Page 4 of Raven’s Fight

“I know you will.”

Nova looks up from her bread at the sound of her name, crumbs on her chin, and makes a noise of firm agreement.

Mom arrives exactly when she said she would. I hear her before I see her — a roar that splits the afternoon quiet, high and sharp and carrying that particular edge she uses when she’s announcing herself to a territory that isn’t hers. A courtesy. Letting Blackhaven’s sentinels know the incoming presence is known and welcome.

I’m on the upper flight platform when she clears the mountain peak, her dragoness enormous against the grey autumn sky, green and iron scales catching what little light the cloud cover allows. She’s smaller than me now — we’re both aware of this and neither of us has mentioned it — but she moves through the air with the absolute authority of someone who has never once questioned her right to be in it. It’s in the angle of her wings, the tilt of her skull. My mother doesn’t fly. She presides.

She shifts mid-descent, the transformation flowing through her like water down a fall, and lands in human form on the stone platform with the particular soft impact of someone who has been doing this for centuries and finds the theatrics somewhat beneath her. She’s in her travel leathers — black, close-fitted, her twin swords across her back and her hair pulled severely from her face. She looks, as she almost always looks, like something the world tried to break and gave up on.

“Raven.” She opens her arms.

I step into them and for a moment I am simply her daughter and not any of the other things I am required to be. She smells of flight and cold air and the faint ozone that clings to her lightning breath weapon, and she holds me the way she always has — like something she made herself and intends to keep.

“You’ve grown again,” she says against my hair.

“Have I?”

“Your dragoness. The presence is larger, even in this form.” She pulls back and studies me the way she studies everything — thoroughly, without pretending she isn’t doing it. Her golden eyes move over my face and find whatever she’s looking for. “You look tired.”

“I’m always tired.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.” I turn and we walk together toward the interior of Blackhaven, falling into step the way we always do — shoulder to shoulder, matched pace, her left and my right. “We leave at dawn tomorrow. I want to brief you tonight over dinner.”

“I’ve read your message three times. I know what we’re walking into.”

“I know you do. I want to talk through what we’re not saying in the message — the parts I wasn’t sure how to write.”

She glances at me sideways. “There are parts you weren’t sure how to write?”

“Don’t make something of it.”

The sound she makes carries the same frequency as a laugh without quite being one. “All right. Tonight then. After I’ve seen Nova.”

“She’s been warned you’re coming. She’s been ready since breakfast.”

A real smile crosses my mother’s face — the one she only produces for specific people. Small, genuine, something it costs her nothing to give and that she gives freely to the people who have earned it. “Then let’s not keep her waiting,” she says.

We go inside. Behind us the mountain closes its silence over the flight platform like water over a stone, and somewhere to the north six months continue their quiet count.

Chapter 2

Corvus

She’s still asleep when I wake up, which almost never happens. Raven wakes before the mountain does — before the torches burn low, before the blink hounds finish their last patrol rotation, before anything that breathes has decided the day is worth beginning. I’ve woken beside her for over a year now and I can count on one hand the mornings I’ve opened my eyes first.

I lie still and let myself have it for a moment. The grey pre-dawn light coming through the narrow window, the sound of her breathing slow and deeper than her daytime self ever seems to allow. She’s on her stomach with one wing half-extended across the bed, the black membrane slack in a way it isn’t when she’s conscious. She carries her wings differently when she’s awake — always a fraction tensed, always ready. Like this, in sleep, they look like what they are. Something extraordinary that happens to belong to her.

I don’t move. My pack is already by the door and Thauglor will be on the flight platform at dawn, which is close enough that I should be up and dressed and ready, and I know this, and I stay where I am for another minute anyway.

The scale she placed over my heart pulses faintly the way it does when she’s close — slow and steady, matched to her sleeping rhythm. I’ve gotten used to it the way you get used to a heartbeat, noticed only when it changes, missed immediately when it stops. The thought of two weeks without that proximity makes something in my chest do something I’m not going to examine too closely before a long flight.

I get up carefully. I’m good at not waking her — years of practice, first from a distance and now from beside her, learning the specific architecture of her sleep. She doesn’t stir when I dress, doesn’t move when I buckle my sword harness, doesn’t do anything at all until I’m fully ready and reaching for my pack and she says without opening her eyes: “Two weeks.”

I stop. “Two weeks,” I confirm.

She opens her eyes then, finding me across the room with that immediate unsettling focus she has — the one that makes people forget she can’t hear out of her right ear, because her eyes compensate so completely that the idea of missing anything seems impossible. Sapphire in the half-dark, still soft with sleep but sharpening fast.