Page 47 of Raven’s Fight

"Three of them," I say. "Giselle told me."

"I know who they were." He holds my gaze. "They weren't chosen at random. Two had shown early signs of very strong mage-blood. The third was the son of a mage council member who defected out of Magnus's territories six years ago." A pause. "Magnus — or Amadeus — is building something that needs omega males with strong blood in them. The net needs mage-blooded men to hold what he became. And if what he became is thinning as the eggs are broken one by one⁠—"

"He needs stronger ones to hold it," Finlay says from my right. His voice goes level and careful the way it does when something has just confirmed a thing he'd been hoping was wrong. "Strong enough blood could carry more of him without fraying."

The room goes quiet.

"Cassius," Mom says from the projection. Quietly. Understanding it.

"Cassius is an omega male mage," I say. "With eleven years of studying exactly this."

"And Amadeus knows he exists." Klauth's voice through Iris carries the flatness of a man who has followed the line to its end and dislikes where it goes. "The night boats weren't a general sweep. They were sent for him."

The candles burn. Outside, the mountain does what mountains do.

"I need to go back to the Eastern Isles," I say. "Soon."

"Yes," Therun says. "You do."

✦ ✦ ✦

The pledge comes in larger than the shape Corvus described. A hundred and eight of Davan's own pack, and forty-two more out of the others, who asked to come after word of the first discussions reached them. A hundred and fifty wolf trackers in all, under Davan's command. And twelve grown metallic fighters out of Therun's own wing.

Therun mentions the extra forty-two the way a man mentions the weather. It isn't weather. Wolves don't ask to join somebody else's war unless a pack-lord they trust has already made up his mind where he's going. The terms are clean: they answer to me directly, not to Klauth or Thauglor or anyone else in the Marzana structure. Therun says so without apologizing for it and I accept without conditions, because it's the right structure. A pledged force that answers to a chain above the dragoness they've pledged to is a liability in any fight that moves fast.

Klauth has something to say about that. I can hear it in the shape of his silence through Iris's projection — the silence of a man who holds a view and is deciding whether this is the room for it. He decides it isn't. I'll raise it with him later, in private, where he can be blunt and so can I and we can end up somewhere neither of us started.

Then I welcome Therun's people formally into the Blackhaven flight. The full declaration, in the words the Marzana line has used for this since it began. What the words mean is: you are of this flight now, your safety is mine to guarantee, your honor is mine to keep. Not merely allied. Not attached for a season. It is a binding of a kind that carries weight.

Davan has been at the edge of the hall since we sat down. When I finish speaking, he moves. He crosses to the table, and not to a chair — to the floor beside mine, where he settles with the unhurried certainty of something that has made a decision and is beginning to live inside it.

The metallic guards at the corners straighten a fraction. Recognition. Their pack-lord has placed himself.

Therun watches it happen. "He chose you before I pledged him."

"I'll try to be worth it."

"You already are." He says it plainly. "Or he wouldn't be sitting there."

✦ ✦ ✦

After.

The table is cleared. Mom and Klauth have gone from Iris's projection. Solaris and Finlay have withdrawn to the far end of the hall to give the meeting its closing room. It's Therun and me and candles burning low, the flowers still holding their color in the warm light.

"I'd like to see your daughter," Therun says.

I look at him a moment, reading his face for what sits behind the asking, and what I find is honest. Curiosity, but the kind that wishes its subject well. Old creatures aren't always good with young ones. Some of them, the ones who have lived long enough to lose nearly everything to time, find youth hard to look at. Therun doesn't look like that.

"All right."

Nova arrives the way she always arrives when she's been told someone is coming and has been made to wait — at a controlled trot that is not quite a run, her own compromise between the dignity she has been told to have and the urgency she actually feels. She stops in the doorway and looks at Therun. He looks at her.

She's carrying her obsidian and burnt-orange coloring in human form today, scales showing along her arms and shoulders, which means her dragoness is close to the surface and paying attention. Her mismatched eyes settle on him with the careful assessment of a hatchling who has learned that large unfamiliar creatures want evaluating before anything else happens.

Therun crouches.

A three-hundred-year-old gold dragon lowering himself to the height of a two-year-old is its own thing to watch. Unhurried. Deliberate. The gesture of someone who understands that size is a fact and what you do with it in front of something small is a choice.