever since. Neither of us performs ease around the other, which is how the ease turned out to be real. He trusts my nose in the field the way I trust his steadiness everywhere else, and neither of us has ever had to say so out loud.

✦ ✦ ✦

Later. Corvus is asleep in the chair — he does this, goes out sitting up with a book and wakes knowing exactly where he stopped, which I have always found remarkable and which he considers unremarkable. The rooms have gone quiet the way they do when most of the people in them are resting or near it.

Raven is at the window.

She's been there about twenty minutes. I know because I've been keeping track of her without looking at her, which is the hound's habit of always knowing where your people are without making a show of knowing. She isn't doing anything. Just standing in the dark with her arms loosely folded, looking at whatever the Shadowcarve grounds look like from this height at this hour.

I go to the window and stand beside her. She doesn't look over. That's fine. Looking isn't required.

The mountain cold comes through the glass, faint but there. Outside, the torches are burned down low, the training grounds empty, the stone buildings solid in the dark. The sky over the academy is high-altitude dark — nothing softening it, no city glow, just actual dark with actual stars in it.

"How are you actually doing?"

She's quiet a moment. Not the quiet of deciding whether to answer. The quiet of finding the accurate one, which is a particular stillness she has when she's being honest instead of managing. I've learned to wait for that one. Most people I'd prompt. Her I wait for.

"I'm angry," she says. "I'm very, very angry, and I'm saving it."

"For the Purge."

"For the right moment." She looks at me then, sidelong and brief, the way she looks at people she trusts when she's saying the actual thing instead of the thing next to it. "There's a lot of it. More than I expected. And I want to spend it correctly. Not just spend it."

I think about that. About what it takes to hold that much anger banked and exact instead of letting it run wherever it likes. About the discipline of sitting beside something that size and not letting it make your decisions. Most people can't. Most species can't — anger is pressure, and pressure wants out, wants to push toward whatever caused it.

She can. She's been doing it since the day we met, and I don't think she knows how rare it is. Most creatures in the middle of something that big either spend it or break under it. She does neither. She files it.

"Okay," I say.

She lets out a breath. Not relief. The breath of someone who has been heard and doesn't want anything more from the moment than that.

I put my head on her shoulder. She lets me. Her hand comes up and her fingers find the back of my neck, light and steady, the touch that says I know you're here and asks nothing back.

"I hate that they're in my school," she says, quietly. "In my building. Sleeping in rooms that should be safe."

"I know."

"I hate that all I can do is watch. Map them. Let them think I don't know."

"It's the right call. You know it's the right call."

"Yes." A pause. "That doesn't make it less hateful."

I press my mouth briefly to her hair. Nothing more particular than that. The acknowledgment. She makes a low sound somewhere between a sigh and a purr and leans into me a fraction more.

"Stay," she says. Not a question. A decision she's already made and is telling me about.

"Yeah."

She turns from the window and I turn with her. The room is warm and Corvus is asleep in his chair and the bond runs the warm register that belongs to the two of us in the late hours — all of it present, no distance in it, the thing I do with my whole self instead of the part of me that manages.

The fire drakes are on the border.

The Purge is in two weeks.

Tonight, for a while, none of that is the point.

Chapter 18

Raven

Finlay teaches mourning rites on a Tuesday.

He doesn't announce the topic beforehand. He never does. He posts the week as a unit heading only, so you know you're covering formal state occasions without knowing which ones until you're in the room. I've come to understand that's deliberate. He wants us arriving with general preparation rather than having crammed for a subject, because what he's testing isn't recall. It's response. How you sit with a thing set in front of you without warning tells him more than how well you readied yourself for it.

This week's heading was State Protocols — Terminal Events. I assumed execution protocols. I did not assume mourning rites, which are a different matter entirely, covering what a ruler is required to do when the death in question is one she ordered rather than one that happened to her. The distinction matters. The ceremony is different. The record is different. The weight of it is different, and Finlay teaches it that way — unsoftened, not academic, with the careful honesty of a man who has watched rulers walk this road for nine centuries and has firm views about what walking it properly requires.

I sit in the third row and I take notes.

That's new. I've sat in the third row for a month without taking notes, keeping it all directly. Today I write it down.

✦ ✦ ✦

The formal mourning rite, as Finlay lays it out, exists for a reason that isn't obvious at first. It isn't for the person who died. It's for the record, and for the ruler, and for everyone who watches the ruler afterward.

"When a ruler orders an execution," he says, standing at the front with his hands clasped behind him in the way he stands when the material is serious, "she is using the most consequential authority she possesses. The rite exists to see that the using is documented, witnessed, and acknowledged — that it cannot be done quietly, or conveniently, or without the ruler standing in front of it in the full light of her position."

He pauses. The room is very still.

"This is not a punishment for the ruler. It is a protection for everyone else. A ruler who can end a life without ceremony, without record, without acknowledgment, is a ruler whose power has no edges. The rite makes an edge. It says: this was done, in this circumstance, for this reason, on this day, and the one who ordered it was this person and no other."

He goes to the board and writes four words. Grounds. Witness. Record. Cost. Then he turns back.

"The grounds must be written down before the order is given, not after. This is the element most often violated — the justification composed afterward and fitted to the decision instead of shaping it. If your grounds cannot survive being written down before you act, your grounds are not sufficient." A pause. "That holds whether or not the decision turns out to be right. A right decision made on poor grounds is still a failure of rule."

Someone in the second row shifts. I don't look. I'm watching Finlay, the way I always watch him in this room, because how he teaches tells me as much as what.

"Witness. The execution must be formally witnessed, and not by your own people — not by anyone whose loyalty to you came before any duty to the truth. The witness exists to produce an account that doesn't depend on your version of events. You arrange to be held to account."

"Record. The acknowledgment, written in your own words, within thirty-six hours. Nobody writes it for you. No formal phrasing unless you choose it yourself. The words are yours because the decision was yours."

He looks at the fourth word.

"Cost." He says it plainly. "The rite requires the ruler to name what was lost. Not as remorse. Not as second-guessing. As witness. You were the one who saw clearly enough to decide. The rite asks you to see just as clearly what the deciding ended."

The room is quiet.

Eleven other students in Royal Protocol. Most of them writing steadily. Two aren't — they're looking at the table with the expression of people taking something in through the body rather than the mind.

I know that expression.

I go into the Purge in two weeks. The Purge permits students to kill students. The ones I'll be moving against are enrolled here. Enrollment at Dragonis runs through the Marzana rolls. Which means, precisely and technically, that they are mine.

I've known that. I filed it the way I file things that are true and consequential and don't need spending on until the spending is required. But sitting in this room, in this Tuesday light, with Finlay laying out the formal shape of what it is to end something that was yours to protect — the filing doesn't hold it as well as it usually does.

Finlay is looking at me.

Not constantly. Not in any way the rest of the room would read as aimed. But every fourth or fifth sentence, in the natural sweep of a teacher's eyes around a room, his find me and hold one beat longer than they hold on anyone else. He knows what I'm thinking. He knew before I sat down.

I hold his gaze when it comes to me. I keep writing.

✦ ✦ ✦

The class ends. The others go out with the energy of people who have been still for two hours and are now moving, conversations starting before they reach the door, held concentration letting go all at once.

I stay in my seat.

Finlay doesn't pack up. He goes to his desk, lifts his water glass, and waits with the patience of a man who has been expecting exactly this and arranged his afternoon around it.

"Is there a formal rite," I say, "for killing someone who was your student?"

He sets the glass down. "Yes."

"Tell me."

He crosses the room and takes the chair nearest mine — not behind his desk, not at the front. Beside me, which is the position of a conversation rather than a lesson. "It differs from a standard execution rite in three ways," he says. "First, the relationship is recorded outright. Not only who was executed and on whose authority, but what they were to you before. The record says: this person was known to the ruler in this capacity."

"So it can't be erased."

"So it can't be erased," he agrees. "Second, the ruler writes the acknowledgment herself. No scribes. No advisors. The words are hers. That requirement exists to keep the act from being passed through other hands on its way into the record — to make certain the one who ordered the death is also the one who names it and describes it."

I think about the four fire drake students. What I know of them, which is deliberately not much, because knowing more would make this harder. Their places in the year, the courses they're taking, the year and more they've spent inside this institution. Not much. But enough to know their faces. Enough that when I write the record it will not be an abstraction.

"And the third?"

"The third is the acknowledgment of cost." He looks at me steadily. "The rite requires the ruler to state, plainly and for the record, what was lost. Not as regret. You aren't obliged to regret a necessary decision. As witness. You were the one who saw clearly enough to act, so you are the one who must also see clearly what the acting cost. Both together."

The room is very quiet.

"You've written this rite," I say.

He's quiet a moment. "Four times."

I look at him. "Was one of them a student?"

"One," he says. "A very long time ago. A different world, a different institution." He looks at his hands, the look of a man opening a room he doesn't usually go into. "I wrote that acknowledgment for three days before I thought it honest enough to file. The requirement that the words be your own is harder than it sounds, when the words keep coming out as justification instead of witness."

"What's the difference?"

"Justification explains why the decision was right. Witness describes what happened." He looks up. "The rite asks for the second. It doesn't ask whether you were right. It asks what was there before, and what is gone."

I write that down. I don't know why. It's not on the syllabus and it won't be marked. I write it anyway.

"I don't know if I can do that," I say. Quietly. Not performing the admission. Actually making it, which is a different thing and one I do very rarely outside the people who already know everything.

"You can," Finlay says. "The question is whether you'll recognize that you need to. Most rulers who fail the rite fail because they've persuaded themselves the cost doesn't need witnessing — that it was purely necessary, purely correct, and nothing was lost that mattered. The rite exists because that is never entirely true."

I sit with that.

The light through the east tower windows has moved since the class began. We've been in here longer than I realized. Finlay is patient with the silence the way he's patient with everything, with the patience of a man who has learned that some things want room to settle before they can be said.

"The loneliness of it," I say. Not quite a question.

"Yes." Simply.

"You can put the grounds to your council. You can arrange the witness. But the acknowledgment of cost⁠—"

"Has to be yours," he says. "Yes. Nobody can carry that particular weight with you, because nobody else held the authority. The decision was one person's. So is the record of it." He's quiet a moment. "Nine centuries of watching rulers make these decisions. The ones who do it well, who can still bear looking at honestly after a long reign, are the ones who work out early that the loneliness is the point. Not something to be managed around. The thing itself."

"Because if you could share the weight you'd be sharing the responsibility," I say. "And then the edges blur."

"Yes." He looks at me with something that isn't quite pride and isn't quite grief but sits between them, the way those two things always seem to sit when I'm being watched by someone who knows how this ends. "You understand it faster than most."

"I've had better teachers than most."

The corner of his mouth moves. Barely.

"Finlay."

"Yes."

"After this is over." I look at him — not the student look. The one I give him when I want him to know I mean the whole of it. "When it's all done. I'm going to need you to help me write some of those."

He holds my gaze. "I know. I'll be there."

✦ ✦ ✦

The door opens.

What happens is this. It opens about four inches, and there's a pause, and then it opens all the way, and Bella is in the doorway with Azalea right behind her, and Bella's face runs through three separate states in roughly a second — first the urgency of someone arriving with a purpose, then the quick reassessment of someone who has walked in on something and is working out what, then the decision, which comes down on the side of pressing on, because Bella's decisions almost always do.

"We need help with the second Shadowcarve assignment," she says, without preamble. "The one due Thursday. Azalea did the first part wrong and now the second part doesn't work and she's been explaining it to me for forty minutes in a way that doesn't help, because she keeps starting from the wrong place, and we need someone who can—" She stops and looks between us. "Are you in the middle of something?"

"Yes," I say.

"But are you almost done?"

I look at Finlay. He looks at me. Something moves in his face — not quite amusement, not quite resignation. The look of a man who has spent nine centuries learning that family does not wait for gravity, and has made his peace with it.

"We're almost done," he says.

Bella brightens. Azalea comes fully into the doorway behind her holding the assignment, wearing the particular mix of guilt and hope that belongs to someone who knows she's made an error and has brought along a more assertive person to do the asking.

"You both sat in on Year Two Advanced Shadowcarve," I say. "You know the second unit. Where is Azalea starting from?"

"That's the thing—" Bella begins.

"Azalea first. She made the error. Let her explain it."

Azalea steps forward and begins. Bella, with visible effort, does not interrupt. I listen with the part of my mind that does this on its own, following the mistake as it comes — it's in the third step, a false equivalence that carries through everything after — while the rest of me is still back in the other conversation, still holding its weight, not setting it down yet.

Both things are true at once. The rite and my sisters. The witness and the assignment due Thursday. The acknowledgment of cost, and the false equivalence in Azalea's third step, which is entirely fixable if someone shows her where she went wrong.

This is what ruling is, I think. Not the gravity by itself. Not the lightness by itself. Both, at the same time, each wanting all of you. The ability to move between them without dropping either thread. Finlay has been doing it for nine centuries — I've watched him class after class, the measured formality and the warmth underneath it, the precision and the care, and he never drops the thread. I don't know whether that comes with time or with practice. I intend to find out.

"Stop there," I tell Azalea. "Back up to step three. Show me what you assumed."

She shows me.

"You set those two forces as equal because they look the same size in the scenario. They aren't. One of them carries a second condition that the description buries in the third paragraph. Read it again."

She reads. I watch her find it — the exact moment, legible in the slight widening of her eyes and the breath she takes before she says anything.

"Oh," she says.

"Yes."

"So everything from step three on⁠—"

"Gets rebuilt from the corrected assumption. But the structure you built is sound. You'll just be filling it with different numbers."

Bella, who has held her silence with visible effort for four minutes, lets it go. "I told her to read the third paragraph."

"You told me the answer was in the third paragraph," Azalea says, with the precision of a sister who has had this exact argument for twenty-five years. "You didn't tell me which part of the third paragraph."

"I pointed at it."

"You pointed at the paragraph."

"I was being pedagogical."

"You were being⁠—"

"Enough," I say. Not unkindly. "Azalea, go fix it from step three. Bella, if you point at something and it doesn't get the information across, the pointing isn't working. Try another method next time."

Bella looks at me. "You sound like him," she says, tipping her head toward Finlay.

"Good," Finlay says, from his chair.

They collect the assignment, perform the sibling farewell that involves no words and a considerable amount of shoulder, and go. The door closes.

I look at Finlay. He looks at me.

"Both things at once," I say.

"Always," he says. "That's the job."

I pick up my notes. I go.

Chapter 19

Solaris

I know she is ready three days before she knows it herself.

This is what it is to watch a thing grow toward a threshold. There's a stretch where the ability has arrived and the confidence hasn't, and the space between the two is where a parent must be careful. Push too early and the confidence never sets properly — it fastens onto somebody else's certainty instead of taking root in the hatchling's own. Wait too long and the ability starts turning on itself, all that readiness with nowhere to go going anxious instead.

I have been watching Nova six weeks. I know the exact morning her wings came to their full reach, three weeks ago, when she opened them in the flight field and the span was suddenly wider than her body had led me to expect, the membrane taut and even, the leading edge finding the wind without her telling it to. I know the day she stopped looking down at the edge of the landing rock and started looking out. I know the morning she began running at the edge instead of walking up to it.

I know today is the day.

She doesn't know it yet. She woke with the same restlessness she's carried all week, ate her breakfast with unusual attention, and has been in the upper flight field since before the sun cleared the eastern peaks. I've been watching from the corridor doorway without going to her. Giving her the field to herself a while longer. She's standing at the landing rock's edge — not looking down, looking at the horizon — her wings half open in the morning wind, the obsidian membrane lit from behind by the low autumn sun and going deep amber where her burnt orange bleeds through.

She is extraordinary.

I have tried not to think that too loudly around Raven, who has complicated feelings about being fair-minded where Nova is concerned, and whom I understand entirely, because you cannot be fair-minded about something you love this much. But standing here, watching my daughter stand at the edge of the world she is about to walk into, I am not attempting anything of the sort. I am only seeing her, and she is extraordinary.

✦ ✦ ✦

Raven came home last night.

She comes every weekend the academy schedule allows, which is more often than she tells the academy it allows. She runs her own timetable now with the efficiency of a woman who worked out the actual minimum and meets it exactly, keeping the remainder for other things. She arrived late, smelling of Shadowcarve leather and the cold of the descent, and went straight to Nova's room and sat on the floor beside the small nest where Nova sleeps and stayed an hour before she came to bed.

I didn't ask what she was thinking. She wasn't thinking. She was being present with her daughter in the dark, which is another matter entirely.

This morning she woke before I did, which is rare, and went to the window and looked out at the field where Nova was already standing. She stood there a long while. Then she turned to me and said, very quietly, "Today."

"Yes," I said.

She nodded once. Her face did the thing it does when she's feeling a great deal and deciding how much of it to show. Then she went to dress.

Thauglor arrives at mid-morning.

He comes without announcing himself, which is to say he comes in dragon form, clearing the eastern peak and coming down to the upper flight field with the unhurried gravity of an ancient wyrm who has decided to be somewhere and intends to take his time arriving. Nova sees him from the rock and her wings snap fully open — instinct, the greeting a hatchling gives an elder she trusts. Her small shape beside his enormous one, once he's down, looks like the foal beside Titan. Scale made visible.

He shifts to human form and looks at me across the field. I raise my chin. He nods once.

He knew as well. Nobody told him. He simply knew, and came.

Nova shifts at the edge of the landing rock.

The change is a thing I have not stopped marveling at. The speed of it, first — faster than most hatchlings half again her age. But more than the speed, the quality of it. Nova doesn't pass through the awkward middle that most young dragons live in during their early shifts, that brief ungainly moment of being neither shape completely. She goes straight across. Girl to dragoness in one movement, as though both forms are equally hers and getting from one to the other takes no more thought than turning around.

She is obsidian and burnt orange, the coloring she took from both of us in a combination that has no business working as well as it does — the matte black of her scales broken by deep amber along her wing edges and underbelly, the color moving in the light the way fire moves, one thing at this angle and another at that. Her mismatched eyes, amber and half-sapphire, read the field with the focus of a hatchling who has been getting ready for this. She has been getting ready for this. We all know it. She knows it best.

She's already large for her age. Her wingspan, fully open, is wider than Raven's was at six. I don't tell Raven that. She knows, and it makes feelings in her that are complicated in the way loving something extraordinary is always complicated when you are also the one responsible for keeping it alive.

She goes to the edge of the rock and looks out. Not down. Out.

Beside me, Raven shifts.

This is the part I want to describe and am not certain I can. Raven shifting is not like watching other dragons shift. It's the same process, the same body doing the same thing — but what comes out of it holds space differently. When Raven is in her dragoness, the air around her changes. Not the temperature of it, not the pressure. Something further down. The particular quality of a space when a thing built to fill it finally does. The skull coloring makes it absolute, the bone-white of her face against the matte black of everything else.

She moves to the left of the rock. Below it and slightly back, wings half open, set to catch.

She will not need to catch.

But she sets herself there anyway, because she is Raven, and Raven leaves nothing to chance where her daughter is concerned. I have watched her take that position beneath Nova's practice glides for six weeks, ready every time, catching nothing because nothing needed catching. She'll do it as long as Nova is learning. She'll do it well past that. This is simply who she is.

I shift.

My wyrm form takes up a great deal of room and I am always somewhat conscious of that at Blackhaven, where my size is the exception. But today I shift fully and take the right, opposite Raven, the two of us balanced around the rock where our daughter stands, a loose cradle of presence.

Thauglor shifts below.

He doesn't hover — wyrms don't hover, we're too large for that kind of fineness in the air. But he moves into the air below the field's edge and holds himself there with the patient power of something that has been doing this for twelve centuries and is entirely prepared to do it for as long as it takes. His sapphire eyes find Nova on the rock and stay.

Nova looks down for the first time.

She sees her grandfather below her, enormous and steady and calm, and I watch her take it in — the small stilling, the weighing. She has her mother's eye for danger and her mother's habit of reading a situation instead of reacting to it. What she reads below her is Thauglor, and Thauglor means I have you. Whatever happens. I have you.

She looks back at the horizon.

She opens her wings all the way. The morning wind takes them and lifts her a little — not flight, the almost-flight she's been practicing for weeks, the push of air against the membrane telling her what her own weight and span already promised. She is built for this. She has always been built for this.

She looks at me.

I make the low sound. Not the rumble of approval I give her when she's done something well. A different one, older, the sound a parent makes watching a child arrive at a moment that is the right moment, bearing witness and nothing more.

She looks at her mother.

Raven's eyes are very bright. Her jaw is set the way it sets when she's holding something enormous and keeping steady around it.

Nova looks back at the horizon.

And she jumps.

✦ ✦ ✦

She drops.

Not far. Two seconds, perhaps three, the long kind of seconds that belong to a thing happening that cannot be stopped and does not need stopping and is going to be exactly what it should be. Her wings open. The wind hits the membrane and she overcorrects — tilts right, wing tips catching unevenly, her small body turning before she works out the answer.

Then she works out the answer.

She catches the air.

Clumsily. Overcorrecting again coming back, losing two feet of height before she steadies. The wing angle is wrong — she's carrying her weight badly, putting too much of it on the leading edge. It'll be weeks before any of this is efficient.

She is flying.

She makes a sound I have never heard before.

In twelve centuries I have heard a great many dragon voices, the whole range of what we make, from the deep rumble of wyrms speaking below anything a human ear can find to the thin shriek of a distressed hatchling and every note between. I know dragon voice the way Finlay knows written language, by its pieces and its structures and what it carries.

Nova's first flight sound is none of them.

It is high and wild, and what's inside it is the sound of a thing that has waited its whole existence for one moment and has arrived at it. Pure and complete and entirely her own. A dragon voice that doesn't yet know which register it belongs to and doesn't care, making the most honest sound I have heard in a very long life.

From my left, Raven answers.

Her cry is lower, and it breaks in the middle — the sound of someone who has carried something a long time and is finally, here, setting it down. Her voice and her daughter's over Blackhaven in the morning, different in pitch and identical in meaning.

I add mine.

Below us Thauglor makes the deep vibration I know well, the sound that travels through bone as much as air, the old speech of a wyrm saying I have you. You are safe. I am here. He didn't need to catch her. He was never going to need to. He made the sound anyway.

✦ ✦ ✦

We fly for an hour.

Nova is inconsistent in all the ways first flight always is. She finds height and loses it, overcorrects and rights herself, discovers that turning left and turning right want different things from her because the muscle hasn't come in evenly on both sides yet, and learns each answer in the air through her own body. This is how dragons learn to fly. You cannot teach it in a field. The body has to find it.

She discovers thermals in the seventh minute. By accident — she flies through the warm air rising off the heated stone and gets fifteen feet of height she wasn't expecting. It startles her. Her wings fold a little in the flinch. Then she opens them again and goes looking for the thermal, and finds it, and rides it in a wide turning circle with the fierce concentration of a hatchling who has just learned something new about the world she lives in.

Below me, Raven makes a sound. Not a word. Just a sound, low and involuntary, the sound of a woman watching her daughter understand rising air for the first time and having no language for what it does to her.

Nova finds the thermal four more times in the next twenty minutes. Each time more deliberately. Each time losing a little less height between finding it and using it. That is the particular cleverness of her — not only the body learning, but the way she catches the pattern while it's still happening and puts it to work.

She calls out three more times, shorter sounds than the first and pitched differently, finding out what her voice does in the air the way she is finding out what her wings do. Each one distinct. Each one hers.

By the end of the hour there's a roughness at the edge of her wingbeats that tells me the muscle isn't ready for sustained flying yet. She knows it too. She banks toward Blackhaven without being told, reading her own body correctly, and that reading is a different kind of cleverness again. She will be a flier who knows her limits before they turn into failures.

She lands on the upper field in a controlled stumble that I choose to call a landing, because she is two years old and has just flown for the first time, and the distinction matters, and it was a landing.

She shifts back and stands in the field in the morning light with grass stains on her knees and her hair wild from the wind, and she looks at me.

"Again," she says.

"Tomorrow."

She considers arguing. She is two years old, she has just flown for the first time, and she is exhausted — and she has her mother's sense for when a position can't be won. "Tomorrow," she agrees.

Raven shifts and crouches to her level and holds out her arms, and Nova crosses the field at speed and hits her like a warm, grass-stained, wind-smelling missile, and Raven catches her and holds her and presses her face into the top of her daughter's head, and closes her eyes.

I stand in the flight field and watch my mate hold our daughter, and I am aware, with the complete clarity of someone who spent a thousand years unable to feel anything at all, that I am standing in the middle of the best thing that has ever happened to me.

A thousand years is a long while to have nothing. It's a long while to be inside a binding that holds you without killing you, suspended in that particular dark of enforced stillness, aware of time going past and unable to move inside it. I don't speak of it often. There's no use in living in the shape of a loss that has ended. But I keep the knowledge of that dark precisely because it is what makes standing in this field, in this autumn light, watching these two, feel like what it is.

Every ordinary thing is extraordinary to a creature that was denied ordinary for long enough.

Thauglor comes to stand beside me.

He's in human form now, having shifted quietly while I was watching the others. He stands with his arms at his sides in the way that is specifically Thauglor at rest — not relaxed. Present. Alert the way ancient things are always alert, but not readied for anything. His sapphire eyes are on his daughter and his granddaughter in the grass.

We say nothing for a long time.

"She'll be faster than either of us," he says eventually. Quietly. Not a boast. An old man making an honest assessment of what he has just watched.

"Yes."

"The rising air at seven minutes."

"I know."

He's quiet again. Then: "When she's old enough to know what she is — what she might be — she'll need people around her who have already come through the kind of thing that will be asked of her. She'll need that in her blood and in the people at her back."

I look at him. "You didn't come only for the flight."

"No," he says. "I came because she needed to see that her grandfather would come without being asked. That some things are simply given." He looks at Nova, who has fallen asleep against Raven's chest the way hatchlings do when they've spent everything they had. "The knowing can come later. Being held is the first thing."

We stand in the field. The autumn sun moves over Blackhaven. The war that is coming is not, for this one morning, the point.

Chapter 20

Raven

Two weeks.

I write it at the top of the page I keep behind the desk panel where nobody will look. Two weeks. Then I cross it out. Not because it's wrong — because crossing it out and writing it again is something I've done since the Purge date went on the calendar, a private ritual with no reason behind it that I keep performing anyway. The number sits differently once you've written it and struck it through. More real. The way saying a thing out loud changes its weight, the way repeating a problem moves it out of the part of your mind that avoids things and into the part that solves them.

I've been carrying this number for weeks. Six when it was six. Four when it was four. A steady count that has come along to every class and every patrol report and every council. It's been with me the way weather is with you — not always at the front of your attention, always there at the edges.

Two weeks.

I have the names.

✦ ✦ ✦

The records come through Callan's adjunct route — the same one Balor used to arrange Keir's visitor mark, which is kept in a different book than the one Anipe watches. Callan pulls them without raising anything, logs the access as part of his ordinary review of his own students, and leaves the files on the east tower desk at the end of a Tactics session when the room is empty.

I read them standing at the desk before I go.

Four students. Four histories. Four paths into Dragonis Academy that all run through the same office — Anipe's — and that all share the same quiet resemblance if you know what to look for. The paperwork is complete, consistent, and slightly too smooth. Real records have texture. They carry the marks of institutions that don't talk to each other cleanly, transfer credits that don't quite line up, personal statements that read like somebody was nervous and rewrote them three times. These are clean in a way real ones almost never are.

They were built. Assembled by someone who understood what a real record looks like and copied the shape of it instead of the thing.

The first. Enrolled eighteen months ago, second year now. Home listed as a small settlement in the western territories, which Keir's border survey marked as holding a fire drake population. Courses all practical, nothing theoretical — combat heavy, movement heavy, the schedule of someone who came here to build one skill rather than an education. His marks show steady competence and nothing more. Good enough to clear every threshold, never good enough to draw an instructor's eye. That's its own discipline. Being good enough to look ordinary is harder than being obviously good.

I follow his movements through the course records. Which classes, which hours, which instructors. He's in Balor's practical sessions twice a week, which puts him in the main courtyard when the courtyard is crowded. Good cover. But last term he chose an elective in outdoor terrain navigation, and that course runs along the western boundary of the academy grounds. The same western boundary the fire drake rotation sits outside of.

Not a coincidence.

The second. Enrolled fourteen months ago, and her papers put her in the northern territory, which is the odd one out. Either a different route in, or the appearance of one. The same smoothness underneath. Her record carries one strange entry: a distinction in a Shadowcarve elective that requires six weeks of sustained close work with the other students in it. The kind of closeness that gives you regular, unremarkable access to the scent of everyone around you. The kind that lets you build a catalog without anyone noticing you're building one.

She was chosen for that. Her work here isn't combat.

The third. Enrolled sixteen months ago, second year, and on paper the least interesting of the four — competent, unremarkable, a schedule with no shape to it at all. That's what makes him worth looking at. Every course he's taken puts him somewhere central at a busy hour. He isn't training for anything. He's learning the building.

The fourth. Callan's confirmed match, the transfer with the invented school. Twelve months enrolled, third year. His record is the most carefully built of them — too carefully. It has what looks like a flaw in it, two transferred credits that don't quite fit the rest of the transcript, which would ordinarily be a mark of authenticity. Except the flaw sits in a subject where the real records for that institution, which I pulled from the continental archive, show they never taught those units at all. Someone added the inconsistency to make the thing look real. They just didn't have accurate material to build it from.

There's one more thing, and it holds across all four.

They have never sat in a class with Orpheus. Never been enrolled in any session that also lists Bella or Azalea. In an institution this size, with three of them here over a year, no overlap at all with those specific people doesn't happen by chance. Somebody has been steering them away.

That's discipline. They aren't here for sport, aren't collecting grievances, aren't doing any of the casual violence a badly briefed plant falls into. They're here for one target on one day, and everything else — every class, every meal, every day they've spent inside these walls — has been arranged to keep that day intact.

I close the files. I take them to Balor.

✦ ✦ ✦

Balor's office has the quality of rooms that belong entirely to the person using them. It smells of old leather and the mineral dust of the training grounds, and the books on the shelves aren't decoration. They're used, the spines broken at the pages he goes back to. He's behind his desk when I knock, which he always is at this hour, and when I come in his face does the thing it does when he's about to receive something he expected and hoped not to need.

I put the files down.

He reads them in silence. It takes seven minutes, which is thorough — he isn't skimming, he's reading what I read and looking for what I looked for and finding it. When he's done he closes the top file, sets both hands flat on the desk, and looks at me.

"Anipe's office," he says.

"All four. The paperwork is built the same way across every file. Same smoothness. Same lack of any honest mess."

He nods once. His face goes very flat, the way it goes when something confirms a suspicion he didn't want confirmed. "I had questions about the second one when she enrolled. That distinction was unusual for the background on her papers." A pause. "I raised it with Anipe."

"And?"

"She produced supporting documentation that answered the question." He looks at me. "The supporting documentation was also too smooth."

"But you accepted it."

"I accepted it because I had no grounds at the time to doubt the paperwork itself. I run combat instruction. Checking the records isn't mine to do." He says it without heat. Not an excuse. A fact. "It is now."

I hold his gaze. Balor has been my mother's mate since before I hatched, my instructor since I came here, and my father since the year we learned what my blood actually was. He took that last one up the way dragons do — quietly, without rearranging anything to mark it. He was always there. He was simply never the one in the flight field the way Thauglor was, and neither of us has ever needed that to mean something it doesn't. For the last three years he has been the person in this institution who stands most consistently at my back. He has never pretended the hierarchy doesn't exist — he treats me as a student when the room requires it and as something else when it doesn't, and the change between the two is always readable and always correctly timed. What's on his face now is the second one. Not student and instructor. Something older than that.

"They stay enrolled until the Purge," I say.

He looks at me.

"If we move on them now, whoever is running them knows we've found them. The rotation outside changes, everything we have inside goes dark, and we're six weeks behind with two remaining." I hold his eyes. "I want them on the grounds. I want them believing the Purge is their day. And I want to be standing exactly where they expect to find me."

The flat expression doesn't move. "You're using yourself as bait."

"I'm the bait that bites back."

Silence. Balor has known me since the morning I hatched — the basilisk whose stone gaze kept a whole generation of Shadowcarve students honest, who spent two decades watching me grow up in the margins of this place. Visiting days. The summer combat clinics. The flight field, when I dragged my siblings through training none of them had asked for. The margins were where he stood. I understand now that he chose them. He has watched me become what I am with the particular attention of a man who loves you and is also your instructor and has to hold both at once.

What's in his face now is all of it together. The love, the professional judgment, and the arithmetic arriving where mine arrived. His red eyes hold mine across the desk.

"The Purge runs under its own rules," he says. "Once the bell goes I can't step in."

"I know."

"If you're wrong about any part of it⁠—"

"I'm not. But if I am, I have five mates and a dragoness who will make extremely poor decisions on my behalf, and any one of them is more than enough."

Something moves in his expression. Not amusement. Relief, maybe, wearing something drier. "Keep Orpheus close during the run. He isn't officially in it and he'll be in it anyway."

"I know." I almost smile. "I'm counting on it."

He nods once and picks up the files. "I'll open a formal review of the enrollments through Anipe's office this week. A routine audit — nothing that looks like it was prompted by anything." He looks at me over the stack. "When the Purge is done, I'll have the whole paper trail ready for Klauth."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," he says. "Get through the two weeks first."

I go.

✦ ✦ ✦

That evening I sit at the desk in my rooms at Malivore with five sheets of paper and five pens, and I write.

Not briefings. Not summaries or plans or the formal documents I've been producing in increasing volume for weeks. Letters. The kind that say the things I mean but don't say aloud, because there is always something else that has to be said first — a meeting, a plan, a next thing pressing into the space where the honest words would go.

I've been putting these off, and I know why. Writing a thing down is its own kind of declaration. It makes it real in a way that thinking it doesn't. And somewhere underneath the tactical part of me there's a superstition that says writing these letters is admitting something I'm not ready to admit. That the Purge might not go the way I've planned it.

It might not go the way I've planned it.

I pick up the first pen.

Corvus first. I tell him about the sea glass — that I still have the first piece he left me, the blue-green one, smooth on every edge, and that it lives in the inner drawer of my desk at Blackhaven and I look at it sometimes when I need to remember something I already know. I tell him what twenty-three years of his patient certainty about me has cost and what it has given, that those are two different things and I understand both of them now, and that I should have said it out loud years ago instead of finding other words. I tell him that watching him look at the wolves and the white unicorns on the Southern Isle — as things to be recognized rather than acquired, the way Therun put it — is the clearest picture I have of why I chose him. That he does that with everything he loves.

Hemlocke. I write about the foal, and the night he delivered her, and what it looked like from the upper field when I watched him work in the stall — his hands, the way he was present without crowding, the skill that looks like nothing because it's been practiced into invisibility. I tell him I know what he does for Blackhaven and that I see it every morning on the circuit. I tell him about Charron and Isolde, and that when the time comes I'll be there for whatever Leander needs to hear.

Keir. His is the shortest, because he doesn't need many words and the ones I give him I mean completely. I tell him I know what it is to be watched over by someone who never makes it feel like being watched over. That I've slept more soundly this past year than in the whole of my life, and that this is his doing. I tell him there's no one I trust more in the dark.

Finlay. I write about the rite — about the thing he said, that the loneliness is the mechanism, and that I understand it better for his having said it. I tell him what it means to have nine centuries of watching rulers walk this road, and to have the man carrying all of that choose to stand beside me while I learn to walk it. I tell him that when I write those acknowledgments after the Purge, the words will be mine, but what I understand about what they require will be his. That isn't a small thing to hand someone.

Solaris last. The longest. The hardest to begin and then the one I can't stop. I tell him about the thousand years — not what they cost him, he knows that better than I could put it, but what it means to me that he came out of them and chose ordinary. Chose the morning circuits and the flight field and Nova asleep on his chest and the paperwork I keep leaving on the corner of his desk and all the small accumulating weight of a life that is only a life. That he chose this, specifically. That every day I understand a little more completely what that means.

I fold each letter. I seal each one.

Xero is on the windowsill, watching me with those blood-red eyes, her leathery wings folded close. She's been there since I started, silent, present. When I finish she crosses the room without being asked and sits in front of the five letters.

"Only if something goes wrong," I tell her.

She looks at them a moment. Then she looks at me with the focused regard of a tressym who has decided something. Nothing goes wrong, she says, in the voice that presses warm against the inside of my skull. Raven is strongest. She lifts each letter carefully and tucks it into the small satchel she wears when she's carrying things that matter.

I watch her settle back on the sill with the letters safe against her side.

Two weeks.

I close the desk.

I go to sleep.

Chapter 21

Corvus

I have known what she's planning since she came back from the Eastern Isles.

This isn't a boast. I have no advantage over the others — Keir's nose and Finlay's network are both far finer instruments than whatever it is I do when I watch her. What I have is twenty-three years of Raven specifically. The way she takes in a threat. The way she builds a plan. The particular quality of her attention when she's decided something she isn't going to explain yet, because explaining it would set off responses she doesn't want to manage before she's ready. I've been watching that quality for a month now.

She's going to stand in the middle of the Purge grounds and let all of it come to her.

She told the war council she'd draw them in, and she will, because it's the right answer and she reached it honestly. Hand me the same problem and I'd reach it too. What she hasn't said out loud is the rest of it. She isn't only choosing this because it's the best move. She's choosing it because she is angry, and because this is the right moment for the anger, and because the Purge is the one event where she gets to be the most dangerous thing on the field and nobody is permitted to tell her to stand down.

I understand that completely.

I spent the first week after I understood it quietly terrified. I spent the second making my peace.

What I came to, at the end of that second week, is this. The fire drakes on the western border have been watching Blackhaven for months and they still don't know what Raven is. Not really. They see the dominant dragoness, the heir apparent, the threat to be measured — but those are categories, and she is not a category. She is specific. She is twenty-three years old, trained by her mother and by Thauglor and by Balor and by Klauth, and by the particular education of growing up knowing exactly what she would one day have to become. What all that training and knowing and anger and love have made is a thing the fire drakes have no name for.

They walked into the wrong Purge.

They just don't know it yet.

I hold onto that and let it do its work, and after two weeks the terror settles into something quieter. Not gone. I'll be on the outside of the bell for however many hours it runs, unable to reach her, knowing exactly what is happening on those grounds. That is not a comfortable place to stand. But comfortable isn't required. Useful is required, and useful I can manage.

✦ ✦ ✦

Two weeks out, Balor runs the pre-Purge staff briefing.

Every faculty member and permanent staff member who'll be on the grounds attends. The main hall, formal rows, Balor at the front with the composure of a male carrying out an institutional requirement that is also, this year, covering something he knows and cannot say.

I'm in the second row, where the adjunct faculty sit, which gives me the whole room. The senior Shadowcarve staff in front. The faculty rows behind them. The outer ring of Year Two observers who sit in on this as preparation for their own Purge when it comes. It's a large room when it's full. It's full.

Balor works through it all: what the Purge permits and doesn't, what makes a tag valid or invalid, the staff's obligation not to intervene and the narrow exceptions for genuine medical emergency. How word gets passed. What has to be written up afterward. The circumstances under which the bell can be rung early to end the whole thing. He covers it in the level, complete tone of a man who has given this briefing many times and finds it exactly as serious every time. If he has private thoughts about this particular year's Purge, none of them reach his face.

I read the room while he talks.

This is the skill twenty-three years of watching Raven from a careful distance built in me — following several things at once without appearing to follow any of them. You learn to let your eyes rest at the front while the edges of your attention do the work. You learn to notice without showing that you've noticed.

The student observers are the easiest to read. Nervous energy carries from here: the held breath, the too-much stillness, eyes that can't find anywhere to land. Some of them are nervous about their own turn, which is the correct response to sitting in a room formally preparing for an event in which some of your year will die. Some are nervous a different way — the nervousness of people carrying something hidden into a room full of people who don't know about it.

That second kind I note carefully.

The fourth plant — the transfer with the invented papers — is in the outer row, twelve feet to my right. He has been still since the briefing started. Not the stillness of paying attention, which looks different, all small shifts of weight and controlled breath. This is the stillness of a man holding himself in check, managing a tension that would otherwise show in his hands. His left hand in particular, gripping his knee harder than anything in this room warrants.

He's watching Raven.

She's in the faculty row, which is her place this year, beside Callan, facing forward. Taking in the briefing, showing nothing, and entirely aware of every person in the space, including the one twelve feet behind me who has been tracking her since he sat down.

She knows he's watching. The quality of her stillness tells me so — she's taking the attention in the way she takes in anything that's true and can't be acted on yet. Filed. Kept. Ready.

I don't look at him. I hold my seat and go on appearing to attend to Balor while I follow where he's looking, the angle of it, the tell in his left hand. All of it kept.

When the briefing ends and the room empties, I stay in my seat eleven seconds after he leaves before I stand.

Eleven seconds is plenty.

✦ ✦ ✦

She finds me in the east corridor an hour later.

I know she's been looking, not because she said so but because I know how she moves. After a formal session where she's had to watch and record without being able to act, she needs a stretch of walking before she can be still again. She'll have taken the east corridor, the south walkway, and looped back. The east corridor is where she'd find me if I were where I said I'd be.

I was where I said I'd be.

She falls into step without preamble and we walk. The corridor is empty at this hour — dinner pulls most of the academy to the main hall and leaves the teaching wings quiet in the way they only manage twice a day. The torchlight is thinner here than in the central buildings, the stone holding the day's warmth the way stone does.

"You know," she says.

"Yes."

"How long?"

"The Eastern Isles. You came back carrying the kind of settled that means you've made a decision rather than reached a conclusion."

