6. Hemlocke
Hemlocke
The Aldenmere mare goes into labor two hours before dawn.
I know before she does, or before she shows it at least. There's a shift in the way a mare holds herself in the last hours, a turning-inward that has nothing to do with distress and everything to do with a body giving its whole attention to one thing.
I've learned to read it across years of working with horses of every kind, and I've learned that reading it right means being ready without hovering, which is the harder of the two skills.
I light the lanterns in the foaling stall, put down fresh straw, fill the water bucket, and then sit on the rail and wait. This is the part that looks like doing nothing. It is not nothing. It is being present without being in the way, which horses understand better than most creatures I've met.
Titan appears at the stall door twenty minutes later.
He has no business being here at this hour.
His stall is at the far end of the block, I didn't call him, and the Aldenmere mare is not his horse in any sense anyone could put on paper.
He simply arrives, the way he does when something is happening that he has decided requires him.
He puts his great head over the door and looks at the mare with those dark fathomless eyes, and makes a sound so low it barely counts as sound — more a vibration in the air, the note a very large creature makes when it is being deliberately calm.
The mare's ears turn toward him. Her breathing steadies.
"Thank you," I tell him quietly.
He doesn't look at me. He keeps looking at the mare.
? ? ?
The foal arrives at dawn.
It's a straightforward birth, which is never as simple as the phrase makes it sound — there are ninety minutes of hard work between the first real contractions and the moment she hits the straw — but nothing goes wrong, nothing turns, nothing asks for more than my hands and my voice and the particular calm a unicorn can put into a room when he decides to.
I've been told it feels like standing beside a very slow, very warm fire.
I don't know what it's like from the outside.
From in here it's just the thing I do when something needs to let go.
The foal is pitch black.
Not dark brown, not the deep seal-bay that reads black in low light.
Actually black — the same matte obsidian as Titan's coat at its darkest, taking light in rather than giving any back.
She has four smoke-gray stockings that fade up into her black legs like mist meeting stone, and a small gray star on her forehead that she'll never see and that I'm going to enjoy telling her about once she's old enough to grasp the idea of having a mark.
I dry her with the warm cloths I set out earlier, working from the head down in steady strokes, and she tolerates it with the wobbling indignation of something that has just arrived in the world and hasn't decided yet how it feels about being handled.
Her legs are absurd. All of them, at once, too long for the rest of her the way foal legs always are, as though the length turned up before the horse did.
She has opinions about this. She expresses them by trying to stand and immediately reconsidering.
The stable fills with the smell of new life — warm straw and the clean animal scent of the mare and something underneath both that I have never managed to name and associate entirely with this one moment, the moment between a thing not existing and existing.
It happens every time and it is never ordinary.
I have delivered foals in three territories across thirty years and not one of them has been ordinary.
Titan watches the whole of it from the door without moving.
When she gets her legs under her for the first time — four separate attempts and one spectacular sideways collapse that puts my heart in my throat before she catches herself — he makes the low vibration again.
Approval, I think. Or recognition. Something very old in him answering something very new.
"You did well," I tell the mare. She's already nosing at her foal with the focus of a new mother who has decided this is the most important thing that has ever happened.
She isn't wrong.
? ? ?
Isolde arrives an hour after sunrise.
This is her pattern now. She comes every morning, has come every morning for three months, as reliably as the feed schedule and a good deal more cheerful about it.
She comes to help, which she does well and without being told what to do, and she comes because she likes it here, which is visible in the way her shoulders drop as she comes through the door — the same drop I see in a horse when something stressful passes and the air goes back to normal.
Isolde is a nightmare, which means she carries shadow even in human form, a faint darkness clinging to her edges in certain lights, the visual equivalent of a low hum.
In her father Leander it reads as gravity.
As command. In Isolde it reads as depth.
She is seventeen — eighteen at the Great Gathering — and already carries more of herself than most people twice that, with the self-possession of someone who has been through something and come out the other side still recognizably herself.
She stops when she sees the foal.
Isolde has her father's eyes, that warm nightmare dark, carrying the depth of a species that lives half in shadow even when it's wearing a person.
Those eyes go wide now, and she presses both hands over her mouth, and the sound she makes is the involuntary noise of someone meeting something so unexpectedly good that the body answers before the mind arrives.
"Oh," she says through her hands. "Oh, she's perfect."
"She came this morning. Just before dawn."
Isolde goes to the stall slowly, the way I taught her — nothing sudden, weight low, hands where they can be seen.
She learned that quickly. She learns everything quickly, which I suspect comes of growing up among extraordinary people and discovering that paying very close attention was the most reliable way to keep pace.
She holds out the back of her hand at the foal's height and waits.
The foal stretches her neck out and sniffs.
Decides. Comes forward on those ridiculous legs and pushes her nose into Isolde's palm with more confidence than ought to be available to something that has been alive ninety minutes.
"Hello," Isolde breathes. The word is barely there.
The foal breathes warm against her palm and doesn't withdraw.
Isolde laughs — quietly, so as not to startle her — and the sound is so purely delighted that Titan turns to look at her from his post. He weighs her the way he weighs everything, thoroughly and without hurrying. Then he goes back to watching the foal.
High praise.
I watch all of it from the rail and feel the warmth that isn't mine — the thread I share with Raven, carrying mood and presence across distance, warm when she's well and bright when she's happy.
It runs quieter when she's away, the way a fire is quieter when you move back from it and still gives heat.
I think about the last time it ran bright instead of warm.
? ? ?
Three weeks ago. Raven's version of a quiet evening, which involves considerably more fire than most people's quiet evenings and which I have come to understand as its own kind of peace.
We had the upper flight field to ourselves.
Nova asleep in the nest below, Solaris on watch, the other three occupied elsewhere the way the nest spreads itself out across a large territory.
The autumn air was cold enough that her breath misted when she shifted back after her evening flight, and she stood there in the dark with her wings half open and her hair loose and her scales still warm from the change, and she looked at me with those sapphire eyes and said nothing at all.
She doesn't always need words. That's one of the things I've learned about her — that the absence of words isn't absence. It's a different kind of presence, one she gives to very few people, and it carries more than most conversations do.
I crossed the field to her. The grass was cold underfoot and the mountain was very quiet and the stars over Blackhaven were the brilliant undiluted stars you only get this high up.
She reached up and put both hands on my chest, over the place where her scale sits under my shirt, and I felt it warm under her touch — the bond answering her the way it always does, brightness moving through it like sunlight through water.
She pressed her forehead into my collarbone.
She smelled of the mountain and the cold and the warmth that is only ever hers, the scent that lives in the bond and that I would know in any darkness, without sight or sound.
"Long day?" I asked.
"Long week." A pause. "I'm glad you're here."
Raven doesn't say that easily. She loves deeply and shows it a hundred ways, but the plain statement — I'm glad, I need this — costs her something, and she offers it rarely, and I take it every time as the thing it is.
I put my arms around her and felt her breathe out against my chest, and the wings came around us both, and the field was very dark and very quiet and the bond ran very bright.
What came after was hers as much as mine — the warmth of her, the way she turns toward gentleness when she isn't carrying the dominance the flight asks of her, the mix of strength and softness that is entirely Raven and that I still find astonishing, three scales and a bond into knowing her.
And underneath it I could feel the others' threads too.
Corvus's steadiness. Keir's warmth. Solaris's ancient depth.
Finlay's contained fire. All of us in her and her in all of us, and the nest whole.
I think about that night when the work gets heavy. When the fire drake reports come in and the six months count down and the war that's coming lies across everything we've built. It doesn't make the heavy things lighter.
It reminds me what the heavy things are for.
? ? ?
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.