Page 142 of Raven’s Fight

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.