Page 107 of Raven’s Fight

I work the line.

Finlay's protocol running underneath the way it runs now. Not as instruction anymore. As a layer beneath the thinking that produces the right action without my having to build it each time. Remember names. Ask the specific question that shows you did the reading. Give nothing away in the face. Watch the hands rather than the face, because hands are harder to govern than expressions. Stand in the way that reads as open without reading as unguarded.

They come in order of seniority. The most experienced and most politically significant first, because that is where the tone gets set. If the first twenty leave having got what they came for, it travels through the Gathering's own gossip and the following two hundred arrive with expectations already shaped.

The first twenty.

A great wyrm from the southern coastal range who has been attending this Gathering for two hundred years and who takes my measure inside thirty seconds with the efficiency of a creature who has measured a great many heirs and knows precisely what he's looking for. I give him three things: his flight's part in the southern alliance, a question about the reef territory dispute that has been running for forty years and that he did not expect the heir apparent to know anything about, and exactly the degree of deference that honors his experience without suggesting I answer to it. He leaves satisfied. I know because he doesn't look back.

A silver dragoness from the far western territories who was inside Magnus's outer alliance five years ago and is not now, for reasons that aren't in her public record but that Finlay's people flagged as worth knowing. She studies me the way someone does when they're making a comparison — I am being held up against something she already has in mind while she decides whether I match it. I give her my whole attention and ask about the migration routes shifting in the west and what it has done to her flight's seasons. The question lands. She stays two minutes past the standard window.

By the twentieth, the word has moved through the hall. I can feel it in how the next ones arrive — posture a little different from what it was in the line, first sentence a little more considered. The heir apparent is paying attention. The heir apparent has done the reading.

Good.

I give the next eighty exactly what I gave the first twenty.

At the hundred and third, I notice something.

The eastern territories bloc — three flights from the far eastern coastal communities that have historically moved as a loose group — are giving me a wide berth. Not refusing the presentation; they're in the line and they'll present when they reach it. But in the intervals between, all three are managing where they stand with a care that keeps them out of my eyeline and out of easy conversational reach.

That isn't accidental.

I've been at this Gathering sixteen hours and in this hall for four of them. Across four hours, the ordinary drift of a person's position makes predictable shapes — you move toward the people you want and away from the ones you don't. This isn't drift. It's coordinated. Three flight leaders holding the same angle away from me, adjusting to keep it as I move down the line.

Not hostility. Hostility reads differently — in the posture, in the eyeline, in the particular quality of refusing to engage on purpose. This is caution. Three flight leaders who have arrived at some shared conclusion about me and haven't yet decided what to do with it. The distance is the room they're giving themselves while the decision forms.

They aren't Magnus's people. I went through their records in the weeks between the war council and the Gathering, and the eastern bloc has held a neutral-to-cooperative line with Marzana for forty years. What they are is small. Middling, short of resources, dependent on the continental alliance for safety in ways the larger flights are not. The anxiety Mina read in the orientation sessions — the flights that need this Gathering to tell them they're still safe — sits exactly in communities like theirs.

Something is frightening them.

And they aren't sure yet whether I'm part of the answer or part of the problem.

I file it.

I don't change my approach. I don't look at them directly or acknowledge the pattern or do anything that tells them I've read it. I give the hundred and fourth flight leader the same attention I gave the first, and I keep the eastern bloc at the edge of my vision while they manage their angle, and I think: three days. In three days whatever they've been building toward will have to become a decision. Either they come to me or they go somewhere else.

I intend to know which before they do.

I have Keir for that.

Keir is going to have a very productive Gathering.

Chapter 37

Keir

The Great Gathering is a blink hound's paradise.

I don't know that other hounds would put it exactly that way. Dax would say something more measured — a target-rich environment, or operationally productive. But for me, three hundred and forty-seven flights in one place, the controlled chaos of that many species working out how to share ground, the constant motion and the information moving through all of it at the speed of conversation — this is what I was built for. Every quality I bring to a situation is worth more here than anywhere else. Speed. Ground covered. Scent read across a wide field. The ability to be inside a conversation for thirty seconds, take what's useful, and be somewhere else before anyone thinks to look for me.

I blink seventeen times in the first hour after the opening.

Not a record. The record is forty-three in a single morning during a border incident my first year with the pack, which I still use as a personal mark to beat. But seventeen in an hour, each one dropping me into a different position, each one adding to the picture — that is very good work.

Raven flagged three eastern territory flight leaders partway through the first day's reception line. Their histories, their standing with the Marzana line, and the pattern she picked out of the hall: coordinated avoidance, she called it. Holding a precise angle away from her position, adjusting to keep it as she moved.

I spent the rest of that day and the first hours of the next confirming it.