Page 113 of Raven’s Fight

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: