Tiny Raven

Alessia was going to set the tent on fire if Askarion didn’t let her up soon.

She had been in bed for days, her ankle a throbbing mess of stitches and poultices.

She was losing what was left of her godsdamned mind.

Stella had taken to her role as “warden” with terrifying enthusiasm, threatening to tattle to Patrian whenever Alessia so much as thought about standing.

So when the tent flap rustled open, she nearly threw her empty kotyle at whoever dared disturb her imprisonment—

—only to freeze when Dionys ducked inside, his expression as unreadable as ever.

His shoulders briefly blocked the morning light, and he froze when he saw the kotyle raised in her hand. His gaze flicked from the cup to her face, and he exhaled through his nose, a sharp, controlled sound.

“Put it down,” he grunted, stepping fully inside and letting the canvas fall shut behind him. “You hit Patrian with that, and he’ll strap your other ankle to the cot just to prove a point.”

He didn’t wait for permission. He crossed the small space in two strides and dropped to a crouch at the foot of her bed, his knees hitting the dirt with a soft thud. His hands found her ankle immediately with the efficient, clinical assessment of a soldier checking a blade for nicks. His fingers probed the bandages, testing for heat, swelling, any give in the fresh stitches.

“No heat,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “Color’s better.”

He looked up, slate-grey eyes meeting hers. His hands remained wrapped around her ankle, solid and grounding, the calluses on his thumbs brushing once against the pale skin just above the wound.

“Still attached,” he said, deadpan. “Despite your best efforts to irritate it into falling off.”

Alessia lowered the kotyle, slowly, dramatically, and let it clatter onto the crate beside the cot with a resentful thunk.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have terrible bedside manner?” she rasped, dropping her head back against the pillows with a huff. “You come in here looking like a thundercloud, manhandle my foot without so much as a ‘how are you doing,’ and then mock my survival instincts. If I wanted someone to poke at me without asking, I’d have asked Askarion.”

She shifted her leg slightly and hissed through her teeth when the ankle protested, hot and sharp. Three days and it still felt like the bronze was there, a phantom-weight, even though she’d watched them melt the damn thing down.

“Irritate it into falling off?” She cracked one eye open to glare at him, though the effect was ruined by the fact that she looked like she’d been dragged through a hedge backward. “I’m trying to convince it to work again. There’s a difference. One involves pacing. The other involves me losing my mind staring at the same canvas seams until I start seeing patterns in the dust.”

She gestured vaguely at the tent around them, at the piles of rocks Stella had strategically placed to prevent Alessia’s escape, at the bandages wrapped tight around her newly freed ankle.

“Your ‘observation post’ is driving me insane, Dio. I’ve counted every water stain. I’ve named them. I’ve considered staging a coup against Admiral Stonebelly just for something to do. If I have to lie here while my daughter threatens me with tattling to Patrian one more time, I’m going to start gnawing through the tent poles.”

She propped herself up on her elbows, ignoring the pull in her side, and fixed him with a look that was half venom, half plea.

“Tell me you didn’t come here just to poke my stitches and make bad jokes. Tell me there’s actually news. A battle. A council meeting. A suspicious seagull that needs interrogating. Anything that isn’t staring at my own feet.”

He snorted, the sound sharp and dismissive, but his hands lingered on her ankle a moment longer than strictly necessary, his thumb pressing once, gently, against the arch of her foot before releasing her.

“No.”

He regarded her for a long moment.

“The council’s still arguing.”

He glanced toward the flap where Stella’s laughter drifted in.

“The gulls remain suspicious.”

He stood, dusting sand from his knees with rough, efficient strokes, and reached behind him to the small of his back. His hand returned holding a cloth-wrapped bundle, which he dropped onto the cot beside her hip with a soft, heavy thunk.

“Since you’re so determined to be useful instead of healing,” he grunted, “you’ll need something better than that boot knife you’ve been palming.”

He nodded at the bundle. “Unwrap it. Carefully. Unless you want to add ‘cut off my own finger’ to Askarion’s list of reasons to strap you down.”

Alessia rolled her eyes but obliged, only to freeze when the linen fell away to reveal a dagger.

Her breath caught.

It was perfect. Balanced for her grip, the fuller etched with curling waves that shimmered in the lamplight. Waves that matched those carved into the old comb in her satchel.

It was a weapon meant for her.

Her fingers hovered over the blade before she dared touch it. The waves glinted in the firelight, almost alive as she traced them with a reverent fingertip.

“… You made this,” she said. It wasn’t a question. The work was unmistakably his, brutal in its efficiency, elegant in its purpose. “For me.”

Her voice cracked on the word.

She had never owned anything so fine. No one had ever looked at her hands long enough to imagine what belonged in them.

Dionys huffed and crossed his arms, not meeting her gaze.

“While you were sleeping off Askarion’s butchery,” he said. “Weighted for throwing if you need to. Balanced for close work.” He nodded at the blade. “Bronze is from the ingots. Cleaner metal.”

He turned toward her, his gaze steady and assessing.

“Took three tries,” he grunted, as if admitting he’d botched it twice was a confession.

He crouched down next to her and took the dagger from her hands. 

“Wave pattern’s Otharan. Handle’s Karethi.”

With a flick of his wrist, he turned the hilt toward her, revealing a hidden detail beneath the leather.

“Look.”

Two tiny engravings, a boar and an owl, nestled side by side near the guard.

“They fit.”

He shifted his weight, looking away toward the tent wall, suddenly fascinated by a water stain.

“Stella gets hers when she’s bigger. This one’s yours. Stop groping for the one in your boot every time someone enters. Makes you predictable.”

