The Price of Mending
The war council meets in the cellar, so Sera can attend: you, Aunt Bee, one diary, one bell, and one unicorn who listens to the tale of Rainstarter with her ears all the way forward and something complicated in her dark eyes.
“I know that name,” Sera says softly, when Bee finishes. “Every foal knows it. Rainstarter the Mender — he's old, Madison, old and kind and real, and he keeps the far marches where the storm-scars are thickest. If that scar opens clean, word can reach him and the Dawn Herd in a day. Healers. Help. Home, on the other side of a door I could walk through and back.” Her eyes go to the grey streak on her own flank, wider now than the diary is tall. “And if it opens dirty — if it's forced — it opens for everyone at once. The watchers at the fence included.”
“So we do it clean,” says Aunt Bee, in the voice she uses for settling livestock and arguments. “Iron rung true — we have the bell. The old songs sung — we have a guardian of the actual Dawn, which is overqualified if you ask me. And a heart's payment, something loved, freely given.” The cellar goes quiet. That one always goes quiet.
“Dawn is the safest hour — thresholds like beginnings,” Sera says at last. “And the wolves like endings, so they'll be slowest just then. Tomorrow, then. Unless—” her ears tilt at you, half fond, half wary, because she has learned exactly how you get, “—someone is about to suggest something braver and worse.”