Chapter 35.
The rest of the morning filled itself.
Varrin walked away. The squad followed in small clusters — Noira and Tavira together, Bran already halfway to the exit, Seth with a notebook that had appeared from somewhere.
Kellen glanced back. Not at her specifically, just back — the look of someone scanning the space before he leaves.
His eyes moved over her without stopping.
Milla walked past her without slowing.
She stayed where she was beside Virvolior.
His scales were warm from the flying, the depth of his heat reaching through her glove.
The formation had held for six passes. She'd kept the gap on five of them and corrected on one.
Varrin had said fourth position is yours and then turned and walked away, and that was that.
They saw it, Virvolior said.
I know.
None of them said anything.
I know that too.
She looked at the sky above the field — pale and clear and too wide to hold. Below, the sound of the squad's footsteps had already faded toward the barracks path. She let it go.
She had leathers to check. She did that.
~
The afternoon session started at two.
It was for the full Claw Section of Second Wing — not just Third Squad — and she filed in with the others in the familiar geometry of people who weren't walking beside her but weren't deliberately avoiding her either.
She'd learned to tell the difference. Deliberate was a choice; this was habit.
Habit was better than choice. Habit changed on its own.
Instructor Hadden ran them through parry drills.
Two rows, facing each other, the whole section.
She was placed in the second row, opposite someone from another squad whose name she knew but had never spoken to — a girl with a dark braid and the kind of movement that came from having done an exercise so many times the body did it without the head.
They came at her. She blocked. They came back.
That lasted an hour.
At the end, Hadden walked the rows and stopped in front of her. She waited.
"Reaction time is good," he said. "Keep your elbow closer on the backward block."
That was all.
She nodded. He moved on.
After that, she had the training room to clean.
Not the floor — that had been done before the session.
But the racks, the sparring bands the section had used and left draped over a corner with the particular carelessness of people who knew someone else would deal with it, the brackets left with tension still on them.
She did it methodically and quickly, because she'd learned it in Rathmere and she'd learned it here and a rack was a rack.
Bran walked past the doorway while she was working. He looked. She looked back. He kept walking.
She was done in twenty minutes. She washed her hands and went to the mess.
~
She sat at the end of a bench by the far window, the quiet side of the hall, with a bowl of soup and a piece of bread. Most people had eaten earlier or were clustered toward the noisier centre. She worked through the soup and didn't look at the table where Third Squad usually sat.
She'd looked once. That was enough.
Noira was saying something to Tavira. Bran had his feet up on the bench across from him. Kellen was eating with the focused efficiency of someone who had somewhere to be. None of them were looking her way.
She turned back to her soup.
It wasn't that she'd expected anything. She hadn't — she knew how the squad worked, knew what a few weeks in actually meant, knew that fourth position was Varrin's assessment and not an invitation. She hadn't expected anything.
She just hadn't quite prepared for how it would feel to have flown that well, to have held a formation beside people for six passes in the cold morning air, and to walk into the mess hall afterward and be as invisible as she'd been the day she arrived.
She ate the bread. It was fine bread. That was something.
You're quiet, Daennia said.
I'm always quiet.
You're quieter than usual. A pause, warm at the edges. The formation was beautiful, you know. From above.
She looked at the window. You were watching?
We are always watching, Giollis said. Virvolior was insufferably pleased, we could feel it.
I was appropriately pleased, Virvolior said, at a remove that suggested he had been listening the whole time and had simply been waiting for an opening. There is a distinction.
She exhaled — something that wasn't quite a smile.
Aeliana. Daennia's voice was careful, the way it was when she was choosing words rather than just offering them. We want to ask you something.
She set down the bread. Alright.
Tonight — Daennia paused. We would like you to fly with us. On us. If you're willing.
She went still.
It wasn't a small thing. She understood that — had understood it since the beginning, when Giollis and Daennia had come to her and the bond had formed and Virvolior had explained, in his measured way,
that three was not common and that it would take time for all of it to become what it was meant to be.
