Page 46 of Raven’s Fight

Across the table, Mom's familiar holds both projections steady in the window alcove — Mom's own face relayed from Sovereign, Klauth's from the capital. Iris has been extending her range since the spring, and she's carrying two at once now without visible strain, which means she's been practicing between nests. I'll ask her about it later.

"You're bigger than your mother," Therun says at last.

From the projection, Mom laughs — full and unguarded, the laugh she gives when something is actually funny rather than merely amusing. It's a good sound. I've been working to hear it more often.

"So I've been told," I say.

"I know Mina Ragnar by reputation." Therun turns toward the projection with the inclined head he'd offer any formidable dragoness. "She was formidable when she founded the Sovereign nest. I imagine she's more so now."

"She submitted dominance to her daughter last year," Mom says, the laughter still in her voice. "I have thoughts about that decision."

"No you don't," I say.

"No I don't," she agrees.

Therun looks between us, and something in his face settles — the settling of a man who has just learned something about the shape of a relationship that no briefing would have given him. He turns back to me.

"Tell me about Magnus," he says. "Not what the reports say. What you know."

✦ ✦ ✦

I tell him.

I give him the whole of it. The fire drake watch on the western border, eight scents when Keir first counted them and twelve at his last. The four planted students at the academy, where we first thought three. Anipe in the administrative wing, half her attention on the corridor, never quite meeting my eyes. Samara in the archive during Balor's night exercise, photographing the founding Purge documents, hunting for what the original language allowed that the current version may not. The alliance between Magnus and Amadeus's men, no longer tucked away in the eastern wing but sitting openly in the throne room.

Then the deeper layer. Solaris's blood-memory, three weeks of careful work, and the picture of Amadeus that comes clear once you line the layers up. Not a dead mage. A man who gave up his body more than a thousand years ago to fuel a binding so large it needed a fire burning inside it, and who built that binding to keep his own self intact within the net instead of ending with the flesh. Scattered. No single body to kill. Survivable only by breaking every egg at once, or by cutting the net off from the mage-blooded men it reaches through.

"You've confirmed this out of the ancestral record," Therun says. Not skeptical. Weighing the source.

"Solaris was one of Amadeus's first," I say. "He knows the working's signature because he was inside it. His account isn't history. It's memory."

Therun is quiet a moment. He looks at Solaris, who holds the look with the patience of a dragon who has had a thousand years to make peace with what was done to him and has mostly managed it.

"How many eggs remain?" Therun asks.

"We don't know. Three destroyed in the last two years that we're certain of. How many exist, or where, we have no idea. Cassius has eleven years of work on this. It's the main reason I have to get back to the Eastern Isles."

"Before the Purge," Therun says.

"The academy calendar gives me a window in two weeks. I intend to use it."

He nods and drinks from his cup. He's been listening twenty minutes and hasn't asked a single question designed to display what he already knows rather than learn what I do, which is rarer than it should be in rooms full of powerful creatures.

"I know of Cassius," Therun says.

I look at him.

"An omega male mage. He came to my court about eight years before he vanished from the records, carrying word about the omega males being moved out of Magnus's territories — which families were being pressed, through which offices, and what paperwork was being used to cover it." He sets the cup down. "He knew things he had no business knowing. He'd already been at it for years before he ever reached me. I tried to keep the thread. He went quiet, and when I went looking I found nothing."

"He went to the Eastern Isles."

"Clearly." Something moves behind his face — the long weight of a search that never closed. "If he has spent eleven years on this one question, what he carries may be the most complete account anywhere of how the net holds together and how it can be broken."

"Which is exactly why Amadeus sent boats for him."

"Yes." He meets my eyes. "Reach him before Amadeus finds another way to."

Then: "There's something else you should know. It concerns the omega males Magnus has been trying to take off the Eastern Isles."