Page 34 of Raven’s Fight

She goes back inside.

I stay in the courtyard and look at the stars coming out over the mountain and think about visible threats, and about what it means when a thing stops hiding.

My phoenix presses warm against my ribs, turned toward the door she went through.

Nine hundred years, and I have never met anyone who could unsettle every settled thing in me and be, at the same time, the thing that settles me again.

It is entirely unreasonable.

I go inside.

Chapter 12

Raven

Callan's east tower classroom smells of chalk and old iron and the faint residue of a hundred tactical arguments that soaked into the stone over the years and never quite left. I like that about it. Some rooms build up a weight when the same kind of thinking happens in them often enough — not atmosphere exactly, more that the walls have learned to take the work seriously.

The scenario is already on the board when I arrive.

Callan writes his scenarios in a shorthand I learned at the end of Year Two, a set of marks and abbreviations that lets him lay out a whole situation in less room than a paragraph would take. Half the class is still working through it when I finish reading. I don't have to translate anymore. The symbols simply mean what they mean, the way a language stops being a language once you've lived inside it long enough.

What the board says is this. A territory with fixed borders. A confirmed threat already inside it, capability known, current position unknown. At the same time, pressure from outside — numbers unknown, direction unstated, timing unclear.

I read it twice. Then I look at Callan, who is leaning against the edge of his desk with his arms folded and his one eye on me, and I know from the way he's watching that he wrote this for this class and expects at least one student in the room to understand why.

This is my life.

Not a version of it. Not something that rhymes with it at a comfortable academic distance. This is the exact situation I am currently managing. A territory with a threat inside it whose position I don't know, pressure from outside in the shape of fire drakes, four weeks to the Purge and counting. He could have copied this straight off my own reports and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

I write nothing down. I think.

✦ ✦ ✦

Callan gives us thirty minutes.

"Work the problem however comes naturally to you," he says, which is his idea of instructions. "I want your reasoning, not your conclusions. Show me how you think."

The class sets to it with varying degrees of confidence. The standard approach, which I can watch being applied in the rows around me, is to start with the outside threat, build a line against it, and treat the one already inside as a second concern. That's what the textbooks say. In most real situations it's also exactly backward.

The outside threat is visible. You know it's coming. The one inside is invisible, is already past your border, and holds the better ground. Spend everything on the outside and the inside acts precisely when you're most distracted and most committed. The outside threat stops being the danger and becomes the cover the danger was waiting for.

So you don't meet the outside first.

You find the one inside and end it, completely, and then you turn to face what's coming with your whole attention and nothing open at your back.

The complication — and there's always a complication, Callan doesn't write them any other way — is that you don't know where the inside threat is. You can't end what you can't find. And while you're looking, what's outside keeps getting closer.

So the real question is this. How do you find the one inside fast enough to deal with him before the outside arrives, without pouring so much into the search that your border stands empty?

I work it through in the shorthand, building each layer before I put the next one on top. What I have is what I have. I can't make more of it, I can only decide where it goes. Every man on the border is a man not searching. Every man searching is a man the border doesn't have. The answer takes me seven minutes to be sure of and three more to say cleanly, and the answer is that you don't commit fully to either job.

You split, but not evenly. You put the smallest force on the border that can still see trouble coming and slow it down, and you put the rest of it into something that isn't a search at all.

The threat inside has one advantage over you: he knows where he is. Which means your best tool for finding him isn't hunting. It's drawing. You build the conditions where he has to move, at a time you choose, in a place you choose.

You don't hunt him.

You make him come to you.