Page 133 of Raven’s Fight

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Nova insists on the morning circuit.

It begins in the second week of summer, when she lands beside me at the flight platform and gives me the look she uses when she has decided something and is informing me rather than asking. I look at her. She spreads her wings — the full span, the obsidian and burnt orange in the early light — and waits.

"You want to fly the circuit," I say.

She nods once.

"It's four miles."

She looks at me with those mismatched eyes and the expression that has been telling me, with more clarity every month since she learned to walk, that she is a Mrithun, and the Mrithun do not find four miles concerning.

We fly the circuit. She manages it — not easily, not at full pace, but completely. On the fourth mile she's flagging, so I slow without letting it show, and she catches up and finishes. When we land she shifts and informs me, with the gravity of someone announcing a decision, that she will fly the circuit every morning.

"Yes," I say.

By the third week she's flying it without flagging. By the fourth she's pulling ahead on the downhill stretches, and I stop slowing.

Every morning. The same path, the same stones, the same mountain light. We fly it side by side, the skull dragon and the obsidian-and-burnt-orange one, the dragoness and her daughter, and neither of us speaks, because there's nothing to say that the flying doesn't already hold.

The circuit has always been the thing that grounds me.

Now it's also the thing that's hers.

I didn't expect this to feel the way it feels. I'm glad it does.

Chapter 47

Solaris

Nova turns two at the height of summer.

I have been alive twelve hundred years and more, and I have learned that most turnings of the season don't matter the way we pretend they matter. A year is a human measure. To a great wyrm it is a single breath in a very long breathing. Inside Amadeus's binding a year meant nothing at all — there was only the dark, and the net, and the slow erosion of any sense that time moved rather than simply was.

I don't speak of the binding often, and I won't linger in it now, on this day of all days. But it is worth setting down plainly, once, so that what comes after can be understood against it.

A thousand years. Not two centuries, not five. A thousand, the full round terrible weight of it, longer than most kingdoms stand. No up and no down, no wing, no wind, no weight of my own body to tell me I still had one. Only the hum of the net holding me, patient and endless, and the horror of a mind built to remember everything being given nothing new to remember for ten centuries. I forgot what light was for. Not what it looked like — what it was for, the way you forget that warmth is a thing the body reaches toward until something warm is laid against you and the reaching starts up again on its own.

I had two hundred and fifty years of life before the dark took me, and I have had a little over three since it let me go. Set beside the thousand in between, those two free spans are small: a bright morning on either side of an endless night.

And yet the three years weigh more than the thousand.

That is what this day makes plain. It isn't the length of a time that gives it weight. It's what the time holds.

So I know, better than almost anyone alive, what a year is and what it isn't. And I am telling you that this one matters. Nova turning two matters to me in a way that has nothing to do with the calendar and everything to do with the fact of her — that she exists, that she is here, that I get to watch her turn two. It is a sentence I could not have formed inside the dark, when I did not know she would exist and did not believe I would be released to meet her if she did.

I hold it the way I hold most large things now. Quietly, with the clarity of an ancient mind that has had a great deal of time to watch itself.

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The mountain is at its best today, as though it has decided to attend.

High summer at Blackhaven is a brief and generous thing. For most of the year the peak keeps its snow and the wind comes off it with an edge, but for these few weeks the meltwater runs down the eastern face in thin bright threads, the lower slopes go green and stay green, and the stone of the keep holds the day's heat long into the evening. A hand laid flat against the outer wall at dusk gets the warmth given back to it like a living thing. The light is different in summer too — longer, gold rather than silver, pooling in the courtyard and lying along the flight field long after it has gone from the valleys below.

I have been free a little over three years, and I have not yet let a warm day pass unremarked, and I don't expect I ever will. That is another thing the dark gave me. A thousand years without a single warm afternoon teaches you not to waste one when it comes.

The birthday itself isn't elaborate. Nova is two, and two doesn't require elaborate. Two requires the people she loves in one place, something sweet, and permission to stay up past the hour she usually goes to sleep. We give her all three.