Page 64 of Raven’s Fight

I eat everything on my plate, including the root thing.

✦ ✦ ✦

The stables in the afternoon hold the warmth they always hold at this hour — bodies and hay and the low autumn sun through the south windows, the smell of a place given over to keeping living things well. I hear the foal before I see her, that high expectant sound a young horse makes when it recognizes footsteps and has opinions about them.

I didn't plan to come here. I finished lunch and my feet took the stable route the way feet do when the body has decided something before the mind catches up. That isn't a bad sign. My body is usually right.

Titan isn't in his stall. He's in the paddock at the far end of the block, where he goes when the weather is clear and the sun is low enough not to bother him. I find him at the fence, holding the stillness that is specifically his — not resting, not alert, simply a very large horse who has decided this stretch of rail deserves his attention today. His black coat takes the afternoon light and gives none of it back. He absorbs it the way I do in dragon form.

He turns as I come. His dark eyes find me and stay.

I let myself through the gate. He doesn't come to meet me. He never does. He waits, with the patience of something that learned long ago the approach is yours to make or not, as you like. I cross the paddock and put my hand on his neck and feel the warmth of his coat in the sun and stand there a while before I do anything else.

He doesn't need anything from me except to be brushed.

That's what I came for, I understand now that I'm here. Not the review. Not the border check. Not another circuit of things I've already been around until the going around stops producing anything new and starts producing dread. Titan doesn't need my strategy. He doesn't need my anger or my plan or anything I've built. He needs the brush to come from the right direction with steady pressure over the shoulder blade, and he would like the apple slice he knows perfectly well I'm carrying.

I take the brush off the hook by the gate, start at his neck, and work.

The motion is its own kind of thinking, the sort where the hands are busy and the mind gets permission to move slowly through whatever it wants rather than at the speed the other work demands. I think about Nova leaning into the wind off Solaris's wings, learning the pull. I think about Hemlocke and the foal and the twenty-seven candles in the great hall. I think about Finlay at the front of the Protocol room saying the rite creates an edge with nine centuries standing behind the words. I think about nothing in particular for a while, which is a skill I've been working at and which the brushing makes easier.

The foal comes to watch at some point, her head over the rail, all legs and bright chestnut, the white blaze down her face still too wide for the rest of her, studying me with the intensity of something young enough to find nearly everything worth investigating. Titan ignores her the way he ignores anything that doesn't require him. The foal watches me the way she watches everyone she hasn't finished deciding about.

I brush him for an hour.

The hour passes without any of it feeling like preparation, or like waiting. It's just an hour. When I'm done I put the brush back, give Titan his apple slice, which he takes with dignified efficiency, and press my forehead briefly to his.

"Thank you," I tell him.

He puts his nose against my palm.

I go.

✦ ✦ ✦

Corvus finds me in the suite at the seventh hour. He comes through the door with a paper bag and the expression he wears when he's done something he knows will land, carrying the knowledge of it slightly ahead of himself.

The bag holds dark sea salt caramel chocolate, the kind from the town market three miles down. It's the only place in the region that makes it properly, which I know because I once ate a badly made version in Corvus's presence and he spent four minutes explaining the difference — which at the time I thought excessive and now understand entirely, because the difference is real and the bad version is genuinely worse.

"You went to town."

"I had time between the fourth-year assessment and dinner."

"That's a three-mile run."

"Six, there and back," he says. "It's fine." He says it's fine in the tone that means it was six miles in the cold and he'd do it again unasked, because this is how Corvus loves people — practically, by fetching the correct version of the thing, by running six miles in the cold rather than buying the wrong one nearby.

We sit on the floor. He doesn't ask about the chair. He knows this is a floor conversation, the kind where neither of us has to perform anything. We eat the chocolate slowly, the way it deserves, small pieces, letting each one finish before the next.

"Callan gave me the same mark for all three."

"Of course he did."

"I knew he would. I still needed to check."

"You always need to check." Not teasing. Warm — the warmth of someone who finds a habit endearing because he's watched it produce right answers for twenty-three years. "It's one of your better qualities. You never take a thing as true just because you expected it to be."

"The root thing at lunch wasn't a potato."