She chuckled into her sleeve, and swept her finger across the broader host.
"As for the rest of the colony, followers too, but of a gentler sort. Followers of their own paths of advancement. The antlered one, the three-faced one, the stone hound at the rear, each of them walked their own long road to Trueness, and each of them is here because a keeper called and the rewards seemed worth the errand. Look at how loosely they fly. Boredom, in a war-column! Every one of them is idly wondering why so many were sent for so small a task, and every one of them expects to be home before their perch cools. That is the comfort of a herd that has never once been thinned. I've seen that comfort many times, in many magnificent gatherings." She sipped her tea. "I rarely saw it twice in the same gathering."
Then she paused, and her voice turned musing, the idle wondering of a very old watcher turning a specimen over in her mind.
