A QUEEN RAISED BY DRAGONS

MAEVE

Maeve was waiting for me in the elder hall when I got there, and she had the particular stillness about her that meant she'd been sitting with something difficult for a while before I walked in.

She'd raised me since I was old enough to remember being raised, though raised has always felt like the wrong word for whatever it is between us. Not warm, exactly. Not cold either. Something more careful than both of those, like a hand that holds something valuable and fragile and never once forgets how easily it could break.

"You look tired," she said, not looking up from the papers in front of her.

"I keep hearing that today."

"Because it's true today." She set her pen down and finally looked at me, and there it was again — that same too-careful look she'd worn yesterday when she told me to be careful around Caspian, the look I'd caught her giving me my whole life and always dismissed as an old woman's habit of studying things too hard because she had nothing better to do with her eyes. "Did you sleep?"

"Not really."

"No," she said quietly. "I imagine not."

Something in the way she said it made the back of my neck go cold. Not I imagine not, given the tremor or I imagine not, given the Blade poking through your archive. Just — I imagine not, like she already knew precisely why, like she'd been waiting for this particular sleeplessness her whole life the way you wait for a storm you've been watching build on the horizon for years.

"Maeve." I sat down across from her, in the chair I've sat in for reports and corrections and every small crisis of village life since I was old enough to hold a pen. "What is happening?"

"A great many things, none of which I can explain to you before I understand them myself." She said it smoothly, the way she says most things, but her hands were folded a little too tightly on the desk in front of her, knuckles a shade paler than they should have been. "The Blade will finish his audit. He'll leave. Things will go back to the way they were."

"You don't believe that."

She didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer.

"Maeve, the ground shook yesterday. Actually shook, not a shiver, not a settling — shook, like something enormous moved underneath the whole valley. And you're sitting here telling me things will go back to the way they were, like you're trying to convince yourself as much as me."

"I am considerably better at lying to myself than you'd think," she said, and there was something almost fond in it, almost sad, an old joke worn smooth from years of use. "It's one of the few skills age actually improves."

I wanted to push harder. I wanted to ask her outright what she knew, what she'd always known, why she looked at me the way you look at a door you've been standing guard in front of for so long you've started to forget what's actually behind it. But there was something in her face that stopped me — not anger, not evasion exactly. Grief. Old, worn-smooth grief, the kind that's been carried so long it's stopped looking like grief and started looking like just another feature of a person's face, the way a limp stops looking like an injury and starts looking like a walk.

I didn't push. I filed it away instead, the way I file everything, and told myself I'd come back to it when I understood more.

I didn't know yet how much there was to understand, or how little time I had left to understand it gently.

She sent me back to the archive with a stack of correspondence to file and a request that I not, under any circumstances, let the Blade near the older shelving without her present.

"Why not?" I asked, already knowing she wouldn't answer.

"Because I said so," she said, which was not an answer she had ever given me before, not once, not in twenty-two years, and the fact that she reached for it now — the flattest, most useless kind of authority, the kind adults use on children too young to argue back — told me more than anything else she could have said.

Maeve does not run out of better answers. Maeve has never once, in my entire life, run out of better answers.

I left before she could see how much that frightened me.

She sat alone for a long time after I'd gone, though of course I only know this because Ronan told me much later, having watched her through the hall window on his way past — one more small vigilance among all the others I hadn't yet learned to see.

She sat with her hands folded on the desk, staring at nothing in particular, and when she finally spoke it was to an empty room, in a voice too quiet for anyone to have been meant to hear it.

"Not yet," she said. "Please. Not yet. She isn't ready."

And then, after a silence long enough that Ronan said he almost walked on, thinking she'd finished:

"I don't think I ever will be, either."

She looked toward the window after that — not at anything in the room, not at the papers on her desk or the door I'd walked out of. At the treeline, black and patient beyond the last fence post of Caldenmere, the way she has looked at it, I would learn, every single day for the last twenty-two years.

She said nothing else. There was no one there to hear it if she had.