Chapter 35. #2
She learned where to distribute her weight on the wider spine, how Daennia telegraphed turns in the set of her shoulders a half-second before they happened.
By the second circuit she'd stopped compensating and started flying.
They came back to the ledge on a long slow descent, the air rushing past them clean and cold and very dark, and when Daennia's claws met stone it was with the unhurried certainty of something that had landed a thousand times and intended to land a thousand more.
Aeliana sat there for a moment before dismounting.
Thank you, she said.
Daennia's answer wasn't words. Just warmth, through the bond — the same quality as before, only fuller.
She stood on the ledge. Felt the cold settle back around her after the heat of the flight. Then she looked at Giollis.
He was watching her with the particular tilt of his long head that meant he'd been paying close attention and was deciding how much of that to let show.
The lavender along his shoulders caught the torchlight differently now that she was looking for it — a faint iridescence, barely there, like the memory of colour rather than colour itself.
She went to him.
The geometry of him was different again — taller, the ridge of his spine higher and more narrow, the wings long and blade-like even folded.
She mounted.
And then he moved — and everything she'd learned on Daennia became, briefly, useless.
Giollis launched like something being released.
Where Daennia's wingbeats were deep and deliberate, his were fast and clean and exact, each stroke calculated to extract the maximum from the air with the minimum of effort.
He didn't push against the wind, he moved through it, and the sensation was entirely different — sharper, more immediate, the cold hitting her face harder because they were cutting through it rather than riding it.
She grabbed on and adjusted and lost the adjustment and found it again.
Narrow your weight, Giollis said, calm as always. You're sitting wide for a dragon my width.
She narrowed. The flight smoothed immediately.
Better.
He banked right, and the turn was nothing like Daennia's — precise and quick, the kind of motion that expected you to keep up. She kept up. Barely.
Again, she said.
He banked again. She was ready this time.
Good, he said. And then, because he was Giollis: You adjusted in approximately two seconds. Daennia took four, the first time.
She felt the very specific pleasure of that, small and private, and didn't say anything.
They went higher than she and Daennia had — higher than she usually flew with Virvolior on an evening circuit, the air thinning to something sharp and pure, the stars above them close enough that she had the irrational sensation she might touch one if she reached.
The quadrant below was small and lit and entirely manageable from up here, all its weight and noise and squad tables and training schedules reduced to orange pinpoints in the dark.
She breathed in. Out.
Giollis held altitude without apparent effort, his wings barely moving now, riding something she couldn't see or name. The lavender along his shoulders shimmered faintly in the starlight.
This is what you see, she said. Not a question.
Every day, Giollis said.
She looked at the stars for a long time.
Eventually he began the descent — unhurried, precise, the same exactness on the way down as on the way up.
Virvolior came in on her left this time, matching pace, his white scales faintly blue in the dark the way they'd been the first night she saw him on a moonlit cliff with two others, and she understood, suddenly and without needing to say it,
that this was what he'd meant when he told her three was not common.
Not just that it was rare. That it was this — three different kinds of flight, three different kinds of knowing, three different weights of presence.
Hers.
She landed on the ledge and sat for a moment before dismounting, looking at the dark sky above the mountains, the stars very clear and very cold and very far away.
She dismounted. Stood between the three of them.
Nobody said anything.
Virvolior lowered his head until it was level with her shoulder.
"Okay," she said, aloud, which she almost never did.
It was all she had. But it was enough.
~
The path back from the launch ledge ran along the outer wall of the east wing, narrow and poorly lit at this hour. She'd walked it enough times that she didn't need the light.
She was nearly past the courtyard steps when he spoke.
"You're up late."
She stopped.
He was sitting on the top of the low wall that bordered the steps — not on the steps themselves, on the wall, boots braced against the stone, arms resting on his knees.
High enough that she'd walked past without seeing him.
He had no lamp. Just the dark and the cold and whatever he'd been looking at before she came around the corner.
"So are you," she said.
"Fair point." He looked at her for a moment. His eyes moved over her once, took in the flying leathers, and then moved back to her face without stopping. He didn't ask. "Can't sleep?"
