His mother had two conditions for the scouting flight.
The first was Shadow. The second was Tsuki. Arthur had not argued with either condition, partly because they were reasonable and partly because Mira had delivered them in the specific tone that indicated they were not conditions so much as facts about what was going to happen.
He left at dawn with Shadow below and Tsuki alongside, both keeping a comfortable distance from his wings.
He had spent part of the winter rebuilding the flight spell from the ground up. His original version — had a spatial displacement spell that moved his body like a jet, fast and direct but with no real control at speed. The one he and Lyra and Saya had developed in Calmere — used conjured wings and wind magic, which handled like something with propellers: maneuverable, responsive, genuinely fun to fly but slower in speed, especially for long distances.
The obvious solution was to combine them.
Conjured wings for control and maneuverability, spatial magic layered in for acceleration. The result hit speeds upward of five hundred kilometers per hour in open air, which required one additional problem to be solved: at that speed, his face took the brunt of the wind impact. He added a wind shield — a shaped air construct that sat in front of him like an invisible pane — and the problem was solved.
The morning was grey and still, the kind of cold that had decided to be cold quietly without wind, and the farm fell away below him and became the patchwork of Thornwick's surrounding fields and then the fields gave way to the wider county geography that he had mapped from the ground but had never seen from above.
It was different from above.
The Veiling Forest to the north was always a sight to behold — from two hundred feet up he still could not see the full extent of it. The dark canopy spreading east and north as far as the eye can see. The road south was a thin pale line through the white winter landscape, connecting the clusters of farmstead and village that were smaller and further apart than the scale of daily life made them seem.
He flew for five hours.
The farmland thinned and then thickened again in the specific pattern of river drainage, the fields becoming larger and more regular as he came into the territory that fed a larger settlement. He smelled the river before he saw it — the specific cold mineral smell of a large waterway in winter — and then the river appeared below him, wide and slow and dark between the snow-covered banks, and Vareth was sitting on the eastern bend of it with the compact density of a town that had been built in the same place for a long time.
Smaller than Calmere in size but more compact. The market square was visible from this height, and the guild office with its standard marker on the roof, and the long river docks where three merchant vessels were moored in winter berth, their masts bare, waiting to unload their inventory and journey back downstream to other trade routes. Warehouses along the dockside. A covered market that ran the length of the main street. The town had the quality of a place that moved things — goods coming in from the inland farms to make their way downstream, and things arriving upstream from the larger cities down south.
He landed on the outskirts, in the shadow of a stone mill at the river's edge where the mill wheel sat frozen and still. He stood in the shadow and set the anchor — the specific attention he directed to a place through Shadow's connection, the way he marked a transit point, the feeling of the location locking into his awareness as a coordinate he could return to.
Shadow was beside him. Tsuki sat on a millstone and looked at the town with the calm amber eyes.
He gave it ten minutes. He had shadow leave a spider here so he can be sure to arrive with his family with no one around to see. Then he found the shadow and Tsuki and teleported home.
◆ ◆ ◆
The family came through in two groups.
He had not been certain the transit would hold ten people. He had tested it with eight in the basement the previous evening — the whole household standing in the main chamber while he ran the connection and confirmed the channel was stable at that load — and it had held cleanly. Ten was outside the tested range, but his already massive pool was significantly larger after the three weeks of dragon absorption.
He went first with Shadow to confirm the anchor was intact. Then he pulled the channel open and brought them through in two groups of five: his parents, Thomas, Lyra, and Saya first; then Clara, Maren, himself, and the cats — Kiiro, who had been explicitly included in the manifest by Clara with a tone that did not invite discussion, and Bella, who had appeared at the transit point on her own and sat down with the expression of a cat that had decided this was happening.
Tsuki came through with Lyra, which she always did.
They arrived in the mill shadow at the edge of Vareth on a February morning that was grey and cold and, to nine people who had spent the past month in a farmhouse and a basement, felt significantly more alive at the sight.
Clara turned in a full circle looking at the river and the docks and the moored ships and the town laid out ahead and said: 'Oh, this is the largest river I have ever seen. Look at how wide it is!.'
'Market first,' Mira said. She had a list.
◆ ◆ ◆
Arthur took his father and Thomas to the guild office first.
He had the two scales wrapped separately in cloth in his pack, the horn sections in Thomas's, plus additional dragon materials in his dimensional storage. They walked through the morning market district with the unhurried quality of people who belonged there and were not in a hurry, which was the correct quality to project when you were carrying dragon scale to a guild dealer in a town where you had never been before.
Before entering, Arthur cast an illusion spell on himself so he looked around sixteen like Thomas. The guild office had the standard layout — front counter for registered work, side door for materials assessment, the specific smell of record-keeping and old magic that all guild offices had. The assessor behind the side counter was a woman of about fifty with the eyes of someone who had been looking at unusual materials for thirty years and had stopped being surprised by most of them.