Work Text:
riorson house, aretia - one month before everything changes
* * *
i. the announcement
The living room of Riorson House has seen a great many things.
It has seen war councils and peace negotiations, riders arriving at midnight with blood still on their leathers, Tairn's shadow falling across the windows on a November afternoon when the world had not yet decided whether it was going to survive. It has seen Xaden Riorson sit in the large chair by the fire with the particular stillness of someone who has survived everything, but at a cost. It has seen Violet Sorrengail fall asleep over a book with her silver hair fanning across the cushions and Andarna's quiet satisfaction pulsing from the courtyard below like a second heartbeat.
It has not, until this particular Tuesday morning, seen Imogen Cardulo stand in the centre of it holding a basket of fabric squares, a spool of thread, and what appears to be a small, slightly terrifying pair of embroidery scissors, with the expression of a woman who has decided that something is happening today whether anyone likes it or not.
"Sit down," she says.
Sixteen people sit down.
This is, in itself, remarkable. Colonel Mira Sorrengail has survived the Krovlan defence campaign against the venin. Garrick Tavis once went three days without sleep during a siege at the Cliffs of Dralor and came out the other side still capable of coordinated combat. Nightwing Captain Drake Cordella has faced down a wyvern at close range without flinching. None of them sit down quite as quickly as they do when Imogen uses that particular voice.
"Good." Imogen sets the basket on the low table in the centre of the room. "You all know about the baby."
"Difficult to miss," says Ridoc, from the settee, where he has arranged himself with the ergonomic optimism of someone who expects to be here for a while. "Vi's been at maximum pregnancy size for two months."
"Ridoc," says Bodhi, from beside him, with a specific quality of warning.
"What? It's observational. It's medical."
"It's neither of those things."
"The baby," Imogen continues, with the focused authority of someone who has learned to talk over Ridoc, "is due in approximately one month. Which means we are doing this now, while there's still time." She reaches into the basket and lifts out a square of fabric - cream-coloured, neatly hemmed, about the size of two palms placed together. "In Tyrrendor, there is a tradition. When a child is coming, the people who will love that child each sew a square. A design of their choosing. Something that carries meaning - protection, hope, memory, a piece of themselves. When all the squares are done, they're stitched together into a blanket." She pauses. "The baby's first blanket. The one they're wrapped in at the beginning."
The room is quiet.
It is the particular quiet of sixteen people all having the same feeling at once and none of them quite knowing what to do with it. Mira Sorrengail, who is sitting near the window with the straight spine and composed face she has carried through years of military service, looks at the cream square in Imogen's hand with an expression that is very careful.
"That's-" Jesinia Neilwart signs, her hands quick and precise, and Liam Mairi, sitting beside her, translates without hesitation: "She says that's beautiful."
"It is," Imogen agrees. She begins passing squares around the room. "Everyone gets one. You have today. The design is yours - anything you want to put on it, as long as it's something real. Something meaningful." She pauses with a square hovering in front of Ridoc. "Something appropriate."
"I don't know what you're implying," Ridoc says.
"Ridoc. No peni-"
"I would never-"
"Ridoc!" This is Bodhi, Sawyer, and Rhiannon, in overlapping unison, with three separate but complementary tones of warning.
"Fine," he says, and takes his square.
It is extremely soft. He looks at it. His chest does something that he doesn't immediately have a name for, which is unusual, because Ridoc Gamlyn generally has a name for everything.
He puts it on his knee and looks at the needles and thread being distributed around the room and thinks: well. It's for Vi's baby. It has to be the best.
Then Imogen hands him the needle and he looks at it and thinks: I am going to die.
* * *
ii. everyone else is fine (ridoc is not fine)
The thing about sewing, Ridoc discovers in the first four minutes, is that it is actively hostile to him specifically.
He is not a person who lacks dexterity. He can braid a climbing rope one-handed. He has excellent reflexes - Aotrom has confirmed this, approvingly, on multiple occasions involving mid-air adjustments that could charitably be described as alarming. He is, by most measures, a physically capable individual.
The needle, however, does not care about any of this.
He has threaded it on the third attempt, which he is counting as a win. He has made four stitches, two of which are arguably in the right place. He has also pricked his left index finger twice, and the square currently looks like it has been worried at by a small anxious bird.
Around him, the room hums with the pleasant industry of people who are apparently fine at this.
