Page 42 of Raven’s Fight

If they say nothing, and she can argue that silence isn't prohibition, and she can find someone in this institution willing to read it her way⁠—

I file all of it and go to find Orpheus.

✦ ✦ ✦

I find him forty minutes later in the north end of the outer grounds, crouched behind a stone formation with the patience of a basilisk who has been there long enough to have become part of it. Two hunters already gave up on this stretch. He watched them go. When I come up beside him he doesn't startle, because he knows my approach the way I know his.

I crouch. My hands move.

Samara. Archive building. Copied the founding Purge rules.

He goes very still. His eyes shift sideways, which is what he does when he's working rather than reacting. Then his hands move.

Looking for what's permitted. A statement, not a question. He got there on his own.

Yes, I sign. Then: Nothing yet. Let her look. I'm looking too.

He studies me a moment. Then he signs one more thing.

She doesn't know about the contacts.

No, I sign. And she won't. Then: The stone gaze is dead to me. Whatever she found in those papers doesn't change that.

His exhale is barely a movement at all. For Orpheus, that's considerable relief.

We spend the last hour in the outer grounds, slipping the hunters with the ease of two people raised by the same people who trained them. At the two-hour mark, when Balor calls it, five of the nine prey are still free. I'm one. Orpheus is another.

Balor takes that in without expression and tells the two hunters who made no tags to be on the grounds at six in the morning. We're dismissed.

✦ ✦ ✦

Malivore is quiet when I reach my rooms. I'm still carrying the night in my body — that sharp alertness a long stretch of careful thinking leaves behind, not quite the rush itself but the state on either side of it, where every surface feels a little more present than it should.

My door is open.

I stop. Then I catch him: bread and smoke and the warm-metal note of silver scale, familiar enough now that my body knows before my mind does. The alertness changes key. Not a threat. The opposite.

Corvus is in the chair by the window in his shirtsleeves, one of the books from my desk open in his lap, the moonlight turning his silver hair into something with no equivalent in any natural material.

He looks up. "Instructor duties," he says. "As of this morning. Balor asked me to run the fourth-year combat assessment this week."

"He didn't mention it."

"He mentioned it to me." Corvus closes the book. "I thought I'd let you find out the good way."

I look at him in the moonlight, in my rooms, in the entirely unreasonable comfort of finding someone you wanted there already there. The exercise is still in my body. Samara is filed. What Solaris found about Amadeus sits at the back of my mind like a stone dropped in still water, everything else rippling around it.

And Corvus is here.

I drop my pack and cross the room, and his arms open and I fold into them, and the scale in my chest pulses warm where his answers it, the bond running bright the way it does when nearness settles an absence. For a moment I'm not thinking about Samara or Amadeus or the count of weeks or any of the rest of it.

"How was the exercise?" he asks, against my hair.

"Informative."

He hears the weight in the word. He always does. His arms tighten. "Tell me later."

"Later," I agree.