2. Corvus
Corvus
She’s still asleep when I wake up, which almost never happens.
Raven wakes before the mountain does — before the torches burn low, before the blink hounds finish their last patrol rotation, before anything that breathes has decided the day is worth beginning.
I’ve woken beside her for over a year now and I can count on one hand the mornings I’ve opened my eyes first.
I lie still and let myself have it for a moment.
The grey pre-dawn light coming through the narrow window, the sound of her breathing slow and deeper than her daytime self ever seems to allow.
She’s on her stomach with one wing half-extended across the bed, the black membrane slack in a way it isn’t when she’s conscious.
She carries her wings differently when she’s awake — always a fraction tensed, always ready.
Like this, in sleep, they look like what they are.
Something extraordinary that happens to belong to her.
I don’t move. My pack is already by the door and Thauglor will be on the flight platform at dawn, which is close enough that I should be up and dressed and ready, and I know this, and I stay where I am for another minute anyway.
The scale she placed over my heart pulses faintly the way it does when she’s close — slow and steady, matched to her sleeping rhythm.
I’ve gotten used to it the way you get used to a heartbeat, noticed only when it changes, missed immediately when it stops.
The thought of two weeks without that proximity makes something in my chest do something I’m not going to examine too closely before a long flight.
I get up carefully. I’m good at not waking her — years of practice, first from a distance and now from beside her, learning the specific architecture of her sleep.
She doesn’t stir when I dress, doesn’t move when I buckle my sword harness, doesn’t do anything at all until I’m fully ready and reaching for my pack and she says without opening her eyes: “Two weeks.”
I stop. “Two weeks,” I confirm.
She opens her eyes then, finding me across the room with that immediate unsettling focus she has — the one that makes people forget she can’t hear out of her right ear, because her eyes compensate so completely that the idea of missing anything seems impossible.
Sapphire in the half-dark, still soft with sleep but sharpening fast.
“Come here,” she says.
I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed.
She pushes herself up and takes my face in both hands the way she does sometimes — the gesture that still catches me off guard three scales and a bond later, because it is so completely hers.
Deliberate. Thorough. Like she’s reading something in my face that I haven’t said yet.
“Therun is going to like you,” she says.
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re the only one of my mates he’s hearing about before he meets any of you.
Dad will spend the whole journey briefing you on gold dragon customs and you’ll walk in already knowing more about Therun’s court than Therun expects.
He’ll respect that.” She tilts her head slightly, the tell she has when she’s arrived at a conclusion she’s pleased with.
“Also you’re very difficult not to like. It’s irritating.”
I feel my mouth move. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Don’t push it.”
She kisses me then — unhurried, thorough, tasting of sleep and something warmer underneath, the particular heat that belongs entirely to her and entirely to this.
I hold on longer than I planned to and she lets me, her hands shifting from my face to my shoulders, and for a long moment the briefing pack by the door and Thauglor on the platform and the six months counting quietly in the north simply don’t exist. Then they do again.
When we separate she keeps her hands on my shoulders for a moment. The scale pulses warm against my chest, present and steady, her rhythm settling into the spaces between my own heartbeats until it becomes difficult to distinguish which is which. She’s reading my face again and I let her.
“Come back with an ally,” she says.
“I intend to.”
“And come back.”
I press my lips to her forehead. “That one’s not in question.”
She releases me and by the time I reach the door she’s already picked up her phone, already back inside the machinery of her day, already becoming the version of herself that never fully stops working.
I watch her for one more second — the line of her shoulders in the grey morning light, the wing half-spread across the pillow relaxed in a way it rarely is. Then I pick up my pack and go.
Thauglor is exactly where I expected him to be, standing at the edge of the upper flight platform in his human form, which is something of a rare sight at this hour.
Usually by dawn he’s shifted, because Thauglor in his dragon form is Thauglor most fully himself, the human form a concession to spaces and conversations that require it.
