Major Raven attends decisions, not ceremonies. He stood at the edge of the courtyard the morning Ryder was promoted because Ryder was not, that morning, being promoted to a routine command. The forest beyond the eastern country had begun to do things no commander had a vocabulary for, and Raven had decided, in his quiet way, that the new lieutenant was the man he wanted measuring it.
He reads patterns. He has built a career on the discipline of refusing to call a pattern a pattern until it has refused, three or four times, to be anything else. When the small extra paragraphs began to arrive at the bottom of village magistrates' notes — a farmer who had stopped speaking, a child who watched the wrong wall, ten villagers gathering at sunset to look at nothing — he laid them out on the map in the war chamber by location and date, and he sat with them, and he waited for the pattern to refuse to emerge. It did not refuse. It moved outward from Shadowglade.
He did not raise alarm. He sent unmarked units. He sent observers. He told Ryder, by rider, two sentences: continue to measure; do not engage anything you cannot identify. He went into the forest himself. He stood beside Ryder when Ferrin's borrowed mouth said Not yet, and he answered it calmly, and he understood that he was no longer the one running the engagement.
He is, in this chronicle, the first mortal authority to register the shape of the warlock's threat. He marches now to Darklume Cathedral with the column at his back, and a letter from Silas Grimshaw folded in his hand.
