Page 24 of Raven’s Fight

He looks at me across the table. I look at him.

Two days. The bond between us has been warm the whole time, carrying the steady reassurance of presence even at distance. But warm isn't bright, and the difference lives in the body rather than the mind — a restlessness that strategic planning and diplomatic meetings and the daily weight of the flight do nothing to address. It's been building since the morning I left.

"She's asleep," I say.

"She is," he agrees. "Keir said he'd check on her."

"He did say that."

I stand. Solaris stands. I cross to him and he meets me halfway, the way he does — not waiting to be come to, but moving toward. Because Solaris has a thousand years of patience and spent most of them being still, and has learned this past year that there's a particular pleasure in choosing not to be.

His hands find my face first, the way they always do. Warm and steady. The calluses of ancient combat worn smooth now, carrying instead the particular roughness of hands that have learned a different kind of work. He looks at me the way he looks at old things he values — with the attention of someone for whom time isn't abstract, and whose regard therefore has weight.

"Two days," he says.

"Two very long days," I confirm.

He laughs, low and warm, the sound resonating through his chest where my hands have found it. "Aye. That they were."

He tips his forehead down to mine and we stay there a moment, in the particular still point of two people who have been apart and are now not — the reunion that lives in the breath before anything else. His scent surrounds me, cedar and deep smoke and the mineral warmth of his scales. It's been part of my scent for over a year now, worked into my skin through proximity and bond and the accumulated weight of mornings.

Then he tilts his head, and I tilt mine, and the waiting ends.

The bond runs very bright.

✦ ✦ ✦

Later, the room is dark except for the low glow of the fire in the grate and the silver-blue of moonlight through the high window.

Solaris is asleep. He does it deeply and completely, the way something does that spent a thousand years unable to and has not taken it for granted since. His arm is across my waist, his breathing even.

Nova is on my chest. She arrived at some point in the last hour, delivered by Keir with the quiet efficiency of a blink hound who has learned exactly what wakes people and what doesn't, and she has settled herself with the territorial confidence of a hatchling who has decided this spot belongs to her. Her wings are folded small over her back, her amber eyes closed, the half-sapphire hidden. She's very warm. She smells of the stables, which means she spent the evening with Hemlocke and the new foal, which means he let her into the foaling stall, which means I'm going to have a conversation with Hemlocke about hatchlings and hooves.

But not tonight.

Tonight I lie in the dark with my daughter on my chest and my mate's arm across my waist and the mountain breathing around us, and I think about the war I'm building toward. The shape of it as it stands: Giselle's conditional alliance, Therun's pledged forces, Cassius's eleven years of research, Solaris's recovered memory, Finlay's northern network, Keir's watch on the border, the fire drakes on the western line. The Purge in six weeks. And Amadeus somewhere behind all of it, like a hand holding a dozen threads.

It's a large thing, and it's been building for longer than I've been alive.

Nova shifts in her sleep, her small wings spreading and folding again, some hatchling dream moving through her. I rest my hand on her back, light, just resting, and feel her heartbeat against my palm — fast, the way hatchling hearts are, a quick bright rhythm that has no knowledge yet of the weight of things.

I close my wings around us both.

Tomorrow, the work continues.

Tonight, this is enough.

Chapter 9

Keir

The thing about a scent that doesn't belong is that you can't unsmell it.

Once your nose has cataloged something wrong, it becomes the thing you're always tracking. Something not native to the territory, none of the species you know, sitting in the air with the stubborn wrongness of a thing that was brought here. Background noise you can't tune out. Every patrol run, every check-in, every sweep of the line — there it is. Not stronger, not closer. Just present, and patient.

I've been running the western line for six weeks. My whole pack has been running it, rotating shifts, two or three of us at a time, building the kind of picture single runs can't give you.

The picture is this. Eight distinct signatures, rotating positions, moving faster than a stationary watch would but never crossing the boundary. They know where our line sits, and they stay just outside it. Someone out there is being very careful, and the particular kind of careful they're being tells me they've been briefed on how far a blink hound can track.