They hurried toward the secluded enclosure at the far end of the castle stables.
Unlike the main stable, this section had remained sealed ever since Leon transformed the mare. Only a handful of trusted hands were permitted anywhere near it.
Before they even reached the fence, Leon slowed.
"...Do you feel that?"
Raymond frowned. "The wind?"
Leon nodded.
A gentle breeze brushed across their faces. Loose strands of hay drifted lazily through the air. Leaves spun across the stone path in lazy circles.
Nothing strange about that.
Except that when Arthur stopped beside the fence and looked toward the treeline beyond the enclosure, not a single branch was moving. The grass lay completely flat. The world beyond the stable's invisible boundary was perfectly, unnaturally still — as though someone had drawn a circle around this place and told the weather it was not permitted to enter.
The stable hand assigned to the mare was waiting outside, looking like a man who very much wanted to be somewhere else. He straightened the moment Arthur appeared and bowed deeply.
"My Lord."
"Report."
The man hesitated. "I... I don't rightly know how to explain it." His gaze drifted toward the enclosure with undisguised unease. "The mare entered labor shortly after sunrise. Everything was perfectly normal at first. But then—" He gestured at the swirling air around them. "This started. I thought a storm was rolling in. I checked the neighboring fields. I rode out to the western paddocks." He swallowed. "There isn't so much as a breeze anywhere else."
Arthur observed the strange currents for a moment longer.
"You've done well. You may leave."
The relief on the man's face was immediate and absolute. He bowed once, quickly, and departed at a pace that stopped just short of running.
The moment he disappeared—
A familiar metallic screech cut through the air above them.
Skyrend launched from Raymond's shoulder, bronze-colored wings snapping open. Rather than fighting the strange currents, he tilted into them — banking sideways, catching an invisible stream, rising sharply before wheeling into a wide circle above the enclosure. The winds almost seemed to redirect themselves for him. He dipped lower. Rose again. Carved a lazy arc through the air with the ease of something doing exactly what it was built for.
Raymond watched him and smiled despite himself. "He likes it."
Arthur simply stepped inside.
The mare rested on a thick bed of fresh straw.
In appearance, she remained unchanged — the same brown coat, the same gentle eyes. But the resemblance to the normal creature Leon had transformed weeks ago ended there. Her coat gleamed. Her breathing was slow and steady. Even in the advanced discomfort of labor, she held herself with a quiet, settled calm — the particular calm of an animal that has decided it is not afraid.
She was still an ordinary horse.
But she was carrying something that might change everything.
Silence settled over them. Only the rhythmic whisper of the wind.
Then Cedric cleared his throat.
"There is another matter we should settle before this goes any further."
Arthur already knew what he meant. So did Raymond. They all turned toward one another with the unspoken question hanging clearly in the air.
Skyrend had proven the principle. Being present at birth seemed to significantly strengthen the initial bond. If this foal carried the same potential — and there was every reason to believe it did — then its future partner should be standing here when it took its first breath.
Leon looked at Arthur.
Arthur shook his head immediately. "This horse doesn't suit me."
Raymond's eyebrow rose slowly. "Oh?"
"Don't tell me," he said, "that you're waiting for something cooler."
Arthur remained completely expressionless.
Raymond stared at him.
Several seconds passed.
"You..." He pointed. "...you actually just said that."
"A horse doesn't suit my temperament," Arthur said, as though this were a reasonable thing to say. "I'll wait."
Raymond turned to look at Cedric, found no support there, and turned back. He appeared to be searching for words and finding none worth using.
Cedric adjusted his spectacles with the careful neutrality of a man hiding a smile. "As for me — this steed would be wasted on an old scholar. My knees already complain every morning." He folded his hands. "I'll leave riding to people who are still enthusiastic about it."
That eliminated both obvious candidates.
Leon scratched the back of his head. "What about Marshal Gareth?"
Arthur shook his head. "This horse, even as a foal, is already running large. But Gareth is..." A faint, carefully restrained smile. "...Gareth. He requires something considerably larger."
"Fair point," Raymond said. "The Thorn brothers?"
Arthur rejected that without hesitation. "If one receives a magical companion and the other doesn't, they'll spend the next decade competing over it instead of commanding. They're accomplished soldiers. They're also remarkably childish when they feel the other has an advantage."
Leon found himself nodding. That sounded painfully accurate.
Silence settled again.
Then Cedric spoke quietly. "General Elara."
The name landed and stayed there. Arthur looked up slowly. Then nodded once — not in concession, but in recognition, the way a man nods when he hears his own thought spoken aloud.
"So did I," he said.
Raymond considered it for a moment, then nodded. Leon found himself doing the same.
Arthur turned it over briefly, formally, as though the case still deserved to be made. "She commands the intelligence network. She scouts. She travels. Speed matters more to her work than force. This steed suits her." He looked at Raymond. "Bring her."
