19. Solaris #2
It is high and wild, and what's inside it is the sound of a thing that has waited its whole existence for one moment and has arrived at it.
Pure and complete and entirely her own. A dragon voice that doesn't yet know which register it belongs to and doesn't care, making the most honest sound I have heard in a very long life.
From my left, Raven answers.
Her cry is lower, and it breaks in the middle — the sound of someone who has carried something a long time and is finally, here, setting it down. Her voice and her daughter's over Blackhaven in the morning, different in pitch and identical in meaning.
I add mine.
Below us Thauglor makes the deep vibration I know well, the sound that travels through bone as much as air, the old speech of a wyrm saying I have you. You are safe. I am here. He didn't need to catch her. He was never going to need to. He made the sound anyway.
? ? ?
We fly for an hour.
Nova is inconsistent in all the ways first flight always is.
She finds height and loses it, overcorrects and rights herself, discovers that turning left and turning right want different things from her because the muscle hasn't come in evenly on both sides yet, and learns each answer in the air through her own body.
This is how dragons learn to fly. You cannot teach it in a field. The body has to find it.
She discovers thermals in the seventh minute.
By accident — she flies through the warm air rising off the heated stone and gets fifteen feet of height she wasn't expecting.
It startles her. Her wings fold a little in the flinch.
Then she opens them again and goes looking for the thermal, and finds it, and rides it in a wide turning circle with the fierce concentration of a hatchling who has just learned something new about the world she lives in.
Below me, Raven makes a sound. Not a word. Just a sound, low and involuntary, the sound of a woman watching her daughter understand rising air for the first time and having no language for what it does to her.
Nova finds the thermal four more times in the next twenty minutes.
Each time more deliberately. Each time losing a little less height between finding it and using it.
That is the particular cleverness of her — not only the body learning, but the way she catches the pattern while it's still happening and puts it to work.
She calls out three more times, shorter sounds than the first and pitched differently, finding out what her voice does in the air the way she is finding out what her wings do. Each one distinct. Each one hers.
By the end of the hour there's a roughness at the edge of her wingbeats that tells me the muscle isn't ready for sustained flying yet.
She knows it too. She banks toward Blackhaven without being told, reading her own body correctly, and that reading is a different kind of cleverness again.
She will be a flier who knows her limits before they turn into failures.
She lands on the upper field in a controlled stumble that I choose to call a landing, because she is two years old and has just flown for the first time, and the distinction matters, and it was a landing.
She shifts back and stands in the field in the morning light with grass stains on her knees and her hair wild from the wind, and she looks at me.
"Again," she says.
"Tomorrow."
She considers arguing. She is two years old, she has just flown for the first time, and she is exhausted — and she has her mother's sense for when a position can't be won. "Tomorrow," she agrees.
Raven shifts and crouches to her level and holds out her arms, and Nova crosses the field at speed and hits her like a warm, grass-stained, wind-smelling missile, and Raven catches her and holds her and presses her face into the top of her daughter's head, and closes her eyes.
I stand in the flight field and watch my mate hold our daughter, and I am aware, with the complete clarity of someone who spent a thousand years unable to feel anything at all, that I am standing in the middle of the best thing that has ever happened to me.
A thousand years is a long while to have nothing.
It's a long while to be inside a binding that holds you without killing you, suspended in that particular dark of enforced stillness, aware of time going past and unable to move inside it.
I don't speak of it often. There's no use in living in the shape of a loss that has ended.
But I keep the knowledge of that dark precisely because it is what makes standing in this field, in this autumn light, watching these two, feel like what it is.
Every ordinary thing is extraordinary to a creature that was denied ordinary for long enough.
Thauglor comes to stand beside me.
He's in human form now, having shifted quietly while I was watching the others.
He stands with his arms at his sides in the way that is specifically Thauglor at rest — not relaxed.
Present. Alert the way ancient things are always alert, but not readied for anything.
His sapphire eyes are on his daughter and his granddaughter in the grass.
We say nothing for a long time.
"She'll be faster than either of us," he says eventually. Quietly. Not a boast. An old man making an honest assessment of what he has just watched.
"Yes."
"The rising air at seven minutes."
"I know."
He's quiet again. Then: "When she's old enough to know what she is — what she might be — she'll need people around her who have already come through the kind of thing that will be asked of her. She'll need that in her blood and in the people at her back."
I look at him. "You didn't come only for the flight."
"No," he says. "I came because she needed to see that her grandfather would come without being asked.
That some things are simply given." He looks at Nova, who has fallen asleep against Raven's chest the way hatchlings do when they've spent everything they had.
"The knowing can come later. Being held is the first thing. "
We stand in the field. The autumn sun moves over Blackhaven. The war that is coming is not, for this one morning, the point.