She's quiet a few steps. "The difference matters to you."

"You reach conclusions constantly. They lead to more conclusions. A decision is different. It closes something, and you carry yourself differently afterward."

Another quiet. Then: "And?"

I consider what and is asking for. My assessment, my reaction, how I feel about the next twelve days. All of those are real and all of them are available to her.

"And nothing," I say. "You made the right call. The one who's been watching you since the briefing began is going to have a very educational Purge."

She looks at me sidelong — the expression she wears when I've said something she wasn't expecting and she's deciding what to do with it.

"You saw him."

"Outer row, twelve feet behind me. Following your line of sight since he sat down. Left hand on his knee, gripping harder than he needs to. He's good." A pause. "Not good enough."

"I know. I felt him."

"I know you did."

We walk. The corridor runs its length and turns. I'm very aware of her beside me — the familiar weight of her presence, the warmth the bond carries when we're this close, the thing that has been steady for twenty-three years and that I have been conscious of, at varying strengths, for every one of them.

"Come back to the suite," she says.

"Yes."

We don't talk about it.

That's the right call and we both know it. There's nothing left to say that hasn't been said, nothing to trade that hasn't been traded, no planning left undone. The Purge is two weeks off. The positions are set. The decision is made. What we have between now and the bell isn't more time to prepare. It's just time, and what you do with time once the preparing is finished is a question most people can't answer.

Raven can. She makes tea.

She does this when she wants her hands busy without her mind having to be, and I've learned over the past year to let her make it rather than offering, because the making is the point.

I sit on the floor with my back against the bed. The floor at Malivore is stone and cold, and I've solved this by keeping a folded blanket on the lower shelf of the desk, which I take out now and put under me. Small adjustments. A year of learning the geography of her rooms.

She brings me a cup and sits down beside me — on the floor rather than in the chair, her shoulder against mine, the warmth of contact without any ceremony around it. I wrap both hands around the cup and let the heat into my palms.

"The one at the briefing," she says. "Did you see his left hand?"

"The grip. Harder than the room called for."

"He's right-handed. The left is his weaker side and he gives it away under strain." She drinks her tea, which is still hotter than any reasonable person would make it. "I'll know him in the dark by the sound his left hand makes when he reaches."

"How?"

"People take hold of things differently when it's the weaker hand doing the work. He'll be a little slower with it. A little louder." She pauses. "A tenth of a second. In the dark that's enough."

I believe her. I believe her because I've watched her do this for a year now, the slow gathering of very small facts about very specific people, and because Raven's read on what a body gives away has never once been wrong in my experience.

"That's enough," I say.

"Yes."

Quiet. Her shoulder against mine. The scale in my chest is warm the way it goes warm when she's this close, the bond entirely present, nothing thinned by distance. I think about saying something and decide not to. What I would say I've already said, in one form or another, over the past three years. She's received all of it. And what's true right now doesn't need words — it's already in the contact, in the cup warming my hands, in the particular quality of the evening.

The tea goes cold. Neither of us moves.

Eventually the night does what nights do. We move from the floor to the bed and the strategy gives way to something older — two people who know each other completely, who know what's coming, choosing presence over preparation, because the preparation is finished and presence is what's left.

The bond runs very bright.

✦ ✦ ✦

I wake at that hour between night and morning when the sky in the east window is going from black to the dark blue that comes before gray.

She's already up.

She's at the window, and she's dressed — not in what she sleeps in, in her leathers, which means she's been awake long enough to dress and standing there long enough to stop needing to move. The early light turns the edge of her the same dark blue as the sky. Her wings are folded and still, the leading edges carrying that slight forward tilt they take when she's thinking.

I watch her a while without speaking. This is a thing I have done — the kind of watching that is only holding someone in your attention, being aware of them without wanting anything from the awareness — for twenty-three years. Since before she knew I existed in the way I existed for her. Since before the bond had a name. I have more hours of watching Raven than of nearly anything else I've done with my life, and not one of them has been wasted.

She knows I'm awake. She always knows. Even before the bond, before the scales, she had the awareness of someone who keeps track of the people in a room as automatically as breathing.

"Two weeks," I say quietly.

She doesn't turn. "Twelve days, actually."

"Twelve days."

Silence. The sky shifts another shade toward morning. Somewhere below, the first of Keir's patrol is starting its run — I can hear the faint disturbance in the air that blink hounds leave behind when they phase, so slight most creatures would never catch it.

"I'll see you on the other side," she says.

Not a question. Not reassurance fishing for reassurance back. A statement, the kind she makes when a thing has settled all the way through her and she is declaring rather than discussing. The same tone she uses for this is the decision, and means completely.

"I know you will."

She stays at the window a moment longer. Then she picks up her pack — already packed, because she does that the night before, always — and opens the door and walks out into the academy's early morning without looking back, because she knows I'm here and looking back isn't required.

I lie in the room that smells of her and of cold mountain air, and I think: she's right. She will.

And I think: twelve days.

I get up. I get dressed. I go to work.

Chapter 22

Raven

The day before the night before, I wake up and I go to Tactics.

This is a choice. There are things I could be doing instead. A last look at everything we have. A check-in with Keir on the border rotation. Another pass over the four fire drake records to see whether I've missed anything. The pre-Purge walk of the grounds that Balor has offered twice and I've declined twice. I've declined because I already know those grounds — three years of training on them, every path and corridor walkable in the dark with my eyes shut — and walking them today with intent would tip me out of the present and into the anticipating. I need to stay present.

The Purge starts tomorrow night. Everything I need to know, I know. Everything that needed doing before it starts is done. The work now is not to keep working. The work is to still be the person who does what needs doing when the bell rings, rather than the person who spent the last day running every scenario until the scenarios crowded out the clarity.

So I go to Tactics. I sit in my usual seat. I watch Callan pin the scenario to the board.

I've seen it before — not this exact one, this kind. A contested resource, several claimants, and incomplete knowledge of what each of them can actually do as against what they've let everyone believe they can do. The classroom version of a problem I've been living inside for months, which means I could run the standard answer in about seven minutes, hand it in, and score well.

Instead I solve it three ways.

The first is the textbook answer, clean and elegant, spending as little as possible. The second takes a deliberately worse road to the same place, to see whether the longer route changes anything about where you arrive. It does, slightly — the long way turns up a consequence further down the line that the clean answer never surfaces. I note that. The third treats the missing information as the actual problem rather than a condition to work around, and builds toward finding out what I don't know before committing anything. It's slower. It's far more certain.

I hand in all three.

Callan gives all three the same mark, which I only learn at the end of class when he tells me. He reads them through in order, then looks up with the expression he wears when something has landed exactly where he built it to land. "Same mark because all three do the job," he says. "Different marks would say one method is better than the others. It isn't. What's right depends on where you're standing."

"I know," I say. "I wanted to see whether you'd say it."

"I know you did." He picks up the papers. "Get some sleep tonight."

I go.

✦ ✦ ✦

Lunch is loud.

Bella has found something objectionable in the hot food and is making that known with the theatrical energy she brings to all food complaints — not actually upset, performing upset well enough to satisfy an audience, because the performance is where the fun is. Azalea is defending the cafeteria with equal energy from the opposite direction, just as theatrical, just as uninvested in the actual question of the food, feeding off the friction the way she's fed off Bella's friction since they were hatchlings in the same nest.

Orpheus eats without objection and watches them both with the dry satisfaction of a man who enjoys other people's performances and has the self-control not to join in.

I eat my food. It's bad. That's fine. The food has been consistently bad for three years and the consistency is its own comfort, the known thing in the known place.

"The potato thing," Bella says, pointing at my plate. "That's not a potato thing."

"It's what they said when I asked."

"They're wrong."

"I think it's a root of some kind," Azalea says. "Not a potato. In the potato family."

"The potato family should be ashamed," Bella says.

Orpheus makes the sound that passes for his laugh. I eat the root thing, which is fine, because it doesn't taste of much, which means it doesn't taste of anything bad.

No strategy. No hand signs. No planning sessions dressed as meals, no briefings dressed as conversation. Bella and Azalea argue about the cafeteria for eleven minutes and then swerve with no warning into a story about Allister, who is apparently in the middle of an elaborate situation with someone in his year that started with a borrowed book and has escalated far past anything a borrowed book should be able to cause. The story is not tactical. It is funny. I laugh in the right places and in a few wrong ones, because it's funnier than they're telling it and Orpheus's commentary underneath is making it worse.

My siblings are exactly themselves today. That's the most useful thing they could possibly be, and they have no idea it's useful, which makes it more so. Nothing in it is performed — not the food, not Allister, not Orpheus running under the noise like a warm current. They're just themselves, the way they always are, and I'm with them, the way I always am, and for an hour none of us is anything else.

I eat everything on my plate, including the root thing.

✦ ✦ ✦

The stables in the afternoon hold the warmth they always hold at this hour — bodies and hay and the low autumn sun through the south windows, the smell of a place given over to keeping living things well. I hear the foal before I see her, that high expectant sound a young horse makes when it recognizes footsteps and has opinions about them.

I didn't plan to come here. I finished lunch and my feet took the stable route the way feet do when the body has decided something before the mind catches up. That isn't a bad sign. My body is usually right.

Titan isn't in his stall. He's in the paddock at the far end of the block, where he goes when the weather is clear and the sun is low enough not to bother him. I find him at the fence, holding the stillness that is specifically his — not resting, not alert, simply a very large horse who has decided this stretch of rail deserves his attention today. His black coat takes the afternoon light and gives none of it back. He absorbs it the way I do in dragon form.

He turns as I come. His dark eyes find me and stay.

I let myself through the gate. He doesn't come to meet me. He never does. He waits, with the patience of something that learned long ago the approach is yours to make or not, as you like. I cross the paddock and put my hand on his neck and feel the warmth of his coat in the sun and stand there a while before I do anything else.

He doesn't need anything from me except to be brushed.

That's what I came for, I understand now that I'm here. Not the review. Not the border check. Not another circuit of things I've already been around until the going around stops producing anything new and starts producing dread. Titan doesn't need my strategy. He doesn't need my anger or my plan or anything I've built. He needs the brush to come from the right direction with steady pressure over the shoulder blade, and he would like the apple slice he knows perfectly well I'm carrying.

I take the brush off the hook by the gate, start at his neck, and work.

The motion is its own kind of thinking, the sort where the hands are busy and the mind gets permission to move slowly through whatever it wants rather than at the speed the other work demands. I think about Nova leaning into the wind off Solaris's wings, learning the pull. I think about Hemlocke and the foal and the twenty-seven candles in the great hall. I think about Finlay at the front of the Protocol room saying the rite creates an edge with nine centuries standing behind the words. I think about nothing in particular for a while, which is a skill I've been working at and which the brushing makes easier.

The foal comes to watch at some point, her head over the rail, all legs and bright chestnut, the white blaze down her face still too wide for the rest of her, studying me with the intensity of something young enough to find nearly everything worth investigating. Titan ignores her the way he ignores anything that doesn't require him. The foal watches me the way she watches everyone she hasn't finished deciding about.

I brush him for an hour.

The hour passes without any of it feeling like preparation, or like waiting. It's just an hour. When I'm done I put the brush back, give Titan his apple slice, which he takes with dignified efficiency, and press my forehead briefly to his.

"Thank you," I tell him.

He puts his nose against my palm.

I go.

✦ ✦ ✦

Corvus finds me in the suite at the seventh hour. He comes through the door with a paper bag and the expression he wears when he's done something he knows will land, carrying the knowledge of it slightly ahead of himself.

The bag holds dark sea salt caramel chocolate, the kind from the town market three miles down. It's the only place in the region that makes it properly, which I know because I once ate a badly made version in Corvus's presence and he spent four minutes explaining the difference — which at the time I thought excessive and now understand entirely, because the difference is real and the bad version is genuinely worse.

"You went to town."

"I had time between the fourth-year assessment and dinner."

"That's a three-mile run."

"Six, there and back," he says. "It's fine." He says it's fine in the tone that means it was six miles in the cold and he'd do it again unasked, because this is how Corvus loves people — practically, by fetching the correct version of the thing, by running six miles in the cold rather than buying the wrong one nearby.

We sit on the floor. He doesn't ask about the chair. He knows this is a floor conversation, the kind where neither of us has to perform anything. We eat the chocolate slowly, the way it deserves, small pieces, letting each one finish before the next.

"Callan gave me the same mark for all three."

"Of course he did."

"I knew he would. I still needed to check."

"You always need to check." Not teasing. Warm — the warmth of someone who finds a habit endearing because he's watched it produce right answers for twenty-three years. "It's one of your better qualities. You never take a thing as true just because you expected it to be."

"The root thing at lunch wasn't a potato."

"I know. It's the northern variety Hemlocke brought in for the lower garden last spring. It tastes of very little, which means it takes on whatever you cook it with. The cafeteria cooked it with nothing interesting, which is the cafeteria's fault."

"Hemlocke should take over the kitchen."

"He'd be extremely good at it and extremely unhappy," Corvus says. "He'd do it perfectly and never once mention that he hated it."

Which is accurate. I eat another piece.

The window goes dark. The conversation drifts with no destination — the foal, Callan and his three identical marks, something Finlay said in Protocol about the difference between mourning and witness that I've been turning over since, whether the town market has the good bread on Thursdays or only Saturdays. The particular drift of two people who know each other well enough not to need the conversation to arrive anywhere.

When the chocolate is gone and he moves to go, I hold on a beat longer than usual.

He doesn't remark on it. He doesn't reassure me or ask about it or do anything with it except hold on back — that bit of extra pressure through the arms that says I know. I have you. Go.

Then he goes, and the suite is quiet, and I am alone.

I lay everything out on the desk.

Not to review it. I know every item, know where each sits on my body, know how each blade comes out and in what order and what my hands do first when more than one thing arrives at once. I lay them out because this is what I do before something that matters. I put the things I'm carrying in front of me and let them be real and physical instead of abstract in my head.

Four blades. The contacts in their case. Two things I'm not going to name even here. And the one written list — Orpheus's name, the signal he'll be watching for, the plan if it goes wrong in one specific way. Folded small, carried against the inside of my left wrist.

I count the blades. I check the contacts. I fold the list.

I put everything away.

Xero has been on the windowsill the whole time, keeping out of the counting because the counting needed the room. Now that it's done, she comes.

She drops to the desk with the soundlessness of something built for exactly that, wings flaring once to steady the landing and folding away against her back so neatly they might not be there at all. Then she crosses the desk with her tail straight up and walks directly into my hand. Not near it. Into it, forehead first, the way cats do, hard enough that my knuckles rock back. She drags the length of her cheek along my fingers, jaw to ear, then turns and does the other side, marking me with the thoroughness of a creature laying claim to something in front of witnesses.

Whiskers against my wrist. The bony little skull under all that fur, butting again, insisting.

Tomorrow.

"Tomorrow," I agree.

Raven wins.

"Yes."

She holds my eyes a moment longer. Then she steps up onto my forearm — small precise weight, claws finding the leather and not my skin, a habit she learned early and has never once forgotten — and walks up to my shoulder, wings opening halfway for balance and folding again the moment she arrives.

She turns twice. Kneads once, twice, three times into the muscle where my neck meets my shoulder, front paws working, entirely absorbed in it, and then settles all at once the way cats do, as though standing was a thing that happened to someone else.

Her tail comes around the back of my neck and curls under my chin, warm and heavy and faintly ridiculous.

Then she puts her face against my jaw and purrs.

It isn't the contented purr. I know the difference — the contented one is loose and irregular and stops when she thinks about something else. This one is steady and low and deliberate, and it goes into the bone. It doesn't say I am comfortable. It says I am here. I have you. We are together. She keeps it up while she pushes her forehead under my jaw and rubs, cheek to jaw, again and again, until the fur is going the wrong way along her temple and she doesn't care and neither do I.

I reach up and scratch behind her ears. She tips her head into my fingers, and the purr climbs.

"Get some sleep," I tell her.

When Raven sleeps.

I close the curtain. I turn off the light. I lie down, and she comes with me, arranging herself against my ribs with her wings tented over her back and her chin on my collarbone, still purring.

I am not afraid.

I am present.

I sleep.

Chapter 23

Raven

I send the message through Orpheus at the sixth hour of the evening.

Not hand signs. A note, plain, slipped under his door while he was in his last class. It says: Suite. Eighth hour. Bring Bella and Azalea. Nothing else. He doesn't need more than that. He has known most of the shape of this for weeks, and the note tells him the managing is over and the knowing starts tonight.

I have been deciding when to tell them for two months. Not whether. Never whether — my siblings deserve to be told, and Orpheus in particular has been circling the edges of it in the signs we've traded all term, close enough to the whole picture that keeping it from him has been a small ongoing dishonesty I've been carrying around. The decision was only ever about when. Too early and they spend weeks holding something they can't act on, which wears at a person. Too late and they don't have time to take it in and adjust, to become the version of themselves that has absorbed this rather than the version that just heard it.

The night before is right. One night is enough to absorb. Not enough to overthink.

They arrive in order. Orpheus first, which is typical, then Bella and Azalea together, which is also typical. They arrange themselves with the ease of people who have shared rooms for twenty-three years and settled the question of who sits where a long time ago. Nobody discusses it. It simply happens.

I stand.

"Three fire drake plants in the student body," I say. "Enrolled through Anipe's office over the past eighteen months on invented papers. They've been deliberately staying away from all of you — steered, not coincidence. They aren't here for sport and they aren't here for Purge standing. They have one target and they have been extremely patient."

I let that land.

"They're here for you," Orpheus says. Not a question.

"Yes. There's a fourth, separate — a third-year transfer, also on invented papers. I think his work is different from theirs. Watching rather than fighting, probably. I'm still confirming. Don't take on any of them directly unless there's no other option."

"Samara," Orpheus says.

"Also hunting me during the Purge. She spent a night in the restricted archive photographing the founding charter, looking for original language about faculty conduct that the current rules never expressly struck down."

"Does the original language give her grounds?" Bella asks. Her voice is level — Ziggy's calm, the flatness that is simply the absence of panic.

"Probably not. It's ambiguous enough that anyone could argue it either way. But she's going to try regardless, which means I deal with her during the Purge instead of after."

"Anipe," Azalea says. She's been quiet, listening, hands folded around the pillow in her lap. "She's the one running the paper side."

"Yes. Balor is building the record. After the Purge he'll have everything Klauth needs. During the Purge she's mine." I look at the three of them. "Here's the plan. I'm the most visible target on those grounds. I stay visible, I stay central, and I let all of it come to me instead of scattering across a hundred students. The fire drakes, Samara, Anipe — all of them come to me. You three and everyone else are out of it."

"Which puts you in the middle of four separate threats at once," Orpheus says. Level. Also not a question.

"Four threats converging on one known position is a simpler problem than four threats moving freely across the whole grounds. It's the right call."

He holds my eyes a moment with the basilisk assessment that has never been entirely comfortable, even between us. Then: "You should have told us sooner."

"I'm telling you now."

A beat. He nods.

This is one of the things I love in Orpheus. He makes his point once, takes the answer, and moves on. He doesn't need the long argument or the last word. He said the true thing. I heard it. We go on.

Bella is looking at me with the face she wears when she's decided to say something. "Are you scared?"

"No."

She considers that. "Good," she says. "That's good."

"You don't believe me."

"I believe you. I also know you. Not being scared and not showing scared are two different things, and you've been doing one of them for six weeks and I couldn't tell which." She looks at me steadily. "Now I know. It's good."

Azalea reaches over and puts her hand over mine — the gesture she's had since she was five, which has always meant exactly what it means without needing anything said around it.

✦ ✦ ✦

I give them each something.

Orpheus gets the list first. Four names. The three fire drake students with their schedules and their tells, and the transfer marked separately, his purpose still unknown, with a note that he should be treated as a fourth until proven otherwise. Orpheus reads it in under a minute. He reads everything in under a minute. He folds it in quarters and puts it in his inner pocket and his face doesn't change, which means he's already fitting it into whatever he's been building in his own head all term.

"The transfer gives away his left hand," I say. "You'll see it in the grip. He reaches a little slower with it and holds harder than he needs to. In low light, go by sound."

He nods. One hand opens and closes, briefly — a fighter's body taking hold of something new. "The second one. The one with the proximity elective."

"She catalogs scent. She's been building a map of the whole student body in her head. She'll know who's near her without looking. Come at her downwind and don't let her nose do its work."

Another nod. No further questions. Orpheus has the list, Orpheus will prepare, Orpheus will be exactly where he needs to be tomorrow.

Bella gets a vial. Small, dark glass, sealed with the red wax that means the contents are dangerous. She holds it up and tilts it, watching how the lamplight moves through it.

"Is that⁠—"

"Carefully bottled. Carefully measured. The Purge permits you to use what your own body can produce." I look at her. "Which means for the length of the Purge it's legal. Outside it, you never saw this. You don't know I can make it."

Bella turns the vial over in her fingers, taking an accurate measure of exactly what she's been handed and what it means. Her expression moves through several things and settles somewhere that isn't quite pleased and isn't quite awed — the face of someone who has just been trusted with something and understands completely what the trust is.

"I'll be very responsible," she says.

"I know. Don't use it unless you're genuinely out of options. It's for out of options."

"Understood."

She tucks it into the inner pocket of her jacket, the one that sits against the ribs and takes a deliberate reach to find. The right place for a last resort.

Azalea gets a signal. I describe it exactly: a red flare, filed under the standard Purge distress rules but meaning, to me specifically, I need you regardless of what you are doing. Not a general call — I'll get those and weigh them against where I am. The red flare skips the weighing. It means Azalea, now, nothing waits.

"You won't need it," I say.

"I know." She looks at me steadily. "But I'll have it."

"Yes."

"And you'll come."

"Yes."

She holds my eyes another moment, the particular look Azalea gets when she has decided to believe something and wants you to know the deciding is done. "Thank you," she says.

✦ ✦ ✦

We eat.

I ordered food from the kitchen earlier — not the cafeteria, the actual kitchen, where Corvus has a standing arrangement with the evening shift. There's bread, and the braised thing I've learned to name by smell before the lid comes off, and cheese from the good batch Hemlocke arranged with a southern supplier last month. Orpheus produces a bottle of something from inside his jacket with the composure of a man who finds this unremarkable.

"The east dormitory cellar," he says, when Bella looks at it.

"That cellar doesn't exist," Azalea says.

"Correct."

We eat on the floor, because four of us spread across the available furniture would require negotiations, and the stone at Malivore is cold and we've all sat on worse. It's fine. It's better than the furniture would have been, in the way that the right people make any space better than its furniture.

The food is good. The wine from the nonexistent cellar is also good. We eat without any agenda — no planning, nothing exchanged, nothing required of anyone except to be here and eat and talk about whatever arrives.

"The worst thing the cafeteria ever served," Bella says, in the tone of a woman opening a competition, "was the gray thing. Third week of Year One."

"The gray thing was porridge," Azalea says.

"Porridge is not gray."

"That one was."

"That is my point."

Orpheus: "The soup in second semester. The one with the⁠—"

"We agreed we don't discuss the soup," Bella says.

"You agreed. I never signed anything."

"The soup is a closed matter," I say. "It's been three years. It needs to rest."

"The soup should rest," Azalea agrees. "Possibly permanently. In the ground."

We discuss the soup for six minutes anyway, reaching nothing, because the soup is the kind of shared experience that resists analysis and rewards description. Then Bella finds the seam between topics and slides through it the way she always does, into the winter Allister decided to teach himself to cook.

Orpheus has additions I didn't know about. He was there for meals I missed, and the ones he describes are worse than the ones I remember, which I would not have thought possible.

"He was trying to impress someone," Azalea says.

"He impressed everyone with something," Orpheus says. "Just not the thing he was aiming at."

"The second attempt was actually edible," I say.

"The second attempt was barely edible," Bella says. "We ate it because we love him."

"That's what family is," Azalea says.

The room goes quiet a moment after she says it. Not a heavy quiet. The warm kind that comes after something true and doesn't want anything added to it.

I look at my three siblings on the floor of my rooms the night before the Purge and I think: I have everything I need. Not the preparation — I have that too, but that isn't what I mean. I mean this. People who know me specifically, who came without needing to be told why, who ate the bad cafeteria food and the good braised thing and the wine from the cellar that doesn't exist and argued about soup for six minutes and are not afraid of tomorrow, because they trust me and I have given them reason to.

It is enough.

We finish the food. We finish the wine. The academy's overnight quiet settles into the corridors outside.

"We should go," Azalea says. She always reads that first.

They go. Bella squeezes my shoulder on the way out, one quick firm press, which is her version of a declaration. Azalea stops at the door and looks at me with the look that means she has something to say and has decided this isn't the night for it, and keeps it for another time, and the keeping is its own kind of love.

Orpheus last. He stops in the doorway and looks at me once — the look that holds everything we've said in signs across the term and everything we've never needed to say, because we've known each other since we were hatchlings in the same nest. He nods. I nod back.

He goes. The door closes.

✦ ✦ ✦

I sit in the quiet a while.

This isn't the anxious quiet of before-something. I've sat in that one enough times to know the difference, and this isn't it. This is the quiet of a thing that has been made ready and is only waiting for its hour, with the patience that comes of having done everything there was to do. The preparing is finished. The decision is made. The night has its hours and they'll pass and in the morning the bell will ring and I will be exactly where I need to be.

I don't need to go through it again.

Xero comes down off the sill.

She lands on the desk without a sound, wings flaring once and folding flat, and crosses to me with her tail straight up and the tip of it curled over. She sits at the desk's edge, close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her, and looks at me with those blood-red eyes that don't reflect the lamp so much as take it in and keep it.

Tomorrow Raven wins.

I look at her. She is attending to me completely, the way she does when she has decided a thing and means to say it.

"Tomorrow Raven wins," I say.

She holds my eyes another moment. Then she pushes her whole head into my hand, forehead first, and drags her cheek along my palm — one side, then a full turn, then the other side, thorough about it. Her whiskers catch on my thumb. She butts once more, harder, in case I missed the point.

Then she steps onto my forearm, claws in the leather and not the skin, and walks up to my shoulder. Wings half open for the balance. Wings folded again the moment she arrives. She turns around twice, kneads three times into the muscle at the base of my neck, and drops into place all at once, tail coming around under my chin.

She presses her face against my jaw and purrs.

Not the loose contented one. The other one — low and steady and deliberate, the one that travels through the bone and doesn't stop. I am here. I have you. We are together. Nothing that matters is alone.

I reach up and scratch behind her ears. She tips into my fingers and the purr climbs, and she keeps rubbing her forehead under my jaw, again and again, until the fur along her temple is standing the wrong way.

We sit in the quiet together. The night runs out its last hours. The lamp burns low. In the morning the bell will ring, and I will stand in the center of the grounds, and I will be the most dangerous thing on that field.

I already know how this ends.

Chapter 24

Raven

The bell rings at dawn.

I'm already in position.

Klauth's voice comes across the grounds the way it always comes at an opening, carried further than any voice should carry, the formal declaration in the words that have been read at the start of every Purge since Dragonis established the tradition. I have heard it three times now. The first time it stood the hair up on my arms. The second time I'd been training a year toward it and I listened differently. This time I hear it the way you hear a starting bell. The signal. Not the ceremony.

The gates close.

The sound they make is old iron on old iron, a mechanism built for this one purpose and used twice a decade, and every student on these grounds feels it in the chest rather than the ears. Not loud. Final. The vibration comes up through the soles of my boots and out through the stone and dies somewhere under the east tower.

Around me, the student body moves.

Most of them scatter — the instinct for high ground, for a wall at your back, for someone who'll watch the side you can't. Some were paired before the bell. Some are running to be paired now, and the running has a particular sound to it, boots slapping fast on frost-slick stone, breath going out in visible bursts in the cold. The ones who prepared know where they're going. The ones who didn't are finding out that the grounds look different with the gates shut.

I don't run.

I walk to the center of the Shadowcarve courtyard and I stand there.

The courtyard is one of the most exposed places on these grounds. Wide open stone, no cover worth the name, no height, four ways in. There is no defensive sense in standing here at all.

Which is exactly why I'm standing here.

I'm not defending.

I cross my arms. I look at each approach in turn — north, east, south, west. The morning light is still low and coming in flat, throwing long shadows that lie across the flagstones like something spilled. Frost has silvered the seams between the stones and hasn't burned off yet; it will in an hour, and the courtyard will go from white-veined to plain gray, and anyone who crosses it before then will leave prints. The western approach is the hardest to read, because the light from that side is behind me — which means anyone coming from the west takes the sun in the face and I don't. I note it. I shift my weight a fraction to give myself the fastest turn that way if I need it.

Then I wait.

The cold sits on the back of my neck. Somewhere off toward the kitchens a chimney is going, and the smoke comes across the courtyard in threads, woodsmoke and the mineral smell of wet stone warming, and underneath both the cold iron of the shut gates. My breath is visible. So will everyone's be.

My dragoness is fully present. She's been present since I woke — not restless, not pushing toward the shift, simply here, the way she is when she's decided something is about to deserve her whole attention. She doesn't speak. She watches with me. The contacts are in. The blades are where they belong. My left ear has settled into the low, wide sensitivity it finds in this kind of silence, sorting the ordinary from everything that isn't.

The first hour is quiet in the way that isn't actually quiet.

I can hear the grounds working. Engagements starting out at the edges — the particular sound a body makes meeting stone, the footfall of someone moving with intent rather than moving somewhere, the short scraping ring that means a blade has come out of a sheath. All of it arrives at my left ear as one continuous map. I'm not searching for threats. I'm counting everyone who moves toward me and everyone who is carefully not moving toward me, and watching the space between those two groups.

The fire drake plants are watching me.

I know because I've spent six weeks learning the weight of their attention, and two of those weights are on me now, and both of them have a direction.

The first is in the eastern approach, fifty feet back, moving in a pattern that is almost — not quite — the pattern of a student picking a route. Too even. He isn't going anywhere. He's holding a distance.

The second is in the north corridor near the archway, using the shadow of a pillar. She took the shadow at a slight angle off the pillar's mass rather than directly behind it, which is good instinct — it makes her harder to pick out from straight on. But the shadow's edge gives her away to the side of your eye, if the side of your eye knows what it's looking for.

The third I haven't found. His scent is buried better than theirs.

My dragoness is very interested in the third one.

Missing is information. Missing means he's either coming from an angle this position doesn't show me, which is possible, or he was never meant to fight at all. Something else.

I smile at the north corridor pillar. Deliberately. Straight at the shadow where she's holding.

The shadow moves. Barely. A hand's width. She wasn't expecting to be seen and the being-seen startled it out of her.

Good.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first engagement finds me at thirty-seven minutes.

I hear him before I see him. A fourth-year I know by face and not by name — nothing to do with the fire drakes, nothing to do with anything I've been tracking, just a fourth-year who has decided that the heir apparent standing alone in the middle of an open courtyard is an opportunity. He's made several correct observations. I'm exposed. I'm not moving. I look like I'm waiting for something, which might mean my attention is elsewhere. He's made one fatal one: he's reading me as a student who got unlucky with her position instead of a dragoness who chose it.

He comes fast from the south and he's gone quiet in the way people go quiet when they believe quiet is enough. Footfall softened, breathing under control. But not the whisper of his jacket lining against his arm as it swings, not the small shift in the air ahead of him as he closes. None of that is loud. All of it arrives at my left ear perfectly clear.

I don't turn.

I let him come to seven steps. Then I pivot, smooth, nothing telegraphed, and the blade is at throat height when he arrives, and the half-shift comes half a second behind it. Scales rising along my forearms, black and cold-looking in the low sun. The dragoness making herself visible without fully arriving. The pressure of her fills the space between us like weather changing. He can feel it. Most creatures can feel it at this distance even when they couldn't name what they're feeling.

He stops. His hands come up at once. He's clever enough to read the position and to know that being clever right now costs him nothing while arguing would cost him everything.

"Tag," I say.

He goes down. The convention — tagged, down, wait for retrieval. He does it correctly, which tells me he was briefed properly and isn't going to make a performance out of losing. I appreciate that. Performances waste time.

I step over him and keep walking. Behind me his breath is loud in the cold, and steadying.

The dragoness eases back out of the half-shift as I go. She isn't disappointed. She never expected the fourth-year to be interesting and he wasn't. What he was is the first fact of the day: the grounds are live, the engagements have started, and the fire drakes watching from their corners have now seen me take a fourth-year in two seconds from a standing start without appearing to try.

The message goes out into the courtyard air with the woodsmoke.

Come find me.

I keep walking.

✦ ✦ ✦

Orpheus finds me at forty-three minutes.

He doesn't announce himself. He is simply there, matching my pace two feet to my right with his hands in his pockets, carrying the quality he uses when he's moving through a place without touching it. A basilisk's trick — being visible without being present, occupying a space without claiming any of it. People look at Orpheus and their eyes slide off. He has been doing it since he was eight. It's considerably more useful now than it looked then.

"The transfer," he says. Quiet.

"I still haven't placed him."

"East tower. Third-floor window. He was set up before the bell."

I take that in without breaking stride. "Watching. Not fighting."

"Sending. Steady, since the bell went. I saw the device when I cleared the tower at minute twelve."

"To the border."

"That's the way it was pointed."

I walk a few steps with it. A running account of me — where I am, where I go, where the others sit in relation to me — going out over the western line the whole time. Not three plants and a watcher. The fire drakes outside the boundary as a live part of this, fed minute by minute.

"That's a great deal more than three angry fire drakes," I say.

"Considerably."

"Can you reach the tower?"

"Already did. He isn't sending anymore."

I look at him.

"He had an accident," Orpheus says, in the dry delivery he keeps for things he considers both deliberate and unremarkable.

"Tagged?"

"Tagged and unconscious. The medical staff will collect him. The device won't be doing anything for anyone."

"So the border loses its eyes."

"Yes. Whatever they fall back on, they're falling back on it blind."

I think about that. Blind, for something built this carefully, means going to whatever was agreed in advance. The plants know their fallback. The question is what it is, and whether I can use the gap while it reaches them.

"How long since you put him down?"

"Eleven minutes."

"Then they've had time to change over."

"Some. It takes a while to reach everyone. Both of the ones on the ground are still where I last saw them."

The wind comes up the corridor from the east training ground, carrying hay and horse and cold. I redraw the picture. The first is still holding in the east. The second — the one who works by scent — is in the north.

"She's broken position," I say.

"Four minutes ago. Moving."

We walk. The grounds are busier in the second hour. Pairs settling old business, small groups working the edges of the marked zones. Somewhere behind the west range someone is shouting, and the shout cuts off. The courtyard has thinned out. Most of the people who had business here have taken it elsewhere.

"Anipe," Orpheus says. Flat.

I look at him.

"South grounds. Moving. She has a crossbow."

Faculty. Armed. During the Purge. Either the founding language Samara went digging for, or something less careful than that — something that never needed legal cover because it was never going to be inside the rules at all. I file the difference and keep moving. Moving is always right when what you know is incomplete.

"Taking a position?"

"Upper south walk. Elevated. She'll see most of the central grounds from up there."

Height and a long-range weapon. A crossbow from that walk reaches most of this courtyard. It's a deliberate placement. She doesn't want to be near me. She wants to own the ground I'm standing on.

"How long until she's set?"

"She was moving when I left the tower. Eight minutes ago. She'll be set by now."

I redraw it again. The watcher gone. Two on the ground converging on the armory. One still unaccounted for. Anipe above the south walk with a crossbow. Samara somewhere I can't see.

"Find Hemlocke," I say. "Stable loft. He can see the south walk from up there. Tell him to signal me if she moves."

"Hemlocke doesn't have a signal⁠—"

"He'll work one out." I glance at him. "He always does. And stay out of her line yourself."

He gives me the look he gives when I've told him to do something he was already doing. Then he peels off, smooth, beside me one moment and not the next.

I go on toward the armory corridor.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first plant makes his move at fifty-eight minutes.

He comes from the east — the one who was holding in the eastern approach, the one whose pattern was too even to be a route. He's angling for the armory corridor, which runs between the main courtyard and the east training ground. Narrow passage, stone close on both sides, ceiling low enough to take vertical options off the table, floor worn to a shine by centuries of feet. The kind of space that forces you in close, cuts every sight line to arm's length, and gives a shifted dragoness nowhere to put her wings.

He's studied these grounds. He's found the one place that suits me least and he's moving to make the fight happen there. That is good thinking.

What he doesn't know is that I have been through that corridor three hundred times. He doesn't know about the slight left curve at the midpoint that makes a blind angle from the entrance, or the drainage channel cut along the eastern wall that works as a step if you know it's there, or that the third torch bracket from the far end has been empty since my first year and leaves eleven feet of dark. He doesn't know that I know all of it, because he has been here eighteen months and I have been here three years, and there is a specific difference between knowing a place and having trained in it long enough that the knowing lives in your body instead of your head.

He wants me in the corridor, in the small space, with fewer options. He's going to get me in the corridor. Everything else he's assuming is going to need revising.

I change direction. Not away. Toward. I set my path to meet his at the corridor mouth, and I time it so I get there first. He expects to be waiting when I arrive. I intend to arrive differently than he's planned for.

Same unhurried pace. I don't look at him. I telegraph nothing.

"The corridor," Orpheus says, at my right.

"I know."

"He's faster than the others."

"I know that too."

"Are you going to⁠—"

"Yes."

A beat. "Good." The word carries the warmth of someone who trusts you completely and has decided not to prove it by being careful.

I reach the armory corridor mouth. Cold air comes out of it, older than the air in the courtyard, smelling of damp stone and lamp oil and the iron-and-leather smell that lives in every armory ever built.

I stop just outside.

Three seconds. Four. Long enough for him to register that I've stopped, that I'm not walking the line he laid out for me. Long enough for the doubt to arrive and start doing its work.

The one who works by scent is forty feet behind me in the east corridor. She's his backup. When he takes me inside, she seals the mouth behind me. Two points, no exit. It's well built. If I were walking in unaware, it would work.

Then his scent reaches my left ear on the cold draft — faint, unmistakable, that burnt-metal heat Keir found on the western border. The same thing. Here. Inside these walls. Inside my walls.

The anger I have been banking for six weeks goes very warm.

My dragoness comes forward. She has been waiting for this since the bell.

I let her come.

I step into the corridor.

Chapter 25

Hemlocke

I made the decision about the stables three days before the Purge.

Not the decision to be here — that one was made the moment I understood what the Purge was and what my part in it could sensibly be.

I am not a fighter. Not the way most of the students on these grounds are fighters. I'm fast when I need to be. I'm stronger than I look. And my unicorn can do things to living creatures that some people would call useful in a fight. But my instinct is not to fight. My instinct is to tend — to watch, to manage, to make the conditions under which the people I love can do what they need to do.

You can spend your whole life building an instinct and still not be able to change it in a crisis. I've stopped trying to.

The stables are where I can be useful. They're easy to hold — Titan alone makes the place nearly impossible to enter for anyone who doesn't have the particular understanding with him that I have. They're high — the loft above the main block lets me see about half the academy grounds. And they hold the things that are going to matter before this is over: water, the medical supplies I moved here quietly over the past week, and a mirror I borrowed from the Shadowcarve teaching cupboard and will return afterward.

I also have the two signals Orpheus taught me. He taught them to me casually, sitting in this loft three weeks ago, in the tone he uses when he has decided you need something and is making it feel like nothing.

And I had him draw me a map of the places on the grounds that matter in a fight. I asked a month ago, making it sound like curiosity about how the Purge lays out. He drew it without comment. I have memorized it.

I am not a fighter.

I am prepared.

✦ ✦ ✦

The bell rings at dawn.

I'm already in the loft, settled at the gap in the south wall where the boards don't quite meet and the view of the main courtyard opens up.

Titan is below me. I can hear him moving in the deliberate way he moves when he has decided something needs his attention — the low stamp of an enormous horse who has registered that the morning feels changed and is not alarmed, only noting it.

The horses know the Purge is happening. Not the way we know it, but they understand that the morning feels wrong and that the humans who usually move in predictable ways are moving in different ones. I explained what I could to Titan. He took it in his own way: ears forward, eyes on me, the full weight of his attention present.

He will not be easy with strangers near the stable today. This is fine. This is useful.

I watch Raven walk to the center of the Shadowcarve courtyard and stand there.

My heart does something complicated.

I have spent a year managing the particular feeling that comes from loving someone far more dangerous than you are — the mix of pride and fear, and the thing underneath both that I've never found the right word for. The thing about watching someone you love be exactly what they are, in a situation that asks for all of it.

I manage it well most of the time. I've learned to feel it and keep going.

Standing in the loft at dawn, watching her choose the most exposed spot on the grounds and wait there with her arms crossed and her wings half-furled and her body carrying the weight of someone who has made all the decisions and is now inside the doing of them, I manage it only moderately well.

She moves wrong for a target.

This is what I keep coming back to as I watch her. Most of the students I can see from up here move with the tense, careful energy of people who know they can be hunted — eyes scanning, pace either too fast or too controlled, the posture of people holding fear down.

Raven moves the way Titan moves when he's leading the herd across unfamiliar ground. Unhurried. Fully aware. Telling the space around her, with her whole body, that it is hers and she knows exactly what she is doing in it.

She is not prey. She has made herself the target on purpose, and there is a real difference between those two things.

The fear goes quieter when I understand that. It doesn't go.

I can feel the bond with her stretched thin at this distance — warm but faint, the particular feel of a connection when you're apart from someone you're bonded to and the distance is doing something to it. She's alive. She's well. She's doing something I don't have a precise word for, but it isn't losing.

That's what the bond carries.

I stay in the loft. I keep my view clear. I watch.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first students try the stables at the thirty-minute mark.