Raymond was already moving.
General Elara arrived only minutes later.
The moment she stepped through the enclosure gate, she slowed. The strange wind reached her immediately — tugging at the edge of her dark cloak, lifting a few strands of raven-black hair across her face. Her emerald eyes moved across the scene with the practiced quiet of someone assessing a room before anyone in it knows they've been assessed.
She looked at the localized wind. The transformed mare. Leon. Cedric. Arthur.
She did not ask what was happening. She did not look confused or unnerved. What she looked was thoughtful — the expression of someone fitting the last piece of something into a picture she had already mostly assembled.
Arthur explained everything nonetheless. Leon. The gift. The Blood Pact. Skyrend. The transformed animals. Why she was here.
When he finished, Cedric asked, "You don't seem particularly surprised."
A faint smile touched Elara's lips. "I oversee the city's intelligence. A secret this large doesn't stay invisible inside my own walls for very long." She glanced toward Arthur with something that might, in different company, have been amusement. "I had questions I didn't yet have the right to ask."
Arthur simply asked, "Will you accept this responsibility?"
Elara turned toward the mare. The wind moved around her, soft and unhurried, the way it hadn't moved around any of the rest of them. She watched for a long moment — not hesitating, exactly, but looking.
"I've spent my entire career chasing information," she said finally. Her eyes remained on the mare. "Perhaps it's time I chased it faster."
Arthur nodded once. "Then stand beside her."
The change was immediate.
The gentle currents strengthened. Hay lifted from the ground. Loose straw spiraled upward. The air itself began to carry a low, barely-audible hum — less a sound than a pressure, felt more in the chest than heard.
The wind was no longer wandering. It was converging — drawing inward from every direction, tightening around the birthing stall, growing faster and higher until a miniature cyclone enclosed the mare entirely. Outside the fence, the world remained perfectly calm. Inside, the stable groaned under the pressure of the swirling air. A loose board in the far wall rattled steadily against its frame.
Even Raymond held his breath.
Above them, Skyrend's wide circles slowed. Once. Twice. Then the eagle simply stopped — held aloft by some combination of the currents and his own impossible stillness, watching.
The mare let out a single powerful neigh.
The wind surged in answer. Straw exploded upward. Dust rose in curtains. For one suspended moment, the cyclone drew so tight around the stall that it looked less like weather and more like something deliberate — something standing guard.
The mare pushed. And again. The foal was coming.
With every moment, the wind grew louder. The stable shuddered. Elara raised one arm instinctively to shield her face from the swirling debris, her cloak snapping behind her.
One final push.
Then—
Silence.
The wind stopped as though cut.
The foal slipped gently onto the bed of straw. A small, still shape.
Leon's breath caught. "It isn't moving—"
One ear twitched.
A foreleg shifted.
The foal tucked its legs beneath itself, found the ground, and simply — stood. No trembling. No slow, uncertain struggle toward upright. It rose the way things rise when they have always known how. The sound of four small hooves settling onto the stable floor was very soft and very clear in the sudden quiet.
Nobody moved.
The foal opened its eyes.
Brilliant sapphire blue. Clear and alert and somehow — aware. Not with the blinking, bewildered awareness of a newborn. With the particular alertness of something taking its first look at a world it intends to understand.
Then they noticed the coat.
Where the mother was brown, the foal was silver-white. Not pale or faded — silver, the way metal is silver, the way a clear sky just before dawn is silver. Its mane caught the morning light and scattered it in a dozen directions at once, shimmering as though each strand were slightly, perpetually in motion.
For a moment it simply stood there, still faintly glistening.
Then the wind returned.
Not the cyclone. Something gentler — countless small currents, moving with an almost deliberate tenderness, wrapping themselves around the foal from every direction at once. The fluids of birth lifted from its coat in individual droplets, each one catching the light as it rose. For a few extraordinary seconds the entire enclosure filled with tiny drifting points of brightness, turning slowly in the air like stars that had decided, briefly, to come down and have a look at things.
Then they scattered into the sky and were gone.
The foal stood there. Pristine. Radiant. Every line of it clean and still and quietly impossible.
Arthur let out a slow breath.
The foal blinked once, turned, and walked toward its mother. Each step unhurried and certain, as though it had done this before. Without hesitation it pressed its head beneath her neck. The mare lowered her own, and licked the silver foal with a slow, unmistakable tenderness.
No magic. No miracle.
Simply a mother, meeting her child.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Then Arthur stepped forward. When he finally spoke, his voice was very quiet.
"This isn't just another magical beast."
He watched the foal lean into its mother's warmth.
"It's the beginning of a new bloodline."
Cedric nodded slowly, not looking at the foal anymore. Neither was Arthur. Their eyes were somewhere further away — fixed on something the others couldn't quite see yet.
Leon looked between them.
Then back at the small silver foal, already standing so steadily in the straw.
He thought he was beginning to understand.