Page 5 of Raven’s Fight

“Come here,” she says.

I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed. She pushes herself up and takes my face in both hands the way she does sometimes — the gesture that still catches me off guard three scales and a bond later, because it is so completely hers. Deliberate. Thorough. Like she’s reading something in my face that I haven’t said yet.

“Therun is going to like you,” she says.

“You don’t know that.”

“You’re the only one of my mates he’s hearing about before he meets any of you. Dad will spend the whole journey briefing you on gold dragon customs and you’ll walk in already knowing more about Therun’s court than Therun expects. He’ll respect that.” She tilts her head slightly, the tell she has when she’s arrived at a conclusion she’s pleased with. “Also you’re very difficult not to like. It’s irritating.”

I feel my mouth move. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Don’t push it.”

She kisses me then — unhurried, thorough, tasting of sleep and something warmer underneath, the particular heat that belongs entirely to her and entirely to this. I hold on longer than I planned to and she lets me, her hands shifting from my face to my shoulders, and for a long moment the briefing pack by the door and Thauglor on the platform and the six months counting quietly in the north simply don’t exist. Then they do again.

When we separate she keeps her hands on my shoulders for a moment. The scale pulses warm against my chest, present and steady, her rhythm settling into the spaces between my own heartbeats until it becomes difficult to distinguish which is which. She’s reading my face again and I let her.

“Come back with an ally,” she says.

“I intend to.”

“And come back.”

I press my lips to her forehead. “That one’s not in question.”

She releases me and by the time I reach the door she’s already picked up her phone, already back inside the machinery of her day, already becoming the version of herself that never fully stops working. I watch her for one more second — the line of her shoulders in the grey morning light, the wing half-spread across the pillow relaxed in a way it rarely is. Then I pick up my pack and go.

Thauglor is exactly where I expected him to be, standing at the edge of the upper flight platform in his human form, which is something of a rare sight at this hour. Usually by dawn he’s shifted, because Thauglor in his dragon form is Thauglor most fully himself, the human form a concession to spaces and conversations that require it. Standing here in traveling clothes with his arms crossed and his sapphire eyes fixed on the northern horizon, he looks like a man carrying something heavy in a way he’s long since stopped noticing.

He hears me coming. He always does. “Mourningstar,” he says without turning. “She made you late.”

“She was still asleep when I woke up.”

That gets his attention. He turns to look at me with an expression I can’t fully read — some mixture of surprise and something softer that comes and goes too quickly to name. “She doesn’t sleep past dawn.”

“I know.”

Something shifts in his face and settles. He turns back to the horizon. “Good,” he says quietly, and doesn’t say anything else about it.

I take my position beside him and follow his gaze south. The sea is visible from here on a clear morning — a dark line where the sky meets something older. The Southern Isle sits several hours of flight beyond it, far enough that the journey is its own thing, a space between departure and arrival where the only business is moving.

“Tell me about Therun,” I say.

Thauglor is quiet for long enough that I wonder if he’s going to answer. Then: “Therun of the Southern Isle has ruled his territory for three hundred and twelve years. He’s older than the current Marzana line by four generations and he has never in that time taken a political position he didn’t hold for at least a decade beforehand.” A pause. “He is not impulsive. He is not easily impressed. And he will form his opinion of this mission in the first ten minutes of the meeting regardless of anything we do afterward.”

“So the first ten minutes matter.”

“The first ten minutes are the only thing that matters.”

“What does he respect?”

“Directness. Preparation. Not wasting his time.” Thauglor finally unfolds his arms. “And he will speak to you directly, not to me, because I am the elder here and he’ll want to know what I think of the male my daughter chose. The most honest answer to that question is what you do when he addresses you.”

I look at him. “What do you think of the male your daughter chose?”

The corner of his mouth moves — I’ve catalogued that expression over years of training in their family’s courtyard, the one Thauglor produces when something lands precisely where he didn’t expect it to. “I think,” he says, “that you waited twenty years without being asked to, which is either profound love or profound stubbornness, and that in a male those two things are usually the same thing.”

He steps to the edge of the platform. “We leave now. Stay close on the southern crossing — the sea thermals shift without warning this time of year and I won’t stop to look for you if you fall behind.”