16. Raven #2
The table is cleared. Mom and Klauth have gone from Iris's projection. Solaris and Finlay have withdrawn to the far end of the hall to give the meeting its closing room. It's Therun and me and candles burning low, the flowers still holding their color in the warm light.
"I'd like to see your daughter," Therun says.
I look at him a moment, reading his face for what sits behind the asking, and what I find is honest. Curiosity, but the kind that wishes its subject well.
Old creatures aren't always good with young ones.
Some of them, the ones who have lived long enough to lose nearly everything to time, find youth hard to look at. Therun doesn't look like that.
"All right."
Nova arrives the way she always arrives when she's been told someone is coming and has been made to wait — at a controlled trot that is not quite a run, her own compromise between the dignity she has been told to have and the urgency she actually feels.
She stops in the doorway and looks at Therun. He looks at her.
She's carrying her obsidian and burnt-orange coloring in human form today, scales showing along her arms and shoulders, which means her dragoness is close to the surface and paying attention.
Her mismatched eyes settle on him with the careful assessment of a hatchling who has learned that large unfamiliar creatures want evaluating before anything else happens.
Therun crouches.
A three-hundred-year-old gold dragon lowering himself to the height of a two-year-old is its own thing to watch. Unhurried. Deliberate. The gesture of someone who understands that size is a fact and what you do with it in front of something small is a choice.
He says something in Old Dragon.
The language is ancient, older than the common tongue by centuries, kept now for formal declarations and very old ceremony and by creatures old enough to have spoken it when it was simply how you talked.
I know perhaps thirty phrases of it. Finlay knows more.
Solaris speaks it as a first language, and Therun speaks it the same way — not for ceremony, but as something still living in his mouth.
What he says, as near as I can follow, is a greeting and a question. Something about what she sees when she looks at the mountain.
Nova is quiet a long moment. Her head tilts, the particular tilt she gives when she's reaching for something, which Solaris tells me is what blood-memory looks like in a hatchling. Not searching. Closer to listening.
Then she answers.
Her Old Dragon comes in pieces. She finds the words in stages, pausing the way you pause reaching for a shape that's nearly there, working from a grammar no living person has taught her.
But the grammar is right. The words are correctly built.
And the answer, in a two-year-old's small vocabulary, is a real answer to what he asked.
She says the mountain is home. Then one more word I don't quite catch, which might mean safe and might mean whole.
Therun looks up at me. "Where did she learn that?"
"She was born knowing it."
He looks at Nova a long moment. She looks back with the patient confidence of someone who has said the correct thing and is waiting for the next part.
Then he does something I don't expect: he reaches into an inner pocket and brings out a small disc of gold, worn smooth, very old, and holds it out flat on his palm.
Nova looks at the disc. Looks at him. Then takes it, carefully, with both hands.
"A gift, in the old way," Therun says, to me. "When you meet a hatchling carrying ancestral speech in the blood, tradition says you give her something that has been spoken over. Something that holds weight."
I don't know what to say to that, so I let the quiet be what it is.
"She was born knowing it," Therun says again, more quietly.
Not a question. Something else — the weight of a piece dropping into a pattern he has been working a long time.
"I suspected. When Corvus described her eyes.
The sapphire marking inside the amber. That pairing has a precedent in the Old Dragon bloodline records.
I wanted to know whether the speech had come with it. "
"And now?"
"Now I know more than I suspected." He meets my eyes. "I'll send you the records. The precedent matters. It changes what she is and what she'll become, and you should understand it before anyone else does."
"Tell me now."
"I don't hand over half a thing," he says. "When I have all of it, so will you."
He says something else in Old Dragon to Nova. She tilts her head, considers, and answers in two words.
Therun stands. He turns to me with an expression I still can't read all the way down — recognition, and something more careful under it, and under both of those something that looks, on a three-century-old king, remarkably like wonder.
"I'll come myself," he says. "When war is declared. Not only the trackers and the fighters. Myself."
I hold his gaze. "I'll hold you to it."
"I expect you to." He looks at Nova once more. She has found the disc entirely absorbing, turning it over, studying the faded markings. Therun makes the sound that might be a laugh. "Keep her safe."
"That isn't negotiable."
"No," he agrees. "I didn't think it was."
He takes his leave. The metallics and Davan and the six wolves gather at the platform. He shifts and launches into the afternoon, the gold of him catching the mountain light and throwing it back until the air around him looks briefly like something that has never existed in ordinary daylight.
Nova watches him go.
"Old," she says, in the common tongue.
"Very," I agree.
"Nice," she says.
I crouch down beside her and we watch the gold shape shrink toward the southern sky, and I think about Old Dragon in a hatchling's mouth, arriving with no one having put it there, and what it means that Therun heard it and his face did what it did.
I file it next to everything else.
The light is going amber when I pick her up and carry her inside.