16. Raven
Raven
Therun studies me a long while before he speaks.
It doesn't bother me. I've been studied by things considerably more frightening than an old gold dragon, and I've learned that the quality of a person's attention during a silence tells you more than whatever he says at the end of it.
What Therun's tells me is this: thorough, unhurried, genuinely curious rather than performing curiosity, and carrying the weight of someone who has been making decisions that matter for three centuries and has made enough wrong ones to take his time over the right ones.
Solaris is on my left. Finlay is on my right.
Both hold a stillness that isn't the stillness of men waiting.
It's the stillness of men already working, even when the working looks like nothing at all.
Solaris has been watching Therun since he sat down with the calm of a great wyrm who has known creatures this old and isn't unsettled by them.
Finlay has been looking at the table with the inward expression he wears when he's setting what he's hearing against what he already knows.
Therun's four metallic guards stand at the hall's four corners, covering every door, leaving no blind angle.
He came prepared. I don't react, because the same is true of my own hall: Keir's pack has been sweeping the approaches since before dawn, and two of the hounds are phased near the platform in case this meeting needs an answer in a hurry.
Across the table, Mom's familiar holds both projections steady in the window alcove — Mom's own face relayed from Sovereign, Klauth's from the capital.
Iris has been extending her range since the spring, and she's carrying two at once now without visible strain, which means she's been practicing between nests. I'll ask her about it later.
"You're bigger than your mother," Therun says at last.
From the projection, Mom laughs — full and unguarded, the laugh she gives when something is actually funny rather than merely amusing. It's a good sound. I've been working to hear it more often.
"So I've been told," I say.
"I know Mina Ragnar by reputation." Therun turns toward the projection with the inclined head he'd offer any formidable dragoness. "She was formidable when she founded the Sovereign nest. I imagine she's more so now."
"She submitted dominance to her daughter last year," Mom says, the laughter still in her voice. "I have thoughts about that decision."
"No you don't," I say.
"No I don't," she agrees.
Therun looks between us, and something in his face settles — the settling of a man who has just learned something about the shape of a relationship that no briefing would have given him. He turns back to me.
"Tell me about Magnus," he says. "Not what the reports say. What you know."
? ? ?
I tell him.
I give him the whole of it. The fire drake watch on the western border, eight scents when Keir first counted them and twelve at his last. The four planted students at the academy, where we first thought three.
Anipe in the administrative wing, half her attention on the corridor, never quite meeting my eyes.
Samara in the archive during Balor's night exercise, photographing the founding Purge documents, hunting for what the original language allowed that the current version may not.
The alliance between Magnus and Amadeus's men, no longer tucked away in the eastern wing but sitting openly in the throne room.
Then the deeper layer. Solaris's blood-memory, three weeks of careful work, and the picture of Amadeus that comes clear once you line the layers up.
Not a dead mage. A man who gave up his body more than a thousand years ago to fuel a binding so large it needed a fire burning inside it, and who built that binding to keep his own self intact within the net instead of ending with the flesh.
Scattered. No single body to kill. Survivable only by breaking every egg at once, or by cutting the net off from the mage-blooded men it reaches through.
"You've confirmed this out of the ancestral record," Therun says. Not skeptical. Weighing the source.
"Solaris was one of Amadeus's first," I say. "He knows the working's signature because he was inside it. His account isn't history. It's memory."
Therun is quiet a moment. He looks at Solaris, who holds the look with the patience of a dragon who has had a thousand years to make peace with what was done to him and has mostly managed it.
"How many eggs remain?" Therun asks.
"We don't know. Three destroyed in the last two years that we're certain of. How many exist, or where, we have no idea. Cassius has eleven years of work on this. It's the main reason I have to get back to the Eastern Isles."
"Before the Purge," Therun says.
"The academy calendar gives me a window in two weeks. I intend to use it."
He nods and drinks from his cup. He's been listening twenty minutes and hasn't asked a single question designed to display what he already knows rather than learn what I do, which is rarer than it should be in rooms full of powerful creatures.
