Page 96 of Raven’s Fight

"That's where Cassius has turned," I confirm. "He believes there are fewer hosts than eggs, and that they can be found."

"Then that's where we put our weight," Raven says. She has been listening in the way she listens to something she is fitting into a picture she is already holding. "Cassius names the hosts. Finlay goes north and takes the contact apart. We use Therun's wolf trackers to find the fire drake supply lines in the western territories. Three lines of work, three separate clocks, all of them running at the same thing."

She says it as though it were simple.

It is not simple.

It is, however, correct.

✦ ✦ ✦

The council runs four hours.

I speak when I have something to add and I am quiet when I don't, which is what I am for in a room like this, and which I have come to understand is more useful than speaking to prove I'm present. The talk moves through Therun's pledge — the wolf trackers already moving, going first to the western territories, the twelve metallics waiting on word. The envoys from the Eastern Isles who still have no names attached to them. The review of Marzana's own security that Klauth has set running since the academy.

And through all of it, I watch Raven.

She runs this council the way she runs everything she has decided to run properly — with the complete, unperformed attention of someone for whom it is simply the work. She follows four conversations at once, holds three separate lines of thinking open, and asks the question that needs asking at the exact moment it needs asking. Not early, which would be presumption. Not late, which would be late. At the moment — because she has been listening not only to what is being said but to the shape of what isn't, to the distance between where the talk is and where it has to arrive.

I watch Thauglor watch her.

He does it with the attention very old things give to very new things made partly out of themselves — the deep recognition of sapphire eyes that have watched a thousand years of Mrithun leadership and are now looking at what comes next. He isn't performing pride. He is having it, with the weight of a creature for whom pride is a large and serious thing that does not visit often.

At one point Klauth defers to her on a question of timing.

He does it without ceremony. He asks because she is the person in this room who has thought about it most carefully and he knows it. Two hundred years on the Marzana throne before the shell took him, and twenty-five since he came out of it, and he asks his twenty-three-year-old daughter for the timeline because she is right and he isn't sure and he knows the difference.

She answers.

She is right.

The thing I can't fully put words to isn't any single moment. It's the accumulation. Every morning circuit and every debrief and every time she looked at something difficult and chose to look at it honestly rather than around it. Every choice she made correctly when the easier one was sitting right there. The thousand years behind me were a particular kind of dark, and what is in front of me — this council, this room, this young woman running the most consequential war planning the Marzana Empire has done in thirty years — is a particular kind of light.

She is twenty-three years old.

She is the most capable person in this room.

Every ancient thing at this table knows it.

I am so proud of her it aches.

✦ ✦ ✦

After.

The council ends and they leave in the order of their business. Klauth and Thauglor together, deep in it already, two great wyrms carrying what comes next in the shorthand of creatures who have been having this kind of conversation for centuries. Balor and Mina. Finlay last, pausing in the doorway to look at Raven with an expression holding everything this week has cost him and everything he intends to do about it.

Then the room is ours.

Raven sits down in her chair at the head of the empty table and looks at the far wall a while — the long blank look that means the forward-facing part of her has finished and her mind is letting go of the grip it had. The exhale of someone who has been running at the top of herself and is setting it down.

I come around the table and sit beside her.

She doesn't say anything for a while. Neither do I.

"Therun's trackers go out today," she says eventually.

"Yes."