Page 98 of Raven’s Fight

Solaris stands nearby. He doesn't make a sound either.

Eventually she pulls back far enough to look at me.

Her mismatched eyes move over my face — the amber, and the half-sapphire that still catches me sometimes with how much of Solaris is in it — in that focused way she has when she is checking something against what she expected. That isn't a hatchling trait. That's Nova.

Her gaze drops to the shoulder.

The scar shows above my collar. The wound has closed and the scale has begun to come back, but the pale line of it reads clearly against the darker scale around it. She reaches up with one small finger and touches it very gently.

She looks up at me.

"Mama hurt," she says.

"Mama's okay."

She looks at the scar again. She works on it — I can watch her working on it, a two-year-old holding two things against each other and finding out they can both be true. That hurt and not all right anymore are not the same. That a thing can be hurt and still be going to be fine. She takes her time with it.

Then she leans in and presses her small mouth to the scar.

I do not cry.

I do not.

I hold her very tightly and look up at the mountain above Blackhaven and breathe — not the measured breathing I've been running on for three days. The breath of someone who is home and is allowed to simply breathe. Nova's warmth against my chest. Her weight. Her smell, which is Blackhaven stone and Solaris and a thread of the flight field underneath, which means she has already been outside today working at something.

Approach angles, Solaris said in the council room.

She decided the morning routine would not be suspended.

I put my face into her hair and breathe.

✦ ✦ ✦

Dinner is the whole nest.

All five of them, which hasn't happened at once in six weeks. The Purge needed everyone where it needed them, and the nest has been spread across those positions the whole time — Corvus on the wrong side of the bell for three days, close enough to hear it ring and unable to reach me, Hemlocke in the stable loft with his mirror, Keir running the grid, Finlay in his office with the fire barely under the skin, Solaris here with Nova and the council to build. Six weeks of all of us pulled apart toward the same end.

Back now.

Corvus cooked.

He does this when he wants to mark something as worth marking without turning the marking into a performance. It's how he says a thing matters — by providing food better than the occasion strictly requires and being in the kitchen that makes it. There's bread, and the braised thing, and a wine from the Blackhaven cellar that only comes out for evenings that have earned it. I notice all of it and I take all of it and I say nothing about any of it, because he has said nothing about it, and that is how it works between us.

Isolde is here, which Hemlocke arranged. I didn't ask. He simply made it happen, the way he makes the things happen that he has worked out are needed. She sits beside Bella with the ease of two people whose friendship needs no explaining, and they are deep in a conversation which — going by Isolde's face and the angle of her shoulders and the very careful way she is not saying a name — is about Charron.

I catch Hemlocke's eye across the table. He makes no expression at all. He doesn't need to.

The food is very good.

Keir tells the story of how the last fire drake got off the grounds — the drainage channel that wasn't on any of the building plans her people had bought, and the exit that followed, which was considerably less dignified than the plan had allowed for. It's Keir's register exactly: present tense, physical, delighted by the world's comic timing rather than working it. Orpheus adds one detail at precisely the right moment.

The detail is devastating.

The table goes up.

I laugh — the laugh that comes out of you when you've been at full stretch for a long time and the body is finally allowed to remember that laughing exists. It goes all the way down. Corvus watches me with the face he wears when he's seeing something he's been waiting on. Nova, on Solaris's lap, watches me with enormous eyes and then laughs herself, because laughter is contagious at two and she doesn't need the story. She only needs that I am laughing, and that is enough.

The evening is long and unhurried and exactly what I came home for.