Two of them — Year Two, by their build — moving with the energy of people who have decided the stables are worth holding, or worth raiding for supplies, and haven't reckoned with what the stables contain.

They reach the door before Titan makes his position clear.

He doesn't kick. He doesn't charge. He doesn't do anything violent at all. He simply fills the entrance with the considerable fact of himself — the enormous black body, the stillness of him, the complete absence of any sign that this space is open to them. Titan's version of a warning is a presence so total that the message is unmistakable: what is beyond this door is mine, you are not part of it, I recommend revising your plans.

They revise their plans within twelve seconds.

Back in the courtyard, at thirty-seven minutes, she drops a fourth-year.

I see it from the loft — the pivot, the blade, the half-shift, the fourth-year going down in under two seconds from a standing start. Clean, efficient, not showy. She steps over him and keeps walking without changing pace.

The fear goes considerably quieter.

I watch her for the next twenty minutes. I watch the way she reads the space, the small adjustments you can't see unless you know her body the way I've learned it across a year of sharing a territory with her. The fraction of a turn toward a sound. The weight shift that comes a breath before she changes direction. I watch her move through the courtyard as though she has already been through it in her head and is simply doing a version she has already finished.

She has. That's exactly what she's doing.

At some point I realize my heart has stopped hammering. I'm still afraid — not for her life, I think, but with the particular fear of watching someone you love work somewhere you can't follow, the helplessness of standing outside a thing and knowing the person inside doesn't need you there.

But I'm watching her be extraordinary, and here is what I understand from up here: she doesn't need me in the courtyard. She needs me in this loft, with this mirror, watching the half of the grounds she can't see from inside the armory corridor.

This is what I do. I tend the space. I hold the ordinary. I am the eyes, and the steady presence, and the knowledge behind the fight that something is being watched over and kept.

I hold the mirror. I hold the loft. I hold my position.

A second pair tries the stables at the forty-minute mark. They're more persistent, and they come from the paddock side, which is a sensible choice — there's no main entrance there, just the fence.

The Aldenmere mare is in the paddock. She makes her view of anything coming too close very plain, with the directness of a horse who has spent four weeks being a mother and has strong feelings about things that get near her foal. The foal, watching all of this from behind her, adds her own voice. She is very loud for her size.

The combination is sufficient.

Orpheus appears at Raven's side at the forty-third minute — no approach, simply there. They talk briefly. She sends him toward the east tower.

I adjust my mirror. The view is clear.

Between that and the third attempt, I feel Charron's voice in my mind.

The bond between siblings of the same herd is not the mate-bond. It's looser, less constant — the difference between a line that hums all the time and one that only carries something when you send it through. Charron is sending something through it now, with the careful, deliberate contact of someone who wants to be present without being a distraction.

How is it going. The inflection is careful, a statement shaped like a question, because he's careful about what he sends. He doesn't want to add his worry to whatever I'm already carrying.

I send back the feeling: watchful, alive. She is doing something extraordinary that I can't describe, and it isn't losing. The herd bond carries feeling more clearly than words. He'll understand what I mean.

Isolde has the foal's morning feeding. The practical thing. The ordinary weight of the flight going on with its business, given exactly when I need to know it.

He knows what helps. He has always known what helps — that is Charron's particular gift, giving people what they need before they know they need it.

I send back warmth and thank you. I hold the bond open one moment longer, just for the connection itself: the knowledge that he is there, and Blackhaven is there, and Nova is with Solaris, and Isolde is in the stables where she is every morning, and the ordinary workings of the flight are running.

Then I close it and go back to the courtyard.

The third pair tries at the fifty-minute mark. Titan has taken up a position at the paddock gate by then, and whatever he says through stillness alone is enough that they don't even reach the fence. The foal, who has apparently decided that anything the mares object to is her business too, joins in with considerable enthusiasm anyway.

They look at Titan. He looks at them. They leave faster than the first two pairs.

I make a note to give Titan something better than the standard apple slice later.

✦ ✦ ✦

She comes into sight just before the hour.

Not Raven. Anipe.

I see her moving along the south approach path, and it takes me three full seconds to understand what I'm looking at.

Staff move through the grounds during the Purge to carry off the wounded and keep watch. It's part of what makes the whole thing work — the faculty presence that makes the Purge lawful rather than simply permitted violence. What they don't do is carry weapons. The rules are clear about that. The rules are the entire reason the Purge is something other than chaos, and keeping the faculty out of the students' fighting is the thing that holds it together.

Anipe has a crossbow.

She's moving with purpose. Not the careful, roundabout movement of someone keeping watch — the direct movement of someone who knows where she's going and means to get there.

The staircase to the upper south walk is at the end of the south approach path. From up there she'd have a clear view of most of the central grounds, including the armory corridor entrance.

I reach through the bond at once. Both of them — the mate-bond, thin at this distance, and the herd-bond, which I know won't carry anything complicated but might carry urgency. I push the urgency out toward her.

The mate-bond stretches and thins. She's over by the armory corridor, on the far side of the main building, and the distance and the stone between us are doing something to it.

It doesn't reach her.

I look at the mirror in my lap.

Orpheus taught me two signals. The first means danger, change direction. The second means south, high up. He said: if you see something from the loft and you can't reach her through the bond, these two together will tell her everything she needs to know.

I find the angle — the gap in the loft boards where the morning light comes through just right for the mirror to throw a flash toward the courtyard side of the main building.

Anipe is still on the approach path. She hasn't reached the stairs. She doesn't have her view yet.

I flash the first signal. Pause. The second. Pause. The first again.

Nothing. Long enough that I think she's already in the corridor, already past the point where a flash can reach her.

Then her path changes.

It's subtle. A slight correction in the way she was moving, the difference between heading straight into the armory corridor and angling a little away from it. Small enough that most people wouldn't read it as deliberate.

I'm not most people. I know the way she moves the way I know the way the horses move.

She's seen it. She's changing course.

I lower the mirror. My hands are shaking slightly. I hold them against my thighs until they stop.

Below me, Titan stamps once — the stamp that means he has sized things up and found them acceptable. He goes back to his hay. The foal runs a small circle in the paddock for no reason at all and stops, entirely pleased with herself.

I take a breath.

I stay in the loft. I watch the grounds.

I can't fight this battle.

But I can be her eyes. And right now, that's what she needs.

Chapter 26

Raven

I don't go to Anipe.

I let Anipe come to me.

Hemlocke's mirror changes my route. Two sequences — the first means immediate threat, change direction. The second means south, high ground. Together they tell me everything. Anipe is setting up on the upper south walk, and she has something with her that earned the first sequence rather than a simple warning.

I adjust my approach to the armory corridor. Not away from it. I still have business in that corridor — the first fire drake plant is waiting in there for a fight he's been building toward for eighteen months and I fully intend to give him one. But the corridor has two ends. I was going to take the north entrance. I take the south instead, which puts me directly beneath the upper walk when I come out.

Directly beneath is a hard place to shoot at. A crossbow — which is what an immediate-threat signal from Hemlocke means, because Hemlocke doesn't exaggerate — needs a braced position and a clean angle. Firing straight down from that walk means leaning out past the parapet, which exposes the shooter and ruins the brace, and an unbraced crossbow shot is a bad shot. Balor spent two sessions in the spring of Year Two teaching me every way each common ranged weapon fails and exactly how to stand in relation to it.

I clear the south exit of the armory corridor. I move into the shadow under the walk, where the stone is still holding the night's cold, and I put my back against it.

I wait.

The wait is four minutes. Long enough for the plant in the corridor to start wondering where I've gone. Long enough for the second one, the one who works by scent, to check my traces against the direction she last had me going and find that they don't agree. Both of them adjusting. Both of them spending time I'm not spending.

Then footsteps on the south approach path.

✦ ✦ ✦

She comes down off the walk a little past the hour.

I hear her before I see her — the particular tread of somebody carrying a crossbow, which is always heavier than the person expects and puts a small hitch in one side of the gait. Twenty paces. Fifteen. The frost has gone off the stone by now and her boots make a flatter sound than they would have at dawn.

She comes around the corner of the south building and she sees me and she stops.

For a moment neither of us does anything at all.

She's in her office clothes. That's the part that lands strangely — the same plain dark wool she wears behind the enrollment desk, the same neat collar, the sleeves buttoned at the wrist the way she buttons them to work through a stack of transfer records. Nothing about her says today. Only the crossbow, held low across her body in both hands, spanned and loaded, the bolt seated and the fletching bright against the dull wood.

Somewhere off past the west range someone is still fighting. It sounds very far away.

Thirty feet between us. Open ground. No cover on either side.

"Anipe," I say.

"Lady Raven." Her voice is exactly the voice she uses at the desk.

Anipe is a hundred and fifty-three years old. I know because I pulled her record last month — all of it, not the employment summary. Sixty-one years at Dragonis. Enrollment, student records, faculty support. She was behind that desk when my mother was a student here. She processed my siblings' enrollments and then mine, and she has been handing me forms across that counter since I was small enough to need lifting up to see over it. The file is spotless. Of course it is.

What the file doesn't hold: the family name she gave up eleven years ago. The community she came out of, in the western territories bordering the ground where Mina's early campaigns ran two decades back. The hamlet listed in the old flight records as a fire drake–allied settlement — one of several that took consequences when Mina's forces came through.

I've known for three weeks. I've spent three weeks deciding how to say it when the moment came.

"You brought in the three students," I say. "You've been feeding the fire drakes for two years. But the work isn't the heart of it, is it. The heart of it is older."

Something goes through her face. She expected this conversation — I think she has rehearsed it — but something under the rehearsal gives way. Not surprise. Closer to relief. The look of someone who has carried a thing a long way and has just reached the place where she can set it down.

"You're very much your mother's daughter," she says.

"My mother didn't order strikes on civilians. The Ragnar campaigns went after installations and supply. Whatever happened to your family, it wasn't the thing you believe it was."

"You weren't there."

"No." Her hands haven't moved on the crossbow. I watch them anyway. "But I have the records. Both sets — the Marzana archive and the independent accounts from the same seasons. The hamlet your family came from was being used by the fire drake command as a staging ground. When the staging ground was taken out, the hamlet caught the edge of it. The target was the installation. It was never the people."

"My grandmother lost four children."

The words land the way she means them to.

The grief is real. It is specific and it is twenty years old and it does not care in the slightest whether it has been aimed correctly. It has been pointed at Mina and at the Marzana line and at me for two decades, and the pointing feels true to her no matter where the cause actually sits.

I understand that. I understand it completely. It changes nothing about what happens in the next thirty seconds.

"I'm sorry for your grandmother," I say, and I mean it, and I can hear that I mean it. "What happened to that community was real. The people who were hurt were real. The grief your family has carried is real. All of that is true." I hold her eyes. "Mina didn't order it. And you have spent two years placing students in this school to kill me on a day when the killing would look permitted. Both of those are also true."

"The Purge permits it."

"The Purge permits students. You're staff." I let that sit for a beat. "The founding charter you photographed in the archive doesn't give you what you think it does. The language is vague enough that any tribunal would throw it out in an afternoon, and you're clever enough to know that. Which means you didn't come out here to stand on a right." Another beat. "You came out here because you've been building toward it for twenty years, and you stopped caring what it would be called some time ago."

The silence after that goes long.

I can hear her breathing. I can hear my own. Thirty feet of open stone, the sun higher now and taking the last of the cold off the wall behind me, and a woman in office clothes standing at the end of a path with a loaded crossbow held across her body.

Long enough that I think she might set it down. Long enough that I let myself think it.

Then her weight comes forward onto the front foot. Her left hand slides four inches up the stock. She takes one short breath in through her nose and holds it.

She raises it.

✦ ✦ ✦

She's fast.

Faster than I allowed for. I expected the hesitation of someone who has spent twenty years walking toward a moment and finds, arriving, that it doesn't feel the way she imagined. There isn't any. The crossbow comes up in the clean practiced motion of a woman who has drilled this exact movement, alone, many times, and has no intention of letting a conversation slow it down. She rehearsed the talking. She rehearsed this more.

I move.

I move as she fires, not before — moving before the shot only tells her where to send it, and I've had three years of being taught not to tell people things. I move on the release, in the sliver between the string letting go and the bolt arriving, which is not much time and demands that the movement be given everything, no hedging, no half-commitment.

Not far enough.

The bolt takes me across the top of the left shoulder — the graze of someone who read the direction of my move and put the shot ahead of it. Her range was better than I'd credited her with. It scores through the jacket, through the scale underneath, and the dragon's bane on the tip goes to work immediately.

It burns cold first.

That's the thing about dragon's bane, the thing that separates it from anything else made to get through scale. Cold on contact, then turning over into a deep heat as it finds dragon in the blood. The cold means it's working. The cold means I have about ninety seconds before the heat starts taking things away from me.

I don't give her ninety seconds.

She's already reaching for the reload. Practiced there too — the speed of the span, the second bolt coming up to follow the first. She isn't panicking. She isn't looking at my shoulder. She's looking at the crossbow, threading the next one, and that is the mistake.

The contacts do their work.

My dragoness comes to the surface. Not the half-shift I use for pressure. The full directed gaze. The stone from a skull dragon with basilisk in the line isn't the same as the stone from a true basilisk, but at fifteen feet with everything behind it, it is more than enough for one woman mid-reload whose attention is on a mechanism rather than on my eyes.

Anipe freezes.

The crossbow stops half-spanned. Her hands stay exactly where they are, the motion caught in the middle of itself, one finger still hooked over the string. Her eyes stay open. She will stay like this for days — that is what a full lock holds at my strength and at that range. The retrieval teams work the grounds in rotation and this path is on their circuit; she'll be found long before it wears off. She won't be harmed.

What she experiences inside a frozen mind, for as long as it holds, is hers. I choose not to spend time thinking about it.

I hold the gaze three full seconds to be certain the lock has taken.

Three seconds is a long time when your shoulder is going from cold to hot and you are standing in open ground in the middle of an active Purge with two more people looking for you. But letting go early risks a partial lock, and a partial lock means she comes out of it in hours instead of days, and hours doesn't guarantee she's still standing here when the sweep reaches this path.

Three seconds. Complete.

I look away.

✦ ✦ ✦

The wound burns.

I take stock of it the way I was taught by a mother who considered field medicine a basic skill and a father who learned it in circumstances I prefer not to look at directly. Left shoulder, across the top. I can map it without touching it — the quality of the burn tells me most of what I need. The dragon's bane has done what surface contact does. Burning in a narrow track, the scale disrupted along the line of it, nothing gone deep, because the bolt went across instead of through.

That distinction is the reason the Purge didn't end on the south approach path.

A real hit would have been aimed at the middle of me. She put it where she calculated I'd be after moving — right about the direction, a little generous about the distance. Her reading was very good. Her timing was a fraction off.

The difference between a graze and a kill was about eight inches.

Eight inches.

I file that for later, when I'm somewhere I can afford to think about how close today's arithmetic has been running.

The bolt has to come out. It didn't bury itself — it scored across and caught in the broken scale rather than in meat, which is the one piece of luck in it, because catching in scale means I can take it out clean instead of working around muscle.

I brace my back against the south wall, plant my feet, reach across with my right hand, and take hold of it.

I pull.

The sound it makes is not pleasant. My dragoness produces a long low note that expresses precisely how she feels about dragon's bane and about the people who choose to put it on a bolt.

I agree with her entirely.

The field seal is the one Balor taught me in the third month of Year Two — a controlled acid closure, mixed weak enough not to do damage of its own, applied fast rather than slowly, because slow gives the body time to understand fully what is happening to it. I apply it fast. The burn changes character. Still there. Contained. Closed.

I test the arm.

Overhead reach is down by about a third. Rotation is worse. Forward reach and grip are untouched, which is most of what matters. I go through everything I might need in the next hours and set aside what I can no longer lead with.

Workable.

I take the crossbow.

I empty the quiver off her belt — she's frozen, she doesn't resist, and there is something in doing this in front of her open eyes that I don't examine — and I look at the bolts. Dragon's bane on every tip. Properly made, not something anyone put together in a shed. The fletching carries a maker's mark I don't know, which means it didn't come through any continental supplier. Western territories, most likely, from someone who doesn't ask what it's for. They go into my jacket with everything else I'm carrying out of today.

I cut the string. Not the frame. I'm not destroying anything anyone will need to look at later — I'm making sure nobody picks this up while she's standing there and finishes what she started. The weapon stays whole. The weapon stays useless.

I look at her a moment.

A hundred and fifty-three years old. Sixty-one of them in this building. Twenty of them carrying this. She never had to place herself anywhere — she was already here, had been here since before my mother sat in these classrooms, and all that was required of her was to turn. Everything she built afterward was patient and quiet and made of paperwork, and it was more careful than most of what I've faced in the past year.

I don't feel good about this. I also wasn't going to let her kill me.

Both things are true.

I leave her standing on the south approach path and I move.

The shoulder hurts. I don't go back to it — I've assessed it, I've adjusted around it, I've closed it. Anything further is just attention, and attention spent on pain in the middle of a fight is attention not spent on the fight.

I put it down.

The first fire drake is still waiting in the armory corridor for something that got interrupted. The second is somewhere in the east corridor behind him. They've had twelve minutes to improve where they're standing.

Good.

Better positioning means more committed to a plan. More committed to a plan means less able to bend when the plan meets something it never accounted for.

They didn't account for me.

The shoulder hurts.

I don't slow down.

Chapter 27

Keir

I blink.

East wall corner — read it, clear, two seconds — blink. Upper east walkway — read it, clear, one second — blink. South end of the east corridor where it meets the training yard: there. First fire drake. He came out of the armory corridor twelve minutes ago and he's been moving since, which means whatever he set up in there didn't happen the way he wanted it to.

Good.

I blink to six feet behind him — far enough back that he won't feel the air move at my arrival, close enough to finish reading him before he shifts again. He's heading east, toward the wall. Not panicking. His movement is controlled and deliberate, the movement of a man working a second plan rather than making one up. A second plan means there's a place along that eastern wall where he's been told to be.

I take him in fast. Height, build, the way he carries his weight when he's moving with purpose rather than for speed. The right-hand grip Callan flagged, which I can't see from this angle but which I keep anyway. And the burnt-metal heat he leaves in the air behind him, which I can follow even after he's gone, because in still air it hangs around about six minutes.

I blink out before he knows anyone was there.

Thirty seconds in the gap between the east corridor and the outer wall to sort what I have. First: heading east on a fallback. Second — the one who works by scent — I had her ten minutes ago at the south face of the main building and lost her when she crossed the angle my blink range doesn't cover. Third: still nowhere. The third is the part that needs answering fastest.

The bond with Raven is warm and alive. It has the quality it takes on when she's been hit and is going on through it — a slight sharp edge under the warmth, like a string tuned a shade high. Not distress. Pain being managed.

She's hurt.

I file it and keep moving.

✦ ✦ ✦

Blink hounds don't fight fire drakes.

That isn't a preference. It's an honest measure of what I can do, made honestly, without dressing it up as something more flattering. Fire drakes run hot in a way that reaches into what a blink hound is — the heat gets into the space I move through when I phase, and it drags, and the drag makes the crossing slower and the arrival less exact. Up close with a fire drake I can still blink away from anything he starts. But slower than I could against anything else. In a fight where the whole of my advantage is speed and knowing precisely where I'll land, anything that takes from those two changes the sum considerably.

I also don't have the weight to take a fire drake's hit and keep working.

Those are facts. I've sat with them three weeks, since I knew this Purge would have fire drakes in it, and sitting with them hasn't altered them. What it has given me is clarity about what my job actually is. Not to fight, to track. Not to engage, to know. Not to be the blade — to be the thing that makes the blade land in the right place.

Raven has the blade.

I have the map.

I find the second one again a little past the hour.

She's holding at the south face of the east building, tucked in behind the drainage outcrop that makes a natural blind spot from the courtyard. She isn't moving. She's set, and waiting, and from the angle of her head she's facing the eastern wall rather than the courtyard.

She's waiting for the first one to reach wherever they've agreed on.

I go to map the eastern wall.

This is the work hounds do better than anybody. Ground covered fast, at a scale nothing else manages. I take the eastern wall in twelve blinks, three seconds at each position, building the whole shape of it — where everyone is, what the ground looks like from every angle that matters. Twelve blinks. Thirty-six seconds. Two hundred feet of wall and every approach that feeds it.

Three places along it would serve as somewhere to converge. The recessed maintenance door at the midpoint. The corner where the wall meets the north outbuilding, which makes a sheltered pocket. And the shadow the wall throws at this hour, running east to west along the ground.

The maintenance door: empty.

The outbuilding corner: a third-year who is definitely not a fire drake and who is doing the sensible thing, which is sitting the Purge out somewhere nobody will look. I blink past without disturbing what he's built.

The shadow line: the first one, arriving just about when I'd worked out he would. He takes the east end of the shadow and settles in. Checks what he can see from there — the south approach, the eastern way into the courtyard, the gap between the main building and the training yard boundary.

He's at the pinch.

The ground clicks together. The shadow line runs east from him. The drainage blind spot, where the second one is holding, runs north. Between them they make a corridor about forty feet wide that anyone crossing from the main courtyard toward the eastern training yard has to pass through. Anyone going west to east across the central grounds has to go through it.

A dragoness coming back from the south approach, having finished her business down there, walks straight into it.

They know her route. They've watched her long enough to know where she goes next.

I blink to Orpheus.

He's waiting where I land, the way he always is — present, still, entirely unsurprised, as though he arrived slightly before I did. I give him what I have in the shorthand we set up before the bell: hand positions for the first one, for the second, for the forty-foot corridor between them and how it sits against Raven's likeliest way back from the south.

He takes it in without interrupting. That's one of the things about Orpheus. He doesn't ask for more when what he has is enough, and he works out that it's enough very fast. By the time I've finished telling him, he's already put it wherever he puts things.

"She knows about the pinch," I say.

"She'll have mapped that wall in the first twenty minutes," Orpheus says. "She maps everything."

"Her shoulder."

He looks at me. "How bad?"

"The bond reads like a graze she's managing. Nothing that went through. But the left arm's down — she'll be leading right for the rest of it."

"She's trained to lead right for two years, specifically because she knew the left shoulder was where anyone would aim if they worked out she favors it." A pause. "She'll be fine."

"I know." I'm not the one who needed to hear it. He is.

He takes that too. There's a small change in how he's standing, which means something has moved in him — not visible to most people, visible to me after a year. "The corridor. I'll get to her."

"Confirm both of them are still where I put them before she comes back through. Even if she already has the ground, she needs to know they've held."

He nods. He goes. I blink back to the eastern wall.

✦ ✦ ✦

The fight I don't step into happens at eighty minutes.

The alley between the north outbuilding and the west face of the kitchen block. Two fourth-years. I don't know either of them by face, which means they're either older students I've never had cause to learn or students who've been careful about being seen. The fight has nothing to do with Raven's war. Nothing to do with fire drakes or anything I'm tracking. This is the Purge doing what the Purge does once you give it permission — two people with something between them using the window to settle it.

The bigger one has a weapon, a flat-edged training blade, legal here because it tags without going through. The smaller one has her hands and her speed and whatever she's been taught, which is enough for about sixty seconds before the blade decides it.

I blink to where I can see. I watch. I don't intervene.

The bigger one wins it in ninety seconds. The smaller one goes into the kitchen block wall hard and stays down. The fall is bad — she takes it at an angle that could be a concussion and could be worse.

I blink to her. Pulse: there, strong, the rhythm of being unconscious and not the other thing. Breathing. Nothing opened that shouldn't be. Her pupils answer when I check them against the light.

She's going to have a terrible headache and a bruise the size of my hand. The medical staff will find her.

I blink away.

I don't engage. It isn't my fight. The Purge makes ordinary violence right alongside the particular violence it was built for this year, and stepping into the ordinary kind costs me ground and minutes I need for the other.

But I checked the pulse.

I'm not going to blink past somebody dying without checking.

The Purge is supposed to make them stronger. I've heard that from instructors and from the papers the institution keeps and from older students who talk about it as a rite of passage rather than a culling with rules around it. Stronger. Harder. More capable.

I think about the girl at the kitchen block wall, and I think: mostly it makes them harder. And I think about my first year running with the pack, about what made me fast and accurate and good at reading ground in a hurry, and I think: I wonder whether harder and stronger are the same thing.

I don't think they are.

I think you can go harder and weaker at once. Harder on the outside and more brittle underneath, the way overtired animals go, the way a person goes who has been through too many things that wanted the response swallowed rather than felt. I've seen that kind in pack work. I've seen what it makes of someone over years.

I don't think that's what Raven is building at Blackhaven.

I don't think the Purge, in her hands, is going to make what it usually makes.

This isn't the place to take that thought further. I blink back to my position on the eastern wall. I have work.

✦ ✦ ✦

The third fire drake isn't at the pinch.

I clock it at eighty-seven minutes. I've been running both of them every three or four minutes — positions confirmed, watching for movement, counting toward the window when Raven comes back through the eastern approach. First: holding in the shadow line, east end. Second: holding at the drainage blind spot, south. Stable.

The third isn't in either place, which I expected. He was never part of the pinch. The transfer was the one watching from the tower and Orpheus put him down at minute twelve, and the third has been somewhere else this entire morning doing something nobody has been able to name.

He should still be on these grounds, doing whatever he was told to do if the day went sideways.

I run the grid.

Twenty blinks, forty seconds, the whole grounds section by section in the overlapping sweep my pack uses for a search. I'm following heat — that burnt-metal trace fire drakes leave behind them, faint but there, the same thing Finlay named from the border samples and that I've spent six weeks learning to pick out from everything else that makes warmth in a stone building on a cold morning.

First: eastern wall shadow line. There.

Second: south building drainage. There.

Third—

South. And moving.

I follow it. Blink, catch it, blink, catch it. The trace is fresher than the others, laid down in the last four minutes instead of the last twenty, which tells me he's been moving recently and moving quickly. He isn't wandering. He's going somewhere, with the certainty of a man who was told exactly where.

I find him at eighty-nine minutes, near the south dormitory.

I put it together very fast. The third was never meant to fight. Whatever he's been doing all morning, this is what it was for.

The fallback, when you can't isolate the target, is the lever. The sibling who isn't the target but who is close enough to her that threatening them buys you the reaction you want. A fire drake in the south dormitory with one of her sisters cornered means the red flare goes up. The red flare pulls Raven off her ground, moving fast, reacting instead of working from the advantage she's spent the whole morning building.

And the way back from the south dormitory runs through the pinch.

It's a good plan. It's actually a very good plan. It allows for the corridor failing. It uses the one thing about Raven that was never tactical — what she becomes when somebody she loves is in danger.

It requires me not to be tracking him.

It requires nobody to have given the sisters a signal of their own, and me not to be standing here watching him walk toward them.

I blink.

Fast.

Chapter 28

Raven

The red flare goes up.

I'm already moving.

The flare is Azalea's — the one signal I gave her for the single circumstance in which I drop everything, regardless of where I am or what I'm holding or how badly I need what I'm holding. I am forty feet from the pinch where the first two fire drakes are waiting. I have spent an hour building toward this exact minute. The first is set. The second is set. If I walk that corridor in the next sixty seconds I have them precisely where I've been working all morning to have them.

The flare burns out against the sky.

I'm already moving south.

Not fast. Fast is predictable. Fast by the shortest road is what the third one is counting on — he made this happen, which means he worked out what it would produce, and what it produces is me arriving committed and reacting along a route anyone could name. If he's put anything in the main corridors, fast and direct walks me straight into it.

So I go up.

The west face of the south dormitory has a drainage pipe I used twice in Year Two for training and tested my weight against both times. It's bolted to the stone every eight feet with anchors far heavier than drainage requires, a decision by the facilities office that I thought was excessive at the time and have been grateful for ever since. The pipe puts me on the second-floor ledge in twenty-two seconds. The stone is cold enough through my palms to feel like it's taking something.

The window latch is the standard kind Balor covered in the Year Two session on getting into buildings — the session everybody thought was absurdly specific and that I have now used three times. It opens from outside if you press the lower left corner of the frame at the right angle while lifting the handle. Four seconds.

Twenty-six seconds total from the base of the pipe.

No announcement. No warning. The third fire drake is somewhere in this building and he has had the time between Azalea's flare and my arrival to set himself. If he set up at the stairwell door, which is the obvious place, he is facing the door.

He isn't facing the window.

I go through the window.

✦ ✦ ✦

The stairwell drops away below me.

I land on the second-floor landing and I read the whole of it in the time it takes to find my feet. This is the thing Balor drills until it stops being a decision: look before you commit, because what a place is when you land in it is never quite what it looked like from outside. It takes one second. One second is enough.

Bella at the foot of the stairs. One arm out, bleeding through a tourniquet she's made from her own jacket sleeve. She's standing the way someone stands who has been in a fight a long time and is managing it rather than winning it — feet wide, weight low, the shape that spends as little as possible while still covering the way in. She has been doing this twenty minutes and she is doing it correctly. The cut isn't slowing her. She's working around it.

A fourth-year green dragon between her and the corridor door. His back is to me. He was watching Bella, not the window. Blade out. He moved it to his left hand when she dropped into that stance, which is either a choice or a sign he's been fighting left-handed the whole time. Either way I keep it.

The third fire drake on the upper landing, above me, mid-shift. The air around him wrong — shimmering, dry, too warm, and the smell of him filling the stairwell like something scorched.

Bella's eyes find me the instant I land. Her face changes, though not in any way visible from where the green dragon is standing. I know her face. What crosses it is recognition and the discipline of not letting it show, the composure of a woman who has just been handed the most useful thing in her fight and has no intention of giving it away.

I move.

The fire drake first. Not a preference — an order of danger. He's mid-shift, which makes him unpredictable and immediately lethal in a way the green dragon, still human and committed to a blade, is not. The half-shifted one is the thing I can't predict. He goes first.

He's six feet above me and the heat is already coming off him in a way I can feel as pressure, as dryness at the back of my throat. Fire drakes run hot in human form. Mid-change they run like an open forge.

I don't give him time to finish.

The acid is directed. The narrow, concentrated stream I can produce when the dragoness is fully forward and the intent is exact. Not the indiscriminate kind. This is a tool with a purpose — break the change, collapse it, take the threat away without taking the person. Balor was very particular about that distinction. The Purge permits killing. That doesn't mean every fight requires it.

It hits him center mass.

The change collapses. He goes down on the upper landing, everything his body had been building for the shift suddenly going sideways in him, and the sound he makes is not one I will forget quickly. He will be in a great deal of pain. He will not be able to shift for a week. He will be found. He will live.

The green dragon turns around.

✦ ✦ ✦

He's bigger than me in human form.

Not by much — he's a fourth-year, built for it, four years of Shadowcarve visible in how he moves as he turns. He reads the landing in about a second. The fire drake down. Me above him, scales up along my forearms. And he does the arithmetic fast. I'm smaller. I've just spent a great deal of acid. I have a second problem on the upper landing. He has a blade, he has four years, and he has the momentum of a fight he was winning until forty seconds ago.

He is wrong about all of it except the blade and the four years.

He starts moving and I let him. The thing Balor teaches about a committed opponent — someone who has chosen the fight and is already inside the choosing — is that trying to turn him before he arrives works far worse than using what he brings with him. You wait for the commitment. You don't argue with it. You put it somewhere else.

He closes.

He has four years of training.

He has been fighting my sister in a stairwell for twenty minutes.

I have been fighting since the bell, and the dragoness has been fully forward for an hour, and my shoulder is burning, and the anger I have been banking since the beginning of all of this is, at this precise moment, exactly where it needs to be.

The movement is from the third session of Year Two Advanced Shadowcarve. The one Balor showed us once and then made us run until it lived in the body instead of the head. It needs full talons, a particular entry angle that borrows his momentum rather than meeting it, and total commitment. There is no careful version. You do it or you don't.

I do it.

It works because it doesn't oppose force. It takes force and finishes the sentence. His own forward motion becomes part of the movement, and the talons meet the commitment rather than the man arriving.

It takes four seconds.

He doesn't get up.

I stand in the stairwell and let the dragoness settle and look at what I have done. The Purge permits lethal engagement. Those are the institution's words, and they cover this the way a sheet covers furniture. I think about Finlay's rite — the acknowledgment that has to be in my own words, the accounting of what was there before and what is gone.

I think: fourth-year. Shadowcarve. Blade. Chose to corner my sister. Chose to stay while she was bleeding. Made his arithmetic about me and was wrong about what I am.

The formal record will carry his name and the circumstance and the date. My words will have to carry what I saw in his face in the second before he came — the look of someone who has decided and is past the place where deciding can be undone. He was past it before he turned around. I didn't make this outcome. I finished it.

I will write it honestly.

After.

✦ ✦ ✦

Bella is staring at me.

Her face is doing several things at once, and I know every one of them, because I have known this face since we were children in the same nest. What she saw. What she is choosing not to show about what she saw. What she is choosing not to say because we are standing inside an active Purge and this is not the moment. Bella's particular intelligence has always been for reading rooms. She knows this isn't the moment.

"Are you hurt?" I say.

She opens her mouth. "You just⁠—"

"Are you hurt?"

A beat. Something in her face settles into the thing she's choosing. "My arm."

I cross to her. Blood has gone down her sleeve and dried tacky at the cuff. The cut is longer than I'd like but clean, a straight edge with no tearing, which means it will close properly once it's bound right. The sleeve tourniquet is doing its immediate job. She tied it correctly, which means she had the presence of mind to bind her own arm in the middle of a fight. I'm not surprised. I have always known her composure was better than her theatrics suggested.

I get the kit out and work fast. Three-layer compression, from Balor's first session on this — the one meant for a forearm that has to keep moving without losing circulation. Firm. Even. I check it after.

"Close your hand."

She does. The grip is strong. The arm works.

"Twenty minutes?"

"About. The fire drake found me first, when I came back from the north grounds. Azalea saw it from the north walk and put the flare up before I lost sight of her — I told her to run and she ran." She says it evenly, the voice she uses when she's reporting to herself as much as to me. "The green dragon came in around ten minutes. Saw I was already busy and decided that was an opportunity. He was faster than the fire drake and less experienced. I kept the fire drake between us as long as I could."

"You did well."

She looks at me steadily. That's the look she uses when she's received something she intends to keep rather than answer. "I used the vial."

"On which one?"

"The fire drake. Fifteen minutes in, when he got close enough. It didn't stop him — different body — but it wrecked his heat for long enough that I could move and keep the door open." A pause. "I was very responsible with it."

"I know you were." I tie the last knot. "That will hold. Don't ask the arm for anything at full extension."

"Understood."

We don't discuss the landing. We don't discuss what she saw, or what I did, or what four seconds cost. We step over the fire drake on the upper landing with the deliberate efficiency of two people who have a next thing and are going to do it.

In the corridor outside, Bella says, "You need to go back."

"Yes."

"Two of them at the pinch."

"Yes."

"They've had—" she works it out, quick, her father's arithmetic sitting under it "—eight minutes since the flare. They know it worked. They know you came south. They'll be moving."

"They'll assume I came through the main corridors and I'm coming back the same way. They'll have set up for a straight approach."

"So you go crooked."

"So I go crooked."

She nods once. "I'll find Azalea. We'll stay together and stay out of the eastern grounds until you send the all-clear through the bond." She looks at me sideways. "Your shoulder."

"Sealed. Working."

"Good." She looks at me a moment — not the long look, the short one that does the same work. "Go. We're fine."

I look at her one more time. The bound arm. The steady face. Her father's discipline sitting in her eyes over the top of everything she's carrying out of that stairwell. She is fine. She has been fine for twenty minutes in a situation most people would not have been fine in for five. The composure she wears for performance is the same composure she reaches for in a crisis, and I have never been more grateful for that in her than I am right now.

I squeeze her good hand.

I go.

The shoulder burns. There are two fire drakes at the pinch who have had eight minutes to think. The Purge has nearly three days left to run, and Samara is still somewhere on these grounds.

I go back to work.

Chapter 29

Raven

Hour sixty-eight.

Orpheus sends at the sixty-sixth hour — two taps through the bond, our pattern for done, nothing further required. The last fire drake still on these grounds. I don't know the details. What I know is that Orpheus used stone gaze, which is poetic in a way I'll appreciate more fully once I've slept, and that everything I've been tracking for six weeks has resolved except one thing.

That leaves Samara.

Sixty-eight hours in. I'm not tired the way a human student would be tired — a dragon handles sustained work differently, and I've taken rest in the short windows the Purge allows. But I'm not untouched. The shoulder is a low constant I stopped counting somewhere around the fortieth hour. The left arm's shortened reach has been worked around long enough that the working around is automatic now. The anger I carried in here has burned clean, and what's underneath it is quieter. A kind of readiness I've been building toward without naming.

I know where Samara is.

I've known three hours. She moves like someone who has spent decades being both a practitioner and a teacher, switching between the two — hunting out of the teaching register, which is slower and more methodical than plain predation and much harder to read, because it doesn't look like hunting at all. She believes she's been tracking me without my knowing. She has been tracking me. But I've been watching how she works long enough to have the whole map of it: how she reads a space, how she moves against what she reads.

I know the exact moment she decides to close.

I let her.

✦ ✦ ✦

I hear the snakes before I hear her feet.

That's the part nobody warns you about. A gorgon has no hair. What grows from her scalp is a crown of living serpents, and in a classroom she keeps them bound flat and hooded under linen, and you spend a year forgetting what is under the wrapping because forgetting is more comfortable than the alternative. Out here she hasn't bothered. What comes down the walk ahead of her is a dry continuous rustle, dozens of bodies sliding over one another, and underneath it the small wet click of mouths opening and closing on nothing.

The smell arrives with it. Warm scale and old copper, the smell of a reptile house in summer, and under that something faintly mineral. Stone dust. The smell of what she leaves behind her.

She comes from the right.

Of course she does.

She knows about the contacts. She's spent a year watching me in class, and she's a gorgon, which means she understands her own gaze better than any other creature alive could, and she has worked out that something in my eyes is turning it back. What she hasn't worked out is which eye. Which means she believes one of them is covered and one is bare. If she can make me look at her with the bare one, she has me, and I become something they carry off the grounds on a board and stand in a corridor somewhere.

She set up on my right because my right ear is deaf and she believes deaf means blind. She believes I'm slower to know what comes from that side. She believes she can talk me into turning — make me look up, make me look at her, produce the one unguarded second she needs.

What Samara doesn't know:

I have spent three years training the left ear to carry both. It doesn't hear adequately. It hears better. Three years of everything routing to one side builds a sense of direction most creatures never develop. Her approach from the right isn't quieter to me. It's louder. Her step in the hunting register — she carries her weight differently when she's hunting than when she's teaching, and I have been cataloging that difference since the first week of Year Three — arrives at my left ear perfectly clean. I know where she is to within two feet. I know when she's about to move before she moves.

I also know every approach she is likely to try, because I spent eleven Tactics sessions working this exact fight and Callan gave me the same mark for all of them.

And the contacts cover both eyes.

She's been assuming one is bare. She's wrong. Her reading of what her gaze is made of was accurate. What she concluded from the reading was not.

I have been deliberately not looking right for three months, to give her a weakness worth aiming at.

She stops ten feet to my right and slightly behind.

I don't turn.

"Lady Raven." The classroom voice. Measured, precise, the tone she uses for material she finds genuinely interesting rather than merely required. That's the provocation — the familiarity of it, the suggestion that we are still in a room where her authority means something, that what stands between us is still teacher and student.

"Samara."

I keep my eyes on the east wall forty feet ahead. Not toward her. Not away. My left ear gives me her position, her stillness, the slight forward lean of someone ready to move. She's assessing. So am I.

Behind the words, the rustling never stops. It changes pitch when she does — a ripple running through the whole crown of them whenever her shoulders shift, and once, when I don't turn, a low chorus of hissing that rises and falls and settles again like something disappointed.

"The Purge is a fascinating institution," she says, and moves — a few steps right, working for an angle where looking at her would feel natural. I track her. I don't move. "The founding language leaves real room on the question of faculty. I spent considerable time in the archive establishing the precedent."

"The language is vague. Any tribunal would throw it out. We both know that."

"Perhaps. But vagueness is its own kind of permission." She's at my two o'clock now, not quite in front. "You've been thorough this Purge. More thorough than I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Callan's approach. Patient, strategic, as little engagement as possible until the moment is right. You don't engage as little as possible."

"I engage appropriately. What counts as appropriate got larger."

A pause. She's weighing whether that's honest or bait. "The contacts. Both eyes, or one?"

"You'll have to keep guessing."

"The right." One of the snakes stretches toward me as she says it, out past the others, weaving, its blunt head tasting the air between us with a tongue I can see at the edge of my vision. "What I carry sits low. Your lenses are turning back something low. The left is almost certainly clear, which makes your right side the way in, and you have not looked right once since I arrived."

The analysis is almost entirely correct. I note that it's almost entirely correct and I hold where I am.

"Very good," I say.

"Then why aren't you turning to face me?"

"Because what you just described is your best reading of my weakness from the evidence available. I've been providing the evidence for three months."

A silence, longer than the others. She's rebuilding.

Then she tries the lunge.

It's fast and well made — the forward surge with the voice coming up under it, built to trip the startle that happens before you can decide anything. She uses it in class. I've watched her use it. I have never once startled in the year I've known her, and I don't start now.

My eyes stay on the east wall.

"You knew that was coming," she says.

"I've watched you do it nine times. The tell is in the breath. You take a slightly deeper one first. Nine out of nine."

Another silence.

"We can go to the end of this," I say, "or you can work through the rest of them. I've thought about all of them."

