Page 22 of Raven’s Fight

That's what I'm looking at from up here. Not the territory itself but the evidence of it working — the proof that what I've built holds its shape when I'm not standing in the middle of it. I'm aware this is supposed to be reassuring, and it is. It's also the particular bittersweetness of a thing you worked very hard for arriving, and turning out to be exactly what you hoped.

I bank into the descent and let myself come home.

✦ ✦ ✦

Nova finds me before I've fully shifted.

She's been told she has to wait until the shift is finished and her mother's feet are on the ground. Solaris told her, because he understands that a hatchling intercepting a parent mid-shift is an excellent way to lose a wing to an involuntary scale-spread. She has interpreted this rule with the creative precision of someone who is very intelligent and very two years old: she stands at the edge of the flight platform, both arms outstretched, both wings vibrating with barely contained urgency, and the moment my human feet touch stone she flings herself across the remaining distance with complete confidence that I'll catch her.

I always catch her.

She wraps her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck and presses her face into my jaw, making the sound she makes when she's been waiting and is done waiting. Not distress — something more like the release of sustained effort, the exhale of a very small person who has been holding herself together and has decided she doesn't have to anymore.

"I was here," she informs me.

"I know. I could see you from the air."

She pulls back to look at me with those amber eyes, the left one with its half-moon of sapphire catching the afternoon light, and subjects me to a thorough inspection. This is what she does when she's been told I'm coming home: she spends the waiting building an expectation, and now she's checking whether I match it.

I apparently match it. She puts her face back against my jaw.

"Solaris made the egg thing," she says.

"Did he save me some?"

"Yes." A pause. "I helped."

"I'm sure you were very helpful."

Solaris appears in the doorway behind her, which means he's been there the whole time and simply let Nova have the first landing. This is a very Solaris thing to do. He looks at me over the top of her head with those amber eyes — the same warm amber as hers, and it still startles me sometimes, the bloodline visible in both of them — and something in his expression eases, in the quiet way things ease when something absent comes back.

"Welcome home, lass," he says.

"Thanks."

✦ ✦ ✦

The war council convenes an hour later in the briefing room.

Mom stays. She came back with me rather than going straight to Sovereign, and she offered without being asked, which is its own kind of thing. The table holds me, Solaris, Finlay, Mom, and Klauth — present through the messenger device of Ziggy's design that carries voice across distance. Klauth uses it with the resigned dignity of someone who finds the technology irritating and the alternative, not being in the room, worse. His voice comes through with a slight echo that makes him sound even more imperious than usual. I've decided this is an accidental improvement.

I brief on Giselle first. The healing center. The two hundred and seventeen. The way Magnus's pressure escalated — official, then unofficial, then force. The conditional alliance. The refuge arrangement. And Cassius, whose existence I summarize carefully: bonded mate of Giselle, an omega male, eleven years on the island, the reason the night boats failed. And, most importantly, someone who has spent over a decade researching Amadeus's specific interest in omega males.

"Cassius," Finlay says when I finish. His voice carries a quality I've come to recognize as him identifying something he isn't ready to name yet — something clicking into place that he's turning over before he commits to it.

"You know the name?"

"I know of an omega male mage who disappeared from the northern records about eleven years ago, under circumstances that were never satisfactorily explained." He's looking at the table. "The name was Cassius Marrowe. He was considered one of the most capable practitioners of his generation, which made the disappearance particularly noted."

The room is quiet.

"Omega male mage," Mom says.

"Yes."

"And Amadeus has a specific interest in omega males."

"Apparently."