Imogen, cross-legged on the floor near the fire, works with quick, practiced movements, her needle moving in and out of the fabric with a confidence that makes Ridoc feel personally victimised. He can already see the shape of what she's making - runes, he thinks, the kind that carry warmth and protection, rendered in deep red and gold thread that she seems to have brought specifically for this purpose. She is not watching her hands. She is watching the fire.
Sloane is beside her, similarly quick, similarly focused. Her square is going to be rune-work too, Ridoc thinks - he can see the careful grid of pencil marks she's made first, a precision approach that is extremely Sloane, and the thread she's chosen is silvery-blue, a similar colour to her eyes.
Bodhi is on the settee beside him, and Ridoc cranes to look at his square, and this is annoying because Bodhi's square already looks good. It's a rune - simple, elegant, one of the old Tyrrish ones. Ridoc knows enough Tyrrish by now to recognise it: warmth. Or possibly home. The two are related in old Tyrrish and Bodhi has once explained the distinction at length, which Ridoc had listened to with genuine interest and then got somewhat distracted by.
"You're good at this," Ridoc says.
"My grandmother sewed," Bodhi says, without looking up.
"That's cheating. You had preparation."
"You could have prepared. Imogen told us this was happening on Thursday."
"I thought it would be fine."
"And?"
Ridoc looks at his square. "It's fine," he says, unconvincingly.
You are struggling.
The voice arrives through their bond with the warm, faintly amused quality that Aotrom uses when he is enjoying something at Ridoc's expense, which is more often than Ridoc advertises. He is, according to everyone who has met him, a small dragon - though what he lacks in size he makes up for in personality - and he is currently on the courtyard wall outside in the sun.
I am not struggling. I am working deliberately.
You have made the fabric bleed.
Ridoc glances at his left index finger. "It's a small amount of blood," he says, under his breath.
"Are you talking to Aotrom?" Sawyer asks, from the armchair, where his own square is progressing with the neat, unhurried competence Sawyer brings to everything. It's going to be a pattern, Ridoc can see - geometric, precise, the kind of thing that takes planning, and Sawyer has definitely planned it.
"Aotrom is being unhelpful."
I am being observational. You said it was observational when you did it to Violet.
"That was different," Ridoc mutters, not quite fully through the bond.
"What?" says Sawyer.
"Nothing. How's your square?"
"Good," Sawyer says, in the mild tone he uses when he knows something is happening and is choosing not to engage with it yet. "How's yours?"
"Progressing," says Ridoc.
Across the room, Liam makes a sound. Ridoc looks up. Liam is grinning at him with the open, uncomplicated warmth that is Liam Mairi's default setting, his own square already looking - it already looks nice, Ridoc notes, with the slight injustice of someone being outpaced by people who are not trying to outpace him.
Liam's is a nature scene of some kind, rendered in greens and browns, still rough but clearly going to be a tree - an oak, maybe, or one of the Tyrrish ridge pines.
Something rooted. Very Liam.
"You've got this dude," Liam says.
"I know I've got it."
"Your face suggests otherwise."
"My face is fine." He applies himself to the needle. He makes three stitches. One of them is genuinely good. "See," he says to no one in particular.
* * *
Aaric Greycastle, sitting in the window seat with the afternoon light catching his blonde hair and his needlework already, characteristically, precise and unhurried and extremely competent, is doing a mountain scene.
Ridoc knows this. He has walked over to look, under the guise of stretching his legs, which he needed to do because he has been sitting still for twenty minutes and his left hand is starting to cramp.
"Mountains," he says.
"The Steelbridge range," Aaric says. He doesn't look up. "I grew up looking at them. Before-" He pauses, makes a small, precise stitch. "Before things changed. I want the baby to know they exist." Another pause. "That things that look immovable can be something to navigate rather than something to be stopped by."
Ridoc looks at the square. The mountains are barely outlined so far, but they're already right - the shape of them, the particular angle of the highest peak. He doesn't say anything for a moment.
"That's good," he says.
"The stitching needs work," Aaric says.
"I meant what it means."
Aaric looks up, briefly. Something in his expression shifts - the composed surface and the warmer thing underneath. "Yes," he says. "Well." He returns to his square. "How is yours coming along?"
"Brilliantly," says Ridoc. "I've done the background."
"The background is blank fabric."
"That's the background."
Aaric's mouth does the thing. "Sit down, Gamlyn. You've barely started."
"I'm aware," Ridoc says, and goes back to his seat, and stares at his square.
He knows what he wants to put on it. He's known since Imogen explained what it was for. The question is how to translate the image in his head - clear and specific and his - into something a needle and thread can manage without humiliating him in front of fifteen people he respects.
