Page 55 of Raven’s Fight

Chapter 19

Solaris

I know she is ready three days before she knows it herself.

This is what it is to watch a thing grow toward a threshold. There's a stretch where the ability has arrived and the confidence hasn't, and the space between the two is where a parent must be careful. Push too early and the confidence never sets properly — it fastens onto somebody else's certainty instead of taking root in the hatchling's own. Wait too long and the ability starts turning on itself, all that readiness with nowhere to go going anxious instead.

I have been watching Nova six weeks. I know the exact morning her wings came to their full reach, three weeks ago, when she opened them in the flight field and the span was suddenly wider than her body had led me to expect, the membrane taut and even, the leading edge finding the wind without her telling it to. I know the day she stopped looking down at the edge of the landing rock and started looking out. I know the morning she began running at the edge instead of walking up to it.

I know today is the day.

She doesn't know it yet. She woke with the same restlessness she's carried all week, ate her breakfast with unusual attention, and has been in the upper flight field since before the sun cleared the eastern peaks. I've been watching from the corridor doorway without going to her. Giving her the field to herself a while longer. She's standing at the landing rock's edge — not looking down, looking at the horizon — her wings half open in the morning wind, the obsidian membrane lit from behind by the low autumn sun and going deep amber where her burnt orange bleeds through.

She is extraordinary.

I have tried not to think that too loudly around Raven, who has complicated feelings about being fair-minded where Nova is concerned, and whom I understand entirely, because you cannot be fair-minded about something you love this much. But standing here, watching my daughter stand at the edge of the world she is about to walk into, I am not attempting anything of the sort. I am only seeing her, and she is extraordinary.

✦ ✦ ✦

Raven came home last night.

She comes every weekend the academy schedule allows, which is more often than she tells the academy it allows. She runs her own timetable now with the efficiency of a woman who worked out the actual minimum and meets it exactly, keeping the remainder for other things. She arrived late, smelling of Shadowcarve leather and the cold of the descent, and went straight to Nova's room and sat on the floor beside the small nest where Nova sleeps and stayed an hour before she came to bed.

I didn't ask what she was thinking. She wasn't thinking. She was being present with her daughter in the dark, which is another matter entirely.

This morning she woke before I did, which is rare, and went to the window and looked out at the field where Nova was already standing. She stood there a long while. Then she turned to me and said, very quietly, "Today."

"Yes," I said.

She nodded once. Her face did the thing it does when she's feeling a great deal and deciding how much of it to show. Then she went to dress.

Thauglor arrives at mid-morning.

He comes without announcing himself, which is to say he comes in dragon form, clearing the eastern peak and coming down to the upper flight field with the unhurried gravity of an ancient wyrm who has decided to be somewhere and intends to take his time arriving. Nova sees him from the rock and her wings snap fully open — instinct, the greeting a hatchling gives an elder she trusts. Her small shape beside his enormous one, once he's down, looks like the foal beside Titan. Scale made visible.

He shifts to human form and looks at me across the field. I raise my chin. He nods once.

He knew as well. Nobody told him. He simply knew, and came.

Nova shifts at the edge of the landing rock.

The change is a thing I have not stopped marveling at. The speed of it, first — faster than most hatchlings half again her age. But more than the speed, the quality of it. Nova doesn't pass through the awkward middle that most young dragons live in during their early shifts, that brief ungainly moment of being neither shape completely. She goes straight across. Girl to dragoness in one movement, as though both forms are equally hers and getting from one to the other takes no more thought than turning around.

She is obsidian and burnt orange, the coloring she took from both of us in a combination that has no business working as well as it does — the matte black of her scales broken by deep amber along her wing edges and underbelly, the color moving in the light the way fire moves, one thing at this angle and another at that. Her mismatched eyes, amber and half-sapphire, read the field with the focus of a hatchling who has been getting ready for this. She has been getting ready for this. We all know it. She knows it best.

She's already large for her age. Her wingspan, fully open, is wider than Raven's was at six. I don't tell Raven that. She knows, and it makes feelings in her that are complicated in the way loving something extraordinary is always complicated when you are also the one responsible for keeping it alive.

She goes to the edge of the rock and looks out. Not down. Out.

Beside me, Raven shifts.

This is the part I want to describe and am not certain I can. Raven shifting is not like watching other dragons shift. It's the same process, the same body doing the same thing — but what comes out of it holds space differently. When Raven is in her dragoness, the air around her changes. Not the temperature of it, not the pressure. Something further down. The particular quality of a space when a thing built to fill it finally does. The skull coloring makes it absolute, the bone-white of her face against the matte black of everything else.

She moves to the left of the rock. Below it and slightly back, wings half open, set to catch.

She will not need to catch.

But she sets herself there anyway, because she is Raven, and Raven leaves nothing to chance where her daughter is concerned. I have watched her take that position beneath Nova's practice glides for six weeks, ready every time, catching nothing because nothing needed catching. She'll do it as long as Nova is learning. She'll do it well past that. This is simply who she is.