Page 25 of Raven’s Fight

That last part bothers me most.

Raven left for the Eastern Isles two days ago, and she's due back tonight. Solaris is running Blackhaven. Finlay is in his study doing whatever Finlay does in his study — based on the volume of outgoing correspondence, either running a spy network or writing a very detailed novel. I have never asked. The answer will be one of those two things and I'm not certain which one I want it to be.

The point is that today I stop mapping and start getting answers. Six weeks of watching is enough. Today we collect something that can be identified.

I find Dax and Maren in the lower courtyard, both mid-shift from their overnight run, fur still carrying the cold of the western tree line. They look up at me with the particular alertness of blink hounds who recognize the face their pack leader makes when something is actually happening.

"Western run," I say. "Now. Bring collection kits."

Dax straightens. Maren is already moving before I finish the sentence, and by the time we clear the courtyard wall the three of us are running the line.

We blink in stages, which is how the pack covers distance — not one long jump but a series of short precise ones, each landing scoped before we commit to it, the space between assessed and cleared in the half-second between leaving and arriving. It's faster than it sounds when you do it right and catastrophic when you do it wrong, which is why I don't let anyone run border jumps until I've watched them blink into a marked space fifty times without misjudging it. Dax can do it cleanly now. Maren has been able to do it since before I met her, and is quietly superior about this in the way she's quietly superior about most things.

The western tree line in autumn smells of rotting leaf litter and cold soil and the sharpness of pine resin reacting to the drop in temperature. All of that is background. Normal. Mine.

And then, threading through it at the boundary, the other thing.

It isn't a smell I can name cleanly. The closest I can get is heat as a chemical process rather than a breath weapon — not the ozone and sulfur of what a dragon exhales, not the clean burn of a phoenix, nothing I've cataloged in six years of fieldwork. It smells the way a reaction smells. Not the thing itself but the leftovers of it: the by-product of something that makes warmth as a side effect of moving rather than as something it aims and controls. Like something that runs hot from the inside out.

I crouch at the newest position marker — a notch I cut in a pine trunk at eye level last week — and breathe slowly. The scent is fresh, inside the last two hours. The rotation has been here and moved on.

"Here," I tell Dax quietly.

He crouches beside me, nose working. I watch his face: the concentration, then the slight widening that means he's caught it.

"Yeah," he says, as quiet as I am. Out here the quiet matters. "Same as yesterday, but stronger. Like there were more of them."

That's new.

"How many more?"

He works his nose again, sorting through it with the focused efficiency of a blink hound in his element. "Two yesterday, maybe three. Today, four, possibly five. The layering's harder to separate."

"Get a sample. Whole branch, if the bark has held it."

While Dax works, I blink east along the line — twenty feet, check, blink, check, blink — mapping the freshest traces. The rotation moved northwest to southeast, the same general direction as the last three runs. They have a preferred track, and that's useful, because predictable things are manageable things. They can be expected, planned around, and if it comes to it, intercepted.

Maren appears at my elbow from the south position. "Same signature down there. Maybe three hours older."

"So the southeast end finishes first and the northwest end catches up."

"That's the pattern."

I look at the tree line. Quiet now, empty, nothing moving. Whatever is out there is either very good at stillness or has pulled back far enough that even my nose loses the thread. Probably both.

"How many separate signatures on the southeast side?"

Maren thinks for a second, her dark eyes going slightly unfocused the way they do when she's pulling scent layers apart. "Two clear ones. Maybe a third — it's layered, like one is covering the other's tracks."

"They're trail-covering."

She nods and doesn't say anything else, because she doesn't need to. Trail-covering means they know about scent tracking, which means whoever is running this watch knows enough about blink hounds to be actively working against us.

That isn't improvised. That's briefed.

I crouch in the leaves and let myself think a moment — the cold of the ground coming through my trousers, the damp smell of the soil up close. The bond with Raven sits warm at the edge of my awareness. She's alive and well and somewhere over the eastern sea, exactly where she should be. At distance the bond is less like a presence and more like a temperature, and I've learned to read it the way you read any kind of weather: not precise, but directional. She's fine. She's working. She'll be back.

And she's going to want to know everything, which means I need to understand what I know before I tell her.