She arrived on foot.
This was unusual enough that Roan noticed it from a distance — most visitors to Shadowmere arrived by vehicle, and the ones who didn't were usually pack runners on official business, moving with the specific economy of someone covering territory. This woman was walking. Not slowly, but without urgency either. A pack bag over one shoulder, the kind people carried when they were planning to be somewhere for a while.
He met her at the gate.
"Can I help you," he said. Not unfriendly — Roan was never unfriendly — but with the careful neutrality of a Delta assessing an unknown arrival.
She looked at him.
She was perhaps thirty, dark-haired, with the kind of directness in her gaze that Roan associated, after a year of working alongside Cole and Aldis and Neva, with peopl