You are going to put me on the square.
This comes through the bond with a quality that Ridoc has come to identify as satisfaction, which on Aotrom sounds different from other dragons' satisfaction - lighter, quicker, with an edge of something that might be smugness if Ridoc is being uncharitable.
I said: you are going to put me on the square.
I haven't decided, Ridoc says, quietly.
You have decided. You decided the moment Imogen explained. You went warm.
Ridoc does not say anything to this. He picks up the needle.
I am a good choice. I am an excellent dragon. The baby will benefit from knowing this immediately.
The baby won't know what she's looking at for months.
She will feel the quality of the craftsmanship.
The craftsmanship is- He looks at his current stitches. The craftsmanship is in progress.
Then you had better improve it.
Thank you, Ridoc says, through his teeth. Thank you, Aotrom, for your ongoing support.
You are welcome. Also - the thread you want is in the basket. Third from the left. The brown one. The colour of my scales.
Ridoc looks at the basket. Then at the square. Then, despite himself, he smiles.
Yeah, he says, quietly. I know.
* * *
iii. everyone else's squares (a survey)
Garrick Tavis is, in Ridoc's private estimation, one of the most competent people at Riorson House, which is a house full of extremely competent people, and it is therefore only fair that Garrick's embroidery square is shaping up to be quietly extraordinary.
He is not talking about it. He is sitting in the corner nearest the bookshelves with his large hands doing very small, careful work, and the square in his lap already shows the beginnings of something Ridoc can't quite identify - a forest scene, dark greens and deep blues, the kind that's all texture and shadow and depth. Ridoc goes over to look.
"What is it?" he asks.
"The Tyrrish Valley Forest. West of Aretia." Garrick doesn't look up. "I used to train there with my dad. Before the rebellion." A pause. "Xaden used to come. When he was twelve or thirteen. He'd watch from the ridge." Another pause. "He thought I didn't see him. I saw him."
Ridoc looks at the square. "He's going to lose it when he sees this."
"He's not going to lose it."
"He's absolutely going to-"
"He won't show it," Garrick says, with the certainty of many years' acquaintance. "But yes." The corner of his mouth moves, almost imperceptibly. "He will."
Ridoc stays for a moment longer, watching the needle move. Then he goes back to his own square, with slightly more determination.
* * *
Dain Aetos has planned his square.
This surprises no one. There is a pencil sketch on the fabric - measured, considered, the kind of sketch that took time before needle was ever applied to thread.
The design, as Ridoc understands it from a strategic lean-across while Dain was briefly occupied talking to Aaric, is a pattern of interlocking knots with a small compass rose at the centre.
"Navigation," says Sloane, who has clearly already asked.
"Among other things," Dain says, with the particular careful earnestness he uses when something matters to him and he doesn't want it to be obvious. "The knots are a Navarrian pattern. For continuity. Connections that hold." He pauses. "The compass is for - I want her to be able to find her way. Whatever that means for her." Another pause. "Wherever that takes her."
Sloane looks at him for a moment with an expression that seems like assessment but is actually something warmer. "That's good, Dain," she says.
Dain goes slightly pink and returns to his stitching. Aaric, from the window seat, does not look over but his mouth twitches upwards.
Ridoc, watching this, feels something warm in his chest.
* * *
Mira Sorrengail's square is precise and deliberate and has, Ridoc notes with some interest, a border of tiny silver chain stitches that catch the light with every movement.
Inside the border: a pattern he doesn't immediately recognise. He asks.
"Narben script," Mira says. She has the same composed expression she's had all morning, but there's something underneath it that Ridoc is careful not to look at too directly, in the way you're careful with certain things. "It's an old writing system. Pre-unified Navarre." She makes a stitch. "My grandmother used it. Violet never learned it - she was too young, and then our grandmother di-" She pauses. "There wasn't time. But she knows what it looks like." Another stitch. "I thought the baby should have something in it. Something that goes back a long way."
"What does it say?" Ridoc asks.
Mira looks at him. It is the look of a Rider who has assessed a situation and decided to trust the intel. "It says: you are made of everything that came before you, and you are the beginning of everything that comes next."
Ridoc is quiet for a moment.
"Mira," he says.
"Go back to your square, Gamlyn," Mira says, but her voice has something in it that is not quite stern.
"Yes, Colonel," he says, and does.
* * *
Drake Cordella has been quiet all morning, which is not unusual - Drake has the particular quality of being entirely present and not particularly verbose about it - he's sitting very still with his tongue slightly between his teeth, which Ridoc has come to recognise as Drake concentrating.
