While Corvus was thinking about this—and to be quite honest, he was thinking about it for the first time ever—the man with the hair on his lip and the woman with the yellow hair emerged from the Hall. They moved with more haste than grace in a straight line for Prim. “Merville,” said Brindle. “Felora. Would you care to sit with us? There is no lack of empty chairs.” But it seemed that Merville and Felora preferred standing behind Brindle and Prim to sitting just a tiny bit farther away. “What I don’t get is this,” Merville announced. “This creature is quite obviously capable of flight—which we are not. It can go anywhere it pleases, any time it chooses. Why then does it not simply go to wherever this Quest is to be—culminated, or whatever—and do whatever needs doing?”

After a short pause, Felora spoke. “I’ll tell you why not. It must be that the completion of the Quest requires humans. The raven can’t get it done without us. And what are humans good at that ravens are not? Well, fighting and all that goes with it in the way of getting hurt and maimed and dying and so on.” And she rested a hand on Prim’s shoulder. This made Prim twitch, but she did just manage to control an impulse to shrug or slap Felora’s hand away.

“Huge talking ravens actually can fight,” Corvus pointed out, “and I have scars to prove it.”

“And this is supposed to reassure us?” asked Merville in an incredulous tone.

“I can’t shake the notion that the Quest will somehow involve going underground,” Corvus said, “or at any rate into some sort of structure so deep and convoluted that it might as well be underground, and perhaps that is why I have been absolutely certain from the beginning that humans must be part of it.”

“Again,” said Merville, “if the intent of these statements is to reassure us as to the nature of the planned activities—or, for that matter, whether you have even the vaguest notion as to what those activities are to consist of—then you might wish to fly away again and stay away for a good deal longer and come back with a plan.”

“Or better yet, find some other family to pester,” put in Felora.