Page 31 of Raven’s Fight

She is watching me with the expression she uses when she is paying close attention and would rather I didn't notice — the soft focus that reads as a relaxed student, and underneath it that faint stillness that means she is taking in every word. I know this expression well, having been on the receiving end of it for some time now. It is what her face does when she is thinking hard and would prefer to keep the thinking private.

I have been on the other end of that look for over a year, and I remain susceptible to it in ways that are entirely unreasonable for a nine-hundred-year-old phoenix. I note this for the record. It changes nothing.

I begin the class.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first unit of Year Three Royal Protocol covers forms of address in mixed-species settings — how you address a visiting dignitary whose title has no clean equivalent in Marzana Imperial custom. It is, objectively, vital material. It is also material most of the class finds immediately tedious, which is fair enough. Diplomatic protocol is exactly as thrilling as a very exact, very consequential examination that nobody ever grades and that you sit every day for the rest of your political life.

I say as much to the class.

Most of them write it down.

Raven doesn't write it down. She doesn't write down a word of the lecture. She sits in the third row with her hands folded on the desk and her eyes on me and takes it in directly, which is what a person does when she trusts her memory enough to skip the middle step. She has been doing it since Year Two and I have been pretending not to notice for just as long, because acknowledging that one student's memory makes note-taking unnecessary would require me to explain to the room why she has that memory. Then we would be discussing Raven instead of forms of address, and this is my class.

The students around her are doing a creditable job of staying with the material. Two of them are genuinely disciplined about it — a young gryphon in the second row who writes with both hands at once, which I find honestly impressive, and a dragon in the fourth row whose notes are already fuller than most of what I'll collect at the end of the unit. The rest sit in the respectable middle of students who are trying, which is all I can ask and most of what I get.

And then there is the matter of the third row.

I have taught here six years and elsewhere on this continent for a great deal longer. I have taught war councils and court officials and heads of state who arrived certain there was nothing left to learn. I have held my composure through all of it without much trouble.

I am finding the third row more difficult than usual.

It is not, I should be clear, anything she is doing. She sits perfectly still, listens perfectly well, and looks at me with the face of a student properly engaged with her studies. Everything visible about her conduct is entirely correct. The trouble is that I know the difference between her being correct and her performing correct, and this is both at once. She is genuinely interested in the material and she is also playing at interest in a key aimed squarely at me, and nine hundred years doesn't make that easier to manage. It only makes it easier to see.

We reach the practical exercise at the forty-minute mark. I hand out the scenario cards — a reception with four visiting representatives, three of them with conflicting expectations about address, and a fourth the student must work out ranks above the others from what's around him rather than from any stated title — and I give the class twenty minutes.

Raven finishes in eleven.

I know because I can see her from the front of the room without looking directly at her, and at eleven minutes she sets down her pen, folds her hands again, and goes back to watching me. The quality of the watching has changed. It is still attention. It is also something that would be difficult to describe as entirely professional, and she knows it, and I am a professional and I intend to ignore it completely and with considerable dignity.

I collect the papers when time is called.

I mark them that evening, in the order they were handed to me, without moving hers. It comes up third.

It is perfect. Not high-scoring. Perfect. Every cue caught, every question of address resolved correctly, the fourth representative identified and handled with exactly the care you give a man whose rank is unclear and whose power is not. She has also written three additional circumstances in the margin that the scenario didn't include, each one with a short note on how it would change the answer.

I grade it. Full marks and nothing else. I don't comment on the margins, because the margins were not part of the assignment.

I do read them three more times.

I hand the papers back at the start of the next class. Hers comes back to her in the order it was collected.

She looks at the mark. Then at me. The expression she wears when she knows precisely what I'm doing and has decided to find it funny rather than take issue with it is very particular. I have cataloged it with some attention over the past year. I am looking at it now. I am a professional.

"Any questions on the grading?" I say, to the room.

"None," Raven says.

Her tone is entirely appropriate.

✦ ✦ ✦

After class, the others clear out at the speed of young people who have somewhere better to be and have been sitting still for two hours. The last one out closes the door behind her. The room goes quiet.

Raven doesn't move from the third row. I don't move from the front.

For perhaps three seconds we simply look at each other across the empty classroom, and then the discipline of the last two hours — the careful distance, the scrupulous register, the management of every glance and every inch of my own face — lets go all at once, the way a held breath lets go. Not gradually. Completely.