Page 118 of Raven’s Fight

"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."