✦ ✦ ✦

She comes at me properly at the sixty-ninth hour.

Not a lunge. A real fight, the full commitment of a gorgon who has decided the talking is finished. She's fast — faster than her classroom movement suggested, which is no surprise, because good practitioners always keep more than they let students see. She has a blade and she has carried one for decades, and she knows how to build the shape she needs: any position where looking at her stops being a choice.

I don't give her the shape.

This fight isn't about strength and it isn't about speed. It is about one rule. My eyes do not go above her jaw. Everything she does is built to lift them past that line. Everything I do is built to keep them under it. Which means tracking her by sound and by the edge of my vision, reading her blade off its shadow and the way it moves the air, feeling the gather in her posture before the movement rather than watching for the movement.

The snakes make it harder than the blade does.

They move on their own and they do not follow her body. When she strikes low the whole crown of them rises instead — high, weaving, mouths open — and every instinct in a living thing says look up. That's the trap. The blade is honest. The snakes are the lie.

She feints left and drives right. I follow the drive, not the feint. Eyes on her collarbone.

She goes high, blade overhead, the movement that pulls a gaze up almost by itself. I track the blade's shadow on the flagstones. Eyes on her sternum. She lands without her angle.

Something strikes my ear on the second pass. Not the blade. One of them — small, and hot, and gone again before I can register it as a bite, and then the whole side of my throat starts burning in a way that has nothing to do with the shoulder.

I don't look up.

She stops moving entirely. "Your family is in danger while you stand here. The Marzana line has been⁠—"

"Finish it. I'll weigh it without looking at your face."

She doesn't finish it. There was no claim. She was testing whether news about my family could make me flinch. It can't. Not at her.

She tries three more. A crouch and rise, meant to put her eyes below mine and bring them up through the middle. A circling movement using the east wall to work my back into a corner. A direct challenge delivered in the tone gorgons use when they're trying to make eye contact into a social obligation. None of it works. I have been thinking about all of it for three months.

The dragoness has waited through the whole of it. She is very good at waiting.

Then Samara commits.

Whole body, inside my guard, blade committed, close enough that any ordinary fighter would have to look at her. It's the best thing she has left and she does it cleanly. I respect it.

I take the blade.

Step inside the commitment, right hand turning the blade arm, left coming up under her guard — the shoulder screams, I override it — the blade out of her hand and reversed, her back against the east wall, edge at her throat, talons at her collarbone.

My eyes stay on her jaw.

Never above it.

She goes very still.

The snakes do not.

✦ ✦ ✦

"Here is where we are," I say.

My voice is level. The dragoness is fully present and unhurried and has been waiting for this since the bell, and now that it's arrived she isn't pushing. She's simply here, weight where it belongs, the talons extended and controlled.

Six inches from my face, the snakes keep working.

They can't reach past the line of her jaw with her pinned like this, and they know it, and they try anyway. Blunt heads stretching, weaving, opening and closing. One of them finds my cheek and rests there a moment, dry and cool, tongue flickering against my skin, tasting me. Another gets as far as my eyelashes and stays, patient as a held breath, waiting for the eye underneath to open upward.

Every one of them is blind. That's the thing they don't teach you until Year Three. The gaze is hers alone; the snakes hunt by heat and by air. Which is why they're all pointed at my face. They can feel where a person's eyes are.

I look at her jaw and nothing else.

"You can die here. The Purge permits it. You came at a student with a blade under cover of a precedent every tribunal on this continent would contest, and you tried to use the gaze on a student on academy ground, which the founding charter forbids outright no matter how vague the language around it. Every door you thought you'd opened is narrower than you counted on."

She doesn't answer. She's still calculating. I can feel it in the quality of her stillness.

"Or you tell me who hired you, and who Amadeus's contact is inside Magnus's court. Both. You give me both and I hand you to Klauth instead of taking the other option. He's a fair tribunal. He ruled for two hundred years before the shell and he made enough hard decisions in them to know how to weigh one properly. You'd survive his judgment."

"Why would I trust that?"

"Because I said it, and I don't need anything from you that I haven't already got. I have what I came out of this Purge with. You're the last thread. I don't need you dead. I need what you know."

A silence. Long enough that I feel the arithmetic finish. Long enough to understand she has arrived at it not because she believes me and not because she's afraid, but because she is thirty years a practitioner and can read a position accurately, and this position leaves her one thing.

"The hiring party is a faction in Magnus's court," she says. The classroom voice again, precise, as if presenting a case rather than surrendering. "The fire drake nationalists. They've been paying for work against the Marzana succession for two years. Anipe was their contact inside the academy. I was hired separately. They found me through the gorgon networks."

"The Amadeus contact."

The silence is different this time. Not calculation. The silence of someone who knows exactly what she is about to hand over and what it weighs.

She says the name.

I keep my eyes on her jaw.

But something happens in my chest that I don't have a clean word for — the particular feeling of information that rearranges everything standing around it. It isn't a name I would have guessed. It isn't anyone in Magnus's outer court or his army or among his envoys. It's older than that. Further back.

It's a name Finlay will know.

I'll give it to him privately, because what his face does when he hears it will tell me how deep this actually runs.

"Thank you," I say.

Both things are true at once: she came here to turn me into a fixture in a hallway, and what she just gave me is the thing the war has been missing for a year. I don't have to reconcile them. They're both real.

I hold her against the east wall. The snakes go on searching my face the entire time, tireless, patient, blind.

Four hours until the Purge ends.

The shoulder burns for all of it.

I don't move.

Chapter 30

Raven

The bell rings at hour seventy-two.

I hear it from the east wall. It sounds different at the end than it does at the beginning — the same iron, the same mechanism, the meaning turned entirely over. Done. Come out now. It's over. The bell at the start says begin. This one says stop, and the authority in it is absolute, and for the first time in three days I can feel everything I've been holding down come forward, now that I'm allowed to stop holding it.

The shoulder hurts. Properly hurts, now that I'm not overriding it.

I let it.

And the rest arrives with it, all at once. Blood dried stiff inside the collar of my jacket. The taste in my mouth, copper and stone dust and three days old. A tremor in the right hand that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with having asked too much of it. The particular cold of a body that has stood still for four hours against a stone wall in the dark. I take one breath all the way down and let every bit of it be there.

Balor's team reaches us within three minutes. He takes one look — Samara against the wall, the wound, four hours of held position written into what my arm is doing — and asks nothing. He has known me since I hatched. He can read it.

"I'll take her," he says.

"She talked without being made to. It goes in her file as cooperation."

He looks at me a moment. "Understood."

I step back. The dragoness settles. I walk toward the gate.

The gate opens.

I walk out on my own two feet.

This matters. I thought about it for six weeks — the importance of the walk, of being upright and visibly working when the academy watches the Purge end. The heir to the Marzana throne went into this Purge as the chosen target of something built out of four planted students, two members of staff, and a line of communication running to the fire drakes outside the western border. She walked out with all of it answered, a wound that's healing, and her bearing intact.

That's the statement. Not a speech. Not a declaration. The walk. What the body looks like after seventy-two hours. The decision to come through that gate the way I come through every space I've decided is mine.

My shoulder hurts.

I walk like it doesn't.

The air out here is different air. Three days of everyone breathing the same shut-in cold, and then this — woodsmoke and trodden grass and somebody's kitchen working away somewhere, and under all of it the sharp green smell of the mountain in the afternoon. Someone starts to cheer and thinks better of it. The sound dies halfway out and leaves a silence with edges on it.

The ground outside the gate has the feel of a long wait ending — people who have been holding tension for three days letting go of it in all the different ways people do. Some moving toward the gate at once. Some standing completely still. Some doing small tight tasks because their hands need something. Hemlocke is near the stable entrance. He's still watching from where he held for three days, or near enough to it — he must have moved, but his eyes have the quality of eyes that have been pointed one direction a very long time. I give him the brief nod that means I'm well, it's over. He closes his eyes for a moment. Then he opens them and nods back.

Keir is somewhere I can't see, but I can feel him — the warmth of a hound who is close and is deliberately leaving the space that Corvus is about to take, without competing for it. I'll find him shortly. He knows that.

Corvus is the first person through the gate.

He doesn't run. He comes through at the fastest walk I have ever seen him walk, controlled and deliberate, and covers the distance between us in fewer seconds than that pace should allow. He stops in front of me and puts his hand on my face.

Both hands, in fact. One on either side. The way you hold something you've been waiting to hold.

His hands are cold. He has been standing outside a gate for three days and his hands are cold, and mine are colder, and the difference between the two is the first thing that has felt entirely ordinary since the bell.

He looks at me.

Not the quick sweep of a man checking for injury. The whole look, the one that takes in everything — how I'm carrying the shoulder, the angle the left arm has settled into, what three days and four hours of standing very still with someone pinned to a wall have done to my eyes. The look of a man who knows exactly what he's reading and is reading all of it.

He's making sure I'm real.

I let him. I stay still and let him look, and I look back — at the twenty-three years in his face, at what seventy-two hours outside a gate leaves on a person, at the thing that has been carefully held since the bell rang and is now, in front of the person it was held for, being set down.

"Shoulder," he says.

"Dragon's bane graze. Sealed. It'll scar."

"Scar," he says again.

"I don't mind."

His thumbs move slightly. Not quite a caress — the motion of someone confirming that what's under his hands is solid. Something in his face does what it does when he puts down a thing he's been carrying. Not visible to most people. Visible to me.

I put my hand over his right hand.

We stay like that a moment. The gate behind me. The academy around us. The Purge over, the war not, and this one moment that is only you're here and I know and nothing else required of either of us.

Then it ends, because it has to. There's a debrief waiting and Klauth's assessment and things owed to people who are owed them, and I have always understood that this is how it works. The moments are real. They're also short.

We walk to the debrief together.

✦ ✦ ✦

The debrief takes four hours.

Balor runs the collection. Anipe, still frozen — she'll stay frozen for two more days, which is what a full lock does rather than anything I chose, though I'm not unhappy about it. Samara, in formal custody now, cooperative in the way of a woman who made her calculation days ago and is simply carrying it out.

Four fire drakes, accounted for as follows.

The transfer, taken out of the east tower at minute twelve — concussed, unconscious for several hours, nothing permanent, and the sending device in pieces.

The one from Bella's stairwell, stopped mid-shift with acid, recovering in the medical wing. He shouldn't be able to shift for about a week. I file that one separately: not a lethal engagement. A medical outcome.

The first, taken at the pinch when I came back through it.

The last, the one who worked by scent, is the only one not in the building. She broke away during the collapse at the pinch and went out through a maintenance access in the south boundary wall during a gap in the watch. Keir has her trail. It's a question of time.

The green dragon from Bella's stairwell goes into the record under the Purge's lethal provision. I write the acknowledgment that night, in my own words, at the Malivore desk with the lamp low. I do what Finlay described. I write what was there before and what is gone, and I write it honestly.

The lamp burns down twice while I write it. The pen sits wrong in my hand — the shoulder puts the whole arm at an angle it isn't used to — and I write the first page three times before the words stop arranging themselves into reasons. Outside, the academy goes quiet in stages, the way a building does.

It takes two hours.

Earlier, at the debrief table, Balor read over my shoulder at one point. "You did right with the acid," he said. "Stopping a shift halfway is dangerous for the one being stopped. It's considerably safer than letting it finish in a stairwell."

"I know. You taught me."

"I taught you the technique." He looked at me over the page. "You chose where to use it, under pressure, correctly. Those are different things." A pause. "You made seventeen correct decisions in this Purge in circumstances where the wrong one was available and easier. The record will say so."

He put his hand briefly on my good shoulder, removed it, and went back to reading. This is Balor's version of I'm proud of you — said once, exactly, and then filed.

I receive it.

✦ ✦ ✦

I give Finlay the name privately.

Not in the debrief. This doesn't go into the record yet, not until he's had time to work through what it means and decide how his people move. I find him in his office at the end of it and close the door and hand him the paper I wrote the name on while I stood holding Samara against the east wall.

He reads it.

His face does something I have never seen it do.

Finlay's face, ordinarily, is the controlled surface of a man who spent nine centuries learning not to let it tell stories he hasn't chosen to tell. The control is real and deeply practiced and almost never gives. What I see is not the control giving. It's the thing underneath it, visible for one second before the surface comes back. Something I don't have a clean word for and understand anyway, because I've felt it — the particular recognition that arrives when a thing you trusted turns out never to have been what you believed.

He knows this person.

He knew this person. Present and past at once.

"How long?" I ask. Quietly.

"A century," he says. "At the least."

I sit with that. A century of contact, inside Amadeus's net, working the same rooms Finlay was working. A century of standing next to someone who should have been an ally and never was.

"You didn't know," I say.

"No."

"Then you didn't fail at anything. You trusted someone who chose to break it. Those are different things."

He looks at me a long moment. The expression that isn't quite pride and isn't quite grief, the one that's been there in various forms since he started teaching me things that mattered. "You sound like me," he says.

"You taught me that as well."

He folds the paper and puts it in his inside pocket. "I'll start tonight. Quietly. Nothing that moves the ground under him."

"I know."

"Give me four days."

"Take what you need."

I leave him with it. There's nothing else to give him right now except time, and I have time, and whatever he does with those four days will be right and thorough and will not need me looking over it.

✦ ✦ ✦

I sleep for fourteen hours.

What a dragon does after seventy-two hours of work on very little rest isn't ordinary sleep. It's closer to the body shutting down everything that faces outward so it can go through itself properly. Solaris told me once, and Mina told me at a different time, both with the certainty of great wyrms who have done it far more often than I have, that the depth of it answers to whatever came before. Three days of Purge, a dragon's-bane graze, and four hours of holding a full gaze produce, apparently, a very deep one.

I don't dream.

Or I dream and don't keep it — the dragoness working through what I was too busy to work through while it was happening. The green dragon in the stairwell. Anipe's face as the crossbow came up. Samara's face when she said the name, and the particular look of giving away something that can't be taken back.

When I surface, the room is warm and the light through the high window is the flat white of late morning, and somewhere below a class is being let out — that ordinary roar of a great many people going somewhere at once, which is a sound I did not hear a single time in three days.

Corvus is in the chair.

He's reading, which is what he does when he's waiting for something that wants patience and doesn't want activity. He reads, and he's present, and he doesn't perform the waiting. He looks up as I come awake, and the change from waiting to being here happens smoothly and without announcement.

"Fourteen hours," he says.

"Was it restful for you?"

"Yes." The word carries all of being in this room with you across from me is the most rest I have had since the bell rang three days ago.

I sit up. The shoulder is stiff, and the burn is much reduced — dragon healing working through the sleep, clearing what the dragon's bane left, starting the scar. It will be narrow and pale and visible. I've looked at it in the small mirror by the bed. It runs at a clean angle across the top of the shoulder where the bolt scored.

I find I don't mind it.

Scars are information. They record something real. This one records Anipe and the crossbow and the arithmetic she did about me that was almost right, and eight inches, and the fact that I kept moving.

"What's today?"

"Thursday. Eleven in the morning."

I sit with that. The first Thursday after the Purge. It's already moving — Balor sent his first report to Klauth last night, before I slept, and the review of every enrollment that passed through Anipe's hands is running through the records office. Finlay is in his office deciding how his people move. Keir is somewhere on the trail of the one who went out through the south wall.

The war isn't over. It's only in a different part of itself.

"I need to find Bella and Azalea today," I say. "And Orpheus. And send word to Blackhaven."

"They all know you're alive and whole," Corvus says. "I told them last night. Hemlocke sent word to Blackhaven through the bond."

I look at him.

"You were asleep," he says. "Someone needed to."

The feeling that produces — being looked after by a man who does it quietly and correctly and doesn't need it noticed — sits in my chest a moment.

"Thank you."

He nods once and picks up his book.

I get up.

The Purge is over.

The war is not.

There is work to do.

Chapter 31

Finlay

The name on the paper is Aldric Vane.

I read it once. I fold the paper. I put it in my inside pocket. I thank Raven and I tell her I need some time before I begin, and she reads that correctly and leaves me with it. She is very good at reading what a person needs. She has become, across this year, remarkably good at reading what I need, which is a form of attention I find I am not entirely used to after nine centuries of managing my own weather without anyone else noticing it was weather.

She leaves.

I sit in my office.

I do not begin.

What I do instead is something I very rarely allow myself. I sit with a feeling without immediately turning it into a task. The feeling is not simple. It is made of things that have been gathering since I read the name — since before I read it, I think, since the quality of Raven's face when she handed me the paper told me that what was written on it would ask something of me that ordinary work does not.

Aldric Vane.

He was a flock elder in the northern territories for a hundred and seventeen years. I have known him for a hundred and twelve of them. He steadied me through the stretch in my eighth century when I was — not lost, phoenixes don't get lost the way other creatures do, we are built pointing toward function — but uncertain. Uncertain in the particular way of an old thing that has reached the age where the purposes that carried the first centuries have all been met and the next ones haven't shown themselves yet. There is a period, for most phoenixes who live long enough to reach it, when the work of continuing stops being obvious. When going on feels less like momentum and more like persistence for its own sake.

Aldric helped me find what came after.

He was patient and methodical and entirely without condescension — that particular absence of condescension which separates a mentor from an authority, the quality of a man more interested in your reasoning than in whether you arrive where he did. We disagreed substantially about the northern territories during the Marzana consolidation thirty years ago. We disagreed about Magnus's early expansion and what ought to be done about it. Both disagreements were real and long-running and never settled. I took that as evidence of a friendship sturdy enough to hold strain without breaking.

I took it to mean he was who I believed him to be.

It did not occur to me that the disagreements could be genuine and the alignment could also be genuine. That a man can hold real opinions and a real hidden allegiance at once — that the opinions aren't cover for the allegiance, they're simply a separate layer, and both have been running side by side for however long this has been running.

A hundred and twelve years.

I sit with the number.

✦ ✦ ✦

I write four letters before midnight.

The first to my primary contact in the northern flock network. Not Aldric. Never again Aldric — the other one, the one I've kept alongside him for forty years on the principle that a network with a single point of failure isn't a network. Her name is Thessaly. She is careful and thorough and in forty years has never once given me something that turned out to be wrong. I write her a letter that tells her nothing about what I know while asking her to confirm where Aldric has been, what doors are open to him in Magnus's court, and whether anything about the way he sends and receives word has changed in the last two years. Clean. Precise. Nothing that moves the ground under him.

The second to a contact inside Magnus's own people — a dragon who owes me a considerable debt from circumstances forty years ago that neither of us has ever discussed with anyone. I ask him to quietly pull Aldric's visitor records at the palace for the past three years. I give him a reason that isn't the real one. He'll believe it. He is not a subtle man, which is exactly why I have never asked him for anything but records, and exactly why he is still useful.

The third to Cassius, on the Eastern Isles — the omega male mage who has spent eleven years on Amadeus. I tell him we have a confirmed name. I don't send the name; Raven and I agreed it travels one channel at a time and never two at once. I tell him his work on how Amadeus's net holds together should be looked at again in the light of a long-embedded contact inside Magnus's inner circle. He'll understand what that does to the timeline and to the size of the thing.

The fourth is the hardest.

I write it to no one. It isn't a letter. It is the beginning of what I eventually admit is simply the business of sitting with something for which there is no useful action yet. No next step, no decision to make, no task I can finish and set down in order to reach for the following one. Only the thing itself. The name on the paper, and what it does to what I believed, and to how I understood a century of standing beside a man who was not what I thought.

I write two lines and then I sit looking at them.

I put the pen down.

✦ ✦ ✦

The fire is the problem.

Phoenix fire is not dragon fire. Dragon fire is outside you — made in an organ, sent outward, a weapon that can be aimed and held back. Phoenix fire is inside. It lives in the body the way breath lives in the body, continuous and involuntary, and it rises and falls with whatever the phoenix is feeling, with an exactness that nine centuries of practice at containing it has still not entirely made convenient.

I am genuinely distressed.

The fire is not controlled.

This has happened perhaps twelve times in nine hundred years at a strength anyone could see. I believed, after the last occasion four centuries ago, that I had built enough practice to keep it under the surface in circumstances of personal difficulty. What I had built was practice. Practice is not immunity. What I understood was less complete than I believed it to be, which is itself a useful piece of information about the evening.

My hands on the desk are faintly luminous. The room has grown noticeably warm. The wood of the desk and the chair and the shelves has begun to answer it in the way wood does, giving off that dry sweetish smell of timber that has been sitting too close to a hearth. Not scorching. Not yet. If I don't have this in hand within the half hour, I will have to explain the smell to Balor, and Balor will know at once what the smell means, and he will say nothing about it, and his saying nothing will be its own kind of statement, and I am not prepared to receive it tonight.

I breathe. The pattern — three centuries of deliberate work, the rhythm that starves the fire by governing what I give it. It works. Partly. The light under my skin dims. The room stops climbing and holds at something just above ordinary rather than well above it.

I sit in the half-controlled quiet and think about what a century of nearness means once you learn it was the nearness of someone who was not the man you believed. What that knowing actually contained, if what it contained was a performance, sustained, across a hundred and twelve years.

The room warms again.

I breathe.

The door opens.

✦ ✦ ✦

Raven doesn't knock.

Which isn't rudeness — she has knocked on this door many times. Tonight she reads it correctly from the other side. A knock is what you do when you're asking permission, and may I come in implies that no is available as an answer, and no is not the right answer to what this is. She comes in, and closes the door, and looks at me with the attention she uses when she intends to offer nothing at all until she has finished looking.

I am sitting at my desk with my hands in front of me and the air too warm and the fire just under the skin.

"I don't need platitudes," I say. The warning is automatic. I have given it to a great many well-meaning people across nine centuries who arrived at moments like this carrying comfort I had no use for.

"I know," she says.

She crosses the room and sits on the edge of my desk.

That is a choice. Not the chair across from me, which is the formal position, the one that leaves the desk between us as a piece of territory. The desk itself. Two feet from where my hands are, with nothing in between, in the posture of someone who has decided the barrier isn't useful tonight.

She doesn't say anything. She sits there.

The fire slowly stops trying to surface.

I did not expect that. I did not expect that a young woman sitting on my desk in silence would do more than nine hundred years of breath work. I note it as a fact, and also as something I have no adequate explanation for and will think about later, when I am not sitting in the approximate wreckage of what I believed about a hundred and twelve years of friendship.

We sit in the quiet a while.

Eventually she says, "He chose his side a long time ago. He just hid it."

"I should have seen it."

"You weren't looking for it. You were trusting him." A pause. "That isn't a flaw."

I consider that. The distinction between a failure of perception and the act of trusting is one I have been drawing for students for nine hundred years, and I find, having it turned around and set in front of me, that it lands differently when the situation is your own. The distinction is real. I know it is real. Knowing it doesn't finish the feeling.

"The failure isn't in having trusted him," I say. "It's in what I couldn't see because I was trusting him. The blind spot the trust made."

She's quiet a moment. Then: "Yes. That's what I said."

I look at her.

"Trusting someone makes blind spots," she says. "That's what trust is — you stop examining certain things. A century of trust makes a century of blind spot. That isn't a failure. That's the shape of the thing."

She is twenty-three years old.

She is also not wrong.

"You are going to say that to people for the rest of your reign," I tell her, "and they are going to find it exactly as insufficient and as accurate as I find it at this moment."

"I know. I learned it from someone who says true things that feel insufficient."

The fire settles. Fully, finally — the light gone, the room cooling, the thing I have been holding down for hours resolving into something quieter.

Not resolved. Quieter.

We sit in it a while longer.

At some point I say, "I'll go north."

She doesn't react.

"Not now," I continue. "Not until we have the whole picture, until Cassius has looked again, until we know precisely what Aldric has had access to and what he's handed over. But when we're ready, I'll go. Not another contact. Not a delegation. Me."

She's quiet a moment.

"He'll know what it means when I arrive," I say. "He'll know the hiding is finished. And I want him to know it's me. I want to have the conversation he has been avoiding for however long this has been going on."

"You want to ask him why."

"Yes."

"He might not tell you."

"He might not. But I want to ask." I look at my hands on the desk. "Nine centuries is long enough to know which questions matter whether or not they're answered."

Raven looks at me for a long moment — the look she uses when she has received something and is deciding what to do with it. Then she nods.

Once.

She doesn't argue. She doesn't add conditions or caveats or strategic concerns. She nods, with the particular nod of someone who has understood that this isn't a tactical decision but a necessary one, and has recognized that some necessary things are not hers to overrule.

I find I am grateful for that.

"Four days," I say.

"Take what you need."

She gets up from the desk and crosses the office. At the door she pauses, and I think she's going to say one more of the things she said tonight that were true and insufficient and necessary.

She doesn't. She simply goes.

The office is quiet. The fire is under control.

Outside the window the grounds are dark and still. The Purge is finished. The investigation has begun. The network is moving. The war is not over, and I have four days, and a decision I made twenty minutes ago that I will not be reconsidering.

I pick up the pen.

I begin.

Chapter 32

Solaris

The war council meets at Blackhaven three days after the Purge ends.

Raven chose the place deliberately. Not Dragonis, which is still working through the aftermath and is nobody's neutral ground. Not the Marzana palace, which carries too much of Klauth's authority for a meeting where she needs these people sitting as peers rather than subjects. Blackhaven is hers. Made, claimed, held — hers in the sense that everyone in this room will feel her authority not because of her title but because they are standing inside the thing she built and can see for themselves what she has made of it.

It is a deliberate choice and it is the right one. I know it as such because I have spent a year watching her make choices like it — decisions that account for what people feel as much as for what a plan requires, that read a room and set the conditions accordingly.

She is twenty-three years old.

I settle into my chair at the council table and wait for it to begin.

The room.

Raven at the head of the table, where she belongs, sitting with the ease of someone who stopped waiting for permission to be at the head of things several months ago.

Klauth on her left — the only person here whose standing sits above hers, arranged with the careful deliberate deference of a king who has understood that this is her council and not his.

Thauglor on her right. Nobody asked him to sit there. He did it anyway, because his presence at her right hand says something about what he believes regarding the Marzana succession, and he has decided to make it visible.

Mina across from Klauth. She gave her dominance to her daughter a year ago, and she sits now with the quality of a queen who has accepted her daughter's authority and found in it, I think, something close to relief. At forty-five she is, her daughter aside, the youngest person at this table by a wide margin, and she carries competence the way people do who achieved remarkable things early — not loudly. Simply always there.

Balor beside Mina. Finlay beside Thauglor. Abraxis at the far end, the ancient black dragon, Lily's father, who was a general before the injury that ended his fighting and who still carries all of that in the way he occupies a room. He does not speak often in council. When he does, everyone listens.

And me. At Raven's left hand, where she asked me to sit, which I understand to be a different statement than Thauglor's — not a declaration about her succession, but a declaration about where her nest sits among the things she trusts.

I am aware that I am the least politically significant person in this room by a considerable distance.

I am aware that she asked me to be here anyway.

Those two facts together are, for me, the shape love takes in a setting like this. Not the private warmth of our nest. The choice to put the person you love in the room where the consequential things happen.

✦ ✦ ✦

She opens with what we know.

No preamble. No ceremony over the council convening. She stands at the head of the table and lays it out in the precise, layered way of a woman who has been ordering this in her head for three days and is now setting it down with the clarity that three days of ordering produces. She starts with what is established and moves to what is inferred, marks the line between them plainly, and never presents a conclusion as a certainty she doesn't have.

That, I have come to understand, is the thing that separates good intelligence work from bad. The willingness to say this we know, this we believe, this we don't yet know, instead of folding all three into one confident account. She is twenty-three and she already has the discipline of it. I watch the room take it in, and I watch the room answer it — the particular attention that honesty about your own limits produces, people leaning in because they trust they're being handed the real picture rather than a tidied one.

What they know: Amadeus's contact in Magnus's court is Aldric Vane, a flock elder placed for at least two years and likely longer, pending what Thessaly sends back. The fire drake nationalists have been paying for work against the Marzana succession for two years, running it through both the drake network and Amadeus's wider reach. The academy was infiltrated by four planted students, two members of staff, and a line of word going out to the border rotation as it happened.

"The Purge was not a serious attempt on my life," she says. "It was a test. They were measuring how I answer pressure, how much I see coming, and what I've built around myself. They wanted to know how I move, what I can do, who I lean on and how — before they commit to something larger with a different purpose."

The room is very quiet.

"The serious attempt is coming," she says. "We don't know when and we don't know in what shape. What the Purge told us is that they are more patient than we thought, better supplied than we thought — dragon's bane in quantity, properly made, not improvised — and running a chain that reaches from the border rotation through the academy's own offices to a man inside the northern flock. This is not a faction making noise. This is a campaign, and someone competent is running it."

Klauth: "Aldric Vane. Finlay."

Finlay's face doesn't change. "It's begun. Thessaly is moving. I'll go north myself once we know what he's had access to."

"Yourself," Klauth says.

"Yes."

A silence. Klauth looks at Raven. She nods once — the nod of a thing already decided. He doesn't press it.

I give them Amadeus.

I have been preparing this for three weeks, since before the bell, since the evening Raven and I sat down with everything I'd brought back out of the old blood and everything Finlay's people had and everything Cassius has built across eleven years, and agreed the council would need the whole of it. I give it the way I've learned to give complicated things to a room where some people know a great deal and some know almost nothing: in order, in layers, assuming nothing.

What I tell them: Amadeus gave up his body more than a thousand years ago to fuel a binding so large it could not be fed from outside itself and needed a fire burning within. He built that binding so that what he was would remain inside it rather than end with the flesh. What he became is scattered — spread across the whole net of cursed eggs that holds the binding up, and living in no single place. He cannot be killed in the ordinary way. Killing a host or breaking an egg wounds the net. It does not end it.

"To end Amadeus," I say, "you break every egg in the net at once. Or you cut the net off from the mage-blooded men who carry him. Both together is the surest way. Either one alone leaves a real chance that something survives."

The room goes quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when a very large problem has been stated plainly for the first time.

Mina says, "How many eggs?"

"Cassius puts it between forty-seven and sixty-three. He's still narrowing it."

"And breaking them all at once means⁠—"

"Doing it across ground we haven't mapped. Yes. That's the difficulty."

Abraxis, from the far end, in the voice he uses when he has been thinking about a thing since before anyone raised it: "The hosts are the easier half. If Cassius can name them, cutting him off from them is careful work rather than impossible work."

"That's where Cassius has turned," I confirm. "He believes there are fewer hosts than eggs, and that they can be found."

"Then that's where we put our weight," Raven says. She has been listening in the way she listens to something she is fitting into a picture she is already holding. "Cassius names the hosts. Finlay goes north and takes the contact apart. We use Therun's wolf trackers to find the fire drake supply lines in the western territories. Three lines of work, three separate clocks, all of them running at the same thing."

She says it as though it were simple.

It is not simple.

It is, however, correct.

✦ ✦ ✦

The council runs four hours.

I speak when I have something to add and I am quiet when I don't, which is what I am for in a room like this, and which I have come to understand is more useful than speaking to prove I'm present. The talk moves through Therun's pledge — the wolf trackers already moving, going first to the western territories, the twelve metallics waiting on word. The envoys from the Eastern Isles who still have no names attached to them. The review of Marzana's own security that Klauth has set running since the academy.

And through all of it, I watch Raven.

She runs this council the way she runs everything she has decided to run properly — with the complete, unperformed attention of someone for whom it is simply the work. She follows four conversations at once, holds three separate lines of thinking open, and asks the question that needs asking at the exact moment it needs asking. Not early, which would be presumption. Not late, which would be late. At the moment — because she has been listening not only to what is being said but to the shape of what isn't, to the distance between where the talk is and where it has to arrive.

I watch Thauglor watch her.

He does it with the attention very old things give to very new things made partly out of themselves — the deep recognition of sapphire eyes that have watched a thousand years of Mrithun leadership and are now looking at what comes next. He isn't performing pride. He is having it, with the weight of a creature for whom pride is a large and serious thing that does not visit often.

At one point Klauth defers to her on a question of timing.

He does it without ceremony. He asks because she is the person in this room who has thought about it most carefully and he knows it. Two hundred years on the Marzana throne before the shell took him, and twenty-five since he came out of it, and he asks his twenty-three-year-old daughter for the timeline because she is right and he isn't sure and he knows the difference.

She answers.

She is right.

The thing I can't fully put words to isn't any single moment. It's the accumulation. Every morning circuit and every debrief and every time she looked at something difficult and chose to look at it honestly rather than around it. Every choice she made correctly when the easier one was sitting right there. The thousand years behind me were a particular kind of dark, and what is in front of me — this council, this room, this young woman running the most consequential war planning the Marzana Empire has done in thirty years — is a particular kind of light.

She is twenty-three years old.

She is the most capable person in this room.

Every ancient thing at this table knows it.

I am so proud of her it aches.

✦ ✦ ✦

After.

The council ends and they leave in the order of their business. Klauth and Thauglor together, deep in it already, two great wyrms carrying what comes next in the shorthand of creatures who have been having this kind of conversation for centuries. Balor and Mina. Finlay last, pausing in the doorway to look at Raven with an expression holding everything this week has cost him and everything he intends to do about it.

Then the room is ours.

Raven sits down in her chair at the head of the empty table and looks at the far wall a while — the long blank look that means the forward-facing part of her has finished and her mind is letting go of the grip it had. The exhale of someone who has been running at the top of herself and is setting it down.

I come around the table and sit beside her.

She doesn't say anything for a while. Neither do I.

"Therun's trackers go out today," she says eventually.

"Yes."

"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.

Solaris stands nearby. He doesn't make a sound either.

Eventually she pulls back far enough to look at me.

Her mismatched eyes move over my face — the amber, and the half-sapphire that still catches me sometimes with how much of Solaris is in it — in that focused way she has when she is checking something against what she expected. That isn't a hatchling trait. That's Nova.

Her gaze drops to the shoulder.

The scar shows above my collar. The wound has closed and the scale has begun to come back, but the pale line of it reads clearly against the darker scale around it. She reaches up with one small finger and touches it very gently.

She looks up at me.

"Mama hurt," she says.

"Mama's okay."

She looks at the scar again. She works on it — I can watch her working on it, a two-year-old holding two things against each other and finding out they can both be true. That hurt and not all right anymore are not the same. That a thing can be hurt and still be going to be fine. She takes her time with it.

Then she leans in and presses her small mouth to the scar.

I do not cry.

I do not.

I hold her very tightly and look up at the mountain above Blackhaven and breathe — not the measured breathing I've been running on for three days. The breath of someone who is home and is allowed to simply breathe. Nova's warmth against my chest. Her weight. Her smell, which is Blackhaven stone and Solaris and a thread of the flight field underneath, which means she has already been outside today working at something.

Approach angles, Solaris said in the council room.

She decided the morning routine would not be suspended.

I put my face into her hair and breathe.

✦ ✦ ✦

Dinner is the whole nest.

All five of them, which hasn't happened at once in six weeks. The Purge needed everyone where it needed them, and the nest has been spread across those positions the whole time — Corvus on the wrong side of the bell for three days, close enough to hear it ring and unable to reach me, Hemlocke in the stable loft with his mirror, Keir running the grid, Finlay in his office with the fire barely under the skin, Solaris here with Nova and the council to build. Six weeks of all of us pulled apart toward the same end.

Back now.

Corvus cooked.

He does this when he wants to mark something as worth marking without turning the marking into a performance. It's how he says a thing matters — by providing food better than the occasion strictly requires and being in the kitchen that makes it. There's bread, and the braised thing, and a wine from the Blackhaven cellar that only comes out for evenings that have earned it. I notice all of it and I take all of it and I say nothing about any of it, because he has said nothing about it, and that is how it works between us.

Isolde is here, which Hemlocke arranged. I didn't ask. He simply made it happen, the way he makes the things happen that he has worked out are needed. She sits beside Bella with the ease of two people whose friendship needs no explaining, and they are deep in a conversation which — going by Isolde's face and the angle of her shoulders and the very careful way she is not saying a name — is about Charron.

I catch Hemlocke's eye across the table. He makes no expression at all. He doesn't need to.

The food is very good.

Keir tells the story of how the last fire drake got off the grounds — the drainage channel that wasn't on any of the building plans her people had bought, and the exit that followed, which was considerably less dignified than the plan had allowed for. It's Keir's register exactly: present tense, physical, delighted by the world's comic timing rather than working it. Orpheus adds one detail at precisely the right moment.

The detail is devastating.

The table goes up.

I laugh — the laugh that comes out of you when you've been at full stretch for a long time and the body is finally allowed to remember that laughing exists. It goes all the way down. Corvus watches me with the face he wears when he's seeing something he's been waiting on. Nova, on Solaris's lap, watches me with enormous eyes and then laughs herself, because laughter is contagious at two and she doesn't need the story. She only needs that I am laughing, and that is enough.

The evening is long and unhurried and exactly what I came home for.

✦ ✦ ✦

Later.

The nest settles into its shapes. Corvus reading. Solaris in the large chair with Nova asleep on his chest, the boneless weight of a sleeping hatchling spread out across him, one small fist against his collarbone. Keir and Orpheus in the back study, where a conversation that began as a debrief has turned into chess, which is where those conversations always end up. Isolde and Bella out on the long balcony, the glow of their talking visible through the glass.

Hemlocke finds me in the east corridor.

Not by accident. Hemlocke does not do anything by accident. He works by careful unhurried attention to what is wanted and when, and what is wanted now is the two of us, and he gave the evening the time it needed and now he is here. He always knows when. I think that's the particular gift of someone who tends things for a living — knowing when care is welcome and when it needs room, and moving accordingly.

He doesn't speak.

He puts out his hand.

I take it.

We go.

Hemlocke in closeness is the opposite of everything the last three days asked of me. He is warm and unhurried and what he offers is presence with nothing attached to it — a man not trying to produce a result, only to be here with me completely. His hands know about the shoulder. They move around it, careful with it in the way that asks for no acknowledgment, the noticing done as action instead of comment. The tenderness of a black unicorn who has decided you're worth tending.

The relief is very large.

I hadn't known, until this evening, how much of the last six weeks I'd been holding at arm's length — keeping the weight of it somewhere manageable so the working part of me could run clean. I know that was right. I know I'd do it again. And I know, with his arm across my back and his warmth against me and the mountain outside the window, that holding a thing at that distance has a cost, and that I am paying it now in relief, the way you pay a debt you always knew was coming.

"You did it," he says. Quiet. Not a question. A naming.

"Yes."

"You're home."

"Yes."

The bond runs the register that belongs to the two of us in the late hours — the warmth of someone who tends, the warmth of being tended, the peace of lying beside a man who wants nothing from you except that you be here.

I close my eyes.

I sleep.

✦ ✦ ✦

Before.

Before the east corridor, before the dinner, before Nova's face against my shoulder in the courtyard — I found Xero.

She was on the upper balcony rail in the position she takes when the evening sky is clear, blood-red eyes tracking along the mountain horizon, absorbed in some discipline of her own I have never found a name for. She heard me coming. She always hears me coming, the way a tressym does when she has made one person the fixed point she measures everything else against.

Raven, she said, without turning.

"The letters."

She turned then. The long look — the Xero assessment that means she is making sure that what she is about to do is the thing actually being asked and not something next to it. Then she went into the satchel and brought them out. Five letters, red wax intact, my handwriting across the front of each. She had carried them through the whole Purge, and the debrief, and the council, and the flight home, and they were exactly as I gave them to her.

Not needed, she said.

"Not needed."

I took them. I held them.

Five sealed letters. Corvus, Hemlocke, Keir, Finlay, Solaris, in the hand of a woman writing the night before the Purge who had decided to say the things she might otherwise never say. The sea glass in the inner drawer. The foal, and what Hemlocke's hands look like when he's tending something. Keir, and the dark, and being trusted in it. The loneliness as the mechanism. The thousand years and the choosing of ordinary.

I had thought, before the Purge, that if I came back I would burn them. That the writing was the part that mattered and the delivering wasn't, that they were for me and not for them — a way of knowing I had said what needed saying to the people who matter, even if the saying stayed private.

Standing on the balcony holding them, I knew that wasn't quite right.

What I wrote is true. It was true the night I wrote it and it is true tonight and it will go on being true for as long as the people it's addressed to are alive and I am alive and what runs between us is real. The emergency didn't make it true. The emergency only made me willing to put it on paper.

I took the letters inside.

I put them in the inner drawer of my desk, beside the sea glass.

Not burned. Not delivered yet. But not private either — not mine the way they were the night I wrote them. The right moment for each will come. I'll know it when it does, because I know these people, and I know what it looks like when the moment is right.

I can wait. The Purge taught me a great deal about what patience can hold.

I closed the drawer.

I went to find Hemlocke.

I was home.

Chapter 34

Raven

Four weeks after the Purge, the academy looks like itself again.

That isn't as simple as it sounds. The Purge leaves marks, and they aren't physical ones — the grounds are repaired inside the first week and any damage from three days of sanctioned violence is dealt with quietly. The marks are in the people. Who avoids which corridor. Which students eat with different people now than they did in September. Which third-years have come out with that particular stillness in the way they move, the habit of reading a room before they walk into it. The look of someone who has seen something real and been altered by the seeing.

The Year Three population that came out of the Purge is not the population that went in. That is, by design, the point of it. I know it's the point, and I know I'm in the category of people it changed, and I have spent four weeks deciding what kind of change I intend to let it be.

The answer I've reached is: precise.

The anger I banked before the Purge and spent during it has settled into something sharper and narrower. Not less. Differently aimed. The Purge showed me the shape of what is being run against me, and everything I do next is built on that. Precise is better than angry. Angry gets things done. Precise gets the right things done.

I walk the morning circuit.

