Page 43 of Raven’s Fight

His hand moves to the back of my neck, warm and grounding, the steadiness that is entirely his. The scale in my chest pulses once, matched to his. The bond settles into a warmth that is nothing like the tension of the exercise and nothing like the cold of what I watched in the archive and nothing like the rest of what today has been.

Just this. Just him.

The moonlight through the window dims as a cloud crosses it and the room goes briefly darker, and neither of us moves.

Later covers a great deal of ground.

Chapter 15

Hemlocke

Hosting a foreign king is, underneath everything else, a hospitality problem.

You can call it other things — a diplomatic exercise, a strategic opening, a test of how the flight presents itself — but the actual work stays the same. You need to make someone comfortable enough to be honest with you, in a space that is yours and not his, without letting the space make him feel smaller. That's hospitality. I'm good at hospitality.

What I know of Therun of the Southern Isle I know from Corvus, whose accounts are always what his accounts always are: ordered, exact, attentive to what matters and uninterested in what doesn't. Gold dragon. Three centuries of rule. Values directness, preparation, and the absence of wasted time. Was reassured by the way Corvus looked at the wolves and the white unicorns — as things to be recognized rather than acquired. Found the sea glass story interesting in a way that suggested it told him something he'd wanted to know.

Gold dragons run toward warmth and abundance. Not wealth for its own sake — the purely greedy gold dragon is a popular fiction — but the look of things cared for and thriving, the visible proof that a place has been attended to. They find neglect offensive where most creatures find it merely unfortunate.

Blackhaven is not neglected. But it is, in certain respects, austere.

None of this was supposed to happen here. Raven was to fly south to him within the month, which is how these things are ordinarily done — the younger party crosses the water to the older one, and the older one decides afterward whether the crossing was worth his while. Then word came that Therun had chosen to come himself, and to come early, and three weeks became three days.

Raven read the message twice and said only that it changed the meaning of the meeting. She's right. A king of three centuries does not cross to a northern mountain to be impressed. He crosses because he has already decided something and wants to stand next to it before he says so out loud.

So I have three days.

✦ ✦ ✦

The great hall is the right room. It's the largest interior space in Blackhaven, built for the mountain's original occupants at full scale, and its proportions carry a grandeur that furnishing it for people on two legs never quite takes away. High ceilings. Stone that holds the heat from deep in the mountain. Windows along the eastern wall that catch the afternoon and do something worthwhile with it.

The trouble is that the great hall, as it stands on any ordinary day, looks like exactly what it is — a working room in a working flight. Long tables worn smooth. Chairs in various states of matching. The patrol board on the south wall that Keir updates every morning in his small tidy hand. A stack of paperwork Raven has been meaning to deal with for a week.

I clear the paperwork. I move the tables. I send to the lower fields for flowers — the late-season varieties my foraging team has been growing on purpose ever since Raven mentioned once that she missed the smell of growing things indoors — and I set them through the hall so they read as abundance rather than effort. Everywhere at once, and nowhere placed.

The candles matter most. Gold dragons answer warm light the way cold-blooded creatures answer actual warmth. It tells them they're safe and comfortable and working at their best. Not a weakness. A nature. I take beeswax from the flight's stores and set them in groups along every surface, twenty-seven of them, each turned so its light falls toward the central table rather than the walls. Lit all together, the effect is that the table sits inside a warmth that seems to come from everywhere and from nowhere in particular.

The flowers go in three arrangements, large and middling and small, spread so the room looks like it grows things rather than like someone dressed it for an occasion. That takes longer than the candles. I rebuild the largest one three times before it sits right.

Finlay finds me adjusting the third.

He stands in the doorway a moment, looking the hall over with the attention he gives things that genuinely interest him — not idle, not social, the full weight of a man whose nine hundred years have given him a great deal to measure against. "Impressive," he says.

"It's adequate. I'd have liked more time."

"Most people would have ordered more chairs and called it done." He crosses to where I'm standing and considers the arrangement I've been fighting with. "Raven's flight is fortunate in who's in it."

I look at him. He means it. With Finlay, sincerity is always easy to spot, because it sounds exactly like his teaching voice and the whole difference lies in what he chooses to say with it.

"She chose us well," I say.

"She chose us at all," he says. "Which in her position was not required, and in her nature was not an accident." He takes in the hall again — the candles, the flowers, the patrol board left where it is. "This is good work, Hemlocke. The board was the right call."

He goes. I finish with the flowers.

✦ ✦ ✦

Therun arrives at the third hour of the afternoon.