Page 19 of Raven’s Fight

Thauglor finds me on the balcony a quarter past the hour, which means he slept about four as well. In an ancient wyrm that's either entirely normal or a sign the situation is occupying him more than he lets on, and with Thauglor the difference between those two is not always legible.

He leans on the rail beside me and looks at the horizon.

"Therun wants to show us the wolf packs this morning," he says. "Before we go."

"How long?"

"Two hours. Maybe three." A pause. "He thinks Raven's mate should see what he's offering before anyone signs anything. He wants you to know what the wolves are, not only what they're worth."

I look at him. "He said that?"

"More or less." The corner of Thauglor's mouth moves. "His exact words were that a female who asks for sea glass instead of weapons deserves a mate who understands the difference between a tool and a life. He wants to know whether you do."

I'm quiet a moment, watching the rose-gold deepen over the water. "He's still testing."

"He will be testing until the day he decides he's finished testing," Thauglor says. "It's how he has lasted three centuries. Don't take offense at it. Take it as information."

"Information about what?"

"That he measures what he's committing to very carefully." Thauglor straightens off the rail. "Which means when he commits, it holds. That's worth a morning."

I go inside and dress.

✦ ✦ ✦

The wolf packs run the western slopes.

Therun has left that half of the island wild while the eastern half is worked and managed, and the line between them is visible from the air — a place where ordered fields give way to something older, the growth thicker and less directed, the land doing what it would do if nobody asked anything of it. I noticed it yesterday from a distance. On foot it's something else. The air changes. It carries more in it. The smell of living things that haven't been arranged.

We walk, Therun leading, two of his guards flanking at a distance that suggests security without suggesting distrust. Thauglor takes his left, which puts me on his right, and I understand that this is another small test — a guest given the right hand is being watched for how he holds it. I hold it quietly. I don't fill silences I wasn't invited into.

We clear the edge of the cultivated land before the trees close in, and I get my first proper look at the white unicorns.

Four of them in the lower pasture at the tree line, two adults and two younger ones, past being foals and not yet grown. Their coats aren't quite white. In direct sun they carry a faint iridescence, the way some feathers do, shifting through white and silver and something almost blue at the edges of movement. Their horns are longer and finer than Hemlocke's. A different line, shaped differently by three hundred years alone in the south, and unmistakably the same creature underneath.

I stop walking. Therun stops beside me and says nothing, which I've come to understand is how he gives a man room to take a thing in.

"Hemlocke is going to need photographs," I say.

"Your mate's bond with the black unicorn herd."

"He runs the warhorses and the grazing and half the practical working of Blackhaven," I say. "And he's never seen one of these. He thought they were gone."

"Most of the continent thinks they're gone." Therun watches the four of them with the comfortable regard of a man for whom this view is ordinary. "I spent forty years finding what was left and convincing them the Southern Isle was safer than wherever they'd scattered to. It was not a short negotiation." A pause. "White unicorns are not easily convinced of anything."

"What changed their minds?"

"Time. And my stopping. I gave up trying to convince them and simply made the island safe. They found their own way here eventually." He looks at me. "Some things can't be negotiated into existence. You build the conditions and you wait."

I think about that. I keep it. We walk on.

The pack finds us rather than the other way around.

I hear them before I see them — nothing as dramatic as howling, only the sound of something large moving through undergrowth with the confidence of something that has no reason to be careful. Then the trees thin and they're there. Eight of them, at the front edge of what I understand is a much larger group. Their coats read black in the morning light, but as they come closer I can see two are deep charcoal and one has silver ticking through hers that catches the low sun in threads.

They are enormous. Not unnaturally so, not the exaggerated scale of a shifted predator, but genuinely large in the way that tells you generations of good feeding, nothing hunting them, and ground that let them become everything their size could be. The largest stands taller than my hip at the shoulder. Their prints in the soft earth are bigger than my hand spread wide.

Therun stops. The pack stops.