Page 30 of Raven’s Fight

Six weeks to the Purge.

The courses lay out cleanly.

Tactics and Warfare with Callan in the east tower. He's already pinned a scenario to the board when I arrive five minutes early, which tells me this year is going to move faster than last. Good. The Year Two problems had started to feel like exercises I was solving rather than problems I was working, and I learn better when I can't see the shape of what I'm meant to be learning. Today's board is a war on two fronts with a compromised source feeding one of them, which is not an academic question for me and is going to make for an interesting class.

Advanced Shadowcarve with Balor on the training grounds. The advanced track is small — fourteen students drawn from Year Two and Year Three, chosen by Balor and nobody else. No appeals, no exceptions. I know every one of them, have trained against most of them, and have a working read on all of them. Balor looks around the group that first afternoon like a male who has decided this is a good year and has no intention of saying so, because saying so would make them soft.

Flight Management with Thauglor, a new course built for this year, which my father is treating with the intensity he saves for things he invented himself. Twelve of us, ranging from dragon to blink hound to black unicorn — exactly the mix that makes up Blackhaven's flight. He didn't design it for the academy. He designed it for me and then offered it to the academy, because the knowledge is useful and he is constitutionally incapable of making something useful and keeping it to himself.

I told him so once. He didn't deny it.

And Royal Protocol with Finlay.

That one deserves its own consideration.

Finlay in a classroom is a different creature from Finlay at home. I understood that in theory and lived it in Year Two, but Year Three is going to test it in a new way, because I'm no longer only his student. I'm the woman whose conduct will shape how the continent gets along for the next hundred years, and he will mark me accordingly. I've already decided to give him nothing to mark down and everything to mark precisely, and to make sure he knows I'm doing it on purpose.

I think he'll find that entertaining.

I think I'll find it entertaining.

The rest of the day runs through all four. By the last bell I've found three holes in my own tactical thinking that Callan's scenario opened up, marked two students at Shadowcarve I didn't know were there and want to watch for different reasons, and set aside a question about Thauglor's flight teaching that I intend to ask him in private. I may also have caught Finlay being precisely as professional as he set out to be and answered him in kind, which produced the most technically correct diplomatic exercise I have ever taken part in and a look on his face that I plan to revisit in detail later.

✦ ✦ ✦

My rooms at Malivore are the same rooms.

The same ones Mom had in Year One. The paintings of her mates are still on the far wall, my father's face rendered in the brushstrokes of someone who was in love while she painted it. I stand in the doorway a moment and look at them the way I look at them every time I come back — the faces, the love worked into the detail of them, the reminder of what it looks like when someone builds a thing that lasts.

I unpack quickly, change into something comfortable, and sit down at the desk.

The paper I take out is blank. I write in clean columns, the way Finlay taught me to lay out what you know when the list of names is short and the time is not.

Anipe. What I know. What I've seen. The pattern of her watching, the small tells, the timing in the corridor, the shape of her attention, the way she wouldn't meet my eyes.

Samara. What a gorgon can do. Her access to the archives. The lenses that close off her stare. What Callan told me about where she goes in the hours she isn't teaching. And what the lenses don't cover, because they stop the stone and nothing else, and I've spent time listing the rest of her separately.

The three fire drake students. Names, year, the courses I traced through the enrollment records. Where they'll be during the Purge, if they hold to the way students of their standing usually move.

I read it back once, fold it once, and put it in the hollow behind the desk's back panel that I cut in Year Two and that nobody knows about except Corvus.

Then I take out a second sheet and write one thing on it.

The date of the Purge.

I look at it for a moment. The number sits on the page the way it has been sitting behind my sternum for six months — exact, real, mine. I circle it, put it away, and close the desk.

Year Three has begun.

Chapter 11

Finlay

I have taught Royal Protocol and Diplomatic Conduct at Dragonis Academy for six years, and I am a professional.

I find it necessary to remind myself of this roughly once every four minutes during the first class of Year Three, because Raven is sitting in the third row.

This is new. In Year Two she sat back left — clear line to every entrance, solid wall behind her, the natural seat of a girl whose mother taught her to know her exits before she needs them. This year she is third row, center, which is the seat that says I am not hiding. I can see everything from here and I am choosing to be seen. It's a different way of reading a room than the back-left corner. Subtler. More confident. Also, from where I stand at the front, considerably more present.