The raven let out a watery little sigh. “You didn’t repeat it.”
He hadn’t really expected him to; he was already familiar with the way Glenn and the lady conversed. But he at least gave enough to seem as if he understood the warning, and the raven shared enough of Glenn’s urgency to accept bare minimum compliance rather than arguing the point. Pick your battles.
The raven’s sharp head tipped down to regard Glenn’s hand, braced flat upon the table. Then upward, with the same oddly incurious intensity, to look into the man’s face. In that moment, the raven seemed as much a cypher as any wild creature, but an odd electricity accompanied the look and the movement: a sense of alliance that neither contained sympathy nor precluded it. A feeling of being chosen. It almost, but not quite, dispelled when he spoke next.
“That’s just it, though. You know how she is with the big guy. Think of how important something has to be if she’d even prank him for it. That’s what we’re up against. Maybe it’s different now, the way she is. It’s like her North’s shifted. The thing that bothers me is that before, her North was always back home. Even with the kid, she wanted the kid back home, too; that’s the way she always talked about it. Now it feels like her North’s him.”
There was a string or a stray hair or something caught under a raised splinter in the table’s surface. It bugged him. It was going to keep bugging him until he plucked it. This was always the danger with ravens. As much as he tried to keep his focus, his head remained pointed toward Glenn while his feet crept along in a sidelong half-circle to get in front of the splinter, to steal it when Glenn wasn’t paying attention. The small charge between them remained, thin but palpable. It would never quite leave again.
“So where do we go from here? You said you want to try to keep her writing to knock her head loose. I was gonner catch her the next time she goes out to clean up. I’m not gonner tell her she needs to get away from the big guy, but I think maybe if I can kinda work the idea into the conversation…what are we doin’ for the spring, wouldn’t it be nice to have your own place again…you know. Make her think about the future. She’s got to be thinkin’ something about it; otherwise she wouldn’t be botherin’ to salvage her stuff. Right?”