Page 108 of Raven’s Fight

She's right. They're holding it deliberately, with the kind of spatial care that only happens when three people have agreed on something beforehand and are actively managing it. This isn't the unconscious drift of people who'd rather not talk to someone. This is people who have already had a conversation about someone and are managing the space between that conversation and whatever comes next.

I start tracking all three.

✦ ✦ ✦

My pack is doing what I'm doing, which is being everywhere at once.

Nobody assigned it. I didn't brief them on targets or hand out positions or tell them to work the Gathering in any particular way. What I said, the day before it opened, was: three hundred and forty-seven flights, go meet them. What they understood from that, correctly, is that this is the kind of place where the pack's social instinct and its usefulness are the same instinct, and that the right thing to do is exactly what hounds do naturally in a crowd full of scents they've never met: make contact, take everything in, compare afterward.

When a blink hound meets someone, he gets the whole picture. The scent, the body, the particular way a person occupies space when they aren't thinking about being watched. It isn't trained. It's what we are. Hounds came up in places where being able to read an unknown creature's state and intent very fast was the difference between living and not, and that reading runs all the time, underneath everything. We don't decide to read a room. We read it the way we breathe.

Dax takes the northern guest corridors. Pell takes the southern grounds, where the loose social clustering happens between formal sessions. Revan takes the stables and the outer fields — the places where people are off their formal behavior because they don't believe anyone who matters is looking. I take the main corridors and the formal rooms, because the three Raven flagged need watching from close to the primary circuit.

By the end of the first day my pack has made contact with representatives of two hundred and sixty-three of the three hundred and forty-seven flights here.

We put it together at the tenth hour in the family suite. It takes twenty minutes, because hounds trade this efficiently — not in sentences, in the pack's own shorthand, where half of it is understood before it's finished.

What comes out of the first day: three separate knots of anxiety among the middling flights, overlapping but not the same knot. Two groups forming among the larger flights, each doing its best to look like people enjoying each other's company while building something with weight in it. And the eastern bloc, which Raven already found and which I've been watching since, behaving like people who have been having a conversation for three weeks that did not begin at this Gathering.

That is very good intelligence.

I love this.

✦ ✦ ✦

Day two, the eastern bloc meets.

I know because I catch the scents converging in the east guest corridor at the second hour of the afternoon — three signatures that have spent the whole Gathering keeping a careful distance from Raven, suddenly moving toward the same point. Not one at a time, not casually. On purpose, inside a seven-minute window, which is the timing of people who agreed on an hour rather than drifting into each other.

I blink to the corridor outside the suite they go into.

I listen at the door.

Six minutes of conversation in Old Dragon.

I don't speak Old Dragon. I know about forty words, most of them nouns out of ceremonies, picked up from three years around Finlay and this past year around Solaris. What I can do is listen exactly. A hound holds sound the way a page holds ink rather than the way a person holds a summary. What I hear, I keep — the tone, the rhythm, the cadence and the breathing of each speaker. I've been told that's unusual. Most creatures remember what a thing meant. I remember what it sounded like.

I listen for six minutes. I hold all of it.

Then I blink to Solaris.

He's in the family suite at the north end of the complex. Nova is in his lap, roughly halfway to sleep and fighting it with the determination of a two-year-old who has worked out that things happen while you're asleep and has strong feelings about missing them. Solaris is patient in the way of something that spent a thousand years waiting for things and got extremely good at it.

I blink in at the far end of the room. I hold there. I wait.

"Three minutes," Solaris says quietly, without looking up. He knows it's me from the shift in the air my arrival makes, which he has learned over the past year.

Nova is out in two and a half. She goes like a dropped stone, the way hatchlings do when they finally stop fighting — here, and then simply not, the whole thing switching off at once.

Solaris moves her carefully onto the cushions beside him, covers her with the Blackhaven blanket she takes everywhere, and comes across the room with the unhurried movement of a man who is never entirely off duty where she's concerned but has decided this particular moment is safe.

"Old Dragon?"

"I think so. Six minutes of it."

"Play it."

I give it to him — the six minutes exactly, tone and cadence and the rhythm of three different speakers, as received. He listens with his eyes closed, with the look of someone reaching for language in a different part of himself than the part that handles ordinary talk.