Standing here in traveling clothes with his arms crossed and his sapphire eyes fixed on the northern horizon, he looks like a man carrying something heavy in a way he’s long since stopped noticing.
He hears me coming. He always does. “Mourningstar,” he says without turning. “She made you late.”
“She was still asleep when I woke up.”
That gets his attention. He turns to look at me with an expression I can’t fully read — some mixture of surprise and something softer that comes and goes too quickly to name. “She doesn’t sleep past dawn.”
“I know.”
Something shifts in his face and settles. He turns back to the horizon. “Good,” he says quietly, and doesn’t say anything else about it.
I take my position beside him and follow his gaze south.
The sea is visible from here on a clear morning — a dark line where the sky meets something older.
The Southern Isle sits several hours of flight beyond it, far enough that the journey is its own thing, a space between departure and arrival where the only business is moving.
“Tell me about Therun,” I say.
Thauglor is quiet for long enough that I wonder if he’s going to answer.
Then: “Therun of the Southern Isle has ruled his territory for three hundred and twelve years. He’s older than the current Marzana line by four generations and he has never in that time taken a political position he didn’t hold for at least a decade beforehand.
” A pause. “He is not impulsive. He is not easily impressed. And he will form his opinion of this mission in the first ten minutes of the meeting regardless of anything we do afterward.”
“So the first ten minutes matter.”
“The first ten minutes are the only thing that matters.”
“What does he respect?”
“Directness. Preparation. Not wasting his time.” Thauglor finally unfolds his arms. “And he will speak to you directly, not to me, because I am the elder here and he’ll want to know what I think of the male my daughter chose.
The most honest answer to that question is what you do when he addresses you. ”
I look at him. “What do you think of the male your daughter chose?”
The corner of his mouth moves — I’ve catalogued that expression over years of training in their family’s courtyard, the one Thauglor produces when something lands precisely where he didn’t expect it to.
“I think,” he says, “that you waited twenty years without being asked to, which is either profound love or profound stubbornness, and that in a male those two things are usually the same thing.”
He steps to the edge of the platform. “We leave now. Stay close on the southern crossing — the sea thermals shift without warning this time of year and I won’t stop to look for you if you fall behind.”
“Encouraging,” I say.
“It’s meant to be informative.”
He shifts — the transformation rolling through him like a tide, human form giving way to the ancient black dragon that Thauglor actually is, enormous and absolute and carrying the particular weight of something that has been alive long enough to have stopped trying to seem less than it is.
I shift beside him, my silver-iron drake considerably smaller but no less real for it.
My scales catch the dawn light and throw it back in ripples of grey and pewter.
I flex my wings once, checking the air, and feel the cold southern currents move through the membrane.
Thauglor launches without ceremony and I follow.
We don’t speak much in the air, which surprises me at first. I’d expected the journey to be a briefing, Thauglor using the hours to load me with information about Therun’s court and gold dragon customs and everything I’d need to know before we landed.
Instead he flies and I fly beside him and the sea passes below us in long grey swells and the silence is the kind that doesn’t require filling.
I find myself watching the southern view instead — the continent shrinking behind us and the open water expanding ahead, the horizon dissolving into a haze that makes it impossible to tell exactly where sky becomes sea.
The scale of it is something I forget when I’m inside Blackhaven’s corridors or the academy’s stone rooms. How much world there is. How much of it I’ve never touched.
Raven is doing this in the other direction right now.
East, toward the Eastern Isles, with Mina beside her.
Two missions running parallel, the same thread pulling both of them — build the alliance before the six months close.
I don’t like that she’s going somewhere I can’t follow.
I understand it completely and I don’t like it at all.
Thauglor banks slightly to the right and I adjust to match him. Below us something large and dark moves through the deep water — a whale maybe, or something older. It doesn’t surface. The sea keeps its secrets.
“She briefed you before you left,” Thauglor says without preamble, the wind carrying his voice clearly despite the distance between our wingspans.