Ridoc looks at Drake's square and then has to look again.
It is a gryphon.
Not a rough gryphon, not a gestural gryphon. A gryphon with intention - the curve of the wing done in gold thread, the proud eagle head in amber and brown, rendered with the careful love of someone who has spent years knowing these creatures as partners and companions and is putting that knowledge into thread.
"Drake," Ridoc says.
"Don't make it weird," Drake says. “It’s Sovadunn.”
"I'm not making it weird. It's brilliant."
Drake looks up. He has the expression of someone who is not accustomed to compliments and doesn't know where to put them. "She should know about gryphons," he says. "Not just dragons. Both." He looks at the square. "They're both part of this. What we built. She should grow up knowing that."
"She will," Ridoc says. "She's got you."
Drake makes a sound that is not quite a response. He goes back to his gryphon. The gold thread catches the light.
* * *
Jesinia is doing what Ridoc privately thinks of as the most quietly extraordinary square in the room.
She has not announced this. She would not. Jesinia works with the contained focus of someone accustomed to communicating through precise, intentional means, and she is applying this focus to her needle with the same careful attention she applies to everything. When Ridoc comes over to look, she notices him and holds the square up.
It is words. Not alphabetical written words - signs. Handshapes, rendered in tiny careful stitches, each one distinct. Ridoc doesn't know all of them but he knows some, because Jesinia has been teaching anyone who asks, and the ones he recognises show: beloved. Welcome. You are seen.
He looks at her.
She meets his eyes and signs something, and Liam, nearby, translates: "She says she wants the baby to know from the beginning that there are many ways to speak and communicate and exist, and that all of them are real and valid."
Ridoc looks at the square for a long moment. "It's perfect," he signs slowly.
Jesinia's expression shifts - the contained warmth of it, the quiet pleasure. She turns back to her square.
Ridoc goes back to his.
* * *
Rhiannon is doing flowers.
Specifically: flowers from her home region in Morraine, the ones that grow on the river cliffs. She'd gone to the market last week for thread in exactly the right colours - that specific sunset orange, the deep violet that edges toward blue. Ridoc had thought she was shopping for herself. She was shopping for this.
"Cliff flowers," she tells him when he asks. "They grow in conditions where almost nothing else can. Storms, wind, thin soil, no shelter." She makes a stitch with the practiced ease of someone who has done this before. "They're not delicate. People think they are because they're pretty, but they're not. They're the toughest thing on the cliffs." She doesn't look up. "I want Violet's daughter to know the difference."
"Between what?"
"Between delicate and small and weak." Rhi does look up now, briefly, with the bright, direct gaze she uses when she is saying something she means. "She's going to be small when she arrives. That's not the same thing as weakness."
Ridoc looks at the orange and violet flowers taking shape on the cream fabric. "No," he says. "It's not."
* * *
Brennan Sorrengail - who arrived at Riorson House three days ago from the northern outpost where he's been based, for exactly this reason - is being extremely competent in a way that does not draw attention to itself. His square already has a structure: a hand, palm-up, rendered in warm gold, with small tendrils of what might be light or might be life itself emerging from the fingers.
"It's a healing hand," he says, before Ridoc asks. "Old signet imagery. From before the Unification." He's matter-of-fact about it. "I heal things. It's what I do. I wanted her to have that. To know-" He pauses, and something moves behind his eyes. "To know that things that are broken can be mended. That there are people whose whole purpose is to make sure of it."
He doesn't say: I know this from experience.
He doesn't need to.
"She's lucky," Ridoc says. "To have you as her uncle."
Brennan makes a sound that is gruff and deflecting. "Don't be sentimental."
"I'm never sentimental."
"You're always sentimental."
"I'm layered," Ridoc says, with dignity. "The sentimentality is one of several layers."
Brennan looks at him for a moment with an expression that is trying very hard not to be fond and failing slightly. "Sit down and finish your square," he says.
* * *
iv. ridoc versus the needle (an ongoing conflict)
It has been two hours.
Imogen has finished her square. Bodhi has finished his square. Sloane finished forty minutes ago and is now helping Jesinia with a particularly complex section, the two of them working in the quiet comfortable way of people who have developed their own communication style. Garrick is close to done. Liam is done, his tree standing rooted and steady on the cream fabric, and is currently stretched out on the floor with his head on Sloane's knee reading the book she was halfway through, because Liam Mairi transitions from task to relaxation with the ease of someone who has never experienced existential guilt about either.
Ridoc is not done.
