Page 21 of Raven’s Fight

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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.