They had been present since then, voices at the edges of her days, watching and occasionally speaking and always there. But they hadn't asked this. Not once.
Tonight, she said.
The sky is clear, Giollis said. The thermals will be different in the dark. Interesting, I think, from a technical standpoint. A pause, and then, with the particular precision of someone choosing not to hide something: And we think you could use it.
She looked at the table. At the soup, nearly finished. At the far corner of the mess hall where Third Squad sat without looking at her.
I've never — she started.
We know, Daennia said. That's why we're asking properly.
She turned it over. The cold outside would be sharp. She had Garrick in the morning. She had no reason at all that was actually a reason.
Alright, she said.
The warmth that came back through the bond from Daennia's side was quiet but unmistakable.
Good, Giollis said. And there was something in his voice — careful and dry and very slightly pleased with himself — that she suspected had less to do with the thermals than he was letting on.
She finished her soup. She went to put on her flight leathers.
~
They were waiting for her at the far end of the launch ledge.
All three of them.
Virvolior stood slightly apart, the way he always did — present but unhurried, his white scales catching the torchlight and doing something strange with it, softening it, as though the light was glad to land on him.
Giollis was to his left: taller, leaner, the lavender along his shoulders barely visible in the dark but there, a faint shiver of colour like moonlight moving over water.
And Daennia beside him, broader through the chest, her matte scales absorbing the torchlight rather than giving it back, the gold veining along her wings catching it instead in thin, intricate lines.
Aeliana stopped a few paces away.
She'd stood beside them before. She'd touched them, spoken to them through the bond, learned their voices and their silences.
But she'd never stood in front of them like this, with her flight leathers on and the launch ledge stretching out behind them and the clear cold night beyond it, and felt the full weight of what was being offered.
You don't have to decide anything, Daennia said. Her voice was the same as it always was: warm, unhurried, the kind of patience that had nothing to prove. Just come.
She walked forward.
She went to Daennia first. It felt right — something in the shape of the invitation, in the warmth that had always lived at the edges of Daennia's presence in the bond.
She stopped at her shoulder and looked up at the broad expanse of her back, the gold-veined wings folded close against her sides.
Different from Virvolior. The architecture of her was different: broader set, the spine lower and wider, the seat not where she would have reached for by instinct.
She figured it out. She always figured it out.
Ready, Aeliana said.
When you are, Daennia said.
She mounted.
The first thing she noticed was the warmth.
Virvolior ran warm beneath her, she'd learned that early, but Daennia's warmth was different in quality.
Deeper. Less like heat and more like being held.
She felt it through her knees, through her palms where she'd braced against her scales, a steady radiance that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the particular fact of this dragon.
Then Daennia moved.
The wingbeats were slower than Virvolior's — longer, more deliberate, each one a full commitment of weight and power.
Where Virvolior launched with a kind of controlled precision, barely displacing the air around him, Daennia's wings caught it completely, pushed against it, drove upward in a surge that Aeliana felt in her whole body.
She leaned into it without thinking, adjusted her weight back at the top of the climb, and then they were up — properly up, the cold rushing in on every side and the launch ledge already far below.
She breathed.
Daennia banked left, the movement wide and smooth.
She followed it, leaning into the turn, and the world tilted — the quadrant below them lit in the moonlight, the mountains beyond them enormous and dark against the stars.
Virvolior came up on her right, his white scales almost luminous in the dark, his pace matched to Daennia's without apparent effort.
How does she feel? Virvolior asked. There was something in the question she couldn't quite name — not territorial, not possessive, just attentive. The way he paid attention to everything she did.
She thought about it. Wide, she said. She feels wide.
Good wide or—
Good wide.
Daennia made a low sound that wasn't quite words — something that vibrated through the bond rather than arriving in it, warm and pleased.
They flew two full circuits of the upper ridge.
Aeliana learned the rhythm of her: the long beat, the brief pause at the top of the stroke, the way the descent came smoother than the climb.