13. Solaris #2
It is not a small thing to write. It means killing Amadeus is not a matter of finding a body or cutting down a host. It means ending the whole net — every cursed egg, everywhere, all at once, or else one after another while keeping him from making more.
The first way requires knowing where every egg lies, which we do not.
The second requires holding back his reach into mage-blooded men long enough to close each shell in turn, which means either ending every host or finding some way to cut what he has become away from what holds him.
Cassius. Eleven years of study. The reason the night boats failed.
So I write: I believe Queen Giselle's mate may hold something we need.
His work on why Amadeus wants omega males may have shown him how a scattered thing stays one thing.
The Eastern Isles visit should include a long conversation with Cassius before anything else is decided.
I underline before anything else. She will understand.
At the top I write: Read this when you have time to think. Not before a class, not before a council. She will understand that too.
I seal it with the fold she taught me — four folds, in order, the corners squared — and set it on the desk where it will wait for her weekend visit.
Then I put on my coat and go outside.
? ? ?
Nova is in the lower flight field.
Hemlocke's voice carries from the direction of the stables, which means she removed herself from his care sometime in the last hour and has been pursuing business of her own, which is entirely in character.
She stands at the far edge of the field on her two human legs, wings half open in the autumn wind, her face turned up to the sky with the look she wears when something has her whole interest.
She hears me coming. She has her mother's ears.
"Solaris," she says, without looking down. Not a greeting. She is telling me she knows I'm here and intends to keep looking at the sky.
"What are you looking at, wee one?"
"Wind." She opens her wings a fraction wider. The autumn air catches the membrane and she corrects for it without thinking, the way a body does when it already half knows what wings are for. "It goes up here."
"Aye. It's the mountain. The stone warms the air and the warm air climbs."
She turns that over. I can watch her do it — the small drawing-together of her brow, the stillness that means a thing is being put somewhere rather than thrown away. She has her mother's memory too. She will ask me about it again in three days, having worked the whole of it out in between.
"Can we fly?"
"Not today, wee one. Your wings want more time before they're ready for a climb like that."
She considers this with the grave care of a hatchling too young to argue well and old enough to know that not arguing is sometimes the cleverer road. "When?"
"Soon." I crouch to her level, and she turns to look at me with those mismatched eyes, amber in both and the half-moon of sapphire in the left catching the afternoon and throwing it back at me like a small fierce star. "Tell me what it feels like."
She looks at her wings. Thinks. "Like pulling," she says. "The wind pulls."
"Aye. That pull is the whole of it. You'll learn to pull back."
She looks at the sky again and opens her wings to their full small span, and the rising air catches them and lifts her heels a hair off the ground. Not flight. The edge of it. She makes a sound that isn't quite a word and isn't quite a rumble. Something between.
I shift.
The change takes me from crouching man to old wyrm in the time it takes the wind to gust and settle.
I try to be careful about coming down — a great wyrm landing in a field tends to leave the field remembering it — but I get low and fold myself down until I am more a feature of the land than a danger, my head resting on my forelegs, one wing stretched out like an invitation.
Nova stares at me.
Then she runs at me with both arms wide and both wings beating, hits my foreleg, bounces off it, and starts climbing with the cheerful conviction of a creature who has decided the mountain is climbable and is right about it.
She finds her grip on the ridges of my scales and goes hand over hand, her wings helping with small enthusiastic beats that lift nothing at all and are plainly practice.
She reaches my shoulder. Then, hand over hand along the ridge of my neck, she works her way forward to the broad flat place between my horns, which she decided some while ago and entirely on her own is where she belongs when I wear this shape.
She sits.
She wraps both small hands around the base of my left horn and turns her face into the wind my wings make when I beat them once, slowly, building her the very thing she was studying.
"Solaris," she says, into the wind.
"Aye."
"Again."
I beat my wings again. She leans forward into it. The pull takes her wings and lifts her a fraction — that same not-quite-flying from the field, but larger now, stronger, made by something heavy enough to move real air.
She makes the sound again. Not a word, not a rumble. Something between. Something that might, with years and practice, become a roar.
I hold very still while she finds out what wind feels like when it means it.
In my chest, between the cold weight of what I found in the archive this morning and the particular warmth that is only ever Nova, there is a place that holds both at once.
This is not, I have decided, a contradiction.
It is only what it is to be alive in a complicated world with people you love in it.
I beat my wings again.
She leans in.
Soon.