Page 17 of Raven’s Fight

She isn't wrong.

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Isolde arrives an hour after sunrise.

This is her pattern now. She comes every morning, has come every morning for three months, as reliably as the feed schedule and a good deal more cheerful about it. She comes to help, which she does well and without being told what to do, and she comes because she likes it here, which is visible in the way her shoulders drop as she comes through the door — the same drop I see in a horse when something stressful passes and the air goes back to normal.

Isolde is a nightmare, which means she carries shadow even in human form, a faint darkness clinging to her edges in certain lights, the visual equivalent of a low hum. In her father Leander it reads as gravity. As command. In Isolde it reads as depth. She is seventeen — eighteen at the Great Gathering — and already carries more of herself than most people twice that, with the self-possession of someone who has been through something and come out the other side still recognizably herself.

She stops when she sees the foal.

Isolde has her father's eyes, that warm nightmare dark, carrying the depth of a species that lives half in shadow even when it's wearing a person. Those eyes go wide now, and she presses both hands over her mouth, and the sound she makes is the involuntary noise of someone meeting something so unexpectedly good that the body answers before the mind arrives.

"Oh," she says through her hands. "Oh, she's perfect."

"She came this morning. Just before dawn."

Isolde goes to the stall slowly, the way I taught her — nothing sudden, weight low, hands where they can be seen. She learned that quickly. She learns everything quickly, which I suspect comes of growing up among extraordinary people and discovering that paying very close attention was the most reliable way to keep pace. She holds out the back of her hand at the foal's height and waits.

The foal stretches her neck out and sniffs.

Decides. Comes forward on those ridiculous legs and pushes her nose into Isolde's palm with more confidence than ought to be available to something that has been alive ninety minutes.

"Hello," Isolde breathes. The word is barely there.

The foal breathes warm against her palm and doesn't withdraw. Isolde laughs — quietly, so as not to startle her — and the sound is so purely delighted that Titan turns to look at her from his post. He weighs her the way he weighs everything, thoroughly and without hurrying. Then he goes back to watching the foal.

High praise.

I watch all of it from the rail and feel the warmth that isn't mine — the thread I share with Raven, carrying mood and presence across distance, warm when she's well and bright when she's happy. It runs quieter when she's away, the way a fire is quieter when you move back from it and still gives heat.

I think about the last time it ran bright instead of warm.

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Three weeks ago. Raven's version of a quiet evening, which involves considerably more fire than most people's quiet evenings and which I have come to understand as its own kind of peace.

We had the upper flight field to ourselves. Nova asleep in the nest below, Solaris on watch, the other three occupied elsewhere the way the nest spreads itself out across a large territory. The autumn air was cold enough that her breath misted when she shifted back after her evening flight, and she stood there in the dark with her wings half open and her hair loose and her scales still warm from the change, and she looked at me with those sapphire eyes and said nothing at all.

She doesn't always need words. That's one of the things I've learned about her — that the absence of words isn't absence. It's a different kind of presence, one she gives to very few people, and it carries more than most conversations do.

I crossed the field to her. The grass was cold underfoot and the mountain was very quiet and the stars over Blackhaven were the brilliant undiluted stars you only get this high up.

She reached up and put both hands on my chest, over the place where her scale sits under my shirt, and I felt it warm under her touch — the bond answering her the way it always does, brightness moving through it like sunlight through water. She pressed her forehead into my collarbone. She smelled of the mountain and the cold and the warmth that is only ever hers, the scent that lives in the bond and that I would know in any darkness, without sight or sound.

"Long day?" I asked.

"Long week." A pause. "I'm glad you're here."

Raven doesn't say that easily. She loves deeply and shows it a hundred ways, but the plain statement — I'm glad, I need this — costs her something, and she offers it rarely, and I take it every time as the thing it is. I put my arms around her and felt her breathe out against my chest, and the wings came around us both, and the field was very dark and very quiet and the bond ran very bright.

What came after was hers as much as mine — the warmth of her, the way she turns toward gentleness when she isn't carrying the dominance the flight asks of her, the mix of strength and softness that is entirely Raven and that I still find astonishing, three scales and a bond into knowing her. And underneath it I could feel the others' threads too. Corvus's steadiness. Keir's warmth. Solaris's ancient depth. Finlay's contained fire. All of us in her and her in all of us, and the nest whole.

I think about that night when the work gets heavy. When the fire drake reports come in and the six months count down and the war that's coming lies across everything we've built. It doesn't make the heavy things lighter.

It reminds me what the heavy things are for.

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