Page 122 of Raven’s Fight

✦ ✦ ✦

She shifts in the dining hall at the mid-morning break, which is not the plan.

The plan was to walk her through the Shadowcarve grounds and show her the outdoor spaces before the main population had time to gather. Nova had other ideas. At two years old she holds strong opinions about plans she wasn't consulted on, and she has decided, with the absolute certainty of someone who knows exactly what she wants, that she'd like to see where Mama eats.

The hall holds about sixty students at that moment, none of whom expected a skull dragon's daughter to come through the door. She doesn't go all the way — just the controlled shimmer she uses when she wants to make a point. Wings out to their current full span. Scale showing, obsidian and burnt orange. The mismatched eyes, amber and half-sapphire, taking the light a little differently than anything else in the room.

She is remarkable, and she fills the space at once and completely.

The dining hall goes quiet. Sixty students, three instructors, and one administrator, every last one of them holding an opinion, and not one of them says a word. Nova looks back at them. Her gaze travels the room slowly, the way it does anywhere she hasn't been before, deciding what she thinks of it.

Then she looks at me, and I give her the nod.

She makes the flight voice at full volume.

The hall erupts — not in alarm, in the warm noise sixty people make when something extraordinary walks in and they answer it the way people answer extraordinary things. Someone starts applauding and it spreads. Nova's face does the thing it does when she has worked out the right response to a situation and is watching it land. She makes the flight voice again, and the applause gets louder. She looks at Solaris, who has the composure of a man who has been watching her since before she could walk and accepted long ago that this is simply who she is. She looks at me. She looks back at the room.

Then she shifts, tucks her wings, and informs the nearest student — a third-year whose name I know and won't put in this account — that the dining hall is acceptable. He receives the information with complete seriousness.

I am not apologizing for any of it.

✦ ✦ ✦

The afternoon involves explaining Nova to five professors. Not apologizing. Explaining. There's a difference, and I hold it.

The difference is this. I am heir apparent to the Marzana throne, currently in my third year at this institution, and Nova is my daughter and Solaris MacLeod's, next in the Mrithun line. She will be a fixture here for as long as I am, because that is simply how it works. The professors who need to understand that will. The ones who don't will learn.

Callan is first, because he has more equanimity than any instructor I've met in three years, and because if anyone is going to have a useful opinion about a hatchling on the grounds during term it's him. He was one of my more fun nest fathers growing up. He takes it in with the attention he brings to a Tactics scenario, thinks, and says, "She's going to need a schedule that doesn't run into the main student traffic."

"I know. I can work up some options."

"I'd appreciate that." He nods and produces a notepad.

This is why I came to him first.

The other four range from delighted to professionally uneasy. I give each of them the same thing: this is my daughter, she'll be visiting from time to time, she is two years old and will move when she feels like moving, and I intend to welcome her rather than try to control her. If there are arrangements that make her visits work better, I'm glad to discuss them.

Three of the four respond constructively. The fourth has a great deal of concern about the precedent this sets. I listen to all of it, and I say, "I appreciate you raising this."

I do not change my position.

Nova walks alongside Solaris through all of it with the focused attention she brings to adult conversations she can't follow yet, climbing him to his shoulders now and then for a better view. He allows this with the calm of a man who has accepted that he is available climbing equipment. By the fifth professor she has the pattern — adult speaks, Mama listens, adult speaks again, Mama answers, adult's face changes — and she performs a small version of it for Solaris, who receives the performance with complete composure.

We pass Samara's classroom on the way back from the last professor.

The door has been closed since the Purge. The year's review has put the room out of use while the proceedings run, and that will take months. It's just a door. The room behind it is just a room.

And yet.

Nova looks at it and doesn't say anything for a moment. She's looking the way she looks when she's picking up something the adults around her are carrying and nobody has explained to her. She is two years old, and she knows things she has not been told.

"Sad room," she says.

I look at her. "Yes."

"Is the sad room gone?"

I think about what the true answer is, for a two-year-old asking about a room that held someone who tried to kill her mother and is now in custody waiting on judgment. About what gone means, and what I want her to understand about what happened.