"I know of Cassius," Therun says.
I look at him.
"An omega male mage. He came to my court about eight years before he vanished from the records, carrying word about the omega males being moved out of Magnus's territories — which families were being pressed, through which offices, and what paperwork was being used to cover it.
" He sets the cup down. "He knew things he had no business knowing.
He'd already been at it for years before he ever reached me.
I tried to keep the thread. He went quiet, and when I went looking I found nothing. "
"He went to the Eastern Isles."
"Clearly." Something moves behind his face — the long weight of a search that never closed. "If he has spent eleven years on this one question, what he carries may be the most complete account anywhere of how the net holds together and how it can be broken."
"Which is exactly why Amadeus sent boats for him."
"Yes." He meets my eyes. "Reach him before Amadeus finds another way to."
Then: "There's something else you should know. It concerns the omega males Magnus has been trying to take off the Eastern Isles."
"Three of them," I say. "Giselle told me."
"I know who they were." He holds my gaze.
"They weren't chosen at random. Two had shown early signs of very strong mage-blood.
The third was the son of a mage council member who defected out of Magnus's territories six years ago.
" A pause. "Magnus — or Amadeus — is building something that needs omega males with strong blood in them.
The net needs mage-blooded men to hold what he became.
And if what he became is thinning as the eggs are broken one by one—"
"He needs stronger ones to hold it," Finlay says from my right. His voice goes level and careful the way it does when something has just confirmed a thing he'd been hoping was wrong. "Strong enough blood could carry more of him without fraying."
The room goes quiet.
"Cassius," Mom says from the projection. Quietly. Understanding it.
"Cassius is an omega male mage," I say. "With eleven years of studying exactly this."
"And Amadeus knows he exists." Klauth's voice through Iris carries the flatness of a man who has followed the line to its end and dislikes where it goes. "The night boats weren't a general sweep. They were sent for him."
The candles burn. Outside, the mountain does what mountains do.
"I need to go back to the Eastern Isles," I say. "Soon."
"Yes," Therun says. "You do."
? ? ?
The pledge comes in larger than the shape Corvus described.
A hundred and eight of Davan's own pack, and forty-two more out of the others, who asked to come after word of the first discussions reached them.
A hundred and fifty wolf trackers in all, under Davan's command.
And twelve grown metallic fighters out of Therun's own wing.
Therun mentions the extra forty-two the way a man mentions the weather.
It isn't weather. Wolves don't ask to join somebody else's war unless a pack-lord they trust has already made up his mind where he's going.
The terms are clean: they answer to me directly, not to Klauth or Thauglor or anyone else in the Marzana structure.
Therun says so without apologizing for it and I accept without conditions, because it's the right structure.
A pledged force that answers to a chain above the dragoness they've pledged to is a liability in any fight that moves fast.
Klauth has something to say about that. I can hear it in the shape of his silence through Iris's projection — the silence of a man who holds a view and is deciding whether this is the room for it.
He decides it isn't. I'll raise it with him later, in private, where he can be blunt and so can I and we can end up somewhere neither of us started.
Then I welcome Therun's people formally into the Blackhaven flight.
The full declaration, in the words the Marzana line has used for this since it began.
What the words mean is: you are of this flight now, your safety is mine to guarantee, your honor is mine to keep.
Not merely allied. Not attached for a season.
It is a binding of a kind that carries weight.
Davan has been at the edge of the hall since we sat down. When I finish speaking, he moves. He crosses to the table, and not to a chair — to the floor beside mine, where he settles with the unhurried certainty of something that has made a decision and is beginning to live inside it.
The metallic guards at the corners straighten a fraction. Recognition. Their pack-lord has placed himself.
Therun watches it happen. "He chose you before I pledged him."
"I'll try to be worth it."
"You already are." He says it plainly. "Or he wouldn't be sitting there."
? ? ?
After.