It's the same circuit I've walked since Year One. The same stones, the same angles, the same mountain light falling the same way at the same hours. I have changed a great deal in three years. The circuit hasn't. That's what I come to it for — the one thing that holds steady across the girl who arrived here and whoever I am now. A reliable anchor. I have learned to value reliable anchors.

Keir runs it with me on the days he's here, which is three of five this week.

The formal investigation closed three weeks ago.

Balor took the report to Klauth himself. All of it: Anipe's record, the invented enrollments, the word going out to the border rotation as it happened, and the dragon's bane, which his people traced back through three separate middlemen to a maker in the outer western territories who works well outside the continental trade. Properly made, properly bought. That kind of buying takes money and it takes knowing which doors don't ask questions.

Four fire drakes. Three of them are in Klauth's custody now, waiting on formal charges. The fourth — the one who works by scent, the one who broke away at the pinch and went out through the south wall — is still loose.

Samara is in custody and has been cooperative since the moment she made her calculation against the east wall, her statement on record in full. The question of the founding charter sits with the continental judicial panel, which moves at the speed it moves and will hand down something in months. I've submitted my account of the engagement. I have nothing further to add to that process.

Anipe's freeze released after three days, which is toward the long end of what a full lock holds. Balor tells me she came out of it calmly. That she sat up, took in the officials waiting for her, and asked, precisely, to speak with someone who could tell her what she was formally charged with. The correct and intelligent response. I put it in the file, noted it, and moved on. Her case belongs to Klauth's tribunal. My part is finished.

The academy had a letter from the continental body three weeks ago acknowledging the outcome and confirming that what the investigation found will be folded into the next review of how the Purge is run. Which is the official way of saying: what happened at Dragonis this year was not standard, and the standard needs rewriting. I am mentioned three times, by title and never by name, which is the official way of saying something I have chosen not to decode.

The academy looks like itself.

The people inside it are not who they were before the bell rang.

✦ ✦ ✦

The shoulder heals.

A dragon's body works in bursts rather than steadily — deep overnight stretches where the scale comes back visibly, then quiet days where nothing seems to happen at all and the work goes on underneath. By three weeks the scar has finished forming. A narrow pale line across the top of the left shoulder, clean-edged, the scale around it slightly raised where the healing pushed against what was already there.

I test the arm at four weeks. Not with an assessment — with a full training session, the kind that would have found the wound if the wound were still there. The whole Advanced Shadowcarve rotation, the Year Two sequence with the overhead work in it, and the movement from the stairwell in the south dormitory that I wanted to know I could still do cleanly.

I can.

Balor watched without being asked. At the end he said, "Full rotation. You worked around it during the recovery without building a habit of working around it. That's correct." Then he left.

That is Balor's clean bill of health. Two sentences, accurate, nothing further.

The scar doesn't bother me. I look at it sometimes. Not with regret, and not with the backward kind of thinking the Purge invites — what would have happened if her arithmetic had been two inches different, if I'd moved half a beat slower. I've decided I'm not spending time in that direction. What happened is what happened. The scar is the record of it. The record is accurate, and that's enough.

✦ ✦ ✦

Keir brings me the western territory report on a Thursday.

We're in the east corridor after the circuit, early enough that it's empty and we can be specific without minding who might hear. He has the map with him, the paper one his pack makes for a long chase, updated every day by whichever hounds are on the trail.

"South-southwest," he says. "Same bearing since the second week. She isn't wandering. She has somewhere to be."

"Which territory?"

"If the bearing holds—" he traces the line "—the outer edge of the old fire drake ground. Not the settled parts. The abandoned zones, the ones they were pushed out of when Mina's campaigns came through two decades ago."

I look at the map.

The abandoned zones. Someone who knows that country — who grew up on stories about losing it and carries the way through it in her head — going home. Or going to something she believes is home. Or going to something that has been waiting there for her.

"Don't intercept," I say.

Keir looks at me.

"Not yet. If she's going to a second position, I want to know what the position is before we pull her out of it. Map where she stops. Find out what's there. Then we move."

He turns that over. "That's three more weeks, at least."

"Yes."

"The Gathering is in three weeks."

"I know."

A pause. "You want her tracked while you're at Sovereign."

"I want to know exactly what I'm walking back into when the Gathering ends," I say. "Three weeks of trail tells us more than taking her now and getting half a picture. Can your pack hold it that long?"

"Yes."

"Good."

He rolls the map and holds it out. I take it.

"You think there are more of them," he says.

"I think there was a reason they wanted us counting three planted students instead of something larger. I think the Purge was a probe, and the probe was meant to learn how we answer, and now somebody is walking home to report what she saw."

Keir is quiet a moment. "If that's right⁠—"

"Then wherever she stops tells us the shape of the real thing." I put the map inside my jacket. "Three weeks."

✦ ✦ ✦

Finlay leaves on a Sunday.

He doesn't announce it. No farewell, no word to the student body, none of the paperwork that would ordinarily go with a faculty member's long absence. He tells me the evening before, in his office, that he goes in the morning — that Thessaly's confirmation has come through with the whole picture of what Aldric has had access to, that he spent four weeks preparing rather than four days because the work required what it required, and that he was not going north until he could go north properly.

He is ready now.

I ask what he needs from me. He says: nothing, for this. This part is his. His contacts, his people, the particular kind of arrival that only a phoenix of his age and history can make. Aldric Vane will understand what it means the moment Finlay appears in person. The showing up is the message, before anything is said. A hundred and twelve years of friendship, and the friend who comes to end it comes himself. That is not something you can send by any other hand.

"How long?" I ask.

"I don't know." The honesty of Finlay in a place where he can't be certain — false confidence would be more dangerous here than an admitted unknown. "He may talk as soon as he understands where he stands. He may need time to arrive at understanding that talking is all that's left. I'll move at whatever pace it wants."

"I'll be at the Gathering when you're ready to report."

"I know. The northern channel if something breaks. Don't expect it quickly."

He looks at me with the expression he has used in various forms across this year, the one that is not quite pride and not quite grief and sits between them the way all of Finlay's deepest feelings seem to sit between things that would be easier to name. The look of a man who has been watching someone become a thing and has arrived at the part where he watches her simply be it.

"Finlay."

He waits.

I want to say be careful. I want to say come back. I want to name what it would actually mean to lose him — not as a network, not as a source. As the man who sat in a chair while I learned to rule, and corrected my posture, and told me the true insufficient things and meant every one of them. The man whose fire got away from him when he read a name off a piece of paper, which told me everything I needed to know about what the betrayal cost, and who picked up his pen anyway.

I say, "The network is yours. Don't let what it costs you personally change how you work."

He almost smiles. "It won't."

And the tone of it tells me he heard all of the rest, and has taken it in the exact careful way he takes things in — completely, and without needing me to have said it out loud.

He leaves in the morning.

I watch him go from the upper flight platform.

He doesn't shift straight away. He walks the grounds to the north gate — the formal way out, the same gate students and faculty have come and gone through for the whole life of this institution. He walks it the way he walks everything, as though the ground underfoot deserves the full attention of whoever is crossing it. At the gate he stops. Then he shifts.

A phoenix in flight is not a dragon in flight.

It isn't the size, though the size is considerable — a phoenix is large without being wyrm-large, a different order of thing from Solaris or Thauglor. It's the light. Phoenix fire lives inside, and in the air it carries in the feathers, visible from a long way off in full morning sun. The gold of him. The particular quality of something that has been burning without pause for nine hundred years and has not gone out.

He clears the northern peak and is gone into the mountain sky.

I stay on the platform a while.

The academy runs its morning underneath me. Class bells. The far-off knocking of the training yard starting its first session. The kitchen block sending up the smell of the morning meal the way it does every day regardless of what happened yesterday. The institution continues. The routines continue. The mountain is the mountain.

The shoulder doesn't ache. The scar catches the light at an angle that makes it briefly visible at the inside edge of my vision, which I have come to understand as my body filing what happened among the ordinary things rather than shutting it away somewhere separate.

The Gathering is in three weeks.

The last fire drake is moving toward the abandoned zones in the west.

Finlay is flying north.

What comes next asks for patience rather than intensity — the patience of someone who has put the pieces where they belong and now waits for them to arrive. I have learned this year that patience is not the absence of action. It's the discipline of knowing which action is right and waiting for the moment when it becomes right.

I am patient.

I go down to the morning circuit.

Chapter 35

Mina

The Great Gathering opens tomorrow.

I've been at Sovereign ten days getting it ready, which is the least any adequate preparation takes for the largest convening on the continent, and which produces the particular tiredness that comes of doing organizational work at scale. Not physical. The mental kind — ten days of logistics and protocol and accommodation assignments, catering for three hundred and forty-seven flights, and the exact choreography of arrival order so that historical enemies don't put down in adjacent fields and open the Gathering with an incident before the formal opening has convened.

I do this every year. I have done it every year for nineteen years.

I am better at it than anyone else alive.

I still find it exhausting.

Klauth is in the east wing going over the declaration with his scribes — the opening statement, the same words in shape that have been used since the first Gathering three hundred years ago, altered each year to suit where the continent actually stands. This year's alterations want care. Nothing about the climate is neutral. Every flight leader arriving tomorrow knows about the fire drake faction, about the academy, about what Raven did during the Purge. The declaration has to acknowledge the changed ground without tipping into language that would amount to declaring hostility before we're ready to declare it.

I drafted three versions. Klauth chose the second. That is typical. The first is always what I actually think, the third is too careful, and the second is what I write when I'm holding honesty and diplomacy against each other and splitting the difference. He has been choosing the second for nineteen years. I stopped being surprised a long time ago.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first arrivals came three days ago.

Early arrivals are always the flights with the longest way to travel — the island flights, the far eastern territories, the northern coastal communities whose geography doesn't allow a quick crossing. We take them in with the standard protocol: formal greeting at the landing fields, accommodation, and the orientation that walks first-time flight leaders through Sovereign's layout and the schedule.

I run the orientations myself, as I do every year.

They serve a purpose that isn't on the official agenda. Twenty minutes of orientation is the first chance I get to take the temperature of an arriving flight before anything formal begins. In twenty minutes I can read a room — the postures, the small signals that tell me which flight leaders have come with something other than what they wrote on their attendance papers.

What I read this year is more fear than usual in the middle of the field. The small and medium communities without the resources to hold their own ground, the ones who depend on the continental alliance for their safety. They arrive with the look of people who have been watching something come apart from what they hoped was a safe distance and are beginning to wonder whether the distance is still safe.

That is useful.

Frightened flights are flights that need something from a Gathering. Flights that need something can be offered something. And what Raven means to offer them — what we settled at the war council at Blackhaven — is precisely what a frightened flight needs most: a place inside a structure large enough to shelter it.

I make notes. I pass them to Klauth's advisor.

The Gathering hasn't begun and we are already working it.

✦ ✦ ✦

Raven arrives the evening before the opening.

I know her flight path. I know all of them — I coordinated them — but I know hers because I plotted it myself instead of handing it to the protocol team. Her approach from the east, her arrival window, the position on the fields that puts her descent in view of the greatest possible number of flight leaders already here without requiring any of them to turn and look for it. Finlay's protocol, worked through my logistics, and what it produces is a landing that is — the word is legible. The heir apparent arrives, everyone who is going to see it sees it, and what they see is a dragoness who flew from Dragonis with her whole nest and her hatchling daughter and her tressym, and who lands the way she does everything, without apology and without performance.

She is in her dragoness when she clears the eastern ridge.

I am on the upper observation platform, which is where I told my coordinator I would be conducting a final review of the landing fields. This is true in the sense that I have papers in my hand.

I am also watching my daughter arrive.

The skull marking carries from altitude — the bone-white of her face against the matte black of the rest of her, the coloring that is specifically hers, that is the Mrithun and the wyrm and twenty-three years of her life written into scale. She is large. She has been growing since the submission at the end of Year Two, the wyrm in her doing whatever it had apparently been waiting for permission to do, and she is visibly bigger than she was six months ago. She moves through the air with the unhurried authority of something that has accepted its own size and stopped negotiating with the space around it.

I watch her.

I have been watching her since she was born — the particular watching of a mother who is also a queen, who knows the shape of power in a dragon's body because she carries it herself and can therefore read it in someone else without laying her own over it. What I read in Raven above Sovereign is not performance and it is not ceremony. It's simply a dragoness who came through the Purge and walked out of that gate and ran a war council and sent her people north and spent four weeks teaching a two-year-old approach angles, and who has arrived at the Great Gathering carrying all of it as ordinary weight, because it has become ordinary to her.

This is the thing I submitted to at the end of Year Two.

Not the strength alone. This.

Behind her: Solaris, enormous and warm. Corvus in drake form, silver-iron scales taking the late afternoon light. Keir trailing the group in the pattern he holds when he's covering an approach, there and not there and there again. Hemlocke in black unicorn form. And Nova — tiny against Solaris's scale, obsidian and burnt orange, flying her approach angles with the total concentration of a two-year-old who has decided to master something.

I watch Nova fly.

Then I watch Raven watch Nova fly, which is the more interesting of the two. The particular quality of Raven watching her daughter do a thing correctly — the careful pride of someone who will not show it fully because showing it fully would embarrass them both, running directly against her complete inability to suppress it. I know that expression. I have been wearing a version of it for the past twenty minutes.

She shifts to human form on the landing field.

I am there by the time she lands. Not running — I don't run in the formal spaces unless something is on fire — but walking at the pace that covers the distance in the least acceptable time. She sees me coming. She doesn't speed up to meet me. She waits, which is correct: the dominant dragoness doesn't move toward the submitted queen. The submitted queen moves toward her. We worked that out between us over the summer, the choreography of how we read in public now that the private truth of it has changed.

In private, the truth is: she is my daughter, and she is twenty-three, and I am forty-five, and I have been the most powerful female dragon on this continent for fifteen years. I submitted to her at the end of Year Two because she was stronger and the submission was correct, and I would make the same choice again. The power and the love are two separate things. Both are real. Occasionally they are complicated.

In public: she is the dominant dragoness. I am her mother. The choreography says the first of those, and everyone watching can see it.

I reach her.

She looks at me with Thauglor's sapphire sitting in her face, which still does something specific to me every time, because those eyes have always been hers and his at once and both of those carry weight.

"The shoulder," I say.

She tilts it slightly — an offer to look, not a flinch. The scar shows above her collar. Narrow, pale, the scale around it still a little raised. "Healed," she says.

"I know. Balor sent me the training assessment."

Something moves in her face. "He didn't tell me he was reporting to you."

"He didn't tell me either. He simply sent it."

She turns that over — a woman adjusting her understanding of what Balor considers to be his business. "Of course he did," she says.

"Of course," I agree.

We stand a moment in the Sovereign landing field with the whole machinery of the Gathering running around us and the nest coming down behind her and the early-arrival flight leaders watching from a careful but entirely unmistakable distance, and what passes between us doesn't require language.

She is here. She is whole. She ran the Purge and came out the far side and is standing in front of me on the eve of the Great Gathering with the scar showing and her shoulders square and her eyes perfectly level.

I am her mother.

What I feel about that right now is very large, and it is mine to manage.

✦ ✦ ✦

That evening the flight leaders who have already arrived gather in the great hall for the pre-opening dinner.

This is tradition — the night before the Gathering opens, the early arrivals eat together in a setting that is technically social and functionally diplomatic. I host it. I have hosted it nineteen times. I know every person in that room by name, by flight, by their history with the Marzana line, by what has brought them here, by where they prefer to sit and whether they drink the northern vintage or the southern.

This year I also know something I have never known in any previous year: my daughter is at the far end of the hall receiving a line of flight leaders who have asked to present themselves to her before the formal opening, and watching her do it is producing a feeling I have no sufficient word for.

Proud isn't enough. Proud implies surprise, and I am not surprised. The word I keep arriving at is confirmed. What I believed about her is being confirmed, in front of the leadership of three hundred and forty-seven flights, and the confirmation has a weight I have been walking toward for twenty-three years.

What I watch: she remembers every name she is given without appearing to work at it. She asks specific questions — the real questions of someone who has read the background and is genuinely interested in the answers, not the pleasantries of someone getting through an obligation. She gives away nothing about the war planning, the intelligence, or the name Finlay is carrying north. She takes each flight leader's offered presence with the attention that says I see you and I am keeping this without ever saying I am assessing you, though she is assessing every single one of them.

She is doing all of this while tracking Nova across the room. I know because every fourth or fifth leader, her attention shifts a fraction to the left — toward where Solaris is standing with Nova in his arms — and comes back. It costs her nothing in the conversation. The flight leader never notices. I notice, because I know her, and because I did the same thing with my own children for twenty years and I know exactly what it looks like to keep hold of a hatchling in a crowded room without appearing to.

This is Finlay's Royal Protocol.

It is also simply her — everything she has been taught running alongside everything she already was, at the same time, invisibly.

Klauth finds me at some point. He watches her a while in the way of a man who knows what ruling looks like when it is being done properly. He says, quietly, "She's ready."

"She was ready last year," I say. "She just didn't have the evidence yet."

He makes the sound he makes when something accurate arrives at an inconvenient angle. "Point taken."

Nova, in Solaris's arms across the hall, chooses this moment to shift — just enough, the small shimmer of a two-year-old letting the dragoness show — and produces the voice she found in flight. High, wild, entirely her own.

The great hall goes still.

Every flight leader in the room. Every ancient dragon, every diplomat, every dignitary. All of them, for one moment, looking at a two-year-old hatchling who has just reminded them what she is.

Raven, at the far end of the receiving line, doesn't turn.

But the corner of her mouth moves.

I see it from here.

The Great Gathering opens tomorrow.

We are ready.

Chapter 36

Raven

The Great Gathering is the largest thing I have ever stood in the middle of.

I've been to the Marzana court in formal session. I've been to the Eastern Isles and the Southern Isle and the war councils at Blackhaven with great wyrms centuries old and kings with armies behind them. I know what significant looks like from the inside. The Gathering is different in the way scale is different from importance — not weightier than the war council, only larger. The kind of event where three hundred and forty-seven flights in one place produce something you feel in the body before you understand it in the head. A constant low hum of accumulated presence. The sound of that many wings, that many languages, that many separate territorial instincts working out how to share ground.

Sovereign was built to hold this.

It holds it.

Barely.

I walk the outer grounds at dawn, before the opening. Alone except for Xero, who arrived on my left shoulder the moment I stepped out of the family suite, as she always does — the tressym's version of the morning circuit being that she comes along on mine. Keir runs security from a distance that leaves me looking solitary while I am not. The sky over Sovereign at this hour is the color of old silver, that particular mountain light before the sun clears the peaks.

The grounds are already busy.

Early risers from a dozen flights, the overnight staff from communities that came in during the small hours, several hundred dragons negotiating shared space with varying degrees of grace. Two silver drakes from the western coastal community are having what I can read from fifty feet, by posture alone, as a conversation about boundaries with a third-year from one of the far eastern island flights. Not a word of it is spoken aloud. It appears to be resolving correctly without anyone's help.

I walk through it and I take note.

This is the circuit, Gathering edition — the same motion as the morning circuit at the academy, applied to different ground and a much larger population. Mapping positions. Reading the informal alliances that have been forming since arrivals began three days ago. Noting which groups are talking to which, and what their bodies say about it while they do. I do it because it's useful and because it is the thing that settles me: the body moving while the mind works.

By the end of the dawn walk I have twelve observations filed and three early judgments about flight leaders whose stated business here doesn't match where they're actually standing.

The day hasn't started.

✦ ✦ ✦

Nova causes a stir before the opening.

This was not the plan. The plan was for Solaris to keep her in the family suite until after the formal opening, at which point she could be introduced properly, in a setting somebody had chosen. Nova had other ideas. Nova's ideas at two years old are specific and immediate and not remotely interested in the schedule.

What happened is that she shifted.

Not in the suite, where Solaris could have managed it. In the outer courtyard, which she reached because Xero helped her — a fact I learned afterward when Xero reported it to me with the complete composure of a tressym who sees no difficulty whatsoever in having assisted a two-year-old out of supervised accommodation. Nova shifted in the outer courtyard, opened her wings to their full span, which at two years old is already remarkable, and produced the flight voice.

The outer courtyard held, at that moment, representatives of forty-three flights.

All of them stopped.

I heard about it from Keir, who blinked to me roughly eight seconds after it happened, which is the response time of a hound who has just seen something unexpected and is delivering it while the situation is still live. His face was doing the thing Keir's face does when he is trying very hard not to find something funny and not entirely succeeding.

"Nova," he said.

"I gathered."

I went to the outer courtyard. She was in the middle of it, still in dragon form, wings spread, looking at the assembled representatives of forty-three flights with the expression she wears when she is weighing something and hasn't decided yet what she thinks of it. Forty-three flight representatives looked back at her.

I didn't shield her.

I stood at the edge of the courtyard and looked at my daughter in the middle of it and let them look.

Let them see the obsidian and burnt orange, the mismatched eyes, the scale pattern that appears in no flight's recorded heritage because it is hers and has never existed before. Let them register that she is already large for her age, that her wings are already long for her body, that she holds herself in dragon form the way she holds herself in everything — without apology, filling all the room available.

She looked at me across the courtyard.

I gave her the nod. The particular one. You are correct. Continue.

She produced the flight voice again, shorter this time, the version she uses when she has decided something about a situation and wants it known that she has decided it. Then she shifted back, walked to Solaris, and climbed him with the efficient confidence of a two-year-old who considers enormous ancient wyrms to be personal climbing equipment.

Forty-three flight representatives watched all of it.

Good.

✦ ✦ ✦

The formal opening convenes at mid-morning.

I stand at Klauth's right, which is the heir apparent's position. This is the first Gathering since I became heir apparent. The placement is exact: slightly behind him and to the right, visible from the whole floor, in the eyeline of every flight leader in the hall without being the thing they're looking at. It says succession without saying displacement. I am here, I am next, and Klauth is still king.

Klauth reads the declaration.

It's the second of the three versions I know Mina drafted. The language admits the changed ground without naming it — the phrase in a season of renewed pressure upon continental stability is doing a great deal of work in the second paragraph. Every flight leader here knows exactly what it refers to. It gives them the acknowledgment without putting anything into the permanent record that would amount to a provocation before we're ready to make one.

Mina's drafting. Nineteen years of second drafts, each one calibrated to the inch.

I listen, and I watch the room.

The assembled flights study me with different eyes than they would have used a year ago. I can feel it without reading any single face — the quality collective attention takes on once it has been changed by information. They've heard about the Purge. About the fire drakes, about Anipe, about the dragon's-bane bolt and the contacts and what happened against the east wall with Samara. It has been moving through the Gathering's own channels for four weeks, since the first formal accounts went out of the Marzana office.

What they're looking at isn't the heir apparent in the abstract.

It's the heir apparent who ran the Purge and walked out.

I stand at Klauth's right in the formal position and I let them look, the same way I let them look at Nova in the courtyard. Let the looking produce whatever it produces. There is nothing useful in managing what people see when they look at you. The useful part is managing what you see when you look back.

I look back.

I start filing.

✦ ✦ ✦

The reception line begins at the second hour.

Three hundred and forty-seven flights, each entitled to present formally to the heir apparent — the traditional first-day obligation, the thing that guarantees every attending flight direct contact with the Marzana succession. In practice not all of them will ask for it. Roughly two hundred will. The rest will look for informal contact during the social events, which is a different conversation and wants handling differently.

I work the line.

Finlay's protocol running underneath the way it runs now. Not as instruction anymore. As a layer beneath the thinking that produces the right action without my having to build it each time. Remember names. Ask the specific question that shows you did the reading. Give nothing away in the face. Watch the hands rather than the face, because hands are harder to govern than expressions. Stand in the way that reads as open without reading as unguarded.

They come in order of seniority. The most experienced and most politically significant first, because that is where the tone gets set. If the first twenty leave having got what they came for, it travels through the Gathering's own gossip and the following two hundred arrive with expectations already shaped.

The first twenty.

A great wyrm from the southern coastal range who has been attending this Gathering for two hundred years and who takes my measure inside thirty seconds with the efficiency of a creature who has measured a great many heirs and knows precisely what he's looking for. I give him three things: his flight's part in the southern alliance, a question about the reef territory dispute that has been running for forty years and that he did not expect the heir apparent to know anything about, and exactly the degree of deference that honors his experience without suggesting I answer to it. He leaves satisfied. I know because he doesn't look back.

A silver dragoness from the far western territories who was inside Magnus's outer alliance five years ago and is not now, for reasons that aren't in her public record but that Finlay's people flagged as worth knowing. She studies me the way someone does when they're making a comparison — I am being held up against something she already has in mind while she decides whether I match it. I give her my whole attention and ask about the migration routes shifting in the west and what it has done to her flight's seasons. The question lands. She stays two minutes past the standard window.

By the twentieth, the word has moved through the hall. I can feel it in how the next ones arrive — posture a little different from what it was in the line, first sentence a little more considered. The heir apparent is paying attention. The heir apparent has done the reading.

Good.

I give the next eighty exactly what I gave the first twenty.

At the hundred and third, I notice something.

The eastern territories bloc — three flights from the far eastern coastal communities that have historically moved as a loose group — are giving me a wide berth. Not refusing the presentation; they're in the line and they'll present when they reach it. But in the intervals between, all three are managing where they stand with a care that keeps them out of my eyeline and out of easy conversational reach.

That isn't accidental.

I've been at this Gathering sixteen hours and in this hall for four of them. Across four hours, the ordinary drift of a person's position makes predictable shapes — you move toward the people you want and away from the ones you don't. This isn't drift. It's coordinated. Three flight leaders holding the same angle away from me, adjusting to keep it as I move down the line.

Not hostility. Hostility reads differently — in the posture, in the eyeline, in the particular quality of refusing to engage on purpose. This is caution. Three flight leaders who have arrived at some shared conclusion about me and haven't yet decided what to do with it. The distance is the room they're giving themselves while the decision forms.

They aren't Magnus's people. I went through their records in the weeks between the war council and the Gathering, and the eastern bloc has held a neutral-to-cooperative line with Marzana for forty years. What they are is small. Middling, short of resources, dependent on the continental alliance for safety in ways the larger flights are not. The anxiety Mina read in the orientation sessions — the flights that need this Gathering to tell them they're still safe — sits exactly in communities like theirs.

Something is frightening them.

And they aren't sure yet whether I'm part of the answer or part of the problem.

I file it.

I don't change my approach. I don't look at them directly or acknowledge the pattern or do anything that tells them I've read it. I give the hundred and fourth flight leader the same attention I gave the first, and I keep the eastern bloc at the edge of my vision while they manage their angle, and I think: three days. In three days whatever they've been building toward will have to become a decision. Either they come to me or they go somewhere else.

I intend to know which before they do.

I have Keir for that.

Keir is going to have a very productive Gathering.

Chapter 37

Keir

The Great Gathering is a blink hound's paradise.

I don't know that other hounds would put it exactly that way. Dax would say something more measured — a target-rich environment, or operationally productive. But for me, three hundred and forty-seven flights in one place, the controlled chaos of that many species working out how to share ground, the constant motion and the information moving through all of it at the speed of conversation — this is what I was built for. Every quality I bring to a situation is worth more here than anywhere else. Speed. Ground covered. Scent read across a wide field. The ability to be inside a conversation for thirty seconds, take what's useful, and be somewhere else before anyone thinks to look for me.

I blink seventeen times in the first hour after the opening.

Not a record. The record is forty-three in a single morning during a border incident my first year with the pack, which I still use as a personal mark to beat. But seventeen in an hour, each one dropping me into a different position, each one adding to the picture — that is very good work.

Raven flagged three eastern territory flight leaders partway through the first day's reception line. Their histories, their standing with the Marzana line, and the pattern she picked out of the hall: coordinated avoidance, she called it. Holding a precise angle away from her position, adjusting to keep it as she moved.

I spent the rest of that day and the first hours of the next confirming it.

She's right. They're holding it deliberately, with the kind of spatial care that only happens when three people have agreed on something beforehand and are actively managing it. This isn't the unconscious drift of people who'd rather not talk to someone. This is people who have already had a conversation about someone and are managing the space between that conversation and whatever comes next.

I start tracking all three.

✦ ✦ ✦

My pack is doing what I'm doing, which is being everywhere at once.

Nobody assigned it. I didn't brief them on targets or hand out positions or tell them to work the Gathering in any particular way. What I said, the day before it opened, was: three hundred and forty-seven flights, go meet them. What they understood from that, correctly, is that this is the kind of place where the pack's social instinct and its usefulness are the same instinct, and that the right thing to do is exactly what hounds do naturally in a crowd full of scents they've never met: make contact, take everything in, compare afterward.

When a blink hound meets someone, he gets the whole picture. The scent, the body, the particular way a person occupies space when they aren't thinking about being watched. It isn't trained. It's what we are. Hounds came up in places where being able to read an unknown creature's state and intent very fast was the difference between living and not, and that reading runs all the time, underneath everything. We don't decide to read a room. We read it the way we breathe.

Dax takes the northern guest corridors. Pell takes the southern grounds, where the loose social clustering happens between formal sessions. Revan takes the stables and the outer fields — the places where people are off their formal behavior because they don't believe anyone who matters is looking. I take the main corridors and the formal rooms, because the three Raven flagged need watching from close to the primary circuit.

By the end of the first day my pack has made contact with representatives of two hundred and sixty-three of the three hundred and forty-seven flights here.

We put it together at the tenth hour in the family suite. It takes twenty minutes, because hounds trade this efficiently — not in sentences, in the pack's own shorthand, where half of it is understood before it's finished.

What comes out of the first day: three separate knots of anxiety among the middling flights, overlapping but not the same knot. Two groups forming among the larger flights, each doing its best to look like people enjoying each other's company while building something with weight in it. And the eastern bloc, which Raven already found and which I've been watching since, behaving like people who have been having a conversation for three weeks that did not begin at this Gathering.

That is very good intelligence.

I love this.

✦ ✦ ✦

Day two, the eastern bloc meets.

I know because I catch the scents converging in the east guest corridor at the second hour of the afternoon — three signatures that have spent the whole Gathering keeping a careful distance from Raven, suddenly moving toward the same point. Not one at a time, not casually. On purpose, inside a seven-minute window, which is the timing of people who agreed on an hour rather than drifting into each other.

I blink to the corridor outside the suite they go into.

I listen at the door.

Six minutes of conversation in Old Dragon.

I don't speak Old Dragon. I know about forty words, most of them nouns out of ceremonies, picked up from three years around Finlay and this past year around Solaris. What I can do is listen exactly. A hound holds sound the way a page holds ink rather than the way a person holds a summary. What I hear, I keep — the tone, the rhythm, the cadence and the breathing of each speaker. I've been told that's unusual. Most creatures remember what a thing meant. I remember what it sounded like.

I listen for six minutes. I hold all of it.

Then I blink to Solaris.

He's in the family suite at the north end of the complex. Nova is in his lap, roughly halfway to sleep and fighting it with the determination of a two-year-old who has worked out that things happen while you're asleep and has strong feelings about missing them. Solaris is patient in the way of something that spent a thousand years waiting for things and got extremely good at it.

I blink in at the far end of the room. I hold there. I wait.

"Three minutes," Solaris says quietly, without looking up. He knows it's me from the shift in the air my arrival makes, which he has learned over the past year.

Nova is out in two and a half. She goes like a dropped stone, the way hatchlings do when they finally stop fighting — here, and then simply not, the whole thing switching off at once.

Solaris moves her carefully onto the cushions beside him, covers her with the Blackhaven blanket she takes everywhere, and comes across the room with the unhurried movement of a man who is never entirely off duty where she's concerned but has decided this particular moment is safe.

"Old Dragon?"

"I think so. Six minutes of it."

"Play it."

I give it to him — the six minutes exactly, tone and cadence and the rhythm of three different speakers, as received. He listens with his eyes closed, with the look of someone reaching for language in a different part of himself than the part that handles ordinary talk.

"The third speaker again. Fourth minute."

I play it.

He opens his eyes. His face has gone carefully neutral, which is what it does when what he's about to translate matters and he intends to hand me the accurate version rather than the gentler one.

"The three eastern leaders are discussing whether to formally acknowledge Lady Raven's succession."

"Whether to. Not that they will."

"Correct. They are considering holding their flights out of the continental alliance. Not a challenge to her claim — that isn't in the conversation at all. They would stay aligned in name and neutral in practice. They would not pledge anything to the war they believe is coming."

I think about that. "Frightened."

"Yes. The phrase—" he pauses, working through it "—comes closest to we cannot afford to be wrong about this. They aren't hostile to her. They're afraid of what it costs to be on the losing side of whatever this becomes, and they can't see it clearly enough yet to know which side that is."

"They don't know if she's going to win."

"They don't know if she's going to win quickly enough, or at a price they could survive," he says. "For a small flight, those are two different sums."

I blink to Raven.

She's in the east corridor between the reception hall and the dining suite — the in-between half hour where the Gathering breathes between the afternoon session and the formal dinner. I find her coming out of a side conversation with a silver drake from the southern territories that has the shape of something finished well. She catches me the moment I arrive and closes the drake exchange cleanly and comes to me.

"The eastern bloc," I say.

"I know they met today. Corridor two, east guest wing, second hour." She already had it. Of course she already had it. She sees me register that, and a corner of her mouth moves. "What did Solaris get?"

I give her all of it. The succession question. Holding their flights out rather than challenging her. The phrase that comes closest to we cannot afford to be wrong about this.

She listens the way she listens to anything that matters — taking it in whole, setting it against the picture she's been building since the Gathering opened.

"Good," she says.

"Good?"

"Better to know who's sitting on their hands before I need them than to find out in the middle of a crisis." She looks down the corridor with the expression of someone working through something I can't see yet. "They aren't wrong to be careful. Small flights, thin resources, a war whose shape they can't make out — being cautious about committing is the correct sum if you don't have enough to go on. The question is whether I can give them enough of the shape before this ends that standing aside starts to look more dangerous than standing with me."

"Solaris said the words were we cannot afford to be wrong about this."

Something moves in her face. Not calculation. Recognition. "They need to understand what being wrong actually costs. Not a demonstration of what I can do. Something else."

"What?"

"I don't know yet." She looks at me. "Give me a day."

I give her a day.

✦ ✦ ✦

That evening, Raven finds me.

Not for work. The formal program is running and the other thing has stopped for as long as it needs to stop. She finds me the way she does when it isn't about work — the bond changing register, the warmth going different from the working warmth. More direct. The signal that says I know where you are and I'm coming there.

I blink to the small suite.

She shuts the door behind her. Sovereign's guest rooms are properly quiet, thick stone and well away from the formal spaces, the sound of three hundred and forty-seven flights reduced to something present but manageable. We have been at this two days. Two days of constant motion and tracking and the sustained attention that a place this dense demands. I have loved every hour of it, and standing here in the closed quiet I am also aware of the particular relief of stopping.

"One hour," she says. "Ninth hour is the evening session."

"One hour," I agree.

Raven in a stolen hour in the middle of all this is a specific thing. She puts everything down completely — the reception line, the eastern bloc, the three observations I gave her this afternoon that she's been turning over ever since. She puts it all down and she is simply here, in that complete present-tense way she has when she decides to be somewhere entirely. And what I bring to it is what I bring to everything: the whole of now, the plain joy of being in the right place with the right person, the state my pack has always called pack-full — where you are inside the moment instead of watching for the next position.

One hour.

Very warm.

She goes to the evening session with the look of someone who has been properly rested in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, and will spend the next three hours working the formal dinner with everything she has.

I blink back to the east corridor.

I resume the watch.

Chapter 38

Raven

The hatchling parade is the Gathering's most reliably chaotic event.

That isn't accidental. The program is carefully built — Mina's building, nineteen years of it — to balance diplomatic weight against genuine celebration, and the parade falls on day four precisely because the first three have been heavy. The opening and its declarations. The reception line and the positioning. The evening dinners that are social in name and something else in practice. By day four, three hundred and forty-seven flights need something that isn't diplomacy.

The parade is the thing that isn't diplomacy.

It is also, in practice, the continent's largest collection of hatchlings being hatchlings in front of the continent's most experienced and powerful leadership, which produces effects that are either heartwarming or mildly disastrous depending on the hatchling, and which this year includes Nova, who is both.

Nova has been preparing since day two.

Not formally. There is no formal preparation for the hatchling parade. Sovereign's parade staff sent a very polite note to our suite on day three saying they looked forward to Nova's participation and that the Blackhaven delegation's handlers were encouraged to maintain their current approach, which is diplomatic language for please keep her from shifting in the preparation area again.

We did not fully succeed in this.

By the time the parade proper begins, Nova has made herself known to roughly forty people in the crowd by shifting halfway and back while waiting in the assembly area. The handlers, who have run this parade for twelve years, have arrived at an expression I can only describe as respectfully resigned. They are not trying to manage Nova. They are managing around Nova, which is correct, and which I appreciate.

I watch from the raised platform at the eastern edge. It gives me the parade and the crowd watching it at the same time. Most of the flight leaders are down there. Families, delegations, diplomatic attendants who have loosened a little from the careful positioning of the first three days — people watching hatchlings be hatchlings, which is the most reliable method I know for producing real rather than performed warmth at a gathering like this. Mina placed it here on purpose. Day four, when the whole thing needs to stop being a negotiation and remember it is also a community.

Nova shifts in the middle of the procession.

The parade is supposed to proceed in human form. There's a protocol, which Mina briefed me on, including what to do with a shifting hatchling, delivered in the efficient tone of a woman who has been handling this for nineteen years and has seen every possible version. The handlers redirect. The parade continues. The shifting hatchling is celebrated rather than corrected, because correcting a shifting hatchling in front of three hundred and forty-seven flights looks terrible and also doesn't work.

Nova opens her wings to full span. At two years old it is already remarkable — the membrane taking the afternoon light and going deep amber at the edges where the burnt orange bleeds through. She produces the flight voice at full volume.

The crowd erupts.

Nova looks at the crowd. She works through the reaction — the specific two-year-old arithmetic of large happy noise and I did the thing that made it. Then she turns and looks at me on the platform.

I give her the nod.

She produces the flight voice again, louder.

The crowd erupts further.

Solaris, on my left, makes the sound he makes when he is trying very hard not to let his face show what he's feeling and is not entirely succeeding. I understand completely.

It's while I'm watching Nova's second performance that I see Isolde.

✦ ✦ ✦

She's in the press below the platform, on Leander's arm, in the deep blue she always wears to formal things.

She is eighteen today.

I've been carrying what Hemlocke told me about Charron since the autumn — standing in the Blackhaven stables with the careful tone of a man delivering something significant and wanting to do it properly. I've been watching the careful proximity ever since. The visits Charron arranges to Blackhaven for reasons that are all real and all adjacent to the actual reason. The way he manages his distance from her — never too close, never pursuing, the patience of a black unicorn who has recognized something and understands that recognition alone isn't enough. That it has to be mutual, and mutual means it arrives on the other person's schedule.

Today is the other person's schedule.

She has been quietly anxious all day without knowing why. I saw it at breakfast — the look of someone who woke up feeling slightly different and can't account for it. Not distress. Not illness. Something under the level of naming, a body registering a change before the mind has words for it. Leander saw it too. We caught each other's eye across the morning meal and looked away again, which was the agreement between us not to say it out loud.

Below the platform the parade goes on. Nova performs. The crowd answers. Isolde watches with the distracted quality of someone who is present and also somewhere else, the somewhere else being inside a feeling she has no word for yet.

And then she goes very still.

✦ ✦ ✦

It happens between one moment and the next.

She's mid-turn — something in the parade has caught her and she's turning to say so to Leander — and then she stops. Not the stop of someone startled, or someone who has seen or heard a thing. The stop of a body that has received a signal from somewhere that bypasses the ear and the eye entirely and goes straight to the older parts. The parts that know things before the mind does.

Her head turns.

Slowly. Not the slowness of hesitation. The slowness of a compass needle. Drawn, rather than choosing.

She finds Charron across the crowd.

He's on the far side of the grounds with the Blackhaven delegation, Hemlocke's family group, the black unicorns who came with our contingent. He isn't looking for her. He knew she'd be somewhere in this crowd, and he came to the Gathering to be in the same space, because that is what the whole of this year has been — choosing to be in the same space, within reach, not pursuing. He has done it with the discipline of a man who understands that the thing he is waiting on cannot be hurried and that hurrying it would damage it.

He feels it when she does.

I watch it arrive in him — the stillness coming into his body, the particular quality of a black unicorn taking a bond-snap. Not dramatic. Very quiet, the way large things usually are, the way the most significant moments tend to arrive without any announcement attached. He turns. His eyes find her through all the people between them.

Isolde walks.

Not urgently. Not running. The walk of someone following something invisible, the body entirely certain of the direction while the mind is still catching up. The crowd parts for her — that is what a forming bond does in its first minutes, the pull of it making a small gravity around the two people it runs between, and other bodies give way to it without ever knowing they did. Gaps open. She goes through them.

She stops in front of him.

He is considerably taller than her, even in human form; black unicorns carry the height of what they are in either shape. He looks down. She looks up. What passes between them I can't read fully from the platform, but I know what a bond-snap looks like from outside, and what I can see is two people standing very still in a crowd of hundreds and being the only ones aware that the crowd exists.

He doesn't speak.

His head comes down, slowly — the black unicorn's acknowledgment, the small bow that means I see you. I receive you. I have been waiting. Isolde's hand comes up and rests against the side of his face. Tentative and certain at the same time.

"Oh," I say.

Just that.

✦ ✦ ✦

Leander makes a sound.

