19. Solaris
Solaris
I know she is ready three days before she knows it herself.
This is what it is to watch a thing grow toward a threshold.
There's a stretch where the ability has arrived and the confidence hasn't, and the space between the two is where a parent must be careful.
Push too early and the confidence never sets properly — it fastens onto somebody else's certainty instead of taking root in the hatchling's own.
Wait too long and the ability starts turning on itself, all that readiness with nowhere to go going anxious instead.
I have been watching Nova six weeks. I know the exact morning her wings came to their full reach, three weeks ago, when she opened them in the flight field and the span was suddenly wider than her body had led me to expect, the membrane taut and even, the leading edge finding the wind without her telling it to.
I know the day she stopped looking down at the edge of the landing rock and started looking out.
I know the morning she began running at the edge instead of walking up to it.
I know today is the day.
She doesn't know it yet. She woke with the same restlessness she's carried all week, ate her breakfast with unusual attention, and has been in the upper flight field since before the sun cleared the eastern peaks.
I've been watching from the corridor doorway without going to her.
Giving her the field to herself a while longer.
She's standing at the landing rock's edge — not looking down, looking at the horizon — her wings half open in the morning wind, the obsidian membrane lit from behind by the low autumn sun and going deep amber where her burnt orange bleeds through.
She is extraordinary.
I have tried not to think that too loudly around Raven, who has complicated feelings about being fair-minded where Nova is concerned, and whom I understand entirely, because you cannot be fair-minded about something you love this much.
But standing here, watching my daughter stand at the edge of the world she is about to walk into, I am not attempting anything of the sort.
I am only seeing her, and she is extraordinary.
? ? ?
Raven came home last night.
She comes every weekend the academy schedule allows, which is more often than she tells the academy it allows.
She runs her own timetable now with the efficiency of a woman who worked out the actual minimum and meets it exactly, keeping the remainder for other things.
She arrived late, smelling of Shadowcarve leather and the cold of the descent, and went straight to Nova's room and sat on the floor beside the small nest where Nova sleeps and stayed an hour before she came to bed.
I didn't ask what she was thinking. She wasn't thinking. She was being present with her daughter in the dark, which is another matter entirely.
This morning she woke before I did, which is rare, and went to the window and looked out at the field where Nova was already standing. She stood there a long while. Then she turned to me and said, very quietly, "Today."
"Yes," I said.
She nodded once. Her face did the thing it does when she's feeling a great deal and deciding how much of it to show. Then she went to dress.
Thauglor arrives at mid-morning.
He comes without announcing himself, which is to say he comes in dragon form, clearing the eastern peak and coming down to the upper flight field with the unhurried gravity of an ancient wyrm who has decided to be somewhere and intends to take his time arriving.
Nova sees him from the rock and her wings snap fully open — instinct, the greeting a hatchling gives an elder she trusts.
Her small shape beside his enormous one, once he's down, looks like the foal beside Titan. Scale made visible.
He shifts to human form and looks at me across the field. I raise my chin. He nods once.
He knew as well. Nobody told him. He simply knew, and came.
Nova shifts at the edge of the landing rock.
The change is a thing I have not stopped marveling at.
The speed of it, first — faster than most hatchlings half again her age.
But more than the speed, the quality of it.
Nova doesn't pass through the awkward middle that most young dragons live in during their early shifts, that brief ungainly moment of being neither shape completely.
She goes straight across. Girl to dragoness in one movement, as though both forms are equally hers and getting from one to the other takes no more thought than turning around.
She is obsidian and burnt orange, the coloring she took from both of us in a combination that has no business working as well as it does — the matte black of her scales broken by deep amber along her wing edges and underbelly, the color moving in the light the way fire moves, one thing at this angle and another at that.
Her mismatched eyes, amber and half-sapphire, read the field with the focus of a hatchling who has been getting ready for this.
She has been getting ready for this. We all know it. She knows it best.
She's already large for her age. Her wingspan, fully open, is wider than Raven's was at six.
I don't tell Raven that. She knows, and it makes feelings in her that are complicated in the way loving something extraordinary is always complicated when you are also the one responsible for keeping it alive.
She goes to the edge of the rock and looks out. Not down. Out.
Beside me, Raven shifts.
This is the part I want to describe and am not certain I can.
Raven shifting is not like watching other dragons shift.
It's the same process, the same body doing the same thing — but what comes out of it holds space differently.
When Raven is in her dragoness, the air around her changes.
Not the temperature of it, not the pressure.
Something further down. The particular quality of a space when a thing built to fill it finally does.
The skull coloring makes it absolute, the bone-white of her face against the matte black of everything else.
She moves to the left of the rock. Below it and slightly back, wings half open, set to catch.
She will not need to catch.
But she sets herself there anyway, because she is Raven, and Raven leaves nothing to chance where her daughter is concerned.
I have watched her take that position beneath Nova's practice glides for six weeks, ready every time, catching nothing because nothing needed catching.
She'll do it as long as Nova is learning.
She'll do it well past that. This is simply who she is.
I shift.
My wyrm form takes up a great deal of room and I am always somewhat conscious of that at Blackhaven, where my size is the exception. But today I shift fully and take the right, opposite Raven, the two of us balanced around the rock where our daughter stands, a loose cradle of presence.
Thauglor shifts below.
He doesn't hover — wyrms don't hover, we're too large for that kind of fineness in the air.
But he moves into the air below the field's edge and holds himself there with the patient power of something that has been doing this for twelve centuries and is entirely prepared to do it for as long as it takes.
His sapphire eyes find Nova on the rock and stay.
Nova looks down for the first time.
She sees her grandfather below her, enormous and steady and calm, and I watch her take it in — the small stilling, the weighing.
She has her mother's eye for danger and her mother's habit of reading a situation instead of reacting to it.
What she reads below her is Thauglor, and Thauglor means I have you. Whatever happens. I have you.
She looks back at the horizon.
She opens her wings all the way. The morning wind takes them and lifts her a little — not flight, the almost-flight she's been practicing for weeks, the push of air against the membrane telling her what her own weight and span already promised.
She is built for this. She has always been built for this.
She looks at me.
I make the low sound. Not the rumble of approval I give her when she's done something well. A different one, older, the sound a parent makes watching a child arrive at a moment that is the right moment, bearing witness and nothing more.
She looks at her mother.
Raven's eyes are very bright. Her jaw is set the way it sets when she's holding something enormous and keeping steady around it.
Nova looks back at the horizon.
And she jumps.
? ? ?
She drops.
Not far. Two seconds, perhaps three, the long kind of seconds that belong to a thing happening that cannot be stopped and does not need stopping and is going to be exactly what it should be.
Her wings open. The wind hits the membrane and she overcorrects — tilts right, wing tips catching unevenly, her small body turning before she works out the answer.
Then she works out the answer.
She catches the air.
Clumsily. Overcorrecting again coming back, losing two feet of height before she steadies. The wing angle is wrong — she's carrying her weight badly, putting too much of it on the leading edge. It'll be weeks before any of this is efficient.
She is flying.
She makes a sound I have never heard before.
In twelve centuries I have heard a great many dragon voices, the whole range of what we make, from the deep rumble of wyrms speaking below anything a human ear can find to the thin shriek of a distressed hatchling and every note between.
I know dragon voice the way Finlay knows written language, by its pieces and its structures and what it carries.
Nova's first flight sound is none of them.