Page 129 of Raven’s Fight

I survived Year Three. More than survived. The Purge is in the record, and the record is accurate and honest. The Gathering widened the alliance in ways that will matter when the fighting comes. Finlay went north and came back, and the letter said — I have read it four times and will read it again — that watching me become what I am has been among the true honors of a very long life.

I look at the mountains. They look the same as they have always looked. They don't mark endings the way I mark them. They will be here after this year and the next and the one after that, through whatever comes, unchanged.

There is something specific and useful about standing in front of something unchanged.

I stand in front of it a moment longer.

Then I pick up my bags.

I go home.

Chapter 45

Raven

The letter arrives before I do.

I land at Blackhaven in the late afternoon with the smell of the academy's stone still on me. Isolde meets me at the courtyard gate with the letter in her hands, wearing the expression she gets when she's read something that matters and is waiting to find out whether she was supposed to. She reads the important papers when they come in, and I haven't told her to stop. She's eighteen, she's Charron's bonded mate, she'll be running Blackhaven's household inside a year, and she needs to be able to read them.

"The timeline," she says.

"I know." I hold out my hand. "Give it to me."

She hands it over and steps back, because she understands without being told the difference between the things I take in with people present and the things I take in alone.

I read it in the courtyard, standing.

What he found comes first. The forces assembled. The positions. The supply lines that have been running for three months, which means the movement was already underway before the Gathering, before Finlay went north, before we knew what timeline we were working against. Magnus staged his build-up to look slower than it was.

The date he gives me is six months out. Six months from now, before the next Gathering, when the flights will be scattered and our ability to answer together will be at its weakest. He picked his moment. He has been planning it for longer than we thought.

Then the personal part. Nine centuries, the letter says, and in them a dozen students who became something the parts would never have predicted. Watching me has been among the true honors of a very long life. The interior work — the choosing to do right when right is harder — will matter for longer than either of us will be here to see it mattering.

I read it twice. Then I fold it and put it in the inner pocket, the one that closes.

"Convene the war council," I tell Isolde. "Everyone available. Tonight."

✦ ✦ ✦

The war council assembles at the seventh hour.

Klauth isn't here; the distance is too great for tonight, and word will reach him through channels by morning. Here instead are Solaris, Corvus, Hemlocke, Keir, and Balor, with Abraxis at the far end of the table and Mina on the relay Keir's pack keeps running. Thauglor is here too. He arrived four days ago for reasons I now understand were an instinct about timing that great wyrms grow into across centuries.

I lay it all out. Three regiments of fire drake infantry at the northern border. Two mounted units drawn from the western territories. Supply lines established and running three months already, which puts the movement well ahead of anything we had.

And then the piece that changes the shape of everything. There is a group of mage-blood practitioners Magnus has recruited across the past eighteen months, brought in one at a time through separate channels, every one of them believing the work is for Magnus's court and nothing else. Aldric's records name fourteen. Cassius will know at least six of them from his host network research.

"Magnus doesn't know," Solaris says quietly.

"Magnus may not know the whole of it. He knows he's been offered resources he didn't ask for, through channels he doesn't fully understand, and he's been taking them because they're useful. Magnus works on the assumption that useful things are worth having no matter where they come from. That's what got Aldric buried in his court for forty years. That's what got the practitioners recruited without Magnus ever understanding what he was building."

"And Amadeus gets an army," Abraxis says from the far end, in the voice of a general reading it from the inside. "He gets the war without appearing to own the war. He watches our full response, maps what we can do, puts his practitioners inside our lines under Magnus's flag. And the whole time he holds the position that he is no part of the fighting."

"Until we've committed everything," I say. "At which point he acts."

The room is very quiet.

"Six months," Balor says. Precise and flat.