It was a deeper green than the beeches Tanaros had known as a boy, the leaves broader, fanning to capture and hold the cloud-filtered sunlight The trunks of the trees were gnarled in a way they weren’t elsewhere, twisted around ragged boles as they grew, like spear-gutted warriors straining to stand upright.

They were old and strong, though, and their roots were deep.

Blight, the Ellylon said; Satoris the Sunderer blighted the land, the ichor of his unhealing wound seeping like poison into the earth, tainting it so no wholesome thing could grow.

Tanaros had believed it, once. No longer. Wounded, yes. The Vale of Gorgantum had endured the blow of the Shaper’s wound, as Lord Satoris himself endured it. Deprived of sunlight, it suffered, as Lord Satoris suffered, driven to earth by Haomane’s wrath. Yet, like the Shaper, it survived; adapted, and survived.

And who was to say there was no beauty in it?

Ahead, a rustling filled the wood. There was no path, but Ushahin Dreamspinner led the way, at home in the woods. From behind, he looked hale, his spine straight and upright, his step sure. His gilt-pale hair shone under the canopy. One might take him, Tanaros thought, for a young Ellyl poet, wandering the wood.

Not from the front, though. No one ever made that mistake.

There, the first nest, a ragged construction wedged in the branches high overhead. Others, there and there, everywhere around them as they entered the rookery proper, and the air came alive with the sound of ravens. Ushahin stopped and gazed around him, a smile on his ruined face.

Ravens hopped and sidled along the branches, preening glossy black feathers. Ravens defended their nests, quarreled over bits of twig. Ravens flew from tree to tree, on wings like airborne shadows.

“Kaugh!”

The sound was so close behind him that Tanaros startled. “Fetch!”

There, on a low branch, a raven; his raven. The wounded fledgling he had found half-frozen in his Lord’s garden six years gone by, grown large as a hawk, with the same disheveled tuft of feathers poking from his head. The raven cocked its head to regard him with one round shiny eye, then the other. Satisfied, it wiped its sharp, sturdy beak on the branch.

Tanaros laughed. “Will he come to me, do you think?”

Ushahin gave his uneven shrug. “Try it and see.”

The ravens were the Dreamspinner’s charges, a gift not of Lord Satoris, but of the Were who had reared him. Elsewhere, they were territorial. It was only here, in Darkhaven, that they gathered in a flock—and only when summoned, for Ushahin Dreamspinner had made them the eyes and ears of Lord Satoris, and sent them throughout the land.

This one, though, Tanaros had tended.

“Fetch,” he said, holding out his forearm. “Come.”