I stood in the corridor and looked at this woman.
My wolf was absolutely silent. Not the alarmed quiet. The kind of quiet a wolf went when it was in the presence of something so much older than itself that the right response was simply to be still.
"How old are you," I said.
Corva looked at me with the slight expression of someone who'd been asked this question before and found it endearing every time.
"Old enough," she said, "to have watched the first three Stabilizers and learned what they needed." She looked at me. "Old enough to have decided, after the third one, that the fourth one was going to have better circumstances." She paused. "I put Hew in place. I chose him specifically because he could identify the marker early enough to give you a childhood before the world wanted somet
