Page 56 of Raven’s Fight

I shift.

My wyrm form takes up a great deal of room and I am always somewhat conscious of that at Blackhaven, where my size is the exception. But today I shift fully and take the right, opposite Raven, the two of us balanced around the rock where our daughter stands, a loose cradle of presence.

Thauglor shifts below.

He doesn't hover — wyrms don't hover, we're too large for that kind of fineness in the air. But he moves into the air below the field's edge and holds himself there with the patient power of something that has been doing this for twelve centuries and is entirely prepared to do it for as long as it takes. His sapphire eyes find Nova on the rock and stay.

Nova looks down for the first time.

She sees her grandfather below her, enormous and steady and calm, and I watch her take it in — the small stilling, the weighing. She has her mother's eye for danger and her mother's habit of reading a situation instead of reacting to it. What she reads below her is Thauglor, and Thauglor means I have you. Whatever happens. I have you.

She looks back at the horizon.

She opens her wings all the way. The morning wind takes them and lifts her a little — not flight, the almost-flight she's been practicing for weeks, the push of air against the membrane telling her what her own weight and span already promised. She is built for this. She has always been built for this.

She looks at me.

I make the low sound. Not the rumble of approval I give her when she's done something well. A different one, older, the sound a parent makes watching a child arrive at a moment that is the right moment, bearing witness and nothing more.

She looks at her mother.

Raven's eyes are very bright. Her jaw is set the way it sets when she's holding something enormous and keeping steady around it.

Nova looks back at the horizon.

And she jumps.

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She drops.

Not far. Two seconds, perhaps three, the long kind of seconds that belong to a thing happening that cannot be stopped and does not need stopping and is going to be exactly what it should be. Her wings open. The wind hits the membrane and she overcorrects — tilts right, wing tips catching unevenly, her small body turning before she works out the answer.

Then she works out the answer.

She catches the air.

Clumsily. Overcorrecting again coming back, losing two feet of height before she steadies. The wing angle is wrong — she's carrying her weight badly, putting too much of it on the leading edge. It'll be weeks before any of this is efficient.

She is flying.

She makes a sound I have never heard before.

In twelve centuries I have heard a great many dragon voices, the whole range of what we make, from the deep rumble of wyrms speaking below anything a human ear can find to the thin shriek of a distressed hatchling and every note between. I know dragon voice the way Finlay knows written language, by its pieces and its structures and what it carries.

Nova's first flight sound is none of them.

It is high and wild, and what's inside it is the sound of a thing that has waited its whole existence for one moment and has arrived at it. Pure and complete and entirely her own. A dragon voice that doesn't yet know which register it belongs to and doesn't care, making the most honest sound I have heard in a very long life.

From my left, Raven answers.

Her cry is lower, and it breaks in the middle — the sound of someone who has carried something a long time and is finally, here, setting it down. Her voice and her daughter's over Blackhaven in the morning, different in pitch and identical in meaning.

I add mine.

Below us Thauglor makes the deep vibration I know well, the sound that travels through bone as much as air, the old speech of a wyrm saying I have you. You are safe. I am here. He didn't need to catch her. He was never going to need to. He made the sound anyway.

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