I have known Leander for as long as I have been alive. He is one of my mother's mates, a nightmare — the dark equine species, the shadow horses of the northern territories, who carry a particular quality of presence: ancient and wild, having chosen a domestic life without ever losing the thing underneath it. He has been part of the family web since before I understood that family webs were a thing. He is quiet the way deep water is quiet, moving under the surface without needing to be seen.

I have never heard him make the sound he makes now.

Broken. Proud. Terrified. All three at once, none of them canceling the others.

I reach over and take his hand.

He doesn't pull away. His hand closes around mine — the grip of a man steadying himself on something solid.

We stand there together. The parade goes on below us. Nova's intermittent performances. The crowd's responses. The warm ambient noise of three hundred and forty-seven flights on day four, when the whole thing has finally relaxed into itself. Neither of us is paying attention to any of it.

"She's going to be all right," I say.

His hand tightens slightly.

"Charron is the best of his herd. I've known him his whole life through Hemlocke, and I've watched him handle this — handle knowing about her before she knew — with more care than most grown men would manage. He waited the better part of a year. He came to places she would be and kept the distance that gave her room, and he didn't push and he didn't pursue. I would not have let him near her if I didn't trust him completely."

Leander exhales.

"She's eighteen," he says. Quietly.

"She's eighteen, and she's making a choice that is entirely hers to make, and one I believe she'll make carefully, on her own schedule, the way Isolde does everything. With more thought than she shows."

He's quiet a moment. Then: "How long did he know?"

"Since the spring. He went to Hemlocke first. Hemlocke brought it to me in the autumn."

"And you let him stay close."

"I watched how he handled being close. What he did with knowing, and with waiting. Months of evidence. That's why I trust him."

Below us, Isolde and Charron haven't moved from where they arrived. His head is still slightly bowed. Her hand is still against his face. The crowd flows around them — people who have no idea what they're looking at, giving them room without knowing why.

"She's my daughter," Leander says. Three words holding everything, and he knows it, so he doesn't add to them.

"Mine too," I say. "A little. In the way she'd let me be."

He looks at me a long moment. The careful stillness is back in his face, but sitting differently now, over something that has moved underneath it.

"Thank you," he says. Quietly. "For watching."

I don't answer. The watching is what I do. He knows that.

Below us, Nova finally runs out of performance, shifts back, and climbs Solaris with the satisfied efficiency of a two-year-old who has accomplished everything she came here to accomplish. The crowd applauds that too. The parade draws toward its end.

Leander doesn't let go of my hand.

I don't either.

The parade ends. The crowd disperses in the particular way three hundred and forty-seven flights disperse after something that wasn't diplomacy — warm, unhurried, the kind of scattering that carries conversation rather than agenda. Flight leaders who have been positioning carefully for four days are talking to people they hadn't needed to talk to until now, because the parade cracked open something the formal sessions keep shut.

Isolde and Charron have moved.

Not far. To the edge of the grounds, out of the flow, into the shade of the eastern colonnade. They're talking now. Or rather, he is listening and she is talking, which is the correct order for the first conversation after a bond-snap — the one who has been waiting lets the one who just arrived speak first, and gives them the whole of the first words. I can't hear any of it from the platform. I can see her face, the animation in it, the look of someone who has been carrying an unexplained feeling all day and now has in front of her the person who explains it.

"She looks all right," Leander says quietly.

"She does. She looks like herself. That's the best possible thing."

He watches his daughter a moment longer. Then he lets go of my hand — not abruptly, with the deliberateness of a man deciding to release something he was holding for support and trusting himself to stand without it. He straightens.

"I should find Mina," he says. "She'll want to know."

"She already knows. She's been watching from the south platform. You'll see it in her face when you find her."

Something that might be the beginning of a smile crosses his. "Nineteen years of these and she still looks like that?"

"She has very good children," I say. "It produces that expression fairly regularly."

He nods once. He goes.

I stay on the platform a while longer, watching Isolde in the colonnade, watching Charron listen to her with the complete unhurried attention of a man who has been given the thing he waited for and does not intend to waste a second of it.

The Gathering goes on around them.

I go down to find my nest.

Chapter 39

Solaris

The Gathering's evening session runs to the ninth hour, and then the formal program releases into the social one, and the social one is where the actual work gets done.

This is my second Great Gathering.

There were none before the binding. The first of them convened three hundred years ago, and by then I had been in the dark for seven centuries — the continent built its largest institution while I sat inside a shell, and nobody thought to tell me, because nobody knew there was anyone left to tell. The first I attended was two years after my release, when I came with no role at all and spent most of it relearning what it means to occupy space in a crowded room.

This one I am present for as myself. Not as an observer. As a great wyrm who speaks Old Dragon as a first language and has been alive twelve hundred years, and whom the three eastern flight leaders looked at during the opening reception with the particular expression of people who have identified someone they might be able to trust.

I recognized the expression.

I have seen it before, across many decades and many rooms, in the faces of creatures who have been frightened long enough that they have begun looking for someone ancient enough to have been frightened before and to have survived it.

I went to them at the fifth hour of the evening session. I suggested, in Old Dragon, that we speak privately. The suggestion was brief and carried no pressure — there was pressure enough in the situation already, four days of it, and adding to it would have produced the wrong result. What I offered was a door, opened.

They agreed.

That was the right answer, and I knew it was the right answer because they agreed without the pause that means deliberation. The decision had already been made. What they needed was the door.

✦ ✦ ✦

The guest suite they've been using for their private sessions is not large. Three flight leaders and one great wyrm in human form fills it adequately, and the fullness helps, in the way tight rooms help honesty along — there is less space in which to keep the diplomatic distance that makes careful truth-telling necessary.

I introduce myself in Old Dragon.

Not the formal introduction. The working one, the one that names lineage and northern origin and sets me inside the same ancient tradition their eastern dialect still carries traces of. Two thousand years of drift have made our dialects different enough to need some adjusting, but the bones are the same bones, and when an old creature speaks your language in the register your tradition uses, it says something that cannot be produced by study or performance: I come from the same world your great-grandparents came from.

The senior of the three — the coastal elder, the female, the one who has kept the most deliberate distance from Raven these past days — answers in Old Dragon. Her dialect is eastern, older than mine by several centuries of divergence. That she answers in it at all rather than continuing in common tells me the opening was received the way it was meant.

We are speaking as equals.

There is a particular quality to that, to being in a room with someone whose frame of reference includes the world before the continental arrangements we all now live inside. I have not had this kind of conversation often. Before the binding there were perhaps six creatures on this continent old enough for it. Now there are fewer. The eastern flights have apparently kept elders who held the tradition across generations, which is itself worth knowing.

"You are Solaris MacLeod," she says. Not a question.

"I was called that before the binding. I am called it again now."

"The Mrithun hatchling. Your mate."

"My mate," I confirm. "Yes."

A silence. The three of them exchange something in the compressed language of people who have been having one long conversation for weeks and have reached a turn in it. Then the coastal elder looks at me with the directness of someone who has decided.

"We are not Magnus's people," she says.

"I know. I am here because I know that."

What they tell me over the next hour:

In the last eighteen months, two members of the coastal elder's flight have gone missing. Not died. Missing — removed, she believes, in the way of people who are taken rather than people who leave. The first was a young male who had been studying mage-bloodline traditions in the eastern archive, working through records of mage-blood lineage that predate the continental period. The second was an elder female who had begun, on her own, to notice patterns in the flight's recent disruptions of communication. Small things, each of them explicable alone, forming a shape only visible if you laid a decade of records side by side.

"She came to me," the coastal elder says, "and she said: something is arranging this. Not Magnus. The pattern is older than Magnus's expansion. Something older and patient."

"And then she went missing."

"Three weeks later. We found nothing. No struggle. No sign of leaving. She was there, and then she was not."

The second and third flight leaders give their own accounts, separately, neither having known about the other's until the three of them began comparing notes at this Gathering. The second flight: a young practitioner who had been working on what she called the egg problem — how a mind might be anchored to a scattered net of objects. Missing eight months ago. The third: a historian of pre-continental mage traditions who had been corresponding with Cassius. Missing four months ago.

I go very still.

"He is taking the people who can understand what he is," I say. "The ones who could describe how he exists well enough to work out how to end him."

The coastal elder's face confirms it before she speaks. "Yes. We believe so. It is also why we stopped writing anything down."

"Amadeus," I say.

"That is your word for it," she says. "We have our own. The thing that persists after the body is gone. The practitioner who gave up the body to fuel something larger than himself and remained — not the way a ghost remains. The way a fire remains when the wood it started in is long gone. Held up by the net. Not ending."

For people who have kept an older vocabulary alive in isolation in the eastern territories, with no access to Cassius's work or the war council or anything of ours, it is a remarkably accurate description of a thing I know from the inside. They arrived at it out of their own tradition, through the people they lost.

"You've been putting this together alone," I say.

"We did not know who to trust," she says simply. "We do not know what the net can hear. We do not know who else it is already inside. So we stopped talking, and we started watching, and we came to this Gathering to decide whether Lady Raven is someone we can bring it to."

I look at them. Three flight leaders who have been frightened and careful and alone for eighteen months while Amadeus took their people, and who came here not to oppose her but to find out whether she could be given what they know.

"She is," I say. "And she can give you something back."

I tell them about Cassius. About the research. About the war council and the three lines of work and the fact that we have been building toward precisely the thing they have been trying to survive.

And then: "Do you know what I am?"

"A great wyrm," the coastal elder says. "Twelve centuries. The MacLeod line."

"Do you know where I spent a thousand and twenty of those years?"

She goes very still.

"Inside Amadeus's binding," I say. "Held up by the same net you are afraid of. I know what it is from the inside. I know things about how it is built that nobody who has not been inside it can know, because I spent ten centuries learning the shape of it from within."

The room is extremely quiet.

"I was released by Lady Raven's mate-bond," I say. "Which means I am permanently and specifically invested in her succeeding, in a way that has nothing to do with politics or alliance or anything I stand to gain. And I am telling you that she is enough. Not because of the acid or the stone gaze or the Purge. Because of what I watched her do at the war council at Blackhaven, where every ancient creature in the room deferred to her judgment and was right to. Because she sees the whole shape of what Amadeus is, and is building against that shape rather than against the part of it she can see."

The three of them say nothing.

"Come to Blackhaven," I say. "All three flights. If he is hunting isolated communities who know too much, then isolation is the thing that kills you. Come where we can all see each other, and you will have the whole of what we know and what we intend to do about it."

✦ ✦ ✦

I bring it to Raven after the formal dinner.

The dinner ran long, as the fourth day's always does — the point in the Gathering where people have been in each other's company long enough to stop performing their positions and start having the real conversations. I watched her manage seven of those at once from across the room, the way she manages any formal evening: whole attention on the person in front of her, the temperature of the room tracked at the edges, every individual exchange leaving its person convinced they had all of her, while underneath it the assessing never stops.

She is very good at this.

She was not always this good at this. I have watched her work at it across the year, watched Finlay's protocol turn from a thing she applied into a thing she is, watched the gap between the performing and the being close and close again until what is left of it is very thin. She is twenty-three. In thirty years she will be extraordinary at this. She is already well past adequate.

I wait at the edge of the room until the last conversation ends. She crosses to me.

She reads my face.

"Tell me."

I give her the whole of it. Two flight members taken by Amadeus's net, the pattern in who is taken — people with knowledge of mage-blood lineage and of how a scattered mind holds itself together — and their fear that committing to her means committing to a war whose scale they could not survive being on the wrong side of.

She listens. She doesn't interrupt once.

"Invite them to Blackhaven," she says when I finish. Immediately. "All three flights. If he's hunting isolated communities who know too much, isolation is what gets them killed. Bring them where we can see each other."

"That is exactly what I told them."

She looks at me with the expression that means something has landed correctly and she is noting precisely who made it land. "Good. Can you arrange the formal invitation tonight? With the right weight to it — Mina will know the framing."

"Yes."

"And Solaris."

I look at her.

"What you told them about the binding. About being inside it." She is careful and direct at the same time, which is a quality of hers I have come to depend on. "Thank you. That isn't a thing you open lightly."

"It was necessary. They needed to know that somebody had been inside it and come out. That it can be survived."

"Yes," she says. "It was still yours to give."

She goes to find Mina.

✦ ✦ ✦

I stand in the great hall a moment after she leaves.

Three flights who spent four days holding a careful coordinated distance from her, arguing in private about whether to withhold their alliance, carrying eighteen months of fear and silence and the knowledge of people taken. Who came here with a decision forming that could have gone either way.

Who are now coming to Blackhaven.

She offered them shelter.

Not as a performance of generosity. It is a strategic decision — the alliance has just grown considerably, the picture is clearer, and three flights who know something about Amadeus's net are now inside the structure instead of sitting alone where he can reach them. All of that is true, and correct, and Raven saw every piece of it.

It is also true that she offered them shelter because they were frightened, and because their people were being taken, and because being alone was going to kill them. Both things are true at once, and the second is what made the offer land — what changed the coastal elder's face from the wariness of someone deciding whether to trust into the look of someone who has been trusted with something real in return.

When you offer shelter from a position of strength, people can tell whether you mean it. They can feel the difference between a strategic offer and a genuine one, even when the offer is also strategic. Raven's was both, and the both was legible, and the coastal elder felt it.

This is the thing I find hardest to put into words when people ask what it is to be her mate. Not the strength — strength is legible. Not the intelligence — intelligence is observable. The thing underneath both: the ability to look at frightened people who are about to work against you and understand that the fear is the problem and not the character, and to answer the fear with what the fear needs rather than what the opposition would have earned.

This is not the acid or the stone gaze or the Purge.

This is why she is the dominant dragoness of this continent.

I have watched her become what she is across a single year of standing beside her, and I was in the binding for ten centuries before that, and I am still not finished being astonished by what she turned out to be.

I go to find Mina and arrange the invitation.

Chapter 40

Raven

The Winter Formal is the Gathering's last event, and the one that asks the most.

I've been preparing for it all day in the background. Not the gown — Mina arranged that three weeks ago, and it was waiting in the suite when we arrived. Not the diadem either; that lives in the Marzana vault and was brought here for this. The preparing has been in my head. The processional order, the required dances and the sequence they come in, which flight leaders I still haven't reached directly and need to before the dancing starts.

Finlay wrote me a briefing on the Winter Formal last year. Six pages. I've read it four times. At this point it's simply there, the way things are there once you've absorbed them. Not recalled. Available.

I put on the gown.

It's obsidian. Not black exactly — the deep shade the Marzana dyers make, the one that drinks light instead of giving it back. Against my scale it reads as continuous, the line between cloth and skin deliberately unclear in formal light. That's the point of it. The gown is meant to extend the dragoness, not dress the woman. Mina wore this shade at every Gathering for nineteen years. I'm wearing it for the first time, and putting it on, I understand why she chose it every time.

Then the diadem. Marzana silverwork, three generations old, the heir apparent's piece rather than the queen's. The queen's is heavier and more elaborate, built up with the weight of final authority. The heir apparent's is simpler and lighter, which is the tradition's way of saying not yet, but coming.

The weight is in what it stands for.

I look in the mirror. My sapphire eyes look back, and the scar on my left shoulder shows clear of the neckline. Deliberately. Mina asked at the fitting whether I wanted it adjusted and I said no. The scar is part of the record.

The Winter Formal is the Gathering's closing statement, the last thing the assembled flights see before they go home and tell their communities what the Marzana succession looks like. What I want them telling their communities is this: she survived the Purge and walked out, and she stood at the formal with the scar showing and her shoulders square.

I look like what I am.

Good.

✦ ✦ ✦

The processional enters from the eastern corridor. Klauth on my left. Thauglor on my right.

That isn't the standard formation. The standard has the heir apparent walked in by the ruling monarch and the monarch's consort or chosen representative. Klauth is the ruling monarch. Thauglor is neither of the other two. He is my father, and he is here because he chose to be, and he put himself at my right as the processional formed with the quiet certainty of a man who has decided where he's standing and has no intention of discussing it.

Klauth looks at him for about three seconds when it happens. Then he looks at me. Then he looks forward, and we go in.

Both my fathers, one on either side, walking into the Winter Formal with three hundred and forty-seven flights watching from the floor.

The statement isn't subtle. I'm not attempting subtlety. The Gathering has spent five days weighing me, and this is the event that settles what it will say about the Marzana succession afterward. What I want them leaving with is that she has the full weight of both lines behind her. Both fathers, the blood of it and the choosing of it, visible. The great wyrm who ruled this empire for two hundred years before the shell took him and has ruled it again since he came out. And the great wyrm who waited twenty-three years in the northern mountains to see what his daughter would become.

Both of them walking her in.

The hall is very quiet. Three hundred and forty-seven flights assembled in the continent's formal dress, under light that turns the Sovereign great hall into something more than a room. The quiet that falls for a processional has its own quality — not the held breath of anticipation but the absorbed quiet of a crowd that has trained itself to receive a significant moment. Every Gathering for three hundred years has opened with this quiet.

This one closes with it.

I walk with Klauth on my left and Thauglor on my right, wings held high, the way my father carries his beside me. Not slowly, which reads as ceremony. Not quickly, which reads as discomfort. At the pace of a woman who has decided where she's going and intends to arrive without apologizing for it.

The hall applauds. Not the formal applause of diplomatic duty. The other kind — the kind that starts somewhere specific and then moves, the sound of a large group deciding in the moment that what it's looking at is worth it.

I find Mina's face in the front row as I pass. Her expression is the one I know from the landing field, and the pre-opening reception, and the platform above the hatchling parade.

I keep walking.

It doesn't stay quiet long.

✦ ✦ ✦

The formal dances have a set order.

The heir apparent opens with the hosting monarch, then works through the visiting monarchs and senior flight leaders by seniority. Six required dances before the floor opens to everyone. I've done the arithmetic: forty minutes accounted for, which keeps me visible and keeps me off the informal circuit the next two hours are going to need.

So I make the forty minutes work.

Each required dance is a conversation in a different key. There's something about moving with someone in a formal dance that gets underneath the managed surface — the closeness, the required eye contact, the movement itself pulling attention away from governing your own face. I've watched it happen across five days. The conversations that happen in motion are more honest than the ones that happen standing still.

The first is Klauth. We don't speak. There's nothing between us that needs a dance to say it; what needed saying was said in the processional, in the placement. The dance is the visible part. He leads with the authority of a man who held a throne for two hundred years and took it up again, and I follow without appearing to follow, and the floor watches the king dance with his heir and reads it correctly.

The second is Therun, the gold of the Southern Isle. He came, which I did not take for granted, and he is considerably livelier on a floor than his political manner suggests. He makes three remarks that genuinely amuse me and I let them, because Therun's gift is making the people near him easier in themselves, and that is useful when the people near you are reading your face for signals. We are visibly comfortable together. The floor notes it.

The third is the senior flight leader from the western coastal territories, who has been careful all Gathering and whose carefulness I've been tracking. I ask him about a boundary dispute that has been running in his territory for forty years and is conspicuously missing from the papers he filed for this Gathering. His answer tells me whether the omission was deliberate. It was. I file it, and I close the dance with the warmth of someone who has noticed and isn't going to make it a problem tonight.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth are three more flight leaders, each one a conversation with a purpose. By the sixth I've closed four gaps the reception line didn't fill, and the obligation is finished.

The floor opens.

Orpheus finds me twenty minutes in. He appears at my elbow the way he always does — no approach, simply there, the basilisk trick of arriving without being seen to arrive. He's in the Blackhaven formal, the dark gray the males of my nest wear, and he looks the way Orpheus always looks at these things: entirely composed, slightly dangerous, and deeply unimpressed by the occasion.

"Dance with me," he says. Not a request. Orpheus doesn't ask for things he has already decided.

"The circuit⁠—"

"Has been running four and a half days," he says. "You have been diplomatic for four and a half days. Five minutes."

I look at him. He looks at me.

"Five minutes."

We dance.

It's nothing like the required six. Those are structured, the steps set, the movement a message to the room. This is Orpheus and Raven, who have known each other since we were hatchlings in the same nest, who spent a Purge moving in coordinated positions across the academy grounds, who talk in the shorthand of twenty-three years and a bond that is all sibling and nothing else. He leads when I'm off the beat and I lead when he is, and neither of us is performing, because there is nobody in this dance to perform for.

He says something in the old nest tongue — the one Mom started for us before we were five and the two of us kept adding to. I don't speak it as easily as I used to. I get enough of it to answer.

He laughs. I laugh.

The continent's assembled flight leaders watch the heir apparent spin with her brother in the middle of the Winter Formal floor, laughing, entirely informal, entirely themselves.

Five minutes.

He bows with an excess of theater, which he finds funny precisely because he doesn't mean a moment of it, and disappears back into the crowd.

I go back to the circuit. I feel better than I did before.

Corvus is at the edge of the floor at the second hour.

He's been here all evening the way Corvus is at formal events — not in the center, in the places where watching works best. I've had him at the edge of my awareness through the bond all night: the low steady warmth of knowing where he is, the feel of what he's attending to, the small shifts that mean he's seen something worth keeping. He reads a room the way he does because it is both the work and the instinct.

He comes to the edge of the floor. He doesn't ask.

I go to him.

There's no diplomatic purpose in this one. He isn't a visiting dignitary or a flight leader or a symbol of anything. He's Corvus. My mate, the man who was there before I knew what that meant, who came through the gate after the Purge with both hands on my face making sure I was real, who runs six miles for the right chocolate. The person I chose deliberately and keep choosing.

The room gives us space. Not a crowd parting — quieter than that. The attention a room gives when it stops watching the political figure and starts watching the person. The heir apparent has been visible all evening. Now they're watching Raven choose where she goes once the obligation is done, and what she's choosing is Corvus, and the room understands exactly what that means.

He dances the way he does everything. Complete, precise, entirely present. His hand at my waist, holding me at the distance formality asks for while making it perfectly clear to anyone watching that neither of us is performing.

"The three flights," he says quietly. Five days have trained us to trade information briefly and on the move.

"Formally requested tonight. Solaris arranged the framing with Mina."

"Finlay."

"Nothing yet. I'm not expecting speed."

"No." Then: "You look different from the processional."

"Five days and Orpheus."

Something moves in his face. He was watching from the floor when Orpheus made me laugh. I know because I know what Corvus looks like watching me from across a room.

"He's good for you," Corvus says.

"He's impossible and I've missed him. Which is the same thing."

"Yes." And there's a particular warmth in it — the warmth of a man who loves the people you love because you love them. The nest warmth. The thing that makes five mates something other than five separate relationships.

We finish the dance, and the formal moves toward its ending.

✦ ✦ ✦

The acceptance happens at the eleventh hour.

The coastal elder and her counterparts from the second and third flights find me in the entry hall as the program releases — that moment after the closing when people are drifting toward their rooms and the platforms, and the formality has loosened just enough to allow something direct.

She makes the request in the formal language, the Old Dragon words that carry a flight's petition to come under another's protection. She reads it from the folded paper she's been carrying. Solaris prepared it last night. The framing is right. The weight is right.

I answer the same way.

"Blackhaven extends its protection to the coastal, eastern reef, and northern island flights. Your people are our people. Come when you're ready."

The coastal elder holds my eyes a moment after I finish. Then, in Old Dragon: We watched you for five days before we decided.

"I know," I say.

We decided correctly.

And that is all.

Three flights. The continental alliance is larger than it was when the Gathering opened.

I go to find Corvus.

Chapter 41

Corvus

The nest separates at Sovereign the morning after the formal.

Solaris and Nova go back to Blackhaven. Nova has been at the Gathering five days and has been extraordinary for all of them, and Solaris has the air of a man happy about that and also ready for it to be finished. Keir's pack scatters back to the tracking in the western territories. Hemlocke goes home because the foal needs him, and because Hemlocke's instincts pull toward Blackhaven whenever nothing else has a claim on him. Orpheus leaves earlier by a different route; the Shadowcarve adjunct schedule wants him by afternoon.

Raven and I fly back together.

That isn't an accident. It's a choice she made two days ago and told me about in the gap between the third and fourth formal sessions, in the corridor where we'd learned to have conversations quickly. Fly back with me. Just us. It wasn't a request that needed thinking about.

The other nests take the southern and eastern routes, the ones that carry the most traffic, the routes that say here we are, come and talk to us. We take the northern high route, which is longer and colder and almost empty. Perhaps four hours in the air before the academy shows on the horizon. Four hours in which neither of us is the heir apparent or the Shadowcarve adjunct or any of the other things we've been managing for five days.

Four hours of sky. It's enough.

✦ ✦ ✦

We've been up an hour when she says it.

"Tell me what the Purge looked like from the outside."

This is the conversation we haven't had. We've talked about the Purge in debrief, in the practical terms of what happened and what it produced and what comes next. We haven't talked about it the way she's asking now. Not the tactics. The thing underneath the tactics.

I take a moment to answer it accurately.

"The first hour looked like what I expected," I say. "She stood in the middle of the courtyard and the student body moved around her, and I could read that. I'd planned for it. I knew she was going to do it. The fourth-year at thirty-seven minutes, I could read that too. That was the message, and I knew what the message was."

"But?"

"But watching from outside is different from knowing." I find the words the way I always find them, by not hurrying them. "I know what she's capable of. I've known it for twenty-three years. Knowing it and watching it happen with a gate between us are two different experiences, and the second one has something in it the first doesn't."

She's quiet a moment. We're flying side by side, the cold up here carrying the mineral edge of the high route, the sky above us the blue of late morning at altitude.

"When did Hemlocke signal you about Anipe?"

"Just before the first hour. The mirror flash. I was already on the south roof by the time it landed where she was going, and I saw her change direction."

"You were on the roof."

"I needed a view that wasn't the gate corridor."

She takes that in. I can see it in the quality of her attention, the shift of Raven absorbing something she didn't have. "You were covering the south approach."

"I had three positions I moved between for the first twenty hours. After Hemlocke's signal I held the south."

"Corvus."

"I know," I say. "I know the rules. I wasn't stepping in. I was watching. There's a difference."

She's quiet again. Then, not quite an accusation, in the tone of someone who knows the difference and is filing it rather than arguing it: "I didn't know you were on the roof."

"No."

"Would you have told me?"

I consider it honestly. "Afterward, yes. During, no. It would have changed what you were doing, and what you were doing was correct."

She makes the sound she makes when something is accurate and she doesn't want to give me the satisfaction of saying so. I take it as agreement.

We fly. The high route carries us above the tree line into air clear enough to see much further than you can from below the passes. I can see three peaks to the east whose names I know. She can probably see five.

"The shoulder," she says after a while.

"I knew when Keir knew. The bond read it right — pain you were handling, not something that had gone through. I held the south building for four hours after that."

"Four hours."

"Yes."

"Doing what, exactly."

"Watching the south approach. Making sure nothing came at that angle while you were in the armory corridor."

A pause. "You were covering me."

"I was observing," I say. "While covering you. The distinction holds. Technically."

She makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh but lives on the same street. "Twenty-three years and you're still going to hold on to the distinction."

"The distinction is real and it means something."

"The distinction is you standing on a roof for four hours."

"With a very good view."

This time she does laugh. Brief, real, the laugh that comes out when a thing is both accurate and slightly absurd. I note it and file it the way I file everything about her, into the store of true things about Raven I've been keeping for twenty-three years.

She tells me what the inside felt like.

Not all of it. There are things she still hasn't put words to — I can tell by the quality of her pauses, the places where she finds the words and the places where she finds approximately the words and takes them anyway, because something is better than nothing. I take all of it. The anger banked and held exact. The moment in the stairwell. The south approach, and Anipe, and the eight inches.

"Eight inches," I say.

"Eight inches. I've thought about it."

"And?"

"And I judged it right and moved right and the outcome was right." She says it with the evenness of a woman who has done the arithmetic at length and made her peace with the answer. "I've also accepted that correct and comfortable aren't the same thing."

"No," I say. "They're not."

We fly in silence a while. The academy is still two hours ahead, hidden behind the range.

"The gate," she says. Not a question.

I know what she's asking. I've been waiting for it since the Purge ended.

"When you walked through," I say, "I couldn't move for a second."

She looks at me. We're close enough in the air that I can see her face clearly, the look of Raven hearing something she already knew said out loud for the first time.

"I knew you'd be all right. I'd known it the whole time. Knowing and seeing aren't the same, and when I saw you come through that gate, the seeing landed differently than the knowing ever had. One second. Then I moved."

"Twenty-three years," she says quietly.

"Twenty-three years of knowing what you are. It still landed."

She's quiet a long moment. Then she reaches across the gap between us.

I take her hand.

Flying while holding hands is not a thing most dragons do. You have to adjust the wing angle and the way you carry your height, and the grip drags at the inside edge and has to be worked against. We've done it exactly once before, in the early months of the bond, when we were still learning the practical business of each other. We worked out how then, and we both still remember.

We fly wingtip to wingtip in silence. The mountain air is cold against both of us. The sky is enormous. The academy is still hidden behind the next range. The scale in my chest goes warm the way it does when we're touching and the touch has no purpose at all, when it's simply the two of us in the space between where we've been and where we're going.

We don't speak. There's nothing to say that the hand and the silence and the flying don't already hold.

✦ ✦ ✦

Malivore is empty when we arrive.

The rest of the student body comes back tomorrow. The academy starts again the day after the Gathering ends, and most students go from the Gathering to their families rather than straight here. The corridors have the quality they never have in term — the silence of a large place caught between its rhythms, our footsteps echoing off the stone.

Her rooms.

I've been in here enough times that it has its own familiarity. The smell of it. The way the afternoon light comes through the east window. The desk with her things on it in the positions they've held all term, the window where she stands in the late hours, the chair that has become mine the way furniture becomes someone's without anyone saying so.

She closes the door behind us.

The Gathering has been five days of being, all at once, the heir apparent and Raven and the intelligence operator and the political figure and the woman who danced with her brother and laughed and held Leander's hand on the platform above the parade. Five days of running all of it together, which is what she does and does well, and which still costs something. The cost shows in how she stands in the closed room. Not tired exactly. The stillness of someone who has been running everything at full and is finally somewhere that doesn't require full.

I put my hands on her shoulders. She leans back into them.

This is the thing about the two of us in private. Twenty-three years of knowing each other has made an ease that is different from the ease of any of her other bonds. Not better. Different. It's the ease of someone who knew you before you knew yourself, who was there for the becoming, who has a reference for every version of you there has ever been. When I put my hands on her shoulders in a closed room and she leans back, what she's leaning into is all of that — the whole weight of the time and the knowing.

We have a few hours.

What follows is the closeness of two people who know each other completely and have spent five days somewhere that had to be managed. The closeness of relief as much as anything else. Presence without performance. The warmth of finally having room to be the two people we are, with time to be them in.

✦ ✦ ✦

Reality asserts itself at the fourth hour.

She gets up while I'm still half asleep and goes to the desk and opens the calendar she keeps on paper, the one she writes in by hand, because she has always said writing it makes it more real than reading it. She goes through the next two weeks with the focused quiet of someone finishing the change from one part of her life into the next.

Classes resume tomorrow. The war planning resumes. The fire drake who fled is in the western territories with Keir's pack still on the trail. Finlay is somewhere in the north running something that will take as long as it takes and has sent no word, because he told her there wouldn't be word quickly. The eastern flights come to Blackhaven sometime in the next month. Cassius is reworking his research. And the name Samara gave at the end of the Purge sits at the center of all of it, the network working it, the thread that ties Amadeus's man to whatever comes next.

I watch her read the calendar from the bed.

Her back is to me. The afternoon light through the east window is at the angle it reaches late in the fourth hour, the particular slant of this academy in autumn — different from Blackhaven's mountain light, different again from Sovereign's. She's in the academy leathers she changed into before we left, practical rather than formal, the familiar shape of her, wings carried slightly forward the way she carries them when she's concentrating.

I've watched her read calendars and reports and briefings, and the faces of flight leaders who believed they were managing their expressions, and the whole landscape from the upper flight platform at dawn. I've watched her for twenty-three years. The attention she brings to whatever is in front of her is always the same attention, whether it's a Shadowcarve assessment or a war council or a page in a calendar.

She turns from the desk. Her sapphire eyes find me directly, the way they always do. Raven doesn't glance at things. She looks at them, with the whole weight of her attention.

"Classes," she says.

"Tomorrow."

"Let's eat first. Something that isn't the Gathering's catering."

"There's bread in the Shadowcarve kitchen. I restocked before we left."

Her face does the thing it does when she's handed something that cost me nothing and means a great deal to her. "You restocked before the Gathering."

"I knew we'd come back to an empty kitchen."

She looks at me a moment. Not the intelligence-gathering look. Not the heir apparent look. The one that is only for me, in the category of things that are mine and hers and nothing else.

"Come on," she says.

We go and find the bread.

The academy begins its next chapter.

Chapter 42

Raven

Nova visits on a Wednesday, and I haven't told the professors.

This isn't an oversight. I considered it and decided against it. The way a place reacts to something it wasn't warned about tells you things the official reaction never will. There's a second reason too, less tactical and more true: I have been managing how I exist in this academy for three years, and Nova is mine. I won't stage her arrival for an audience. She exists. She's here. The academy can respond to the reality of it.

She arrives mid-morning, in the break between first and second session. Solaris lands on the upper flight platform in wyrm form, the enormous fact of him making the platform feel briefly smaller than it is, then shifts and picks her up. Nova landed on her own just ahead of him, which she has decided is a point of pride and not open for discussion. Xero appears on his shoulder — she settled the question of her own attendance while the travel party was still forming at Blackhaven. Standard Xero. She goes where she has decided she should be, and the matter of an invitation doesn't strike her as relevant.

The moment Nova sees me she tells me she flew all the way from the big mountain and it was very fast and she did the whole entire mountain part by herself. I look at Solaris. He confirms, with the expression of a wyrm who is deeply proud and also deeply tired, that she did roughly a third of the mountain part by herself and the rest with help.

"Very fast," I tell her.

She nods with grave dignity, and the day begins.

✦ ✦ ✦

She shifts in the dining hall at the mid-morning break, which is not the plan.

The plan was to walk her through the Shadowcarve grounds and show her the outdoor spaces before the main population had time to gather. Nova had other ideas. At two years old she holds strong opinions about plans she wasn't consulted on, and she has decided, with the absolute certainty of someone who knows exactly what she wants, that she'd like to see where Mama eats.

The hall holds about sixty students at that moment, none of whom expected a skull dragon's daughter to come through the door. She doesn't go all the way — just the controlled shimmer she uses when she wants to make a point. Wings out to their current full span. Scale showing, obsidian and burnt orange. The mismatched eyes, amber and half-sapphire, taking the light a little differently than anything else in the room.

She is remarkable, and she fills the space at once and completely.

The dining hall goes quiet. Sixty students, three instructors, and one administrator, every last one of them holding an opinion, and not one of them says a word. Nova looks back at them. Her gaze travels the room slowly, the way it does anywhere she hasn't been before, deciding what she thinks of it.

Then she looks at me, and I give her the nod.

She makes the flight voice at full volume.

The hall erupts — not in alarm, in the warm noise sixty people make when something extraordinary walks in and they answer it the way people answer extraordinary things. Someone starts applauding and it spreads. Nova's face does the thing it does when she has worked out the right response to a situation and is watching it land. She makes the flight voice again, and the applause gets louder. She looks at Solaris, who has the composure of a man who has been watching her since before she could walk and accepted long ago that this is simply who she is. She looks at me. She looks back at the room.

Then she shifts, tucks her wings, and informs the nearest student — a third-year whose name I know and won't put in this account — that the dining hall is acceptable. He receives the information with complete seriousness.

I am not apologizing for any of it.

✦ ✦ ✦

The afternoon involves explaining Nova to five professors. Not apologizing. Explaining. There's a difference, and I hold it.

The difference is this. I am heir apparent to the Marzana throne, currently in my third year at this institution, and Nova is my daughter and Solaris MacLeod's, next in the Mrithun line. She will be a fixture here for as long as I am, because that is simply how it works. The professors who need to understand that will. The ones who don't will learn.

Callan is first, because he has more equanimity than any instructor I've met in three years, and because if anyone is going to have a useful opinion about a hatchling on the grounds during term it's him. He was one of my more fun nest fathers growing up. He takes it in with the attention he brings to a Tactics scenario, thinks, and says, "She's going to need a schedule that doesn't run into the main student traffic."

"I know. I can work up some options."

"I'd appreciate that." He nods and produces a notepad.

This is why I came to him first.

The other four range from delighted to professionally uneasy. I give each of them the same thing: this is my daughter, she'll be visiting from time to time, she is two years old and will move when she feels like moving, and I intend to welcome her rather than try to control her. If there are arrangements that make her visits work better, I'm glad to discuss them.

Three of the four respond constructively. The fourth has a great deal of concern about the precedent this sets. I listen to all of it, and I say, "I appreciate you raising this."

I do not change my position.

Nova walks alongside Solaris through all of it with the focused attention she brings to adult conversations she can't follow yet, climbing him to his shoulders now and then for a better view. He allows this with the calm of a man who has accepted that he is available climbing equipment. By the fifth professor she has the pattern — adult speaks, Mama listens, adult speaks again, Mama answers, adult's face changes — and she performs a small version of it for Solaris, who receives the performance with complete composure.

We pass Samara's classroom on the way back from the last professor.

The door has been closed since the Purge. The year's review has put the room out of use while the proceedings run, and that will take months. It's just a door. The room behind it is just a room.

And yet.

Nova looks at it and doesn't say anything for a moment. She's looking the way she looks when she's picking up something the adults around her are carrying and nobody has explained to her. She is two years old, and she knows things she has not been told.

"Sad room," she says.

I look at her. "Yes."

"Is the sad room gone?"

I think about what the true answer is, for a two-year-old asking about a room that held someone who tried to kill her mother and is now in custody waiting on judgment. About what gone means, and what I want her to understand about what happened.

"The sad room is gone now," I say. "The person who made it sad is somewhere else."

She looks at the door a moment longer, then at me, then at Solaris, who has been holding her through all of it with the particular stillness she reads as confirmation. When Solaris is still, things are as they should be. She takes it in.

"Okay," she says.

We keep walking.

✦ ✦ ✦

Evening in the Malivore suite.

Nova has eaten what she considers an acceptable amount of dinner, which is more than I'd have guessed and less than Solaris offered. She's been here about forty minutes, giving the place the going-over she gives any new space — everything touched, everything examined, everything put through the Nova assessment that ends in approval or measured disapproval with nothing in between. The desk has been rearranged. Xero's windowsill position has been renegotiated. The small box from the inner drawer was held, examined, and put back, which is more careful handling than I expected.

She falls asleep between us, which is also not the plan. The plan was the small nest Solaris brought in his travel pack, the right size for her, set in the corner of the room that holds its warmth best. Nova considered the plan and chose otherwise, and once she has decided a thing like that it is not open to negotiation. She goes down like a dropped stone. Awake, then entirely gone, the way hatchlings sleep, with nothing gradual about it. No drowsy stretch, no slow descent. Present, and then deeply asleep — a small creature who has been fully alive all day and is now fully at rest.

Solaris and I look at each other over her.

"She held the box carefully," he says quietly.

"I noticed."

"She knows it matters."

"She knows a lot of things."

He watches her a moment with the expression I've come to understand as his version of wonder, the look of someone who has been alive twelve hundred years and keeps finding things that are new. "She asked me today what the big mountain's name is. I told her, and she said it back correctly. Not approximately. Correctly — the full Old Dragon pronunciation."

"The ancestral memory."

"Or she is simply extraordinary."

"Both can be true."

We sit in the quiet a while. Nova breathes between us, warm and heavy, all obsidian hair and the faint scale already showing on the backs of her hands — the early edge of what she'll be.

"The war," Solaris says eventually. He sets the word down gently rather than dropping it.

"Yes."

"How long do you think?"

I think about it, and not tactically — that reckoning runs in the background all the time and gives different answers depending on what I weight. I mean how long in the way that matters to the person asleep between us.

"I don't know," I say. "Long enough that she'll understand it when it comes. I want her to understand it when it comes."

"Not be protected from it."

"Not be unprepared for it. Protection that leaves someone unprepared isn't protection. It's delayed exposure. I'd rather she know what things are, in the version she can hold at her age, than be surprised by them at the wrong moment."

"She already knows things we haven't told her," he says.

"I know. The sad room. The way she looked down the administrative corridor this afternoon when we passed the door of Anipe's old office — she didn't say anything, but she looked at it the way she looks at things she has already worked out, as if she got the information somewhere else and came to confirm it in person."

"Ancestral memory works differently in hatchlings. More porous. More immediate. I don't fully understand it."

"You said that about her Old Dragon too."

"I did. She pronounced the MacLeod territorial marker correctly — the tonal variation that separates the northern line from the southern. It hasn't been in common use for three centuries. She shouldn't know it."

"But she does."

We sit with that. Nova breathes between us, warm and completely gone.

"What do you want her childhood to look like?" I ask. Not the tactical version. The real one.

He's quiet a long moment, the considered kind of quiet he takes when he's reaching for something true rather than something expected. "I want her to know what she is before anyone else defines it for her," he says finally. "I want her to walk into a Great Gathering in twenty years as something the room has to adjust to, rather than something adjusting to the room. The way her mother does."

I look at Nova. "She's already adjusting the dining hall."

"Yes." There's something warm in his voice. "She absolutely is."

The academy's evening sounds come in from outside, the rhythm of a large place at rest, the noise it makes when the structured day has ended and the unofficial hours have started. Nova doesn't move. She sleeps with the completeness of a two-year-old who has had a wonderful day and knows exactly who she is and where she belongs.

For tonight, it's enough.

Chapter 43

Finlay

She doesn't ask me to be careful.

