Page 41 of Raven’s Fight

Orpheus knows. He's known since we were eight and I told him during an exercise where he needed to know, and he has held it since with the reliability of a basilisk who treats anything about family as belonging to the family and to nobody else. He angles left, drawing attention toward the outer grounds, making noise — not obvious noise, not clumsy noise, just enough that a tracker following him will feel like he's on something real. He's the decoy. I'm the ghost.

I take a different line through the inner grounds, close to the wall where stone swallows a footfall differently than open path does. My boots are the shadowblade leather Mom drilled into all of us, silent by design, the soles treated so they don't whisper against stone, the uppers cut close so the leather doesn't sigh when you move fast. I keep count of what my left ear brings me. Two hunters heading northeast after Orpheus's trail. One sweeping the western edge in a pattern that's a search grid rather than real tracking. Two more I haven't placed.

Three placed, two still loose. Five hunters against nine prey — long odds for the hunters, which is the point. Balor doesn't set fair problems, he sets instructive ones. The ones most likely to fail are the ones walking grids — that's what you do when you have no scent and no sound and are hoping to blunder into somebody. It works eventually. It doesn't work inside two hours against people trained specifically to make it not work.

I find a place in the lee of the inner archive building, where the historical records are kept — open to senior faculty, closed to students — and settle into stillness. Stillness is a skill. Mom taught it by example. She's the only person I've ever watched be completely still and completely present at once, not the stillness of somebody gone somewhere else but the stillness of something that has stopped spending anything on being seen. It took me years. It comes easier now.

I wait.

And then I hear it.

✦ ✦ ✦

Footsteps inside the archive building.

That isn't possible tonight. Students aren't permitted in the archive at any hour, and no part of this exercise touches the inside of any Shadowcarve building — the grounds are the field, Balor said so. These aren't a hunter cutting through. These belong to someone who has a reason to be in a restricted archive that has nothing to do with what's happening outside.

My left ear places them exactly. One floor up, moving slowly, the rhythm of somebody reading spines in the dark or working from memory rather than heading anywhere in particular. Searching.

I know this walk.

I go to the side door — locked to students, not to faculty — and test it. Locked. I test the window above it, which is not, because nobody keeps up the latches on the archive's second floor. Students aren't supposed to be up there and faculty don't come in through windows. I'm on the ledge and inside in eleven seconds without a sound.

The second level is a long corridor of shelved records, the spines marked in the ordering system Balor handed out at the start of term. The torches in here are cold. My dragon's sight makes nothing of that — the shelves come to me as warmth and its absence, the markers faintly luminous, and the clear warm shape of a person working along the far wall. Pulling files. Reading. Putting them back.

Samara.

She shouldn't be here. She's faculty and faculty may use the archive, but the exercise is running on the grounds outside and the hour is well past anything ordinary, and there is no academic reason for a gorgon to be standing in the institutional records at this time of night.

I stay still. I watch.

She takes a file from the far left section, the oldest shelves, the ones holding the institution's own records rather than students'. She opens it and reads with the efficiency of a woman who knows what she came for and has found it. Then she photographs it — two pages, quick, the phone held flat and steady above the paper, the screen throwing a small cold light up onto her face. She replaces the file, moves three shelves right, and does it again.

I read what she's pulling by the markers, which my sight can just make out at this range. The first is coded to the founding documents — the original charter records from Shadowcarve's establishment. The second carries an annual review code and a year I'd need longer to read exactly, but the decade mark is old. Very old.

She's reading the original Purge documents.

The founding rules. Not the current ones. The rules as they were first written, before decades of revision softened some things and clarified others. Whatever the founders originally permitted and forbade, which the version we all study may or may not have carried forward honestly.

She's looking for what the rules actually allow.

She photographs a third page, replaces the file, and starts for the door with the unhurried composure of a woman working through a plan she made some time ago. I'm out the window and onto the ledge before she reaches the corridor, down to the ground without sound, moving off along the wall before she comes out.

I put distance between us and stop.

What she was reading: the founding charter of the Purge provision, and review records from the institution's earliest decades. The founding charter would hold the original language — what was allowed, what was forbidden, and what fell into the gaps the drafters never thought to close, because the situations they imagined were narrow and the situations that have actually happened across two centuries are not.

Institutions grow their rules over time. Readings pile up. Precedents get set. And sometimes the current version of a rule and the original version differ enough that knowing both gives you room that knowing one does not.

Samara is a gorgon. She has taught here eleven years. She knows the current rules by heart. She already knows exactly what they permit and forbid.

What she was photographing is what the old rules permitted that the current ones may not.

A gap. An old precedent. Something the founders wrote in that has since been quietly ignored or deliberately edited out, but that still stands in the original charter, and that a clever argument could claim was never formally struck down and therefore still holds.

The Purge permits students to kill students. Faculty are not supposed to take part.

What Samara is hunting for is the original language on faculty conduct during the Purge — whether that prohibition was written in at the founding, or added later, or whether the founding documents say nothing about it at all.