Homing

Dressed as a commoner and helped along by Anna, Charlotte finishes a batch of sweets meant for Griffith. She plans to use them as a pretext to visit him, and though Anna suggests she simply go, Charlotte worries that dropping in on a whim would only pull him away from his responsibilities. Anna quietly reflects that the princess has not looked this content since the Kushan swept into the kingdom.

On her way, Charlotte spots Griffith standing by himself atop a hill, gazing toward an approaching column. His figure strikes her as something out of a painting, so untouchable that she freezes. Before she can close the distance, the column turns out to be Sonia, Mule, and the Kushan children coming back from Vritannis. Sonia bounds up and throws her arms around Griffith, who greets her warmly, and she reports gaining a new friend while Mule earned a rival.

Noticing Charlotte at the base of the hill, Sonia watches her nervously offer the confections to everyone present. With a knowing glint, Sonia grabs the treats and passes them around to all except Charlotte. Griffith praises the baking, and the brief hush that follows is broken by Mule, who tugs Sonia off and explains that Charlotte, as Griffith's lover, has had no private moment with him and cannot get one while the two of them hover nearby. Souring at once, Sonia shoves her share into Mule's mouth and stalks away.

Come nightfall, Sonia wanders along a shallow creek and finds Irvine seated alone before a fire, playing a lute. Given leave, she settles in to warm herself and remarks that he is forever by himself, to which he answers that solitude is where a hunter feels most at ease. He calls himself an exception among hunters, describing how the chase erodes his sense of time until he becomes little more than a beast prowling the dark.

Sonia confides that her gift as a medium isolates her too, letting her perceive what ordinary people cannot and sealing her inside her own world, and she muses about the loneliness Charlotte endured for years in Wyndham. She drifts off, and Irvine drapes his coat over her before returning to his lute. In sleep she dreams of a kite and an owl at play in a forest, and of Griffith. This nineteen page chapter, part of the Millennium Falcon Arc and its Falconia Chapter, appeared in Young Animal issue 13 on 24 June 2005.