Ridoc is, if anything, in a more complicated relationship with his square than when he started.
The dragon is taking shape. He can see it - the outline is there, the curve of Aotrom's compact body, the particular fold of the wings. He has used the brown thread that Aotrom indicated. He has also used a gold thread for the details, because Aotrom's scales have warmth in them, and he has found, with some surprise, a small cache of metallic silver-white thread at the bottom of the basket which he is using for the snow.
Glittery snow. Ridoc's signet is ice, technically - cold and precision and the ability to freeze things in their tracks - but it manifests in snow, in the particular swirling drift of it that he's come to think of as his, and he is putting it on the square, careful flakes and spirals radiating out from Aotrom's form like the dragon is mid-flight in a winter sky.
It is taking a very long time.
He has stabbed himself six times. One of the stabs has been mended by Brennan. Bodhi, at this point, has stopped pretending not to notice and has simply placed a small folded cloth within reach without comment, in the way that Bodhi resolves problems that don't need to be discussed.
Your proportions are slightly off.
I know they're slightly off, Ridoc says, under his breath.
My tail is too long.
Your tail is - it's artistic.
It looks like I have a tail injury.
It looks like you're dynamic.
Ridoc.
I'm working on it, he says, with some feeling. I am working on it. I have been working on it for two hours. This is - do you know how small these stitches are? Do you understand what I'm doing here?
I understand that you are making a representation of me. For the hatchling of your friends. I am taking this seriously, even if the tail-
The tail is fine, Ridoc says firmly. The tail is characterful.
...I accept characterful.
From across the room, Rhiannon says: "Are you arguing with Aotrom about your embroidery?"
"We're having a collaborative discussion."
"Is the collaboration going well?"
"The collaboration is-" He makes a stitch. It's a good stitch, actually. "The collaboration is progressing."
Rhi goes back to her flowers. Dain, who has finished his square and is now reviewing it with the expression of someone trying to decide if it's allowed to be done, looks over at Ridoc's square with what Ridoc generously interprets as interest rather than pity.
"That's Aotrom," Dain says.
"It is."
"You're doing snow."
"I am."
Dain looks at it for a long moment. "It's good," he says. He says it the way Dain says things that cost him something - directly, without decoration, which means he means it completely.
Ridoc looks at him. "Thanks, Dain."
Dain nods and goes back to his square.
* * *
The third hour.
Mira has finished. Drake has finished. Brennan has finished and gone to find food and come back with enough food for everyone, because Brennan expresses care through application of provisions, and no one has complained about this. Aaric has finished and is back in the window seat with a book, which he sets down with perfect composure every time someone shows him their square and picks up again after.
Ridoc is still going.
The snow, he thinks, is actually good. The snow might be the best thing he has ever made with his hands, and he is including several years of performance work in that assessment, and he is not being hyperbolic. The tiny silver-white flakes spiralling out from Aotrom's body have a quality to them - a lightness, a scatter. He has mixed two threads for it, the metallic and a plain white, so they catch the light differently. He learned this from watching Imogen's rune-work for ten minutes when she wasn't looking.
The dragon is - the dragon is good. It is not perfect. The tail is characterful, as agreed. But Aotrom is recognisably Aotrom: the compact solidity of him, the slightly oversized head that Ridoc has always privately found endearing and would die before saying so, the way the wings fold up against his body in flight.
He has one section left. The face.
He has been saving the face.
You are nervous.
I'm not nervous. I'm precise.
The face is important.
I know the face is important. I see your face every day. I know what your face looks like.
It is a good face.
It is a good face, Ridoc agrees, and picks up the needle, and does the face.
It takes twenty minutes. When he lifts his head, his neck aches and his eyes feel slightly strange from close work in the afternoon light that has shifted while he wasn't paying attention, and the room has gone quieter. Several people have left to help with dinner preparations. Bodhi is still there, reading, present in the way Bodhi is present - not watching, not waiting, just there. Imogen is there, near the fire with the basket, waiting for the last square.
Ridoc looks at his square.
Aotrom is there. Brown and gold against the cream, surrounded by silver-white snow, mid-flight, wings up, face turned out with an expression that is - it's Aotrom's expression, the particular alertness of him, the warmth in the eyes that Ridoc has spent years learning to read.
He is not going to talk about what he feels looking at it. He is going to hand it to Imogen and he is going to make a joke about the tail and that will be the end of it.
...Ridoc.
Yeah, he says, quietly.
It is good. It is- yes. It is right.
He sits with that for a moment.