I thought she might — not because she is given to empty comfort, but because a leaving has weight, and weight pulls the usual words out of people whether the words help or not. She isn't given to it. In a year and a half of teaching her Royal Protocol I have never once heard her say the careful thing instead of the true one.

What she says is: The network is yours. Don't let what it costs you personally change how you work.

And underneath it, unsaid and entirely audible: come back.

"I will," I say — and I answer the second one, and she knows I have.

She looks at me a moment with those sapphire eyes. They have been looking at me since she was a student in the third row, the one who asked the question that cut to the middle of every lesson. Then she nods once and steps back.

I shift, and I clear the northern peak, and I fly.

A phoenix in the air is the fastest thing on this continent, though not the fastest I have ever been. There is a speed I reached in my third century and haven't needed since, one that costs something real to hold. Today doesn't justify the cost. Today I fly at a pace that is quick and sufficient and leaves me something for what comes after.

The northern territories change as you cross into them, and it isn't only latitude or altitude, though both change sharply. The light changes first, before the plants or the rock or the way the ground sounds. Northern light is older than southern light. That isn't true as weather. It's true as experience. The north has been doing what the north does for long enough that the weight of it shows in the way the light falls on stone.

I was born here. Not in the territory I'm crossing now — further east, in a valley that still exists on the map. It has changed enough in nine centuries that I wouldn't call it home. The name I had then isn't the name I have now, and the family I had then exists only in my memory. That is the particular experience of living a very long time. The world you were born into survives only in what you carry of it. The world that exists now grows up around those facts the way a forest grows around an old foundation, taking the stones into something new.

The north still feels familiar. Not home. Familiar in the way of a place that shaped you before you knew what shaping was. The light. The wind off the high passes, carrying a mineral cold that belongs to this latitude and no other. The way open ground sounds at this speed, the near things arriving before the far ones, so the landscape comes to you in order rather than all at once. I have been crossing terrain like this for nine centuries, and my body knows it before my mind does.

I missed this without knowing I missed it. You don't know the shape of an absence until you're standing in the thing that fills it. I have been in the south six years, teaching a skull dragon who will be better at ruling than anyone I have ever taught, and the north has been here the whole time, waiting with the patience of geography.

I fly through it and take it in. Then I begin to descend.

✦ ✦ ✦

Thessaly's information is accurate, as it has always been.

I find Aldric Vane in the eastern flock's meeting house at the fourth hour of the afternoon, exactly where her records say he works late in the day. The routine has held for forty years — the quiet hours after the midday sessions, when the hall is empty and a man of his standing has the room he needs for work that wants solitude. He told me about it himself twenty years ago, when I asked him where he still found time for theory. The routine he described then is the routine he keeps now.

This is what I mean when I call him a creature of continuity.

He sees me come in and he doesn't look surprised, which confirms what Thessaly suggested in her last report: he had warning that the Marzana network was moving and knew it was a question of when and not whether. He has had time to decide how this goes.

"Finlay," he says. The word carries everything a single name can carry between two creatures who have known each other across a century.

"Aldric."

We look at each other. I look at the face I have known for a hundred and twelve years and find I have nothing to say yet that would be true, so I say nothing. He gestures to the chair across from him. I sit. He sits.

We begin.

It isn't a brief conversation. Across the weeks of preparing I thought about what kind it would be — whether he would deny it, or argue that my information was wrong, or try to turn me. There is none of that. What there is instead is Aldric in the late afternoon light of a northern meeting house, explaining himself. Not defending himself. Explaining. The difference matters, and he is making it deliberately.

He chose a position a long time ago, one I never believed he held, and he kept up the appearance for a century because it was useful. And because — this is the part I was not prepared for — he did not want to lose the friendship. Even while working against everything the friendship sat inside, he did not want to lose it.

I sit with that a moment.

"Why," I ask. It is the question I told Raven I needed to ask, whether or not it produced a useful answer. Nine centuries is long enough to know that some questions matter in the asking, even when the answer can't give you what you hoped for.

He tells me. The reason is not simple and it is not stupid. It is the reason of a man who thought his way there sincerely, however wrong the place he arrived. I won't put it in this account. It's his; the hearing of it is mine, and some things don't need writing down to be real and carried.

What I will say is that it changes nothing about what he did or what I came here to do. It only gives me something I can hold alongside the betrayal without the two canceling each other out. That is the texture of an ancient friendship ending. Not a clean cut. The complicated weight of knowing someone well enough to understand him even in the moment of his worst choices.

So I give him the offer.

"One chance," I say. "Step away from the operation. Give what you know to the Marzana network. Take yourself out of the picture entirely. One chance — and not because you've earned it. You haven't. Because we were something to each other for a century, and that earns you one."

He is quiet a moment, looking at me with the face I have known for a hundred and twelve years.

"I will not step away," he says. There is no hesitation in it, which tells me the decision was made before I arrived. He came to this conversation already knowing what he would choose.

I nod once. I believe him.

✦ ✦ ✦

What I do next, only a phoenix can do.

This is what Raven didn't know when she asked what I needed from her, and what I didn't explain. It's why I told her this part was mine — not because of the century, but because of the mechanics.

You cannot end a phoenix by killing it. You can kill one; it isn't even difficult. We are easy to injure and we die the way most things die. But the dying doesn't take. The fire is not something a phoenix carries. The fire is what a phoenix is, and it sits behind the breastbone, and as long as it is there the body is a temporary arrangement. Burn one of us, break one of us, put a blade through one of us, and all you have done is inconvenience him and make an enemy who will remember it for four centuries.

To end a phoenix, you take the core. To take the core, you have to reach into the fire. And there is only one creature on this continent who can reach into a phoenix's fire and still have a hand at the end of it.

Fire doesn't burn fire.

Aldric has known this since I walked through the door. It is what he has been sitting with across the whole long conversation — not whether I would do it, but that I was the only one who could, and that my arriving and his ending were the same event.

He stands. He doesn't run, and he doesn't shift, and he doesn't reach for the fire the way a younger man would, spending everything in one bright useless surge that would take the roof off the meeting house and change nothing at all.

What he does is tidy.

He squares the papers on the table in front of him, the afternoon's work, the pages he won't finish. He aligns the edges with two fingers. He caps the ink. He moves his chair back against the wall where it belongs, out of the way, so nothing will be knocked over.

A creature of continuity. To the last.

Then he turns and faces me and opens the front of his coat.

"Finlay," he says. Just the name, the same word he used when I came through the door. A hundred and twelve years, bracketed by my name in his mouth twice, meaning something different at each end.

"Aldric," I say.

He doesn't close his eyes.

I put my hand into his chest.

There is a threshold, and then there is heat — not pain, but heat the way the mouth of a forge is heat, an enormous energy in a small space going about its business with no interest in you. His fire parts around my wrist. It knows who I am. It doesn't resist me because it can't; fire has no opinion about fire, and the oldest reflex a phoenix has — the one that closes the body against everything, that has kept him alive longer than most nations have existed — does not recognize my hand as a thing to close against.

This is the cruelty of it, and it is worth naming honestly. His own fire lets me in.

I feel the shape of him from the inside. The heat has structure. It runs in the pattern that is his and no one else's, the way a voice is a person's. I have known that pattern for a hundred and twelve years from the outside — in the warmth of a room he was sitting in, in the heat that came off him when he laughed. I have never felt it from within, and I know it immediately.

Then my fingers close on the core.

It is small. Nobody expects that. Nine centuries of my own, and I still expect it to be larger — the whole of a life, the fire that has burned without a break since before this continent had borders, and it sits in the palm of a hand like a stone out of a riverbed. It isn't shaped or carved or grand. It is a smooth dense weight, the brightest thing I have ever held, and through my fingers I can see the bones of my hand.

He makes a sound. Not a scream; Aldric wouldn't. It is the sound of a man who has understood something at the exact moment it becomes irreversible. Small, and surprised, and almost quiet.

I pull.

There is a moment of resistance, and the resistance isn't his. It is the body's. A phoenix's body does not want to give up the core any more than a heart wants to stop, and it holds on with everything it has, which is ancient and very strong and not enough. Something gives. It is not like tearing. It is like a root coming out of hard ground.

And then it is in my hand and out of his chest, and the fire goes out. All of it. At once.

I have seen nothing like it, and I have been alive nine hundred years. The light goes from him the way it goes from a window when the sun drops below a ridge, except it isn't a room going dark. It's a person. The mentor who found the thing that came after for me when I couldn't find it myself. The mind that argued with me about the northern territories for three decades and never once condescended. The friend. The whole architecture of him, unlit, in the space of a breath.

He looks at me while it happens. He is still standing — the falling comes later — and for a moment he is simply there, dark, with his own fire in my hand between us. I make myself hold his eyes, because the least I can do is not look away from what I am doing to him. I don't know what is in his face. I have known this face for a hundred and twelve years and I don't know what is in it now.

Then he goes. The body doesn't fall so much as stop being a body. Without the core there is nothing holding the arrangement together, and it comes apart into ash — fine, pale, warm, more than a man should make — drifting down across the squared papers and the chair he moved out of the way.

It's only ash. That's the point. Ash is what we come back from.

Nothing comes back from this.

I hold the core while it dies, and it takes longer than people would think. It doesn't go out when it leaves the body. It goes out the way a coal goes out, slowly, with a great deal of light on the way down. I stand in the ash of my oldest friend, holding the whole of what he was in my closed hand, watching it fade through every color heat makes on the way to nothing.

I could put it down. I could set it on the table beside his papers and step outside and let it finish alone. I don't. The taking was mine and the ending is mine, and if I am willing to do the first I will not be too fine to stand for the second. A hundred and twelve years earns him one thing at the end, and the one thing available is that he does not go out in an empty room.

It's warm. Then it is only warm in the middle. Then it is a small gray stone in my palm, no heavier than it was, with no light left in it at all.

That's all. That is the whole of what he was.

✦ ✦ ✦

I didn't expect to enjoy it, and I don't.

What is left is the particular state of a man who has done something necessary and correct and will carry it anyway. It isn't regret; the decision was right and I would make it again. It's the weight of what has ended — a hundred and twelve years of what we were, finished in what I have just done. That kind of finality has to be acknowledged, even in the doing.

I acknowledge it. Then I put the gray stone in my inside pocket. Not for evidence, not for the network, not for any purpose I could defend to the war council if anyone asked. I don't intend to explain it. Some things don't need documenting to be real and carried.

Then I set the weight aside, because the work isn't finished.

Aldric's materials are organized with the care of someone who has been doing this a long time — everything filed clean, the records complete, the order of them plain enough that a stranger could follow it. The work of a man who expected another pair of hands here one day. Forty years of buried access to Magnus's court makes a considerable archive.

I take what matters. The military timeline. The forces at each position. The supply lines. And the route marked as the primary incursion.

The document that uses that phrase was written fourteen months ago. The plan has been in the making longer than we thought, and the timeline is much closer.

I take everything, and I step outside into the northern night.

The sky is fully dark and very clear, with more stars in it than most people see in their lives. I look at it a moment. Then I shift and rise into it, and I write the letter at altitude.

Phoenix fire can carry a message across distance. It's a property of the flame I have used perhaps six times in nine centuries, always for the most necessary things and never for convenience. The fire holds what I put into it and carries it to the one it is meant for at the speed of flame rather than the speed of flight. It arrives before I do. That is the point.

I don't put the intelligence in it. That comes with me, in the archive out of Aldric's files, and reaches Raven when I reach her — too specific and too consequential to trust to any channel, even this one.

What I put in the letter instead is two things.

The first is a summary of what I found and what it does to the timeline, so she can begin the revised planning before I am back with the full archive. Magnus's primary incursion is sooner than the war council believed. The date I put in the letter is exact, and when she reads it she will understand why it needed a letter rather than waiting for my return.

The second is this.

I have spent nine centuries teaching, and in that time there have been perhaps a dozen students who became something I could not have predicted at the beginning. They arrived at what they were going to be through what they were given and what they chose to do with it, and they produced something in the choosing that none of the parts would have predicted. I tell her she is one of those. I tell her that watching her become what she is has been among the true honors of a very long life. I tell her that the work she has done — not the strategy or the Purge or the Gathering, but the interior work, the choosing to do the right thing correctly even when correctly is much harder — will matter for longer than either of us will be here to see it mattering.

I release the fire. It goes south, bright and fast.

I follow it. The north falls away behind me — the passes, the particular northern light I won't see again for some time, which I look back at once before the high ground takes it. The valley where I was born is somewhere to the east, invisible in the dark, unchanged by anything I have done tonight.

The south opens ahead of me. I fly toward it.

The letter is already there.

Chapter 44

Raven

The final Tactics examination runs three hours.

I've known the format since Year One. A live scenario, built by Callan for the student sitting it and drawn from nothing in the standard set. It uses everything a student has developed across three years and tests what Callan has decided are that student's true edges — not the weak points, the places where the abilities are unusual, where the exam has to reach past the ordinary limits to find where you stop. He has been watching me for three years, and I have been watching him watch me, so I have some sense of what he has been building toward.

What he presents is a conflict with several sides and the information spread unevenly between them. I have more than some and less than others, and working out which is which is part of the problem. There's a shortage I can see coming, and it shifts the moment I move to prevent it, which is not a coincidence. There's a clock set to be beatable but not comfortable — the pressure of a man who knows exactly how fast I work and has set it to push without breaking.

Late in the third hour, with the resolution built and nearly complete, something unexpected arrives and knocks it apart. I have seven minutes to decide whether to rebuild or adapt.

I adapt. I take the change that saves the three parts that matter most and gives up the two that matter least, and I finish with four minutes to spare.

Callan grades it as it happens, aloud, with the senior class watching from the tier above. He works through each part in the precise language he uses for everything — factual, specific, nothing added. He names what was right and why. He names what could have been different and what the difference would have produced. He doesn't say whether the alternative would have been better, because he is teaching the seniors that the question has more than one answer.

He reads the score at the end. Perfect. He closes the folder and offers no comment, and he doesn't need to, because the score is the comment.

I take it the way I take things that are accurate. Completely, and without needing anything added.

The Royal Protocol final is the following morning, and I know what's coming. Finlay briefed me on the format last year, including the detail that the live exercise uses real visiting dignitaries who aren't told they're part of an exam. This isn't dishonest. The dignitaries attend a formal academic reception, which does happen. The student being examined navigates the reception. Both things are true at once.

The three this year are the representative of the northern trading consortium, who has been here before and whose manner I know from Finlay's extended briefings; the newly appointed deputy of the southern coastal alliance, in her first year in the role; and the eastern flock's cultural liaison, an elder sixty years in the post who, I suspect, knows perfectly well this is an exam and has decided to take part anyway, because she finds education interesting.

I navigate it.

With the northern representative, I raise a trade corridor dispute that has been running in his consortium for two years. It isn't in the standard briefing, but it's in the extended material I read on my own. He notices that I know about it. He doesn't comment. He stays eleven minutes past his scheduled window.

The southern deputy is still working out her own diplomatic shape, still discovering what she thinks and what she doesn't. I ask her about her predecessor's approach to the coastal fishing agreements and where she thinks the gaps in it were, and she tells me — thoughtfully, specifically, giving away more of her thinking than she meant to before she's finished. When she stops, she looks at me with the expression of someone who has just worked out what happened. She appears to find it acceptable.

The eastern elder knows it's an exam, and we proceed on that basis, which is its own kind of diplomacy. We have a direct conversation about what formal work asks of the young, and she tells me three things I will use for the rest of my life. I give her one in return that she doesn't appear to have considered, and she takes it the way people take a thing that rearranges something they were sure of.

The exercise ends, and I notice Finlay at the back of the room.

I don't know when he arrived. He has been there for some part of it and made himself unnoticeable because he chose to; nine centuries of formal events will teach a man to move through one without being seen. His face gives nothing away, and a face that gives nothing away is its own kind of expression once you know how to read it. He looks at me when the last dignitary leaves, and gives me a single nod. The nod of a man who has reached a conclusion — nine centuries of watching students arrive at what they'll be, distilled into one gesture.

I take it.

Balor delivers the year-end rankings at the third hour of the last day of term, the way he does everything. No ceremony. The flat language of a formal assessment, standing at the front of the combined Year Three class in the main Shadowcarve hall, with no preamble and no acknowledgment of the year's unusual circumstances. The ranking is a number, and he delivers numbers.

He reads the name at the top of the combined assessment. My name. Then he goes straight on through the list, the same tone for every entry, top to bottom.

The ranking isn't celebrated. It's noted, formally, and filed. That is exactly correct. Celebration would suggest that being at the top of the list is the point, and being at the top of the list is not the point. The point is the three years of work that produced it, and what the work produced in the person.

When he finishes, he closes the file. He looks at me once — the brief direct look that holds Balor's entire commentary. The look of a man for whom seventeen correct decisions was once a fair assessment, who has revised the number upward across the year, and who is satisfied. Then he dismisses us and leaves.

That is Balor's clean bill of health for a year. Closed file, one look, gone.

✦ ✦ ✦

Klauth's formal review is that afternoon, and not in the throne room but in the working office, which is where he holds reviews that are substantive rather than ceremonial. I know the difference and I appreciate the choice. The throne room is for declarations. The working office is for the real accounting.

He goes through the year's outcomes methodically.

The fire drake infiltration is resolved. Three students are in custody awaiting tribunal, one is at large and tracked, and the investigation is closed. Balor is overseeing the reforms to how enrollments are checked. Anipe and Samara are moving through their separate proceedings — Anipe's tribunal date is set for next month, and Samara's waits on the continental judges finishing their review of the founding charter, which will return a finding within six months.

Balor's team traced the dragon's bane back through three middlemen to its maker in the outer western territories. Klauth's enforcement division has shut the maker down. Two of the middlemen are in custody. The third is under active investigation, with closure expected inside the month. The tips recovered from Anipe's bolts match the maker's production marks, and the chain of evidence is complete.

The Gathering brought three eastern flights under Blackhaven's protection, and the paperwork is filed with the continental registry. Therun's wolf trackers are producing their first reports out of the western zones. The eastern bloc is actively part of the alliance now rather than neutral. Solaris's private session, and the exchange about Amadeus's net that I authorized, produced what Klauth calls one of the most effective pieces of alliance-building in a decade of Gatherings.

Cassius's research is updated. The host network is clearer, the way to end Amadeus is better defined, and what the eastern flights know about their missing has filled gaps he couldn't close on his own.

And Finlay's work is finished — the northern intelligence confirming Magnus's timeline, his assembled forces, and the primary incursion route.

Klauth closes the review. He's quiet a moment, in the particular quiet of a man who has spent a great deal of his life making assessments and has arrived at one that satisfies him.

"You've done well," he says.

"We're not done."

He looks at me. His eyes hold mine with the expression that is Klauth's expression for something correct.

"No," he says. He smiles. "But you've done well."

I take that with me.

Then I go and pack my room.

✦ ✦ ✦

The Malivore suite at the end of the year.

I'm not sentimental about leaving. I have Blackhaven, which is mine in a way this room has never been — not because I haven't lived in it fully, because I have, but because Blackhaven is the place I built rather than the place I was assigned. There is a real difference between those two kinds of belonging, and I know which one I prefer.

Still. I pack carefully. Not quickly. Carefully, the way packing matters when you're packing for three years rather than a term.

The desk first. The notes and the files, the assessments that will go to the Blackhaven archive, and the small things that arrived here through the accumulation of daily life rather than by any decision. The contacts case, cleaned. The field kit from the Purge, restocked. Orpheus's schedule from the first week of term, with the date circled in red and I know. Tell me when underneath it in his small precise hand, which I kept and am not going to stop keeping.

The walls are bare when I'm done. A room becomes a room again when you take out what made it yours. The smell of the stone and the mountain air through the window stays, because that belongs to the academy and not to me, and it will still be here after I go.

I think about the three years.

Year One was the beginning of understanding what I was becoming, which was not what I was supposed to become, and it took most of the year to tell the two apart. The circuit. Corvus on the flight platform before dawn. The first time Balor put me into a scenario built for someone older and I understood that I was being measured against something other than my classmates.

Year Two was the submission, and what it cost, and why it was right. Blackhaven starting to be mine. The nest starting to be what it actually is rather than the thing I was managing or the thing I was performing — the thing it had been building itself into in all the time I spent not looking. The bonds deepening past the point where I could control how they felt, and my deciding that was acceptable.

Year Three was the fire drakes, the Purge, the Gathering, the war council, Finlay going north. Nova working her landings over Blackhaven at dawn. Leander's hand in mine on the platform above the hatchling parade. Three eastern flights choosing to come to us. The coastal elder telling me we decided correctly.

Year Three was the year I stopped becoming the dominant dragoness and started being her.

I stand at the window. The Shadowcarve grounds are below and the mountains beyond, and the light is at that particular angle on the eastern face of the peak that I have seen hundreds of times across three years — always at a different hour, always carrying the quality of the day I saw it from. Today it carries the quality of the last day of term. Of something completed.

The war is coming. Finlay's letter is at Blackhaven. The war council is forming. The next thing is already the next thing, and it is large, and it will take everything I have and more.

I am not afraid of it. I am also not blind to its weight. Those are different states, and I have learned across three years to keep them separate.

I survived Year Three. More than survived. The Purge is in the record, and the record is accurate and honest. The Gathering widened the alliance in ways that will matter when the fighting comes. Finlay went north and came back, and the letter said — I have read it four times and will read it again — that watching me become what I am has been among the true honors of a very long life.

I look at the mountains. They look the same as they have always looked. They don't mark endings the way I mark them. They will be here after this year and the next and the one after that, through whatever comes, unchanged.

There is something specific and useful about standing in front of something unchanged.

I stand in front of it a moment longer.

Then I pick up my bags.

I go home.

Chapter 45

Raven

The letter arrives before I do.

I land at Blackhaven in the late afternoon with the smell of the academy's stone still on me. Isolde meets me at the courtyard gate with the letter in her hands, wearing the expression she gets when she's read something that matters and is waiting to find out whether she was supposed to. She reads the important papers when they come in, and I haven't told her to stop. She's eighteen, she's Charron's bonded mate, she'll be running Blackhaven's household inside a year, and she needs to be able to read them.

"The timeline," she says.

"I know." I hold out my hand. "Give it to me."

She hands it over and steps back, because she understands without being told the difference between the things I take in with people present and the things I take in alone.

I read it in the courtyard, standing.

What he found comes first. The forces assembled. The positions. The supply lines that have been running for three months, which means the movement was already underway before the Gathering, before Finlay went north, before we knew what timeline we were working against. Magnus staged his build-up to look slower than it was.

The date he gives me is six months out. Six months from now, before the next Gathering, when the flights will be scattered and our ability to answer together will be at its weakest. He picked his moment. He has been planning it for longer than we thought.

Then the personal part. Nine centuries, the letter says, and in them a dozen students who became something the parts would never have predicted. Watching me has been among the true honors of a very long life. The interior work — the choosing to do right when right is harder — will matter for longer than either of us will be here to see it mattering.

I read it twice. Then I fold it and put it in the inner pocket, the one that closes.

"Convene the war council," I tell Isolde. "Everyone available. Tonight."

✦ ✦ ✦

The war council assembles at the seventh hour.

Klauth isn't here; the distance is too great for tonight, and word will reach him through channels by morning. Here instead are Solaris, Corvus, Hemlocke, Keir, and Balor, with Abraxis at the far end of the table and Mina on the relay Keir's pack keeps running. Thauglor is here too. He arrived four days ago for reasons I now understand were an instinct about timing that great wyrms grow into across centuries.

I lay it all out. Three regiments of fire drake infantry at the northern border. Two mounted units drawn from the western territories. Supply lines established and running three months already, which puts the movement well ahead of anything we had.

And then the piece that changes the shape of everything. There is a group of mage-blood practitioners Magnus has recruited across the past eighteen months, brought in one at a time through separate channels, every one of them believing the work is for Magnus's court and nothing else. Aldric's records name fourteen. Cassius will know at least six of them from his host network research.

"Magnus doesn't know," Solaris says quietly.

"Magnus may not know the whole of it. He knows he's been offered resources he didn't ask for, through channels he doesn't fully understand, and he's been taking them because they're useful. Magnus works on the assumption that useful things are worth having no matter where they come from. That's what got Aldric buried in his court for forty years. That's what got the practitioners recruited without Magnus ever understanding what he was building."

"And Amadeus gets an army," Abraxis says from the far end, in the voice of a general reading it from the inside. "He gets the war without appearing to own the war. He watches our full response, maps what we can do, puts his practitioners inside our lines under Magnus's flag. And the whole time he holds the position that he is no part of the fighting."

"Until we've committed everything," I say. "At which point he acts."

The room is very quiet.

"Six months," Balor says. Precise and flat.

"Six months," I confirm. "To finish bringing the eastern flights in, position Therun's forces, prepare the defensive line, and map Cassius's host network well enough to move on it the same moment the fighting starts."

"The same moment," Mina says from the relay.

"Amadeus can't answer two threats at once if he doesn't know both are coming. If the fighting begins and we move on his host network inside the same window — if we've already cut him off from the practitioners before he's had the chance to use them — then he's fighting a war without his primary tool inside it. He's down to the net itself, which Cassius can hold still while we⁠—"

"While we end him," Solaris says. "Both at once. The eggs and the hosts."

"Both at once," I say. "Before he sees us move."

Solaris goes still a moment, the stillness of someone who was inside the binding and knows exactly what that means from within. "It's possible," he says. "If the timing is exact. If Cassius's mapping is complete. If the strike on the hosts lands before Amadeus can turn."

"Then that's what we'll make certain of."

I lay out the opening. Three tracks running at once, each with its own deadline inside the six months. The eastern flights fully brought in and the alliance formally documented before month three. Therun's forces positioned and Keir's pack deployed in the western territories, giving us live reports on Magnus's movement from month two. Cassius's mapping complete by month four, which leaves eight weeks to prepare the simultaneous strike.

The room listens. Nobody argues.

Finlay arrives at the ninth hour, carrying the smell of northern snow.

He walks in while Thauglor is working through the defensive line — Thauglor's particular expertise, the lie of the land on the western approaches, the passes that can be held and the ones that can't. Finlay stops at the door and reads the room the way he always does, the whole of it taken in before he has moved off the threshold. Then he takes the open seat, pulls the northern archive from his case, and opens it to the map he's marked.

He has been in the air fourteen hours. Nothing about him suggests it.

"Magnus's primary route," he says, tracing it with one finger. "Not the eastern pass. He knows the eastern pass is what we'd expect, and he doesn't want the fight where we'd expect it. The western route, here, through the lower passes. It gives him the fastest line to Sovereign and misses the defenses we'd naturally set on the eastern approach."

"Sovereign," Mina says sharply from the relay.

"Not the Gathering itself. The approach to it. If he holds the approach, the Gathering can't convene. Three hundred and forty-seven flights scattered, no way to answer together, and he can hand the Marzana throne a choice between conceding the approach or answering alone. Either outcome serves him."

"Neither outcome is available to him," I say. "Because the Gathering isn't the piece he's moving. We are. We convene before he moves. Inside six months we formalize the alliance and document it, and we make certain that when he reaches the approach to Sovereign he finds three hundred and forty-seven flights already aligned and already holding his timeline."

Finlay looks at me across the table. Something moves in his face — not surprise exactly. Recognition. The look of a teacher watching a student use a thing he handed her and finding she has made it into something past what he gave.

"He won't expect that," Finlay says.

"No. He won't."

The war council runs until the second hour of the morning.

✦ ✦ ✦

Late.

The council has ended, and the war room has the quality it takes on afterward — the leftover warmth of a large group, the quiet that comes in behind them, maps on the table, documents stacked and marked. Abraxis is gone. Mina has dropped off the relay. Thauglor is in the east wing guest quarters, settled in like a man who intends to stay a while and has made his peace with it. Finlay is still at the table, going through the archive with the unhurried focus of someone finishing the paperwork before he sleeps.

He looks up when I pass. "Go," he says. Not a suggestion.

"The third track timeline. Cassius needs⁠—"

"I'll reach Cassius in the morning. Go."

I leave.

I find the nest in the main room.

All five of them are here. Corvus is in the chair that's become his, book open, reading the way he reads at the end of a long day — not fast, taking his time with each page, the kind of reading that's rest rather than work. Solaris is on the long seat with his eyes closed, not sleeping; great wyrms have an inward state that is neither sleep nor waking, and it's where he goes when the council is done and the thinking isn't. Keir sits cross-legged on the floor with the pack's western reports and his scent maps spread around him, wearing the focused satisfaction of someone doing the work he was made for. Hemlocke is at the window with his back to the room, looking out at the grounds in the slow careful way he looks at things he tends, as though the looking is itself a kind of keeping. Xero is on the sill above him, blood-red eyes open, tracking something in the mountain dark I can't see from here.

Nova is asleep in the next room. I can hear her through the wall, the slow rhythm of a two-year-old gone all the way under with nothing held back, the complete unconsciousness of someone who used everything today. Earlier she had asked, with the gravity of a two-year-old asking a serious question, whether the war council was the kind of thing that takes a long time. I told her yes. She considered it, and said she would wait. She was asleep by the seventh hour and hasn't moved since.

I sit down on the floor beside Keir. He shifts his maps to make room without looking up.

Nobody speaks for a while. This is what the nest is like at this hour — the warmth of people who have come through something hard together and out the other side into the ordinary quiet of a room. The council is done. The strategy is set. The six months are what they are. Right now they're here, and Nova is asleep, and Xero is watching the mountain, and Blackhaven holds all of it, and none of us has to be anything in particular.

I look at each of them. Corvus, who stood on the south roof for four hours and called it observing. Hemlocke, whose mirror flash came just before the first hour and changed the shape of the Purge. Keir, who ran the grid and is running it still, the western territories now, the trail of the one who went out through the south wall still live. Solaris, who translated six minutes of Old Dragon in a guest suite with Nova asleep on the cushion beside him. Finlay, who flew north and came back carrying an archive and a letter.

"Thank you," I say. "For this year. For all of it."

I rarely say things like that, and they know it. They have known me long enough to understand what costs something and what doesn't. This costs something, and the room registers it the way people do when they understand what they're being given.

Corvus closes his book. Hemlocke turns from the window. Solaris opens his eyes. Nobody says anything, because the right answer to this isn't words. It's taking it in, fully and quietly, which is what they do. Keir puts his hand over mine. Corvus sets the book on the side table with the care of someone putting a thing down deliberately rather than casually. Hemlocke lets go of the tension he carries at the window and comes back into the room with us, which is a different thing entirely.

I look at them.

The war is six months away. The strategy is set, the tracks are running, the six months will be what they are, and at the end of them we will be at the beginning of something enormous. All of that is true and real, and I am not afraid of it.

Tonight, this.

They don't make me anything I'm not already. They never have. They stay close to what I am, and in the staying, they make it larger than it would be alone.

Xero shifts on the sill. The mountain holds its cold outside. Nova breathes in the next room.

It's enough.

Chapter 46

Raven

Summer at Blackhaven is different from every other season I've known here.

The first summer, at the end of Year One, I was here three weeks before the academy recalled me for the early return program, and Blackhaven was still finding its shape. The second, at the end of Year Two, I was here longer, but the submission was fresh and everything still had the quality of a thing settling into a new arrangement. This summer I'm here the whole season, and the difference isn't only the length of it. The difference is that Blackhaven is now what it is.

The morning circuit looks different. Not the path — the path is the same, the same stones in the same order, the same mountain light at the same angles. But the flight I run it through has more than doubled since the Year Two summer, and the people it holds are real and specific and mine in the way a flight belongs to a dominant dragoness. Not possession. Responsibility. I drew the boundary lines, which means I am also the one held to them, and I've been learning across the summer what that actually weighs.

Most mornings, it feels like purpose.

✦ ✦ ✦

The dispute comes to me on a Tuesday in the third week of summer.

Two families, both dragons, both brought into the Blackhaven flight in the past year, both out of the eastern flights that came under our protection at the Gathering. The Vreth family and the Solan family. The matter is nesting rights on the eastern face — the ledge system between the second and third ridge, the one with the best southern exposure and the windbreak that makes holding a steady temperature easier for a clutch during incubation.

The Vreth family was there first by three weeks. The Solan family arrived, looked the ledges over, and came to a different conclusion about whose they were.

This isn't an unusual dispute in dragon communities. The old resolution is combat — not to the death in most traditions, but to submission, the weaker party yielding the territory by physically giving way to the stronger. It works when a community is small enough and isolated enough that the outcome of one fight settles the question for everyone. Mine is neither of those things.

I hear both families separately first.

That isn't the traditional approach. Traditionally you hear them together, so each knows the other's position is being weighed in the same moment. It's a kind of social pressure, the awareness of being watched making people testify more carefully. I hear them apart because I want to understand both positions before either family has performed one for an audience.

The Vreth case is straightforward. Three weeks of prior occupancy, the nesting preparation already established, the labor and materials already spent on the ledge, and the grievance of being pushed off the exact spot of their own work. The elder Vreth female carries herself with the quiet dignity of someone certain of her position and in no need of making it louder than it is. She gives me the facts and doesn't decorate them.

The Solan case is that the ledge suits their clutch better, that the southern exposure is more appropriate for the temperature their eggs need in the critical third week, and that they arrived with four adults capable of defending the claim.

I note all of it, and I pay particular attention to the last part. Four adults capable of defending the claim is not a nesting consideration. It's a threat wearing nesting language.

After both sessions I walk the eastern face myself with Corvus's survey in hand, which takes most of a morning, and it confirms what I suspected. Neither family has claimed the best position, because neither of them knew the full picture of what was up there.

I schedule the joint session for the next day.

"Here is what's going to happen," I say.

The Vreth family is on my left and the Solan family on my right, eight adults in all, every one of them in human form, which is what Blackhaven requires when a dispute is heard formally. Human form makes a different kind of conversation than dragon form, and I want this to be a conversation. We're in the great hall, a room that leaves no question about whose territory it is.

"The eastern face has enough ledge for both families, if the territory is divided correctly. You wouldn't have found this on your own, because you each started from the assumption that there was one suitable position and only one of you could have it."

I lay out the survey Corvus ran last month, the full mapping of the eastern face, ledge by ledge, with the temperature and wind readings his training runs turned up along the way.

"The Vreth position has the best windbreak and poor southern exposure for the third week. The Solan position has the exposure they need and too little protection from the northern wind shift in the fifth. Neither is right for either clutch on its own. But both families on adjacent ledges, sharing a windbreak that Hemlocke's team will build, gives both of you better conditions than either would have had apart."

I draw the boundary on the map with my talon.

"This is the line. Vreth to the north, Solan to the south. The windbreak is shared work. Both families build it, both families keep it. Any dispute about the keeping comes to me."

There's a silence. Then Darik Solan — eldest of the four Solan adults, the one who mentioned the four capable adults in the first session — says, "You can't simply decide this."

I look at him. I'm very calm when I answer.

"I can," I say. "I did. That's what dominant dragoness means in this flight."

I don't raise my voice. I don't shift. I don't do anything that counts as a visible demonstration of the thing I am. But something in the room changes, the way air changes when a dragoness who has been holding herself in check stops holding quite so carefully.

The dragoness isn't a performance. She is what I am underneath the management, underneath the protocol, underneath three years of learning how to be in a room without the full weight of me pressing on every surface in it. She's the thing that ran the Purge, and killed a green dragon in four seconds, and walked out of the gate after seventy-two hours the way she always knew she would. And she is aware of Darik Solan's challenge the way she's aware of everything — completely and precisely, the weighing already finished.

I give her exactly enough room. Not all of her. Enough to say what I am and what this room is, without turning it into something that needs a physical answer. Because a physical answer isn't what this family needs, and it isn't what this flight needs, and it isn't, if I'm honest, what I want. What I want is for Darik Solan to understand that he walked into my territory and issued a challenge in it, and that I chose to teach him instead of putting him on the floor, and that he should be grateful for the choice.

From the quality of the silence, he understands.

Darik Solan looks at me. Then he looks at the floor.

"When does construction begin?" says the Vreth elder, in the tone of a woman moving a conversation to its proper end as efficiently as possible.

I have decided that I like her.

"Next week. Hemlocke will meet both families Thursday to go through the design."

They leave. I stand in the great hall a moment after they've gone.

The weight of it isn't unpleasant. This is what I've been learning across the summer. Drawing the boundary lines isn't only the weight of being accountable for them. It's also the weight of being the one who ends the thing — the one who says here is the line, and means it, and is believed.

Dominant dragoness. It means something particular, and I'm still learning what.

✦ ✦ ✦

The flight's shape in summer.

Hemlocke's foal program has produced its first confirmed second-generation pairing, the Aldenmere mare and one of the warhorses out of Therun's southern herds. It wasn't the planned match, but Hemlocke judged it the better one and adjusted the program to suit. The foal won't arrive until spring, but the confirmation is in, and he walked me through the numbers on a Tuesday evening with the quiet of a man who has been building toward something a long time and is finally looking at the beginning of it.

Keir's patrol network now covers the whole of Blackhaven territory and reaches into the eastern buffer, the ground between our mountain and the next real border east. The extension happened in the second week of summer, when one of the eastern flights' blink hounds asked to join the rotation, and then a second one did. It's a true mixed network now rather than a blink hound operation with guests. Keir briefed me on it with the look of someone handed something excellent that he didn't design.

Finlay's web is three things: the contacts Thessaly runs, the northern channel that has been quiet since Aldric and is being rebuilt to a different shape, and the eastern flight connections the Gathering produced. He works on it every morning after the circuit, in the small office that is his at Blackhaven now, the one with the east window and the view of the flight field. He chose that room precisely because the flight field is where he can see what he's protecting.

Corvus runs the training for the combined forces. I attend three sessions a week, and they have the quality of everything Corvus teaches: precise, unhurried, the standard set high and held there without drama. The fire drake watch that sat outside the western line all autumn is gone. What he's building now is the force we'll need when Magnus moves — dragon infantry, mounted units, blink hound rapid deployment, and the eastern flight volunteers who came to Blackhaven with unusual skills, each of them fitted into the structure where the skill goes.

Solaris keeps the archives. He's been building the Blackhaven archive since the first summer: the ancestral memory records, the histories, the Amadeus research, Cassius's updates as they arrive. It's large enough now that he's begun training two of the eastern flight elders to help with the ongoing work. I walked through it last week, and the scale of what he has assembled surprised me the way a thing does when you've watched it grow a little at a time and then see all of it at once.

Blackhaven is becoming a kingdom, and I am the one responsible for it.

Most mornings this feels like purpose. Some mornings it feels like the weight of all of it, which is also a kind of purpose.

✦ ✦ ✦

Nova insists on the morning circuit.

It begins in the second week of summer, when she lands beside me at the flight platform and gives me the look she uses when she has decided something and is informing me rather than asking. I look at her. She spreads her wings — the full span, the obsidian and burnt orange in the early light — and waits.

"You want to fly the circuit," I say.

She nods once.

"It's four miles."

She looks at me with those mismatched eyes and the expression that has been telling me, with more clarity every month since she learned to walk, that she is a Mrithun, and the Mrithun do not find four miles concerning.

We fly the circuit. She manages it — not easily, not at full pace, but completely. On the fourth mile she's flagging, so I slow without letting it show, and she catches up and finishes. When we land she shifts and informs me, with the gravity of someone announcing a decision, that she will fly the circuit every morning.

"Yes," I say.

By the third week she's flying it without flagging. By the fourth she's pulling ahead on the downhill stretches, and I stop slowing.

Every morning. The same path, the same stones, the same mountain light. We fly it side by side, the skull dragon and the obsidian-and-burnt-orange one, the dragoness and her daughter, and neither of us speaks, because there's nothing to say that the flying doesn't already hold.

The circuit has always been the thing that grounds me.

Now it's also the thing that's hers.

I didn't expect this to feel the way it feels. I'm glad it does.

Chapter 47

Solaris

Nova turns two at the height of summer.

I have been alive twelve hundred years and more, and I have learned that most turnings of the season don't matter the way we pretend they matter. A year is a human measure. To a great wyrm it is a single breath in a very long breathing. Inside Amadeus's binding a year meant nothing at all — there was only the dark, and the net, and the slow erosion of any sense that time moved rather than simply was.

I don't speak of the binding often, and I won't linger in it now, on this day of all days. But it is worth setting down plainly, once, so that what comes after can be understood against it.

A thousand years. Not two centuries, not five. A thousand, the full round terrible weight of it, longer than most kingdoms stand. No up and no down, no wing, no wind, no weight of my own body to tell me I still had one. Only the hum of the net holding me, patient and endless, and the horror of a mind built to remember everything being given nothing new to remember for ten centuries. I forgot what light was for. Not what it looked like — what it was for, the way you forget that warmth is a thing the body reaches toward until something warm is laid against you and the reaching starts up again on its own.

I had two hundred and fifty years of life before the dark took me, and I have had a little over three since it let me go. Set beside the thousand in between, those two free spans are small: a bright morning on either side of an endless night.

And yet the three years weigh more than the thousand.

That is what this day makes plain. It isn't the length of a time that gives it weight. It's what the time holds.

So I know, better than almost anyone alive, what a year is and what it isn't. And I am telling you that this one matters. Nova turning two matters to me in a way that has nothing to do with the calendar and everything to do with the fact of her — that she exists, that she is here, that I get to watch her turn two. It is a sentence I could not have formed inside the dark, when I did not know she would exist and did not believe I would be released to meet her if she did.

I hold it the way I hold most large things now. Quietly, with the clarity of an ancient mind that has had a great deal of time to watch itself.

✦ ✦ ✦

The mountain is at its best today, as though it has decided to attend.

