42. Raven
Raven
Nova visits on a Wednesday, and I haven't told the professors.
This isn't an oversight. I considered it and decided against it.
The way a place reacts to something it wasn't warned about tells you things the official reaction never will.
There's a second reason too, less tactical and more true: I have been managing how I exist in this academy for three years, and Nova is mine.
I won't stage her arrival for an audience.
She exists. She's here. The academy can respond to the reality of it.
She arrives mid-morning, in the break between first and second session.
Solaris lands on the upper flight platform in wyrm form, the enormous fact of him making the platform feel briefly smaller than it is, then shifts and picks her up.
Nova landed on her own just ahead of him, which she has decided is a point of pride and not open for discussion.
Xero appears on his shoulder — she settled the question of her own attendance while the travel party was still forming at Blackhaven.
Standard Xero. She goes where she has decided she should be, and the matter of an invitation doesn't strike her as relevant.
The moment Nova sees me she tells me she flew all the way from the big mountain and it was very fast and she did the whole entire mountain part by herself.
I look at Solaris. He confirms, with the expression of a wyrm who is deeply proud and also deeply tired, that she did roughly a third of the mountain part by herself and the rest with help.
"Very fast," I tell her.
She nods with grave dignity, and the day begins.
? ? ?
She shifts in the dining hall at the mid-morning break, which is not the plan.
The plan was to walk her through the Shadowcarve grounds and show her the outdoor spaces before the main population had time to gather.
Nova had other ideas. At two years old she holds strong opinions about plans she wasn't consulted on, and she has decided, with the absolute certainty of someone who knows exactly what she wants, that she'd like to see where Mama eats.
The hall holds about sixty students at that moment, none of whom expected a skull dragon's daughter to come through the door.
She doesn't go all the way — just the controlled shimmer she uses when she wants to make a point.
Wings out to their current full span. Scale showing, obsidian and burnt orange.
The mismatched eyes, amber and half-sapphire, taking the light a little differently than anything else in the room.
She is remarkable, and she fills the space at once and completely.
The dining hall goes quiet. Sixty students, three instructors, and one administrator, every last one of them holding an opinion, and not one of them says a word.
Nova looks back at them. Her gaze travels the room slowly, the way it does anywhere she hasn't been before, deciding what she thinks of it.
Then she looks at me, and I give her the nod.
She makes the flight voice at full volume.
The hall erupts — not in alarm, in the warm noise sixty people make when something extraordinary walks in and they answer it the way people answer extraordinary things.
Someone starts applauding and it spreads.
Nova's face does the thing it does when she has worked out the right response to a situation and is watching it land.
She makes the flight voice again, and the applause gets louder.
She looks at Solaris, who has the composure of a man who has been watching her since before she could walk and accepted long ago that this is simply who she is.
She looks at me. She looks back at the room.
Then she shifts, tucks her wings, and informs the nearest student — a third-year whose name I know and won't put in this account — that the dining hall is acceptable. He receives the information with complete seriousness.
I am not apologizing for any of it.
? ? ?
The afternoon involves explaining Nova to five professors. Not apologizing. Explaining. There's a difference, and I hold it.
The difference is this. I am heir apparent to the Marzana throne, currently in my third year at this institution, and Nova is my daughter and Solaris MacLeod's, next in the Mrithun line.
She will be a fixture here for as long as I am, because that is simply how it works.
The professors who need to understand that will. The ones who don't will learn.
Callan is first, because he has more equanimity than any instructor I've met in three years, and because if anyone is going to have a useful opinion about a hatchling on the grounds during term it's him.
He was one of my more fun nest fathers growing up.
He takes it in with the attention he brings to a Tactics scenario, thinks, and says, "She's going to need a schedule that doesn't run into the main student traffic. "
"I know. I can work up some options."
"I'd appreciate that." He nods and produces a notepad.
This is why I came to him first.
The other four range from delighted to professionally uneasy.
I give each of them the same thing: this is my daughter, she'll be visiting from time to time, she is two years old and will move when she feels like moving, and I intend to welcome her rather than try to control her.
If there are arrangements that make her visits work better, I'm glad to discuss them.
Three of the four respond constructively. The fourth has a great deal of concern about the precedent this sets. I listen to all of it, and I say, "I appreciate you raising this."
I do not change my position.
Nova walks alongside Solaris through all of it with the focused attention she brings to adult conversations she can't follow yet, climbing him to his shoulders now and then for a better view.
He allows this with the calm of a man who has accepted that he is available climbing equipment.
By the fifth professor she has the pattern — adult speaks, Mama listens, adult speaks again, Mama answers, adult's face changes — and she performs a small version of it for Solaris, who receives the performance with complete composure.