"No." She looked at him. "You?"
"Not tonight." He didn't elaborate. She didn't ask.
He moved over on the wall without being asked, which was an invitation. She climbed up and sat beside him, the cold stone under her boots.
The courtyard below was empty. Beyond the wall, the training fields stretched out pale and flat in the dark, and above them the sky was enormous and full of stars.
They sat in the silence that had built between them over months — the easy kind, the kind that didn't need filling.
"Can I ask you something?" she said eventually.
"Yeah."
"Sloane." She felt him go still beside her, just slightly. "You said she was sent somewhere else. Do you know where she ended up?"
He was quiet long enough that she thought she'd pushed too far. Then he shifted his weight on the wall and looked at the stars.
"Morrathen, last I heard. There's a facility there for the marked kids they don't know what to do with — too young to conscript. They call it a school." He paused. "It's not really a school."
"How do you know she's there?"
"I don't. Not for certain." He turned one hand over on his knee — the gesture she'd noticed before, unconscious, something he did when working through something difficult.
"I had a letter once. About a year after they separated us. Someone who'd been there — one of Lindell's contacts — said they'd seen a girl matching her description. Dark hair, about nine, from the provinces. Wouldn't talk to anyone."
He stopped. "That was the last time anyone said anything."
She looked at his hands.
"She'll attempt the Parapet next year," he said. It came out flat. Factual. Like he'd said it to himself enough times that the shape of it had worn smooth.
Aeliana didn't say anything.
"A year younger than me." He exhaled slowly.
"I've been here. Doing — this. Training, briefings, formation drills. And she's been wherever she's been, and next year she has to walk across that thing alone and I won't be to stop her from fall—" He stopped.
Started again. "I don't even know if she has the letters I sent."
"You write to her?"
"Yes. Through Lindell's network. No way to know if it reached her." He turned his hand over again.
He was quiet for a moment. The cold pressed in around them. Somewhere above, something shifted in the eyries — a distant sound, wings settling.
"She used to climb the fence at the edge of our property," he said.
"When she was small. There was a field on the other side, and sometimes you'd see dragons overhead heading toward Basgiath. She'd stand on the top rail with her arms out for balance and watch them until they disappeared."
He paused. "Never once fell. Better balance than me at that age."
Aeliana looked at the stars.
"She wasn't afraid of them?"
"Never." He said it with a kind of certainty that came from knowing someone very well. "Not even the first time she saw one up close. Most kids freeze. She just — looked. Like she was memorising it."
"Then she'll be fine on the Parapet."
"She's not trained," he said. "Not the way I was. Lindell had me running drills from the week I arrived. Whatever they have at Morrathen, it's not that."
"She climbed a fence as a child and watched dragons until they disappeared," Aeliana said. "That's not nothing. That's someone who knows what she wants and isn't frightened of the distance between her and it."
He didn't answer right away.
"She's going to be so angry at me," he said. Quieter now. Not bleak — something more complicated than that. "When I see her. She's going to be absolutely furious."
"Good," Aeliana said.
"Good?"
"That's the right reaction. You should let her."
He held that for a moment. Then: "You're not going to tell me it'll be fine."
"No."
"Or that she'll understand."
"Probably not. Not right away."
He nodded slowly, like something had been confirmed that he'd needed confirmed. "Okay," he said. "Okay."
"What was she like?" Aeliana said. "Before all of it."
He looked at the stars. And then he started talking.
She listened.
He talked about a girl who had taught herself to read using the instruction pamphlets from their father's forge because she'd run out of proper books.
Who had fed a stray dog for three months by sneaking food from the kitchen and then been outraged to discover it had three other families doing the same.
Who had very strong opinions about the correct way to lace boots and was prepared to argue about it at length.
Who had, at seven years old, told their mother with complete certainty that she was going to be a rider, and their mother had said maybe — which everyone in the family knew meant yes.
Aeliana sat on the cold wall and listened and didn't try to make it resolve into anything useful. She just let him talk.
At some point the cold deepened. She didn't move.