High summer at Blackhaven is a brief and generous thing. For most of the year the peak keeps its snow and the wind comes off it with an edge, but for these few weeks the meltwater runs down the eastern face in thin bright threads, the lower slopes go green and stay green, and the stone of the keep holds the day's heat long into the evening. A hand laid flat against the outer wall at dusk gets the warmth given back to it like a living thing. The light is different in summer too — longer, gold rather than silver, pooling in the courtyard and lying along the flight field long after it has gone from the valleys below.

I have been free a little over three years, and I have not yet let a warm day pass unremarked, and I don't expect I ever will. That is another thing the dark gave me. A thousand years without a single warm afternoon teaches you not to waste one when it comes.

The birthday itself isn't elaborate. Nova is two, and two doesn't require elaborate. Two requires the people she loves in one place, something sweet, and permission to stay up past the hour she usually goes to sleep. We give her all three.

The nest is here. Corvus has made the honey cake Nova has decided, across this past year, is the finest substance in the world, and he made it without a word about the fact that she requested it eleven separate times in the week beforehand, because he understands that the requesting was part of the wanting. The smell of it reaches all the way to the flight field while it bakes, honey and warm butter on the summer air, and Nova stops mid-chase three times to lift her face to it, the way a small creature turns toward the thing it loves.

Hemlocke has brought the foal to the lower field, which she has been asking for over a month, and the two young things regard each other with mutual grave interest. The foal's ears forward. Nova's small hand held out flat and patient the way Hemlocke taught her. Neither of them in any hurry at all.

Keir spends the afternoon letting Nova chase him across the field. He blinks short distances, just far enough that she has to work for it, and she shrieks with the delight of a child who knows she is being allowed to win and does not care, because the chasing is the point. Twice she nearly catches him, and he lets the near miss stand a heartbeat too long, so that for that heartbeat she believes she has done it, and the sound she makes is one I would have crossed the whole thousand years to hear.

Finlay tells her a story. He doesn't often, which is part of why it lands — an old one, from before the continent had the name it has now. Nova listens with the whole of her attention, the kind she saves for things she has decided are important, the honey cake abandoned on her plate until he has finished.

And Raven watches all of it.

I watch Raven watch it. This has become one of the great pleasures of my life — not only watching Nova, but watching Raven watch Nova, the careful pride she won't fully show and can't fully hide. She is twenty-three, and she has spent this year becoming something the continent will spend the next several decades adjusting to. But on her daughter's second birthday she isn't the heir apparent or the dominant dragoness or the architect of the war that's coming. She stands at the edge of the flight field in the gold end-of-day light with her arms loose at her sides and her wings half-furled and easy, and she is only a mother watching her child be delighted. The watching has undone something in her face that the council rooms never reach.

I love her. I want to be clear about that, in an account that is mostly about the child. I was released by her bond, and the release was the return of my life to me, and I have never once mistaken the size of that. But what I feel watching her isn't the debt of the released to the one who freed him. It's the plainer, larger thing.

She made this. Not only Nova — this. The nest, the warmth, the field full of people who love a two-year-old enough to spend a whole gold afternoon being chased across it. She built the place where it could happen, and she did it while running everything else, and she does not appear to know that this is remarkable, which is part of why it is.

✦ ✦ ✦

In the evening, Nova asks me why I go quiet.

She climbs into my lap on the long seat in the last hour before sleep takes her, warm and heavy and slowing down, smelling of honey cake and summer grass and the outside cold she carried in when the light finally went. She has been watching me all day with the sidelong attention she gives to things she is working out, and now she has arrived at the question.

"You go quiet," she says. "When I fly. You get a quiet face."

I consider how to answer honestly to a two-year-old. It's a thing I have decided about how I speak to her: I won't give her the easy false version because she is small. She notices more than the people around her assume, and she will remember what she is told, and I would rather she remember the truth in a shape she can hold than a comfortable thing she will later have to unlearn.

"I get quiet because I am very happy," I say. "And sometimes, when a feeling is very big, it comes out as quiet instead of loud."

"Happy is a big feeling," she says, with the seriousness she brings to important information.

"It's one of the biggest."

"Bigger than sad?"

I think about this, because she deserves a real answer. "The same size, I think. They're the two biggest. But I have had a great deal of sad in my life, and now I am having the happy, and the happy is very big because it came after so much of the other thing."

She looks at me. She is two, and she doesn't have the words for the thing she is understanding, but she is understanding it. I can see it move across her face the way it moves across Raven's, the family resemblance sitting in the very machinery of thought.

"It's okay to be quiet-happy," she tells me. Firmly. As though granting permission.

Something happens in my chest that I don't have a good word for, even after twelve hundred years of gathering words. This small creature, two years old today, has looked at the largest and most complicated thing in me, named it in four words, and given me leave to feel it.

"Thank you," I say. "I'll remember that."

She nods, satisfied, and settles further into me, and for a few minutes she is heavy and nearly gone.

Then she stirs, slides down off my lap, and crosses the room to Hemlocke at the window, and holds up both arms without saying anything at all. He lifts her. She is asleep against his collar before he has finished sitting down.

Two-year-olds choose where they finish. I let her choose.

✦ ✦ ✦

Wyrms remember differently from the rest of you.

Hemlocke keeps his own life and little more, and he has told me he finds that sufficient. What I carry is the whole line — not only my own centuries but fragments of the thousands before me, the long chain of the MacLeod wyrms reaching back past the point where the names dissolve into the general dark of ancient time. For a wyrm the remembering is a choice. A thing done on purpose, reaching back along the line to hold what came before.

I am doing it now, across the fire, while Hemlocke holds my daughter.

She went down an hour ago, all at once, one small fist knotted in his collar, and he hasn't moved since. A tender thing settles into a particular stillness when it trusts the hands holding it, and Hemlocke has spent his life learning not to break that. So he sits with the warm weight of her, and I sit with the line, and neither of us disturbs the other.

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.

Xero rides on my shoulder through all of it, blood-red eyes tracking the mountain, saying nothing. She knows what today is. She has known for days — the rest of us worked the shift out from intelligence, and she came to it from something older. She doesn't leave my shoulder all morning.

✦ ✦ ✦

The nest gathers for the morning meal, and I do with them what I did with the household. Look at all of it at once. Feel the size of it.

Corvus has made the meal. He does this on the mornings that matter, feeds the people he loves and says nothing about why, and this morning there's more of it than usual and it's better than it needs to be, which is Corvus's entire language for I know what today is. There's bread, and the eggs done the way Keir likes them rather than the way anyone else does, and a pot of the mountain tea that only comes out for days he has decided are worth marking. He doesn't look at me while he sets it down. He doesn't have to. I learned a long time ago to read what he says by making instead of speaking, and what he is saying this morning, in bread and eggs and tea, is I see the size of this, and I am feeding you before it starts.

"You made the good tea," I say.

"It's a good morning," he says, which is both true and the other thing, and we leave it there, because that is how it works between us.

Hemlocke is beside me. Somewhere in the middle of the meal his hand settles on my knee under the table — not a grab, not a suggestion, a warm resting place. It carries the weight of a hand that has spent the year tending everything at Blackhaven that needed tending and never once asked for thanks. He doesn't say anything either. Hemlocke's care has never needed words, and this morning it comes through his palm: I'm here, I'll be here, whatever the day is. I put my hand over his, and his fingers turn and lace through mine, and neither of us looks at the other, and both of us know.

Keir is across from me, home from the western tracking for this one morning because he asked to be. He's sitting the way he always sits, one foot tucked under him, leaning into the table, occupying his whole body at once like a greyhound. He's telling Nova about an idiot mountain goat he swears he met on the western ridge, and Nova receives the story with total seriousness, and Keir is doing the thing he does where he makes a small one laugh purely for the pleasure of the sound. But when he catches my eye across the table the lightness goes out of him for half a second. Not gone. Set down. What's underneath is the stillness he only reaches when something real is happening, and he gives me the smallest nod. It means I know, and I came home for this, and I'll be at your wing when it starts.

Then the goat story resumes.

Solaris sits at the far end with Nova on his lap, breaking a piece of honey bread into portions she is perfectly capable of managing herself. She permits it because, in the particular logic of a two-year-old, being helped by Solaris is a thing she enjoys. Twelve hundred years of him, released three years ago from a thousand-year dark, and he spends this morning cutting honey bread into pieces a small hand can hold. When he looks up the length of the table at me, it's with the expression that isn't quite pride and isn't quite grief, the one the ancient ones get watching a young thing carry a weight it was made for. He, of anyone here, knows what a last ordinary morning is worth. He spent a thousand years without a single one. He doesn't say that. He holds my eyes a moment, inclines his head, and goes back to the bread.

Finlay is in the seat that became his after the north, back these six months, the gray stone that nobody asks about somewhere in his rooms. He came home from Aldric carrying something he hasn't set down, and I haven't asked him to, because nine centuries has taught him how to hold a thing and I trust him to hold this one. He's quieter than he was before the north — a different quiet, weightier — but this morning there's something eased in him too, watching the table. He catches me watching him watch it, and he knows I've seen it, and he gives me a brief shadow of the nod he gave me at the back of the room after the Royal Protocol final. Whatever the north cost him, this is what it was in service of. He knows it. So do I.

And Nova is in the middle of all of it, the one person at this table who doesn't know what today is, which is the entire point. She eats her honey bread and interrogates Keir's goat and informs Solaris, gravely, that she can do the bread herself and also that she would like him to keep doing it. She doesn't know that five adults are arranging themselves quietly around her this morning like a windbreak around a clutch.

That's the work. That is what all of it is for — that she gets to be two at this table, on this morning, with no weather in her sky at all.

Five mates. A daughter. A tressym on my shoulder. A household of families I drew boundary lines around and made safe. This is what the war is for. Not the throne; the throne is the instrument, not the point. This. The table, the honey bread, the good tea, the goat story, the small hand that wants help and doesn't need it. The people who came through a year of everything and are here, warm, in the last ordinary morning before what's coming arrives.

I don't make a speech. That isn't what this is, they wouldn't want it, and I don't have one in me that wouldn't cheapen the thing by naming it. I've said all of it already, in the way this nest says things — in a hand under the table and a nod across it, in the good tea and the set-down lightness and the inclined head. We have had the whole conversation without speaking a word of it.

That's what a year of this has made us. That's the thing itself.

I hold the picture. I make it accurate — not sentimental, accurate, every one of them exactly as they are — so that I carry the true thing into what's coming and not a softened version of it.

Then I let them go back to their morning, and I go back to watching them have it.

✦ ✦ ✦

The letter comes at the ninth hour.

Keir's pack relays it through the western channel, the fastest route, which tells me what it is before I open it. Nothing that could travel slower would come that way.

I take it in the war room, standing, the way I take the things that change the shape of everything.

Magnus has moved.

Not the primary incursion; that's still weeks out, on the timeline Finlay's intelligence set. This is the opening. The first units crossing into the western lower passes, the advance elements of the force that will drive for the approach to Sovereign. It begins the way these things begin — not with the whole of it but with the first piece, the piece that turns six months of preparation from a plan into a war.

I read it twice. I fold it. I put it in the pocket that closes.

Then I stand in the war room a moment, alone, in the quiet before I call the council and the last ordinary morning ends for good.

What comes next is enormous. It will take everything I have and more, and I have spent this year and the three before it and the whole of my life becoming ready for it.

I am ready for it.

I am also, for one more moment, standing in the quiet, holding the picture of the table and the honey bread and the hatchlings on the windbreak in the early light. The accurate picture. The true one. The whole of what I am about to fight for.

Then I let the moment close. I open the war room door.

"Convene the council," I say.

It begins.

Chapter 49

Solaris

Six months after the letter, the war comes to the western passes.

I hold the western ridge. This is my position because Raven assigned it to me, and she assigned it to me because it is the position that most needs a great wyrm, and because she trusts me to hold it without needing to watch me do it.

The western ridge is the high ground above the lower passes — the route Finlay's intelligence marked as Magnus's primary line, the fastest approach to Sovereign, the one he chose precisely because he believed we would defend the eastern pass instead. We are not defending the eastern pass. We are here, above the route he actually took, because a year ago Finlay flew north and came back with the truth of where he would come.

From the ridge I can see the whole of it. Magnus's forces fill the lower passes: three regiments of fire drake infantry, two mounted units out of the western territories, the supply train behind them, the whole assembled weight of a build-up that ran beneath our picture for months before we understood the timeline.

It is a large force. Seen from the ridge in the gray light before the fighting starts, it is larger than the numbers on the war room maps ever made it feel. Numbers are one thing. A valley full of the enemy is another.

I have been alive twelve hundred years, and I spent a thousand of them in Amadeus's binding, and I have seen a great many things. I have rarely seen a war begin. It is a quiet thing at the start, quieter than anyone who has not stood in it would believe. The two forces face each other across the ground they are about to fight over, and for a long moment there is only the wind off the passes, the gray light thinning toward dawn, and the held breath of thousands of creatures who all know what the next hour holds.

I can smell them from the ridge. Fire drakes run hot, and the massed heat of three regiments carries up the passes on the cold morning air, that dry metallic scent of a great deal of banked fire waiting to be let out. Below it, the ordinary smells of any army before any battle: leather and iron and cold rock and the sourness of fear held in check.

They are afraid down there. So are the creatures on my side of the line. Fear is the honest response to what a battlefield is, and I have lived long enough to distrust anyone who claims not to feel it. What matters isn't the absence of fear. It is what you do while it sits in your chest.

Then it begins.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first hour is the shape we planned for.

Magnus drives for the lower passes, as we knew he would, because they are his fastest line and he does not yet understand that we let him have the route so we could hold the ground above it. His infantry comes hard and disciplined. Fire drakes are good soldiers, whatever else is true of the faction that fields them, and they come up the passes in good order under competent command.

They come up into the combined answer we spent six months building.

Therun's forces hold the western shoulder — the gold dragon himself and six metallics of the Southern Isle, the first of his pledge to stand in a real line, dropping onto the flank of Magnus's advance from the high rock with the fury of creatures who have been waiting months for the order. Keir's pack works the passes themselves, the blink hounds there and gone, carrying the reports that let Raven see the whole field almost as it happens, cutting the supply train's coordination to pieces without ever holding still long enough to be answered. The eastern flights hold the northern line — the coastal elder's people, the reef flight, the northern island community. Three flights who came to us out of eighteen months of fear and isolation, standing now in the line of a war, fighting for the alliance that took them in.

And I hold the ridge.

When Magnus commits his reserve to the lower passes — the moment the plan turned on, the moment we built the whole shape to produce — I come down off the high ground.

A great wyrm in a battle is not a subtle thing, and it is not a thing you send down into a crowded pass. I know what I am, and I have twelve hundred years of knowing how to use it, and the use of it is the high ground. So I don't go down among them. There is no space for what I am in that pass, and no need for it either, because the crowding is the whole point. They have packed the lower passes wall to wall, regiment behind regiment, which is how you move a large force fast.

It is also how you make it a single target.

I bank off the western ridge and bring the fire down the length of the pass.

Not a burst. A great wyrm's fire is not a burst but a poured thing, sustained, and I pour it along the massed column from above, where nothing they carry can answer it. Fire drakes run hot, but they take fire poorly all the same when it comes in that volume, in that narrow ground, with the walls holding the heat in. The pass becomes a furnace of my making.

I take no joy in it. The creatures I end were soldiers following orders, and I hold that truth and what I am doing to them in the same breath, because an old thing that cannot hold both has no business on a ridge. But the flank of Magnus's reserve is exactly where a great wyrm is meant to break a war, and the shape of the battle bends around the fire the way it was designed to.

The reserve breaks. Not quickly, and not without cost; the fire drakes are disciplined even breaking, and they make us pay for the passes. But it breaks, and when the reserve breaks the whole forward push loses the weight behind it, and Magnus's drive stalls in ground he thought he had already taken.

The first phase is ours. I feel it turn — the moment a battle stops being a question and starts being an answer, which you feel in the field before you could put a name to it, the way the pressure shifts.

And it is in that moment, with the reserve breaking and the passes holding and six months of preparation resolving into the thing it was built to be, that she takes the field.

✦ ✦ ✦

She comes from the east, out of the high sun, which is a choice.

I know it is a choice because I know her, and because nothing she does on a battlefield is anything but a choice.

She held herself back through the first phase. Not from caution. The dominant dragoness entering the field is a thing you spend once, at the moment it does the most, and the moment it does the most is now — with the reserve breaking, Magnus's line already bending, and his forces beginning to understand that they came the wrong way into the wrong ground.

She comes out of the sun so they see her late.

And when they see her, they see the skull dragon. The bone-white face on the matte black. The coloring that appears in no flight's records anywhere, because it has never existed before her. The size of her, which is not great-wyrm size but is larger every season, the wyrm in her still doing what it has been doing since the submission at the end of her second year.

She comes down out of the high sun into the center of Magnus's faltering line, and the sapphire of her eyes catches the light, and the thing that lands on that battlefield is not the woman who cut Nova's honey bread this morning and held the whole nest in a single look before the letter came.

It is the heir apparent who ran the Purge and walked out.

She hits the center of the line, and the line doesn't bend around her the way it bent around me.

It breaks.

A great wyrm is weight and force, and weight and force can be planned for. What she is cannot. She is acid and shadow and the stone gaze and the four seconds it took her to kill a green dragon, and three years of Shadowcarve, and underneath all of it the thing no drill produces: the will of a creature who decided a long time ago exactly what she is and has never once since been talked out of it.

Magnus's soldiers came expecting a war. They did not come expecting her. There is a difference, and she is the difference, and the center of the line comes apart where she touches it.

She does not fight the way I fight. I am old, and I fight the way old things fight, with economy and patience and the long view. She fights the way she does everything — completely, precisely, the whole of her attention on the exact thing in front of her while the whole of the field stays mapped at the edges, so that she is never only where she is.

She turns the collapse of the center into the collapse of the flank. She reads Magnus's field commander deciding to fall back before he has finished deciding it, and she is already at the ground he means to fall back to. She wastes no motion. She does not spend a life she does not have to spend; I watch her let a whole broken unit flee that a lesser commander would have finished, because finishing them costs her forces and gains her nothing but bodies, and Raven has never once confused bodies with victory.

I hold the ridge, and my part of the field, and I watch the dragoness take Magnus's war apart in the western passes.

I am twelve hundred years old. I have seen a great many things.

I have not seen this before.

✦ ✦ ✦

By the fourth hour it is over, as over as a first battle ever is. The field is ours. Magnus's forces are in retreat up the passes they came down, the opening he drove for is closed, and the cost of it will be counted for weeks and will be real.

We hold the western passes.

The simultaneous strike went in on Cassius's mark, in the same window, while Magnus's attention and ours were fixed on the fighting. The host network cut. The eggs hit. A year of building landing while the enemy watched the war and not the thing underneath it.

I don't have the full report yet. I know only what came through the bond and the relays: that it went in, that it landed, that what we did in the western passes today was the visible half of a blow whose other half struck somewhere Magnus never thought to guard. Whether it ended Amadeus, I don't yet know.

That report will come.

What I know, standing on the western ridge in the late light with the field held below me and the passes ours, is this. The war has begun, and the first thing it learned about the Marzana heir is that she came the way she comes to everything — ready, precise, entirely herself — and took its opening apart in an afternoon.

She lands beside me on the ridge as the light fades. She shifts, and the skull dragon folds back into the woman, and the thing the enemy reckoned with all afternoon becomes, again, the person I love. There is blood on her that isn't hers. The scar shows above her collar. She is breathing hard, her eyes still bright with the field, and she is looking down at the passes where the last of Magnus's forces are climbing back the way they came.

"Report from Cassius?" she asks.

"Not yet."

She nods and doesn't push. She has learned patience this year, and she will wait for the report that changes everything as long as it takes to come.

"You held the ridge," she says.

"You took the field," I say.

She looks at me. Something passes between us that is twelve hundred years of me and twenty-three of her and three years of the bond that pulled me out of the dark and put me on this ridge beside her on the first day of the war.

Neither of us says anything for a while.

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.

But forty-one isn't all of them. Somewhere between six and twenty-two eggs were never on the map, because the map was never complete, because Cassius had eleven years and the net was still larger and better hidden than eleven years could fully chart.

It worked. It didn't finish him.

The report is precise about what that means, and I make myself read the precise version rather than the one I want. Amadeus's net took terrible damage but wasn't fully cut. What he became, spread across the eggs and held up by the net, has lost the great majority of what held it, but not the whole. What he is now is a remnant. The host network gone, forty-one eggs gone, what he can reach for cut down to a sliver of what it was.

But he isn't ended. He is scattered and wounded and diminished, and somewhere in the six to twenty-two eggs we couldn't find, he persists.

And the eggs we couldn't find are the ones that will define the years to come. An egg you have mapped is a target. An egg you haven't is a seed. The six to twenty-two we missed aren't merely what's left of him. They are the whole of what he can become again, and every one of them is somewhere we don't know, because the not-knowing is precisely why they survived.

Cassius understands this better than anyone alive, and he doesn't pretend otherwise. He says it plainly in the last line, because Cassius doesn't soften reports either: what remains of the net will attempt to rebuild, from a much weaker position, over a much longer timeline than the first build took. Years, not months.

But it will try. The map we spend those years drawing is the map that ends him — or the map that comes up short a second time, at a worse moment, with no war going on to hide the strike inside.

I set the report down.

Not ended. Wounded.

✦ ✦ ✦

I convene the small council at the third hour and give them the correct version. Solaris, Corvus, and Finlay in the room. Keir on the relay from the western line. Balor and Mina from Sovereign. Klauth on the long channel.

I don't dress it up and I don't dress it down. The battle was ours, and the cost was real and will be counted for weeks. The strike was the best-coordinated blow anyone has landed on Amadeus in a thousand years, and it did not finish him. He is wounded and scattered and cut down to a remnant of what he was, and he'll spend years rebuilding from a much weaker position, and we'll spend those years making certain he doesn't get to.

"So it's not over," Mina says. Not a complaint. A commander confirming where things stand.

"The battle is over. Magnus is thrown back from the passes and will need months to reform for another attempt, if he attempts it at all now that his hidden partner is gutted. The war with Magnus has turned in our favor on its first day." I let that stand a moment, because it's true and they earned it. "Amadeus is not over. He is hurt worse than anyone has ever hurt him, and he is still there, and now he knows we can find him. Which means the next phase is him hiding better and us hunting harder."

"Years," Finlay says. Not a question. He has nine centuries behind him; he knows what a hunt that long looks like.

"Years," I agree. "We built for a war and we got the first battle of it. The rest is the rest of my reign."

Nobody flinches from that. This is the council that came through a year of everything to stand on the far side of the first battle, and not one of them expected the enemy under the war to fall in an afternoon. They wanted it. They didn't expect it. There is a difference, and this council knows it.

Balor speaks from Sovereign, in the flat tone he uses for things that are simply true.

"Forty-one at once is not a partial strike. It's the largest coordinated action against a distributed binding in recorded history, and your people executed it cleanly while fighting a battle. Whatever comes next, the record will say that. Make sure your commanders hear it said, because they'll spend the coming years being told the job isn't finished, and a force that only ever hears what it hasn't done stops being able to do the next thing."

It is, for Balor, a great deal of words, which is how I know he means them. I file it the way I file everything Balor says — once, and exactly — and I decide to say it to the western line before the day is out.

Klauth speaks last, from the long channel, in the voice of a man who held a throne for two hundred years and then took it up again.

"You held the passes, cut his net down to a fraction, and turned Magnus in a day. That is not a partial anything. That's a victory that happens to also be a beginning. Learn to hold both, or the beginning will eat the victory."

"I know," I say.

"I know you know," he says. "I'm telling you anyway, because I wish someone had told me."

The council closes.

✦ ✦ ✦

Afterward I stand in the war room alone a moment, with the maps and the report and the count of our dead.

We won the first battle of the war, and the cost was real, and some of Therun's people won't fly home. We hit Amadeus harder than anyone ever has, and we didn't end him, and he is out there scattered, already beginning to rebuild.

Victory and beginning. Triumph and cost. I don't resolve them into one feeling, because they don't resolve, and a commander who forces them to resolve has stopped seeing clearly. I hold them both, the way I have learned to hold two true things that pull against each other.

Then I do the thing I decided on the ridge yesterday, the thing I promised myself I would do this morning if I lived to do it.

I go to find Nova.

She's on the flight platform with Solaris in the early light, waiting, because it's morning and the morning circuit is hers, and nobody has told her that yesterday was anything other than a day her mother was away.

That's the work. That is what the passes were held for and the dead were spent for and the entire year was built toward — that she gets to stand on the platform in the morning light and want to fly, with no weather in her sky at all.

"Circuit?" she says, with the gravity of a two-year-old proposing the most important thing in the world.

"Circuit," I say.

We fly it together. The same path, the same stones, the same mountain light. She pulls ahead on the downhills, and I don't slow for her, because she doesn't need me to anymore.

Below us the field hospital is working. The dead are still under cover at the north end, waiting for their rites. The report sits in my pocket and weighs exactly what it weighs. None of that is made smaller by the morning.

And also this. The circuit. My daughter flying ahead of me into the light because she was made to.

Both things are true. I fly the circuit with Nova and I carry both, and the second day of the war begins the way I mean to fight the whole of it — with the cost seen clearly and the reason for paying it flying ahead of me in the morning sun.

Chapter 51

Raven

Late that night, I stand at the window with Nova asleep against my chest.

It's the window in the Blackhaven main room, the one that looks east toward the peaks and the long dark fall of the mountain below them. I have stood here a thousand late nights across three years — after the Purge, after the Gathering, after the war councils, after the days that asked more than I had and got it anyway. It has become the place I go when the day is done and the thinking isn't. Everyone has a fixed point they return to. This is mine.

Tonight I stand at it with my daughter asleep in my arms, and I let the whole of the day come and stand with me.

The passes held. The dead are counted and their names are true. Amadeus is hurt worse than anyone has ever hurt him and is still not ended, and somewhere in the eggs we couldn't find he has already started over, in whatever way a scattered thing starts. Magnus is thrown back from the western passes and will need months to reform, if he reforms at all now that the partner he never understood he had is gutted. Everything we've gathered says the next move is his to make, and he is in no condition to make it soon.

The first day of the war is ours. The cost of it is real. Neither cancels the other.

Both things are true.

I have said that to myself, and to other people, more times this year than in the whole of my life before it. It has become the shape of how I think — the refusal to collapse two true things into one comfortable one, the discipline of holding the victory and the cost in the same hand without letting either lie about the other. I didn't have that discipline when I started at the academy three years ago. I have it now. The Purge gave me the first version of it and the war gave me the finished one, and it is, I think, the most important thing either of them taught me.

Nova shifts against my chest and settles, one small fist at my collarbone, and doesn't wake.

✦ ✦ ✦

I think about the years ahead, because standing here I can, for once, without a council waiting on the answer.

The hunt for Amadeus will be years long. Cassius said so, and Cassius is right. What remains of the net will try to rebuild from a much weaker position over a much longer timeline, and we'll spend those years mapping what we missed and closing on the eggs we couldn't find. It will be slow and patient and unglamorous and nothing like the single clean afternoon everyone secretly wanted. I have made my peace with that. A year ago the length of it would have felt like failure. Now it feels like the work — the actual shape of the thing, which was always going to be a hunt and not a duel, and which I would rather see clearly than wish were shorter.

The war with Magnus is its own thread, tangled with the first and not the same as it. He's thrown back, not beaten. He'll reform or he won't, and either way the western line holds and Therun's people hold the shoulder and Keir's pack holds the passes and the eastern flights hold the north, and Blackhaven holds all of it.

Because that is what Blackhaven is now. Not a household, not a nest with a mountain around it. The center that a continent's worth of frightened flights stands behind.

I have been at this for years in one form or another, since before I understood that was what I was doing. What I understand tonight, at the window, with the day behind me and my daughter asleep in my arms, is that I have found the way of carrying it that I can sustain. Not the way that runs hot and burns out. Not the way that holds everything at arm's length until the holding cracks. The other one — the one that sees the cost clearly and pays it deliberately and goes to fly the circuit in the morning, because the ordinary isn't a distraction from the work but the reason for it.

That's the thing I didn't know three years ago and know now. You don't carry a war by becoming nothing but the war. You carry it by keeping the thing the war is for close enough to touch, close enough that you never once forget — in a council room, on a ridge, at a window at midnight — what the fighting buys.

It buys this.

✦ ✦ ✦

I look down at Nova.

Two years old. Obsidian and burnt orange, the mismatched eyes closed now, the faint scale already showing on the backs of her small hands. Asleep with the completeness she does everything with, gone all the way under, trusting the arms that hold her without the smallest doubt that they'll keep holding. She flew the full circuit this morning and pulled ahead on the downhills and didn't know that yesterday was anything but a day I was away.

That was the work. That is still the work. That she gets to be two, at this window, in these arms, with no weather in her sky at all.

She's the answer to the question the whole of this year kept asking me.

The question is what the Purge made me, and the war made me, and the throne is making me. What kind of ruler comes out the far side of seventy-two hours and a green dragon and an east wall and a field of the covered dead. There's a version of that answer that frightens me, and I have felt it near this year, on the ridge and in the passes — the version where the weapon is all that's left, where you get so good at the cost that you forget the reason, where you become the thing the enemy reckons with and nothing else besides.

That isn't the answer. I know it isn't, because I am standing at a window at midnight holding my sleeping daughter instead of studying a map, and the holding isn't a break from who I am.

It is who I am.

Not a weapon that also loves.

A person who loves and can be a weapon when love requires it.

That's the difference, and it is the whole difference, and I have spent three years learning it, and I finally have it in my hands where I can see it. The acid and the shadow and the stone gaze and the four seconds it takes me to end a green dragon are all real, and I'll use every one of them, for years, for as long as the hunt takes and the war lasts and the throne asks. But they are what I do. They aren't what I am.

What I am is standing at this window.

✦ ✦ ✦

On the sill in front of me, small and dark against the glass, is a piece of blue-green sea glass.

Corvus left it here weeks ago, the way he leaves things — without comment, in a place I'd find it. Not the first piece; that one lives in the inner drawer of my desk with the letters. This is the one that ended up at the window instead of in the drawer with the others, and I don't know whether he set it on the sill on purpose or whether it migrated here the way small, loved things do. It doesn't matter. It's here, where I stand a thousand late nights, catching what little light there is.

I pick it up. It's cool and smooth, worn soft by a sea I have never seen, the particular gentleness the water spends years putting into a thing. Corvus walked a shoreline and saw it and thought of me and carried it home and left it where I'd find it. It has sat on this sill through the Purge and the Gathering and the war's first day, and it is still here, and so am I.

I hold the sea glass in one hand and my daughter in the other arm, and I look east toward the peaks where the war is, and the dark below them where the mountain falls away and the whole sleeping weight of Blackhaven holds.

This. All of it. The whole of what I'm fighting for — asleep against my chest, cool and smooth in my hand, dark and vast outside the glass.

The war is years long. Amadeus is wounded and not ended. Magnus is thrown back and not beaten. The hunt is slow, the cost is real, and the throne will ask everything I have and more, for the whole of a reign that is only just beginning.

I am not afraid of it.

I have the discipline to hold the victory and the cost in the same hand. I have the way of carrying it that lasts. I have five mates and a daughter and a household of families I made safe and a mountain that holds all of it. I have the sea glass and the window and the morning circuit and the true weight of the dead and the accurate picture of everything I am fighting for.

I have the answer to the question.

A person who loves and can be a weapon when love requires it.

I set the sea glass back on the sill. I carry Nova to her nest and lay her down, and she settles without waking, trusting the arms even as they leave her, which is its own kind of answer.

Then I stand a moment longer in the dark of the main room, with the mountain outside and the nest asleep around me and the war waiting in the morning.

I'm ready.

I go to bed.

Tomorrow, the circuit. Then the rest of it.

Up next the conclusion of the series: Raven’s Peace

Also By Serenity Rayne

2026 releases:

Greyson Academy:

The Secrets We Keep - Greyson Academy

The Lies We Tell - Greyson Academy

The Truths We Hold

Dragonis Academy Gen 2:

Raven’s Song - Dragonis Academy

Ravens Journey - Dragonis Academy

Contemporary

Stolen - The Nightshade Chronicles

Dragonis Academy:

Trials of the Cursed Eggs

Guardian of the Cursed Egg

Klauth

Progeny of the Cursed Egg

Thauglor

Queen of the Cursed Egg

Solstice

Shifters:

Claimed by the Alpha Pack

Embraced By the Alpha Pack

Coveted by the Alpha Pack

Finding Forever with the Alpha Pack

Children of the Moon: New Moon Rising

Children of the Moon - Waxing Crescent

Children of the Moon - Full Moon

Her Elemental Mates

The Aurora Marelup Saga

Ascend

Hunt

Fight

Attack

Welcome Home

The Aurora Marelup Omnibus 5 year special edition

The Aurora Marelup Holiday Edition

Hybrid Royals Series

Princess Lost

Destiny Found

Hybrid Royals : World at War

The Dark Angel Chronicles:

Discovered

Innate

Balance

Destroyer

Daughters of the Destroyer - Nikita

Stand alones:

Heart Shaped Box

Blood Moon Pack

Once Upon the a Raven

Glossary

Glossary of species of the Aurelian Isles:

Green Dragon: Green dragons were most notable for the large, waving crest or fin that started at the dragon's nose and ran the entire length of the dragon's body. They also had exceptionally long, slender forked tongues. Green dragons' scales did not fully harden, granting them greater flexibility than other chromatic dragons. They also had particularly long legs and elongated necks. Green Dragons are known for being poison masters and assassins. Most famous nest is Risedale where the Shadowblades are trained by Abaddon Bladesong, head of the Shadowblades. Breath Weapon: Acid

Red Dragon: They were supremely confident of their own abilities and were prone to making snap decisions without any forethought. The largest and most powerful of the chromatic dragons. Red dragons were physically distinguished by their enormous size and wingspan, which was the widest of all dragons, both in absolute size and relative to body length. Most Famous nest was the Marzana nest where King Klauth Ragnar reigned from until his capture. Breath Weapon: Fire

Black Dragon: Black dragons appeared abnormally slender in comparison to other chromatic dragons—wiry, but not gaunt. Physically, they were most distinguished by their horns, which protruded from the sides of their heads and wrapped around, projecting forward. A large frill adorned the upper part of the neck. Most Famous nest was Blackhaven where Thauglor Mithrun lived until his capture. Breath Weapon: Acid

Blue Dragon: Also known as storm dragons, were a breed of chromatic true dragon. Their breath weapon was a line of lightning or a large electrical discharge. Blue dragons were physically distinguished by the single large horn protruding from their heads and by their ears, which were rather large and frilled. Semi-hard scales. The neck was short and broad. The tail was thick and flat. No Famous Nests associated with this species. Breath Weapon: Lightning.

Bronze Dragon: While most of its body was a reflective bronze color, the wings were often tipped with green. The dragon had four large horns on each side of their heads, three protruding from each cheek and one from the top of their head, pointing back towards the tail. A large frill ran down the upper part of its neck. Breath Weapon: Cone of repulsion energy

Iron Dragon: were intelligent and deadly dragons. They were the most powerful of the ferrous dragons. They had broad, almost shovel-shaped heads with multiple thick, backwards-pointing horns, and large plates that resembled shark fins ran down their spine. They possessed the hardest scales of any dragon to exist. Breath Weapon: a cloud of sleep gas, and cone of lightning.

Fairie Dragon: Faerie dragons were extremely small in comparison to their large metallic or chromatic dragon cousins—about the size of a cat. Each had an iridescent coat of scales that reflected all colors of the rainbow, predominantly reflecting one particular color which changed with age. They had a long, prehensile tail and platinum-colored, butterfly-like wings. Breath Weapon: Unknown

Gem Dragon: were friendly, curious dragons. They enjoyed conversing with other creatures but sometimes came into conflict with other dragons due to shared preferences in habitats. They were the smallest of the gem dragons and had translucent, crystalline scales. Breath Weapon:  a blinding cone of white light.

Phoenix: Are enormous birds with brightly colored feathers ranging from orange to red and violet, and blue-violet beaks and claws. Their talons had the consistency of diamonds. Their eyes were a glowing ruby color.  A phoenix's body was naturally bright and shed its own light. Phoenix bodies were almost immaterial, composed of flame taking solid shape.

Greater Basilisk:  A phenomenally lethal creature, direct eye contact with a Basilisk would result in instantaneous death, but an indirect look would merely render the victim Petrified. Highly venomous.  True serpent basilisk with six eyes and can grow to be over 40ft long. Scales are harder than most armor, only a titanium dragon’s talons can cut the hide.

Lesser Basilisk: Similar to a greater Basilisk but can only get to be about twenty foot long and softer scales. Can only petrify its victims. No venom to speak of.

Green Hag: Like all hags, the strength behind a green hag's frail physique was not to be underestimated, for not only were they resistant to magic but their calloused flesh made them resistant to physical attacks and their hardiness extended to their flesh-rending claws. A green hag's touch could sap strength with even the slightest brush.

Manticore: were true monsters. They were giant beasts with the bodies of lions, the wings of a dragon, the head of a man, and a tail that ended in a mass of deadly spikes. The coloration of these various body parts was similar to that of their base creature. The mouth of a manticore was full of rows and rows of razor-sharp teeth, similar to that of a great white shark. It used these teeth to feed upon any creature the manticore could catch, be it animal or human. Tail holds a paralytic venom.

Gargoyle: appeared to be winged statues of demon-like humanoids. These creatures could stand motionless for long periods of time, which added to the façade of their statue-like appearance. Nearly indestructible, able to roam about in the daytime with a daylight charm. Without the charm they are forced to become nocturnal.

Nightmare: their warhorse-like exterior was revealed to be entirely superficial. They had huge heads, fangs like vipers, and malevolent dark eyes often illuminated by red-hot flames, and they sprouted orange fire when their nostrils flared. Wreathed in fire, their manes were wild and their tails unkempt. The titular power of nightmares was their ability to appear in dreams or cause nightmares.

Black Unicorn: have coal-black scaled armor and silky manes. Their eyes could be glossy black,,or burning magenta. Their distinctive spiraled horns were long and chased with silver. Unlike normal unicorns, they have the sharp teeth of a carnivore.

Gryphon: A griffon had the body of a lion with the head and wings of an eagle. The forelimbs of the gryphon were often like those of an eagle, ending in sharp talons, but this was not always the case. Just as lions and eagles had varying physical characteristics based on where in the world they are found.

Fire Drake: Fire drakes resembled lithe, 12-foot-long dragons with fiery yellow eyes and scales that ranged in color from blood red to bright vermilion.

Ambush Drake: These creatures had elongated jaws and muscular builds, though their wings were quite stunted for their size. These wings were only used, when necessary, the ambush drake instead preferring to get around on its four legs.

Sphynx: a race of intelligent, immortal magical beasts. It was said that they once held a vast kingdom given to them by the gods in an effort to teach mortals the way of truth. The sphinxes had their own methods, however, by teaching mortals to think for themselves with riddles and parables.

Gorgon: Greater medusae were quite rare, being born at only one in ten births. Like their more common kin, they had heads of living snakes and bodies covered in fine scales, but instead of a woman's lower body, they had snake tails.

Displacer Beast: are large cat-like creatures, sometimes described as panther- or puma-like with six legs and a pair of tentacles 5 feet long sprouting from their shoulders. The tentacles ended in pads with sharp horny edges, brownish yellow in color. They were covered in a pelt of blue-black fur. Displacer beasts were generally strong creatures, and their tentacle barbs were hard enough to punch through pure steel armor. Able to phase over long distances in an extremely short period of time.

Blink Hound: was a mysterious, intelligent canine creature. Most blink dogs have yellow-brown fur and large ears with sharp spines down their backs to their tails. They were well known for their ability to blink—a supernatural teleportation ability.

Watch Spiders: breed of huge spiders that were raised and trained to obey a master. Watch spiders were fast, both when running and climbing webs or walls. They could leap up to 30 feet. A single strand of their silk was strong enough to support their weight plus one additional medium-sized creature. If allowed to spin a web, they could know the location of any creature that touched their web. Some were bred to have a paralyzing venom, the paralytic effect had an onset time of one to two minutes and then full-body paralysis set in for twenty minutes to over an hour. The victim could see and hear, but not move or speak and would eventually die.

Asperii: also known as wind steeds, were magical horses that possessed keen minds and telepathic powers and the ability to fly. Asperii appeared as normal horses, averaging around 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall. They had hides that were dun, gray, or white and long manes that were most often light gray, silver, or white. Asperii were sentient creatures, being more intelligent than most humans. They were usually very gentle, except when it came to their enemies.

Terms and Items mentioned:

Nest: A central gathering consisting of a female and however many males she has taken as mates.

Flight: Only found with dragons. It’s where other nests join the nesting area of a dominant dragoness for protection.

Den: Living space of solitary male dragons or some fur bearing creatures.

Pride: Usually found with Displacer Beasts.

Pack: Group of canines usually worg, blink dogs/ hounds and wolves

Herd: Found with horse-like creatures or those of cloven hoof.

Clutch: A group of eggs or a gathering of gargoyles

The Accords: Rules for dragon kind were amended as time went on.

Right of Inheritance: When an elder of an area or their descendant/ comes to reclaim what is rightfully theirs by blood rite.

Right of Succession: When the strength of an elder / parent is questioned the most powerful progeny of the drake may challenge or hunt their sire. It further says that they may name another to find or hunt down their target.

Cursed Eggs: Dragons bound by mages in eggs until certain criteria are met.

Blood Rite: Genetic succession. Inheritance proven by blood line.

Dominium: The head of the household (pater familias) had authority and could defend family/property as an extension of self.