Page 110 of Raven’s Fight

"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.