Page 18 of Raven’s Fight

Charron arrives at mid-morning.

He has no reason to be here today. Covering my morning rounds was his reason yesterday, after I mentioned — carefully, without weight on it — that Isolde was expected in the stables. Today he has arranged a different one. He carries a report on grass coverage from the western grazing boundaries, a document that could have waited until the afternoon briefing and which he has nonetheless delivered by hand to the stables at precisely the hour Isolde is in them.

I say nothing.

Charron is thirty, which makes him thirteen years older than Isolde and four years younger than me. He has the coloring most of our herd has — the long black hair, the pink eyes that go bright magenta when his unicorn is near the surface — but there's something in him that's only his, quieter than most of the males in the herd and more considered. Our mother used to say he was the one born knowing how to wait. She meant it as observation, not criticism. She was right.

He helps Isolde move clean straw into the next stall while I check the foal's legs and write down her first measurements. He is careful around her — not performing care, actually careful, the attentiveness of a male who knows he is standing near something he doesn't want to frighten. He talks to her the way he talks to the horses. Not much, and when he does, with a warmth that asks nothing back.

Isolde talks back. That isn't nothing. She isn't shy, but she is selective — there are people she expands around and people she contracts around, and the difference is legible if you know what you're looking at. Around Charron she expands. She has, every time, since the first morning he turned up with some reason or another to be in the stables.

I've been watching. Watching very carefully, because what I've known for months — that Charron has scented her, that my brother is as certain about Isolde as I was certain about Raven before I understood what that certainty was going to mean — is something I'm holding with both hands while I work out the timing.

Leander will need time. That much I know as fact. He loves his daughter with the fierce particular love of a father who nearly lost her, and the idea of her finding a mate at eighteen — however good the male, however clear the bond — is going to sit badly before it sits well. So I've been waiting for the situation to do some of the work itself. For Isolde to have had enough time around Charron that she knows him, rather than simply meets him.

I think we're getting close.

Raven will have thoughts about this when I tell her. She'll have them immediately and they'll be in order before I finish the sentence. I've carried it alone long enough — I'll tell her tonight, once she's back from the Eastern Isles and the council business has settled for the evening. It's hers to know. Isolde is her sister in every way that counts.

At the end of the morning, with the foal asleep and the stalls clean and Isolde washing her hands at the trough, Charron appears at her elbow with the careful unconcern of a male who has been working up to something for three hours.

"Can I ask you something?"

Isolde looks at him. "Sure."

"Black unicorns have a bonding tradition. The herd teaches the young ones how the bond works — what it feels like before you know what it is." He pauses. Not nervous. Deliberate. "I could explain it to you. If you wanted. Some of the other species in the flight have been asking."

It is, objectively, a reasonable offer. The flight is mixed, and its bonding traditions are becoming a practical matter as more families settle here. That he has clearly been rehearsing the phrasing since dawn is not visible to anyone who isn't his brother and hasn't known him thirty years.

Isolde considers it — really considers it, not performing the consideration — and nods. "Yeah. I'd like that."

Not I suppose. Not if you're offering.

I'd like that.

I turn back to the foal's stall before either of them can see my face.

She's asleep in the straw, smoke-gray legs folded under her, already entirely at home in a world she has known less than a day. Titan is still at the door, patient as stone, watching her breathe.

I let out a slow breath.

Outside, something begins.

Chapter 7

Corvus

The second day on the Southern Isle begins before the sun does.

I'm on the balcony of the guest quarters watching the horizon go from black to gray to the rose-gold this coast produces at dawn. It's different from Blackhaven's, in ways I find myself cataloging without meaning to. Blackhaven's mornings come in cold and sharp, the mountain light cutting rather than spreading. Here it arrives softly, the sea mist thinning it before it ever reaches the land, turning the edges of the world into something that looks painted — by someone with strong feelings about color and enough time to act on them.

Standing here, I understand why a gold dragon chose this island. Gold dragons lean toward beauty as much as value, and Therun built both into the same place.

I slept four hours, which is barely enough. The shipping agreement is on the table in the room behind me, laid out in Thauglor's handwriting, which is neater than mine. It will need Klauth's signature eventually, and I didn't want it looking like it was written by a man who had flown several hours and met a foreign king on the same day. Which it was. It doesn't need to look like it.

Yesterday's meeting ran three hours and ended with Therun's pledge — wolf trackers and metallic dragons, conditional on Klauth's signature over the shipping lanes. But what I keep turning over isn't the outcome. The outcome was better than anyone had cause to expect from a first meeting. It's the shape of how it happened. That Therun went straight at what Raven is rather than what she represents. That he asked me to describe her as a person rather than a position. That he listened to the sea glass and the Purge in the same breath and said she sounded worth the trouble, with the settled certainty of a man who has used that exact phrase before and meant it every time.

He's going to like her. I think she's going to like him. And I'm glad, in a way I didn't expect to be, that she'll get to reach that judgment herself.