We pass Samara's classroom on the way back from the last professor.
The door has been closed since the Purge. The year's review has put the room out of use while the proceedings run, and that will take months. It's just a door. The room behind it is just a room.
And yet.
Nova looks at it and doesn't say anything for a moment. She's looking the way she looks when she's picking up something the adults around her are carrying and nobody has explained to her. She is two years old, and she knows things she has not been told.
"Sad room," she says.
I look at her. "Yes."
"Is the sad room gone?"
I think about what the true answer is, for a two-year-old asking about a room that held someone who tried to kill her mother and is now in custody waiting on judgment. About what gone means, and what I want her to understand about what happened.
"The sad room is gone now," I say. "The person who made it sad is somewhere else."
She looks at the door a moment longer, then at me, then at Solaris, who has been holding her through all of it with the particular stillness she reads as confirmation. When Solaris is still, things are as they should be. She takes it in.
"Okay," she says.
We keep walking.
? ? ?
Evening in the Malivore suite.
Nova has eaten what she considers an acceptable amount of dinner, which is more than I'd have guessed and less than Solaris offered.
She's been here about forty minutes, giving the place the going-over she gives any new space — everything touched, everything examined, everything put through the Nova assessment that ends in approval or measured disapproval with nothing in between.
The desk has been rearranged. Xero's windowsill position has been renegotiated.
The small box from the inner drawer was held, examined, and put back, which is more careful handling than I expected.
She falls asleep between us, which is also not the plan.
The plan was the small nest Solaris brought in his travel pack, the right size for her, set in the corner of the room that holds its warmth best. Nova considered the plan and chose otherwise, and once she has decided a thing like that it is not open to negotiation.
She goes down like a dropped stone. Awake, then entirely gone, the way hatchlings sleep, with nothing gradual about it.
No drowsy stretch, no slow descent. Present, and then deeply asleep — a small creature who has been fully alive all day and is now fully at rest.
Solaris and I look at each other over her.
"She held the box carefully," he says quietly.
"I noticed."
"She knows it matters."
"She knows a lot of things."
He watches her a moment with the expression I've come to understand as his version of wonder, the look of someone who has been alive twelve hundred years and keeps finding things that are new.
"She asked me today what the big mountain's name is.
I told her, and she said it back correctly.
Not approximately. Correctly — the full Old Dragon pronunciation. "
"The ancestral memory."
"Or she is simply extraordinary."
"Both can be true."
We sit in the quiet a while. Nova breathes between us, warm and heavy, all obsidian hair and the faint scale already showing on the backs of her hands — the early edge of what she'll be.
"The war," Solaris says eventually. He sets the word down gently rather than dropping it.
"Yes."
"How long do you think?"
I think about it, and not tactically — that reckoning runs in the background all the time and gives different answers depending on what I weight. I mean how long in the way that matters to the person asleep between us.
"I don't know," I say. "Long enough that she'll understand it when it comes. I want her to understand it when it comes."
"Not be protected from it."
"Not be unprepared for it. Protection that leaves someone unprepared isn't protection. It's delayed exposure. I'd rather she know what things are, in the version she can hold at her age, than be surprised by them at the wrong moment."
"She already knows things we haven't told her," he says.
"I know. The sad room. The way she looked down the administrative corridor this afternoon when we passed the door of Anipe's old office — she didn't say anything, but she looked at it the way she looks at things she has already worked out, as if she got the information somewhere else and came to confirm it in person. "
"Ancestral memory works differently in hatchlings. More porous. More immediate. I don't fully understand it."
"You said that about her Old Dragon too."
"I did. She pronounced the MacLeod territorial marker correctly — the tonal variation that separates the northern line from the southern. It hasn't been in common use for three centuries. She shouldn't know it."
"But she does."
We sit with that. Nova breathes between us, warm and completely gone.
"What do you want her childhood to look like?" I ask. Not the tactical version. The real one.
He's quiet a long moment, the considered kind of quiet he takes when he's reaching for something true rather than something expected.
"I want her to know what she is before anyone else defines it for her," he says finally.
"I want her to walk into a Great Gathering in twenty years as something the room has to adjust to, rather than something adjusting to the room. The way her mother does."
I look at Nova. "She's already adjusting the dining hall."
"Yes." There's something warm in his voice. "She absolutely is."
The academy's evening sounds come in from outside, the rhythm of a large place at rest, the noise it makes when the structured day has ended and the unofficial hours have started.
Nova doesn't move. She sleeps with the completeness of a two-year-old who has had a wonderful day and knows exactly who she is and where she belongs.
For tonight, it's enough.