5. Rafe
RAFE
MARRY ME, WRITTEN IN SMOKE
The highest point of the manor had always looked, to outsiders, like a helipad.
That was how journalists described it in the occasional profile piece, and how guests described it after their third glass of wine, lowering their voices as though the family fortune might be listening from inside the stone.
They saw it as a practical landing point for helicopters, just another vulgar convenience for people with more money than tact.
They were wrong. At least partially.
My father had it built for my mother.
Not for transport, though it served that purpose often enough. He had built it because when he first brought her home after their marriage, she’d stood at the edge of the roofline and looked out over the hills with a melancholic expression because she missed the sky.
He’d noticed, of course. My father had many deficiencies, but in the matter of loving my mother, he was offensively attentive.
So, he’d built her a place to take off and to land again.
And, in the private mythology that forms inside marriages, he built it for any heirs who might take after her. That was how love worked in this house. It imagined a future, then made room for it.
There had only been me.
And my mother couldn’t use it now.
So the platform remained, broad and pale against the old stone, built first for my mother and now used mostly by me, with the occasional helicopter tolerated only when necessity called for it.
The place still belonged to this family, just not in the way my father had imagined when he built it.
In that version, my mother still tilted her face into the wind.
In that version, grief hadn’t yet moved in and rearranged the furniture.
I stood at the edge of it now and let the cold evening air move over me.
The sky had begun its long descent into color.
The western edge of the horizon was washed in apricot and bruised rose.
Higher up, cool violet thinned into blue so clean it almost looked polished.
The first stars hadn’t yet committed to showing themselves, and the air held that suspended quality it acquired just before night, as though the day were taking one final breath.
I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply.
There was always a moment before I shifted when my body seemed to gather itself around the decision.
A tightening, then an opening. Bone and muscle and heat finding an older shape, one my human form only ever approximated.
It wasn’t pain, exactly. Pain implied injury.
This was something more intimate than that, a rearrangement so complete it felt like truth.
My shoulders widened, my spine lengthening and rolling with the change. Power rippled under my skin.
The world sharpened.
When I opened my eyes again, the platform looked smaller beneath me. The wind slid along the long curve of my body and gathered beneath me. This was something I knew well, the first language my body had ever understood. I stepped forward off the edge.
The drop lasted only a second.
Then the air held me.
Relief moved through me.
Flight had always done that. It stripped everything down too quickly for self-deception. On the ground, I could fake competence, make myself a necessity. In the sky, there was only the fact of being alive inside a vast and beautiful thing. It was humbling in the least charming sense of the word.
The manor receded below me, its slate roofs and long windows becoming mere pinpricks in the landscape, the formal gardens a pattern of green stitches. Beyond them, the grounds opened into dark trees and the silver suggestion of the river. The air cooled, sliding over my scales as I gained height.
My mother had loved dusk flights.
She preferred evenings like this, when the sky looked hand-painted and the world below seemed, briefly, less concerned with ownership and rank and all the other inventions people used to make themselves miserable.
She used to turn slowly just to watch the color shift across her scales.
I still remembered flying beside her as a child, trying and failing to match her ease, my turns too eager, my climbs too sharp.
She would glance over at me with open amusement, then trace one slow, effortless spiral, telling me without words: you’re overdoing it, darling.
And I would immediately overdo it in a different way.
The memory arrived so whole it nearly undid me, so I pushed higher.
Cloud-strands drifted above the valley in faint ribbons, their undersides touched pink by the sinking sun. At this height, the wind had teeth. It passed over my face and into my lungs like ice water, clean enough to hurt.
I stopped thinking. All that existed was altitude, color, and the long muscular stretch of my body across the sky.
I curved east, then back west, climbing until the manor had fallen away behind me and the world below had gone soft with distance.
Roads became threads. Ponds caught the last of the light like held breath.
Gradually, I let myself drift lower to warmer air. I closed my eyes for one reckless second, letting the cold move over me, letting memory do what it always did when I was alone in the sky.
When I opened them, a striped, absurdly cheerful balloon was directly in my path. Close enough that I could make out the wicker basket and the woman already leaning over the side with her phone in her hand.
Swearing, I dropped hard, rolling to the side so sharply the sky snapped sideways around me.
The basket passed near enough for me to hear the burner hiss.
When I righted myself, the woman was waving at me with both hands as though we had arranged this in advance.
She was beaming so widely I could see it even from several yards away.
Her phone was out again in seconds. A man in a blazer stood beside her, one hand braced on the basket.
The other was raised in a gesture universally recognized to mean I’d ruined his evening.
Fuck you too, buddy.
I hovered long enough to stare at him.
He stared back and, with admirable commitment, repeated the gesture.
I might have left it there. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have.
His evening was his own business, and nearly colliding with a dragon during a romantic outing was objectively the sort of adversity that gave a story shape.
But then my vision settled properly on the details I’d missed in the first seconds of avoiding a crash, and I saw the small square of dark velvet clenched in his other hand.
Ah.
That explained the gesture and the blazer. It also explained the woman’s hair, which had been blown into the kind of expensive softness that required either a professional or a rare alignment of weather and genetics.
I circled once, slowing.
The woman gasped and pointed at me, then at the man, then back at me, clearly incapable of choosing which development deserved precedence. The man looked less moved. His mouth had flattened into a tight line now that he realized the universe had assigned him a supporting role in his own proposal.
Something unexpectedly warm stirred in me.
A memory of my mother laughing on the upper terrace when I was perhaps ten, demanding I do the smoke trick again because, in her words, it made me look both majestic and deeply pleased with myself.
I had practiced for a week after that, improving it solely because she asked.
I drew in a breath.
Heat gathered at the back of my throat, bright and immediate.
I held it there until it glowed behind my teeth, then let the fire die before release.
Smoke poured from my mouth in a thick white plume, denser than cloud, obedient for a moment to the angle of my flight.
I banked upward and curved through the sky, writing with the trailing smoke.
MARRY ME?
The words stretched across the evening above them in enormous pale script.
For one suspended second, neither of them moved.
Then the woman gave a shocked, disbelieving cry. Her hands flew to her face. Her phone nearly went over the side of the basket. The man turned and looked up at the words hanging over them, then at me, awe written all over his face.
Having committed to the bit, I decided that half-measures would now be embarrassing.
I dropped beneath the balloon, the basket passing overhead with a soft groan of wicker and burner heat, then pulled sharply upward behind it.
When I rose into view again, I coiled through the air so the man, now kneeling in the basket, had a dragon and a full sunset at his back.
It was excessive and almost certainly invasive.
It was also, however, a remarkable backdrop.
The man turned and blinked at me once as if asking whether I intended to remain.
I gave what I hoped was an encouraging look rather than the expression of a dragon evaluating his time management skills.
To the man’s credit, he recovered quickly and opened the box. Even at a distance, the stone caught the last of the light.
The woman burst into tears.
She bounced on her toes, then threw her arms around his shoulders before he had finished speaking. Laughing into her hair, he rose to his feet. She nodded several times in furious succession, then kissed him with such enthusiasm the basket rocked.
Satisfaction I hadn’t earned moved through me. It was ridiculous that I should feel personally invested in the outcome of a stranger’s proposal, yet I found myself smiling as I turned away and darted through the air.
The sky had darkened while I played accomplice.
The apricot along the horizon had turned amber with tinges of ash blue.
Below, lights had come on in clusters, warm and golden against the land.
The smoke letters would be gone already, whisked away by the wind.
Only the memory of it would remain, sharpened by retelling.
The dragon interrupting, then painting the sky with one of the most important questions a person could ask.