Page 16 of Raven’s Fight

I think about what Blackhaven has to become. Not only a territory. Not only a flight. Something with room in it for people who need room. The warhorse fields and the patrols and the mountain are the structure. What lives inside a structure is a choice.

I already made mine. I made it when I offered Giselle refuge yesterday without anyone asking me to.

But walking through that building put a different weight behind it. Not heavier, exactly. More real. The difference between understanding a thing in principle and understanding it with a face attached.

The continent comes up on the horizon — the dark line of the ranges, the particular shape of the coastal cliffs.

Home. My territory. My flight.

Our flight, my dragoness says.

And for the first time in weeks the word doesn't feel like a claim. It feels like a promise.

I bank right onto the line for Blackhaven and let myself think about all of it at once — Amadeus, Magnus, Cassius, the healing center, two hundred and seventeen, Finlay's letter, the war council that has to happen, Nova waiting with Solaris at Blackhaven, the six months counting down in the north.

There is so much to do.

Good.

I tuck my wings and drop into the descent, the wind pulling water from my eyes and the mountain rising to meet me, and I am already building the agenda by the time my feet touch stone.

Chapter 6

Hemlocke

The Aldenmere mare goes into labor two hours before dawn.

I know before she does, or before she shows it at least. There's a shift in the way a mare holds herself in the last hours, a turning-inward that has nothing to do with distress and everything to do with a body giving its whole attention to one thing. I've learned to read it across years of working with horses of every kind, and I've learned that reading it right means being ready without hovering, which is the harder of the two skills.

I light the lanterns in the foaling stall, put down fresh straw, fill the water bucket, and then sit on the rail and wait. This is the part that looks like doing nothing. It is not nothing. It is being present without being in the way, which horses understand better than most creatures I've met.

Titan appears at the stall door twenty minutes later.

He has no business being here at this hour. His stall is at the far end of the block, I didn't call him, and the Aldenmere mare is not his horse in any sense anyone could put on paper. He simply arrives, the way he does when something is happening that he has decided requires him. He puts his great head over the door and looks at the mare with those dark fathomless eyes, and makes a sound so low it barely counts as sound — more a vibration in the air, the note a very large creature makes when it is being deliberately calm.

The mare's ears turn toward him. Her breathing steadies.

"Thank you," I tell him quietly.

He doesn't look at me. He keeps looking at the mare.

✦ ✦ ✦

The foal arrives at dawn.

It's a straightforward birth, which is never as simple as the phrase makes it sound — there are ninety minutes of hard work between the first real contractions and the moment she hits the straw — but nothing goes wrong, nothing turns, nothing asks for more than my hands and my voice and the particular calm a unicorn can put into a room when he decides to. I've been told it feels like standing beside a very slow, very warm fire. I don't know what it's like from the outside. From in here it's just the thing I do when something needs to let go.

The foal is pitch black.

Not dark brown, not the deep seal-bay that reads black in low light. Actually black — the same matte obsidian as Titan's coat at its darkest, taking light in rather than giving any back. She has four smoke-gray stockings that fade up into her black legs like mist meeting stone, and a small gray star on her forehead that she'll never see and that I'm going to enjoy telling her about once she's old enough to grasp the idea of having a mark.

I dry her with the warm cloths I set out earlier, working from the head down in steady strokes, and she tolerates it with the wobbling indignation of something that has just arrived in the world and hasn't decided yet how it feels about being handled. Her legs are absurd. All of them, at once, too long for the rest of her the way foal legs always are, as though the length turned up before the horse did. She has opinions about this. She expresses them by trying to stand and immediately reconsidering.

The stable fills with the smell of new life — warm straw and the clean animal scent of the mare and something underneath both that I have never managed to name and associate entirely with this one moment, the moment between a thing not existing and existing. It happens every time and it is never ordinary. I have delivered foals in three territories across thirty years and not one of them has been ordinary.

Titan watches the whole of it from the door without moving. When she gets her legs under her for the first time — four separate attempts and one spectacular sideways collapse that puts my heart in my throat before she catches herself — he makes the low vibration again. Approval, I think. Or recognition. Something very old in him answering something very new.

"You did well," I tell the mare. She's already nosing at her foal with the focus of a new mother who has decided this is the most important thing that has ever happened.