47. Solaris
Solaris
Nova turns two at the height of summer.
I have been alive twelve hundred years and more, and I have learned that most turnings of the season don't matter the way we pretend they matter.
A year is a human measure. To a great wyrm it is a single breath in a very long breathing.
Inside Amadeus's binding a year meant nothing at all — there was only the dark, and the net, and the slow erosion of any sense that time moved rather than simply was.
I don't speak of the binding often, and I won't linger in it now, on this day of all days. But it is worth setting down plainly, once, so that what comes after can be understood against it.
A thousand years. Not two centuries, not five.
A thousand, the full round terrible weight of it, longer than most kingdoms stand.
No up and no down, no wing, no wind, no weight of my own body to tell me I still had one.
Only the hum of the net holding me, patient and endless, and the horror of a mind built to remember everything being given nothing new to remember for ten centuries.
I forgot what light was for. Not what it looked like — what it was for, the way you forget that warmth is a thing the body reaches toward until something warm is laid against you and the reaching starts up again on its own.
I had two hundred and fifty years of life before the dark took me, and I have had a little over three since it let me go. Set beside the thousand in between, those two free spans are small: a bright morning on either side of an endless night.
And yet the three years weigh more than the thousand.
That is what this day makes plain. It isn't the length of a time that gives it weight. It's what the time holds.
So I know, better than almost anyone alive, what a year is and what it isn't. And I am telling you that this one matters.
Nova turning two matters to me in a way that has nothing to do with the calendar and everything to do with the fact of her — that she exists, that she is here, that I get to watch her turn two.
It is a sentence I could not have formed inside the dark, when I did not know she would exist and did not believe I would be released to meet her if she did.
I hold it the way I hold most large things now. Quietly, with the clarity of an ancient mind that has had a great deal of time to watch itself.
? ? ?
The mountain is at its best today, as though it has decided to attend.
High summer at Blackhaven is a brief and generous thing.
For most of the year the peak keeps its snow and the wind comes off it with an edge, but for these few weeks the meltwater runs down the eastern face in thin bright threads, the lower slopes go green and stay green, and the stone of the keep holds the day's heat long into the evening.
A hand laid flat against the outer wall at dusk gets the warmth given back to it like a living thing.
The light is different in summer too — longer, gold rather than silver, pooling in the courtyard and lying along the flight field long after it has gone from the valleys below.
I have been free a little over three years, and I have not yet let a warm day pass unremarked, and I don't expect I ever will. That is another thing the dark gave me. A thousand years without a single warm afternoon teaches you not to waste one when it comes.
The birthday itself isn't elaborate. Nova is two, and two doesn't require elaborate. Two requires the people she loves in one place, something sweet, and permission to stay up past the hour she usually goes to sleep. We give her all three.
The nest is here. Corvus has made the honey cake Nova has decided, across this past year, is the finest substance in the world, and he made it without a word about the fact that she requested it eleven separate times in the week beforehand, because he understands that the requesting was part of the wanting.
The smell of it reaches all the way to the flight field while it bakes, honey and warm butter on the summer air, and Nova stops mid-chase three times to lift her face to it, the way a small creature turns toward the thing it loves.
Hemlocke has brought the foal to the lower field, which she has been asking for over a month, and the two young things regard each other with mutual grave interest. The foal's ears forward. Nova's small hand held out flat and patient the way Hemlocke taught her. Neither of them in any hurry at all.
Keir spends the afternoon letting Nova chase him across the field.
He blinks short distances, just far enough that she has to work for it, and she shrieks with the delight of a child who knows she is being allowed to win and does not care, because the chasing is the point.
Twice she nearly catches him, and he lets the near miss stand a heartbeat too long, so that for that heartbeat she believes she has done it, and the sound she makes is one I would have crossed the whole thousand years to hear.
Finlay tells her a story. He doesn't often, which is part of why it lands — an old one, from before the continent had the name it has now.
Nova listens with the whole of her attention, the kind she saves for things she has decided are important, the honey cake abandoned on her plate until he has finished.
And Raven watches all of it.
I watch Raven watch it. This has become one of the great pleasures of my life — not only watching Nova, but watching Raven watch Nova, the careful pride she won't fully show and can't fully hide.
She is twenty-three, and she has spent this year becoming something the continent will spend the next several decades adjusting to.
But on her daughter's second birthday she isn't the heir apparent or the dominant dragoness or the architect of the war that's coming.
She stands at the edge of the flight field in the gold end-of-day light with her arms loose at her sides and her wings half-furled and easy, and she is only a mother watching her child be delighted.
The watching has undone something in her face that the council rooms never reach.
I love her. I want to be clear about that, in an account that is mostly about the child.
I was released by her bond, and the release was the return of my life to me, and I have never once mistaken the size of that.
But what I feel watching her isn't the debt of the released to the one who freed him. It's the plainer, larger thing.
She made this. Not only Nova — this. The nest, the warmth, the field full of people who love a two-year-old enough to spend a whole gold afternoon being chased across it.
She built the place where it could happen, and she did it while running everything else, and she does not appear to know that this is remarkable, which is part of why it is.
? ? ?
In the evening, Nova asks me why I go quiet.
She climbs into my lap on the long seat in the last hour before sleep takes her, warm and heavy and slowing down, smelling of honey cake and summer grass and the outside cold she carried in when the light finally went.