Okay, he says. He stands up. His back makes a noise of protest. He crosses the room and gives the square to Imogen, who takes it and looks at it with careful attention.
"Aotrom," she says.
"And snow. For my signet."
She looks at it for a long moment. Then she looks at him, and her expression is the one she uses very rarely - the genuine one, the one that lives underneath the formidable front. "It's beautiful, Ridoc."
"The tail is characterful," he says.
"The tail is perfect," she says. "The whole thing is." She sets it carefully with the others. "She's going to love it."
Ridoc looks at the pile of squares. Tens of them - cream-coloured, each one carrying something. A mountain range. A Tyrrish ridge pine. Cliff flowers. Runes for warmth and safety and love and home. A gryphon in gold. Handshapes spelling welcome. Narben script for continuity and beginning. A healing hand. A pattern of knots around a compass rose. A forest vale. And a small brown dragon mid-flight in a winter sky.
"Yeah," he says. "I think she will."
* * *
v. general sorrengail's work
It is Lilith who stitches the squares together.
She had said nothing about this when Imogen announced the tradition. She had already done her square, and then when the last piece was done and the basket was full she had held out her hand and Imogen had given her the squares and she had gone to the table by the window and spent three hours sewing.
Ridoc watches from across the room for a while. He is not the only one. At one point Brennan comes to stand beside him and they both watch in silence for a moment, and then Brennan says: "She sewed all our blankets. Mine and Mira’s and Violet's. When we were small." He pauses. "After-" Another pause. "After Father died, she sewed for a whole winter. Every evening. I didn't understand it then."
"Do you now?"
Brennan is quiet. "I think she needed to make something," he says. "When everything else was-" He doesn't finish. He doesn't need to.
They watch Lilith's hands for another moment.
"She's an extraordinary woman," Ridoc says.
"Don't tell her that," Brennan says. "It'll inflate her ego."
"I know," Ridoc says. "I'm telling you."
Brennan looks at him briefly. "Yes," he says. "She is quite good." And then he goes to get more food, because that is how Brennan manages large feelings, and Ridoc goes to sit with Bodhi, because that is how Ridoc manages them.
* * *
The blanket comes together over the course of the afternoon.
Ridoc doesn't watch the whole process because at some point Lilith makes a small gesture that communicates clearly that she would prefer to do this part alone, and the room - to its collective credit - responds by becoming occupied elsewhere. But when the light is going gold through the west-facing windows and dinner is almost ready and the blanket is done, Lilith carries it to the main table and lays it out and calls them all in.
It is - it is the squares made whole. Each one present, each one distinct, but together they are a thing that none of them were separately. Imogen's runes glow red-gold beside Sloane's silver-blue. Liam's tree roots into the bottom of Aaric's mountains. Drake's gryphon faces out from its corner as if watching over the whole. Jesinia's handshapes speak quietly beside Dain's knots. Mira's Narben script runs along the top like a border, like a blessing, like a promise kept.
And in the centre-right - Garrick has the centre-left, Ridoc notes, which feels right - Aotrom flies through his winter sky, small and warm and perfectly imperfect in a handmade way.
Nobody says anything for a moment.
Then Imogen says, quietly, "It's ready."
* * *
vi. violet and xaden
They bring Violet and Xaden to the main room after dinner.
Violet is enormous, in the specific way of someone in their last month, and she walks with the careful deliberate gait she's adopted in the past few weeks and she holds Xaden's hand or his arm or sometimes just the hem of his shirt, and he lets her, and the thing between them is the same thing it has always been - the particular gravity of two people who have been through everything and come out the other side still reaching for each other.
Someone has folded the blanket and placed it on the table.
"Imogen said there was something for us," Violet says, looking around the room at all of them - the assembled chaos of her people, some standing, some sitting, Ridoc on the arm of the settee because that's where he always ends up. "What is this?"
"Open it," Imogen says.
Xaden picks it up. He is - there is a quality to his expression that is very controlled and very present at once, the face of someone who has learned to manage what he feels when he is in rooms with people. He unfolds it carefully.
The blanket opens out between them. Violet makes a sound.
It is not a word, exactly. It is the sound of someone being hit by something they weren't braced for, quiet and sharp and then sustained.
"Each square," Imogen says, "is from someone in this room. A Tyrrish tradition. For the baby. For her first days, and after." She pauses. "So she's wrapped in all of us."
Xaden is looking at the blanket. Specifically, Ridoc notices, he is looking at the centre - Garrick's forest, the one Ridoc knows now is the place where a twelve-year-old Xaden used to watch from the ridge. He is looking at it with vulnerable tears in his eyes, and love and gratitude clear on his face.
