Page 44 of Raven’s Fight

He comes with a small escort: four metallics in human form, the sheen still showing on them even in Blackhaven's indoor light, and the pack-lord Davan, who appears at the edge of the landing platform with the unhurried presence of something that has decided to be here and intends to take its time about establishing that. Davan brought six wolves. They move through the lower grounds with the alertness of a species that has arrived in somebody else's territory and is taking a careful inventory of it. They aren't threatening. They're simply very much here.

Therun himself lands in gold dragon form and shifts on the platform, which is an interesting choice. He could have come in already shifted and kept the whole arrival quiet. Instead he chose to be seen, at full size, by everyone on the mountain who happened to be looking. A statement about what he is, and an acknowledgment that Blackhaven is worth the full version of himself.

I note that and file it as favorable.

He is exactly what Corvus described. Ancient, sharp-eyed, three centuries of rule carried in the way he stands without any of the borrowed gravity smaller creatures use to cover for authority they don't quite have. The amber eyes take in the courtyard, the mountain above it, the flight moving through its ordinary afternoon, all of it read in the few seconds it takes him to reach me.

"Hemlocke," he says, with a slight inclination of the head. Not a bow. A real acknowledgment, the greeting of an equal meeting an equal on the other's ground. He has done his preparation too. He knows my name and my work and opens by treating both as real.

"King Therun." I match the gesture exactly. "Welcome to Blackhaven. Lady Raven is on her way from the academy and sends her respects — she'll join us within the hour. If you'll allow me to show you the hall."

He looks at me a moment. I've learned to let that happen without flinching, because it's how old things orient themselves to new ones, and because minding it would only suggest I had something to hide. Then he nods.

We walk.

He approves of the hall.

He doesn't say so. But when he comes through the door and sees the candles and the late flowers and the proportions the preparation has brought out rather than covered over, something in him settles the way things settle when an expectation has been exceeded instead of merely met. I know that response from the horses — the same ease in an animal that has been treated exactly as well as it needed, no more and no less, and in precisely the right way.

We don't go straight to the table. He moves through the hall slowly, stopping at particular things: the windows and the angle of the light, the patrol board I deliberately left on the south wall, the mountain stone that shows generations of use without showing neglect. He touches nothing. He simply looks, with the attention of someone who reads rooms the way other people read faces.

"You left the patrol board," he says, pausing in front of it.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because taking it down would have suggested we're something other than what we are. Blackhaven is a working flight, and you know it. Hiding the evidence would have insulted your intelligence."

He glances sideways at me. Something in his face might be satisfaction. "Corvus mentioned you."

"Did he."

"He said the practical running of this flight rests on three people. You, the blink hound pack-lord, and Lady Raven herself." He turns from the board. "He said it without qualifying it."

I don't know what to do with that, so I do what I always do when I don't know what to do, which is to reach for the next task. "Shall I show you the stables before we sit? The foaling season has gone well this year, and I understand your southern herds have an interest in the warhorse lines."

He looks at me a moment longer. Then: "Yes. Show me the stables."

The stable corridor smells the way it always smells, hay and warm horse and the mineral of the stone that no amount of mucking out will ever get rid of. I find it steadying. Therun walks the length of it without comment, looking into each stall as we pass with the attention of a man genuinely reading what he sees rather than performing interest in it.

We reach the Aldenmere mare's stall. She looks up from her hay with the mild interest of a horse who has been here long enough to find visitors unremarkable. Her foal — three weeks old now, coal-black with smoke-gray stockings, the star on her forehead barely showing in the warm light — presses herself against her mother's shoulder and regards Therun with the deep suspicion of something small that knows it's small.

Therun stops. He looks at the foal for a long moment. She stares back. Then he puts out one hand, palm up, the way a man does when he knows how to meet a young horse and doesn't need telling. Patience without performance.

The foal takes three seconds to decide. Then she stretches her neck and touches her nose to his palm.

"A black unicorn running warhorses," Therun says, without looking away from her. "How does that work?"

"I find horses easier to talk with than most people. They're clever in ways that get underestimated because their cleverness doesn't look like ours. Treat one like a tool and you'll get a tool. Treat one like a partner and you get something a good deal more useful."

He glances at me sideways. "And your dominant dragoness. Does she understand the difference?"

"Raven has been asking Titan's permission to ride him since the day they met. He chose her before she chose him."

Something in Therun's face shifts, the particular movement of a very old creature meeting a fact that changes the shape of what he thought he knew. He takes his hand back from the foal, who watches it go with the mild offense of something whose investigation has been cut short. "Tell me about the flight," he says.

I do.