She has been watching me all day with the sidelong attention she gives to things she is working out, and now she has arrived at the question.
"You go quiet," she says. "When I fly. You get a quiet face."
I consider how to answer honestly to a two-year-old.
It's a thing I have decided about how I speak to her: I won't give her the easy false version because she is small.
She notices more than the people around her assume, and she will remember what she is told, and I would rather she remember the truth in a shape she can hold than a comfortable thing she will later have to unlearn.
"I get quiet because I am very happy," I say. "And sometimes, when a feeling is very big, it comes out as quiet instead of loud."
"Happy is a big feeling," she says, with the seriousness she brings to important information.
"It's one of the biggest."
"Bigger than sad?"
I think about this, because she deserves a real answer. "The same size, I think. They're the two biggest. But I have had a great deal of sad in my life, and now I am having the happy, and the happy is very big because it came after so much of the other thing."
She looks at me. She is two, and she doesn't have the words for the thing she is understanding, but she is understanding it. I can see it move across her face the way it moves across Raven's, the family resemblance sitting in the very machinery of thought.
"It's okay to be quiet-happy," she tells me. Firmly. As though granting permission.
Something happens in my chest that I don't have a good word for, even after twelve hundred years of gathering words. This small creature, two years old today, has looked at the largest and most complicated thing in me, named it in four words, and given me leave to feel it.
"Thank you," I say. "I'll remember that."
She nods, satisfied, and settles further into me, and for a few minutes she is heavy and nearly gone.
Then she stirs, slides down off my lap, and crosses the room to Hemlocke at the window, and holds up both arms without saying anything at all. He lifts her. She is asleep against his collar before he has finished sitting down.
Two-year-olds choose where they finish. I let her choose.
? ? ?
Wyrms remember differently from the rest of you.
Hemlocke keeps his own life and little more, and he has told me he finds that sufficient.
What I carry is the whole line — not only my own centuries but fragments of the thousands before me, the long chain of the MacLeod wyrms reaching back past the point where the names dissolve into the general dark of ancient time.
For a wyrm the remembering is a choice. A thing done on purpose, reaching back along the line to hold what came before.
I am doing it now, across the fire, while Hemlocke holds my daughter.
She went down an hour ago, all at once, one small fist knotted in his collar, and he hasn't moved since.
A tender thing settles into a particular stillness when it trusts the hands holding it, and Hemlocke has spent his life learning not to break that.
So he sits with the warm weight of her, and I sit with the line, and neither of us disturbs the other.
The two hundred and fifty years before the binding are still mine.
I remember them as clearly as anyone remembers a whole life, and they belong to me the way a stranger's life does — an old man looking at the boy who used to wear his name and finding someone else there.
Then the thousand years inside it, which I remember the way you remember a long illness, the slow forgetting of what light was even for.
And then the release, and Raven, and Blackhaven, and these three bright years.
Inside the binding I had a single division to organize myself around. There was before, and there was now, and before was a life I grew less sure had ever been real. Two poles, and one of them fading.
It has a different shape now — before the binding, and the binding, and since — and it is the since that holds me.
Three years, the smallest span of the three by an enormous distance, and it is the one I am always turned toward.
Not because it erases the thousand. Because it is the part I would choose again, all of it, the dark included, if the dark were the price of arriving here.
Nova is two, and I have been free a little over three, which means the whole of her life has run inside my freedom. She isn't merely the best thing in my second life. She is very nearly the entire measure of it.
Hemlocke shifts his arm, and she stirs and settles, and I come back from wherever I have been. My eyes find her first. Then they find him.
"I have her," I say. It isn't a question. It is an offer, and a thanks, and a claiming, all in three words, and he hears all three.
He doesn't hand her over the way you hand over a parcel.
He gathers her carefully, the fist unknotting from his collar without waking her, and crosses to me and gives her into my arms the way you give a thing back to the one it belongs to.
I have watched him do that with foals and with frightened horses and once, early on, with me.
It is the truest work there is — tending a thing well and then returning it whole.
She fits against my chest the way she has since the day she was born. Twelve hundred years arrange themselves around the shape of a sleeping two-year-old, and I let them.
I never expected to reach a stretch of life worth a thousand years of dark. I have one now. It is two years old and asleep against my collarbone, and a black unicorn put it there.
That is the other thing I have learned since the release, and I learned it from him.
You cannot argue a creature back into trusting the world.
Nobody talked me into believing in the light again.
Hemlocke kept the room warm and was there every evening and let the trusting rebuild at the speed it rebuilt, and one evening I noticed my body had remembered what warmth was for without my having decided anything at all.
An hour ago my daughter climbed into my lap and asked me why I go quiet when she flies, and I told her the truth, because I always will.
That a very big feeling sometimes comes out as quiet instead of loud.
And she told me, with the flat certainty of a two-year-old handing down a law, that it is all right to be quiet-happy.
I don't say any of the rest of it to her. She's two. But I think it, holding her now while she sleeps — the whole long life of me arriving at last at this small warm weight, which is the reason it was worth continuing.
Hemlocke settles back into his chair and keeps the room warm and lets me have this, because that is what he is for, and there is nowhere in three years or twelve hundred that I would rather be than here.
Happy is a big feeling.
It's the biggest.