Violet is crying with complete, unguarded honesty - and she reaches out and touches each square in turn, moving around the blanket, and Ridoc watches her face as she goes. The mountains. The tree. The flowers. The runes. She stops at the Narben script and looks at Mira and something passes between them that has no word.
Then she reaches Aotrom.
She looks at the small brown dragon in his silver-white snow, and she makes another sound, this one different - a breath of laughter inside the tears - and she looks up at Ridoc.
"Ridoc," she says.
"The tail is characterful," he says, by way of explanation.
She laughs, fully this time, and then she's crossing the room and putting both arms around him, which given the current situation is somewhat logistically creative, and he holds on.
"Thank you," she says, into his shoulder.
"Don't," he says. "You'll make me cry."
"You're already tearing up."
"I'm not."
"Ridoc."
"I'm not!" he says. He holds on tighter. "She's going to be brilliant, Vi. She's already brilliant. Look at all the love and family she's got."
Vi makes the sound again - the laugh inside the tears. "Yeah," she says. "Look at what she's got."
Across the room, Xaden is holding the blanket and looking at Garrick. Garrick meets his eyes. Neither of them says anything. That's fine. Some things don't require words.
Then Xaden says, quietly, to the room: "Thank you." That's all. Just that. But he says it with the full weight of someone who does not say things lightly, and everyone in the room hears everything underneath it.
There. You see? The tail does not matter.
The tail never mattered, Ridoc says.
No. What matters is that it is ours. What we gave her.
The warmth comes through the bond - simple, clear, the particular satisfaction of something done rightly. Ridoc puts his hand briefly over his sternum, where the bond feels strongest.
Yeah, he says. Ours.
* * *
vii. one month later
She is six hours old.
Her name is Lyra. Ridoc learns this from Brennan, who tells him in the corridor outside the room where she has arrived in the world, and he has to stand there for a moment with his hand on the wall because his legs have done something unexpected.
Lyra Aisling Riorson.
He says it in his head three times while Brennan is talking about birth weight and health and all the things that should be said and that Ridoc is genuinely glad to hear but is processing at a slight remove because his brain is still catching up on the name.
Lyra.
* * *
They let him in after most of the others have had their turn. This is right - Mira goes first, and Brennan and Lilith, and then slowly the room fills and empties and fills again with people who have earned this, who have been part of getting here. Ridoc waits in the corridor with Bodhi and Liam and Sawyer, and none of them talks very much, and that is fine.
When it's his turn, Violet is in the bed and Xaden is in the chair beside her and they both look wrecked, in the best possible sense. The particular kind of wrecked that comes from something enormous happening and the world being irrevocably different now and your body and mind both knowing it.
The blanket is on the bed. The Riorson House quilt, opened out, spread across Vi's knees and the lower half of the bed, all its squares present.
In Violet's arms is a bundle.
"Come here," Violet says.
Ridoc crosses the room. He has not, in over two decades of life and several years of genuinely dangerous situations, ever felt quite this reverent about anything.
He sits in the chair Xaden moves aside for him, and Violet shifts the bundle, and says: "Support her head," and he is a godfather, he knows this, he has been told this and has made promises about it and has understood it conceptually for months, but the moment his arms take her weight and he has her - actually has her, Lyra, six hours old - the conceptual becomes extremely actual extremely quickly.
She is tiny.
He knows babies are small. He has known this his entire life as a fact. But knowing it and holding it are completely different categories of experience, and Lyra Riorson is the most precisely, incredibly, specifically small thing he has ever held, and she is also the most completely herself thing he has ever held, which seems impossible given that she is six hours old but there it is. She has Violet's nose, or what will become Violet's nose. She has Xaden's brow, maybe, or possibly his jawline.
Her eyes are closed.
Her hands are - he looks at her hands. Her hands are the size of the pads of his thumbs. Her fingers are perfect. They are the most perfect fingers he has ever seen, and he has seen a great many fingers in his life, and these are objectively the best ones.
Ridoc Gamlyn, who has not been at a loss for words since he was approximately three years old, does not say anything.
He looks at her. He looks at her for a long time. The room is quiet - Vi has her head back against the pillow and Xaden is watching him with an expression that has nothing guarded in it at all, which is the rarest thing Ridoc has ever been given, and he doesn't look away from Lyra long enough to appreciate it properly.
She makes a sound. Not a cry - just a small, interior sound, the sound of someone very new in the world making sense of being in it.
