Page 9 of Raven’s Fight

The path from the landing platform to the palace takes us through the lower grounds, and what I see there recalibrates something in my assessment of this place. Females everywhere, of every species — fae-touched, mer-descended, shifters of three different kinds I can identify and several I can’t, humans walking beside dragons walking beside beings I have no name for. The variety should feel chaotic but it doesn’t. It feels like a place that has made room for all of it deliberately, over a long time, with considerable intention. The paths are wide enough for wings. The doorways are scaled for multiple species. The gardens are planted in layers — ground-level, climbing, elevated — as if whoever designed them was thinking about who would need to move through at what height.

No one looks at us with fear. That’s the thing I notice after the species variety. We are two of the most powerful dragonesses on the continent walking through foreign territory, and the people we pass look at us with curiosity and the particular alertness of species accustomed to assessing new arrivals, but not fear. Respect in a few faces, interest in most, and no one steps back. On the continent we clear a path just by existing. Here, people simply move around us the way they’d move around anyone.

The omega males move among them and I notice this the way I notice things my dragoness flags before my conscious mind catches up — the slight difference in how they carry themselves, the particular quality of their ease. Not hidden, not apologetic. Moving through the market stalls and garden paths with the simple confidence of people who have learned that this place will not require them to be anything other than what they are. One of them stops to help an elderly fae woman carry something heavy up a set of stone steps. Another is deep in conversation with a healer outside what looks like a treatment building, both of them bent over a collection of dried plants laid out on a low table, the conversation animated and entirely equal.

On the continent, omega males are removed from the record as soon as they’re identified — born into flights and packs and then quietly erased, too soft, too different, incompatible with the hierarchy that most species build around physical dominance. It has always struck me as waste dressed up as tradition. Giselle’s island shelters them, has been sheltering them from what Xero’s report suggested for as long as the island has been a sanctuary.

I file it. All of it. Mom’s hand finds my elbow briefly — the lightest contact, gone before anyone else would clock it. She saw it too. We keep walking.

Queen Giselle receives us in a formal receiving room that manages to feel neither cold nor performative, which is a considerable achievement. The ceilings are high, the windows open to the garden breeze, and the furniture has been arranged to suggest equals across a table rather than a throne and supplicants below it. She is already standing when we enter.

I had built her from Xero’s description — blonde, emerald eyes, a quality of stillness that Xero described as someone who has survived long enough to understand that almost everything presented to her is a test of something. In person the description holds but doesn’t capture the particular precision of her attention. She looks at both of us the way my fathers look at new arrivals to Blackhaven — not hostile but thorough, cataloguing, deciding.

“Queen Mina.” She bows her head with the respect of an equal. “And Lady Raven.” She looks at me directly and holds it for a moment. “Your tressym speaks very highly of you.”

“Xero has undiscriminating loyalty,” I say. “She’d speak highly of anyone who gives her fresh fish.”

Something moves in Giselle’s expression — amusement maybe, or the recalibration of an expectation. “Please sit. Both of you.”

We sit. Tea arrives brought by an omega male who moves with the ease of someone long accustomed to the work, who meets my eyes when he sets the cup in front of me and doesn’t look away first. I nod and he nods back and leaves. Giselle watches this exchange and says nothing about it.

“I understand,” she says, wrapping both hands around her own cup, “that you’ve come to determine whether I am working with Magnus.”

Mom opens her mouth. “I’m not,” Giselle says. “I haven’t been and I won’t be. He’s made four separate approaches in the past three years and I have declined all of them. I want you to have that clearly before we discuss anything else, so we’re not spending the first hour of this conversation circling it.”

I look at her. “Why?”

She tilts her head. “Why am I not working with him, or why am I telling you directly?”

“Both.”

“Because this island exists for one reason.” She sets her cup down. “We take anyone who needs sanctuary. Females who have been broken. Omega males born into flights and packs that would have destroyed them. Species that have no other refuge on the continent. Magnus’s world produces all of those people in considerable quantity.” A pause, precise as a blade’s edge. “He and I have fundamentally incompatible interests.”

The room is quiet for a moment. Outside, wind moves through the garden below the window and I hear something that might be laughter from the lower grounds — light, ordinary, the kind of sound that shouldn’t be remarkable and is, here, deeply so.

“Neutral by design,” Mom says. It isn’t a question.

“Neutral by necessity.” Giselle looks at her. “The moment I take a political position I become a target rather than a sanctuary. The females and males on this island have already survived being targets. I will not make them targets again for the sake of a flag.”

Reasonable. I understand it completely and it changes nothing about the question I have to ask.

“What happens to your neutrality if Magnus marches on the continent?” I say.

Giselle goes quiet — not uncomfortable quiet but the quiet of someone who has already had this thought many times and has not yet arrived at an answer she trusts.

“That,” she says eventually, “is the question I’ve been sitting with for two years.”

“And?”

“And I don’t have a clean answer for you.” She meets my eyes. There’s something in hers that I recognize — the specific exhaustion of a person holding a great deal of weight and not putting it down, not because they can’t but because they’ve looked at what happens if they do and found it worse. “Neutrality protects this island as long as no one makes a move that renders neutrality impossible. If Magnus marches, he makes that move himself.”

“So the alliance exists in principle.”

“The alliance exists in principle,” she agrees carefully, “contingent on the circumstances rendering it necessary.”

Mom is watching me. I can feel it without looking — the particular quality of her attention when she’s letting me run something to see where it goes.

“I can offer you something,” I say. “Not a military pledge and not a political position. Something practical.” Giselle waits. “Blackhaven. If Magnus moves, if the continent becomes unsafe, if the sanctuary here is compromised in any way — Blackhaven is a second refuge. Flight protection, the full weight of the dominant dragoness’s guarantee, and every resource this territory can offer. Anyone who needs to move does so under my protection.”