Alessia stared at the dagger until her vision blurred.

She’d had knives before, ones she had stolen or scavenged, hidden in boots and under pillows. Never one that fit her palm like it was carved from the negative space where her hand ended.

She was about to say something sharp, something about compensating for his terrible bedside manner with expensive gifts, when her fingers brushed against something soft in the linen. 

She pulled it free. A skein of yarn, dark as Stella’s wild curls, threaded through with gold like her own sun-bleached strands.

“For the doll,” Dionys grunted, shifting his weight on the balls of his feet like he was preparing to retreat. He didn’t look at the yarn, his gaze fixed on the tent wall. “That patchwork disaster she drags everywhere.”

Alessia had been braiding scraps of old linen into the doll’s hair because yarn had always cost more than food.

He reached out to adjust the angle of the dagger where it lay across her lap, ensuring the blade faced away from her belly.

“Stella mentioned Queen Whatsit was going bald. Can’t have the General’s second-in-command looking shabby.”

He kept his eyes on the tent wall. 

“Don’t,” he muttered. “It’s yarn. It’s a knife.” He shrugged. “You needed both.”

He stood abruptly, sand gritting beneath his boots, and turned toward the flap. Paused. Didn’t look back.

“Try not to stab yourself with it before Askarion clears you to walk. I’m not sewing you up again.”

The tent flap snapped back with theatrical flourish, and Odrian strode in, juggling a flat parcel wrapped in dark blue linen, his elbows barely missing Dionys’s retreating shoulders.

“Oh, do excuse me,” he sang out, sidestepping with exaggerated grace as Dionys froze mid-exit. “I seem to have interrupted a moment of intense… yarn exchange?” He peered past Dionys’s broad shoulder at the skein in Alessia’s lap, then at the dagger gleaming on her blankets, and clucked his tongue. “Dionys, you absolute soft touch. You put waves on it. Next you’ll be embroidering handkerchiefs.”

He dodged the elbow Dionys aimed at his ribs with practiced ease and swept past him into the tent, dropping the parcel onto Alessia’s lap with a solid thunk beside the dagger.

“Since our beloved vanguard has seen fit to arm you for violence,” Odrian announced as he perched on the edge of her cot with deliberate casualness, “I have provided for your other weapon of choice.”

He gestured grandly at the dark blue linen. “Unwrap it. Go on.”

Alessia arched a brow at his intrusion, her fingers still trembling slightly around the dagger’s hilt as she adjusted her grip on the blue-wrapped parcel. The weight of it was solid, and she shot Odrian a look that tried to be cutting but landed somewhere closer to wary curiosity.

“Let me guess… It’s a map of all the exits in camp, so I can finally flee your terrible hospitality? Or perhaps a manual on how to properly identify dockweed, since Askarion seems determined to let me poison myself through botanical ignorance?”

She unwrapped the linen slowly, the dark blue fabric rough against her calloused fingers, and stilled when she saw the papyrus sheets between the wooden boards.

Not weapons.

Not intelligence.

Blank pages.

“Don’t look so suspicious, Thief,” Odrian chided, though his voice had lost its usual theatrical edge, settling into something quieter. “It’s not a trap. If I were going to bait you, I’d use something more tempting than blank papyrus and splintered wood.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and tapped the edge of the board with one finger. The gesture was light, but his gaze was steady, pinning her with the sharp, spymaster’s intensity he rarely turned on friends.

“It’s for the stories. The ones you tell Stella.” He paused, letting the words settle. “Little Star. The mountain. The constellation waiting with outstretched arms. You’ve been spinning them from memory every night, patching them together from whatever scraps of breath you can steal between escaping death and inventorying herbs.”

He glanced toward the tent flap, where Stella’s shadow moved against the canvas, arranging her rock battalion with the seriousness of a general deploying cavalry.

“Write them down,” he said, voice dropping to a murmur meant only for her. “Before they fray at the edges like old rope. You’re already changing them without realizing it. She deserves to have them forever.”

Alessia’s thumb traced the edge of the papyrus, feeling the texture of the blank surface.

Five years of hoarding stories in her head, whispering them in the dark so Stella would sleep, and now she had pages waiting for them. Not borrowed. Not scavenged. Given.

She looked up at Odrian, then at Dionys still hovering by the flap, and felt something hot and uncomfortable tighten in her chest.

“You’re both terrible at this,” she muttered, clutching the scroll packet to her ribs alongside the dagger and the yarn, forming an impossible, heavy collection of things that were hers. “Bringing me weapons and yarn and… and permanence. I don’t know what to do with that. I know how to survive. I don’t know how to stay.”

She looked down at the bundle gathered against her chest.

The dagger wasn’t only for her. It meant she would live long enough to use it.

The yarn wasn’t only for Stella’s doll. It meant someone had noticed the little things that made her daughter smile.

And the blank pages… they weren’t simply hers, either. They were for the little girl outside, marching rocks across the dirt, so that one day Little Star would still have a mother telling stories, even if memory failed.

None of the gifts had really been for her alone. She gestured vaguely with the hand that wasn’t holding the dagger as she held their gazes, Odrian’s sharp and calculating, Dionys’s gruff and distant, and forced a smile that wobbled only slightly. 

“I suppose I’ll have to learn. Though if you expect me to fill this with heroic ballads about your tactical brilliance, King Odrian, you’ll be disappointed. Little Star’s adventures are far more interesting than yours. She at least has the decency to include talking crabs.”

“I’ve met several talking crabs,” Odrian protested. “Most were politicians.”

Alessia snorted as she looked down at their gifts.

She didn’t put any of them down.