Ridoc's throat does something.
She is very small.
The bond carries something that Ridoc has never felt from Aotrom before - not the usual warmth or satisfaction or amusement. Something quieter. Something like awe.
She is very small and she is perfect. Like... He pauses, and it's the pause of a dragon finding language for something that has never needed language before. Like a new thing. A whole new thing.
Yeah, Ridoc whispers through the bond. Yeah, that's exactly right.
She makes the sound again. Her fingers flex, infinitesimally, and catch the edge of his thumb.
He is not going to cry. He is absolutely not going to cry. He is a person with a reputation and a carefully maintained exterior and he is one of this child's godparents which means he has a responsibility to-
He cries a little bit. It is dignified and minimal and he is going to deny it forever.
"Hey," says Violet, softly. "Hey, Ridoc."
"I'm fine," he says.
"I know you are."
"She's very-" He stops. Looks at Lyra. "She's very... I don't have a word."
"No," Xaden says. "Neither do we."
Ridoc looks up at him. Xaden Riorson - who has never in Ridoc's experience been without words, who has spent years being precise and deliberate with language as a survival strategy - looks back at him with the open face of someone who has laid everything down and is not going to pick it back up.
"She looks like you both," Ridoc says. "She's got your - the brow thing." He says this to Xaden, who makes a very small expression that is the Xaden Riorson version of being undone by something. "And the nose. That's Violet's nose."
"It's early to say," Violet says.
"It's Vi's nose," Ridoc says, with total conviction. "I'm confident."
Violet laughs, quietly. Xaden looks at her while she laughs - looks at her the way Ridoc has come to understand is just how Xaden looks at Violet, with the particular attention of someone who made a choice a long time ago and has been making it every day since.
Lyra, in Ridoc's arms, makes another small sound and then settles.
She is, he thinks, already decided about things. Already entirely herself. She arrived in this world with opinions.
"She's going to be trouble," he says.
"Yes," Xaden says.
"She's going to be extraordinary trouble," Ridoc says. "The good kind."
"Yes," Violet says.
"I'm going to be an excellent godfather." He looks at Lyra. "I'm going to teach her all sorts of useful things."
"Define useful," Xaden says.
"I'll send you a list."
"I'm going to need to pre-approve-"
"I'll send you a list," Ridoc says, "and it will be a good list, and you will not have concerns about it."
"I will have many concerns about it."
"Xaden." Ridoc looks at him. "I would never. This is-" he looks down at Lyra, at her perfect fingers and her undecided nose and the small complete personhood of her, "-this is Lyra. This is different."
Xaden looks at him for a long moment. Then he does something that is relatively rare - he nods, once, small and certain, which is the Xaden Riorson version of: I know. I trust you. You're ours.
Ridoc looks at Lyra.
On the bed, the blanket lies spread out - all the squares, all the hands, all the things they made and meant and gave. Aotrom mid-flight in his winter sky, right there in the centre-right, surrounded by runes and flowers and mountains and a gryphon in gold.
Her first blanket. Already waiting. Already ready to wrap around her.
Tell her-
Aotrom pauses. It is unusual. Aotrom is not a pausing sort of dragon.
Tell her that she is already everything. That she doesn't have to become anything other than who she is. She is already perfect.
Ridoc is quiet for a moment, holding six hours of human in his arms.
Yeah, he says, softly. I'll tell her. He looks at her. "Hey, Lyra. You're already everything. Aotrom said so, and he's very rarely wrong about things that matter." He pauses. "Also I embroidered him on your blanket. You're welcome. The tail is characterful."
Violet makes a sound that is a laugh.
Lyra, against all laws of newborn timing, makes a tiny sound in response.
"See," Ridoc says. "She agrees."
"She's six hours old," Xaden says.
"She's perceptive," Ridoc says. "Runs in the family." He looks at Lyra. "Hi," he says, quietly, just to her. "Hi. I'm Ridoc. I'm one of your people." He swallows.
"There are a lot of us. You're going to learn all of us." He thinks of the squares on the blanket - all of them, everyone in this house who made something and meant it. "But you've got a head start."
Lyra breathes.
The room is warm.
Outside, in the courtyard, on the wall where he's been waiting since the morning, Aotrom shifts in the night air and looks up at the window where the light is, and something moves through the bond that has no name - something large and quiet and complete.
Ridoc feels it. He sits with it. He lets it be what it is.
"Welcome to the world, little one," he thinks.
Lyra sleeps, wrapped up in her blanket of love.