Page 51 of Raven’s Fight

"For the Purge."

"For the right moment." She looks at me then, sidelong and brief, the way she looks at people she trusts when she's saying the actual thing instead of the thing next to it. "There's a lot of it. More than I expected. And I want to spend it correctly. Not just spend it."

I think about that. About what it takes to hold that much anger banked and exact instead of letting it run wherever it likes. About the discipline of sitting beside something that size and not letting it make your decisions. Most people can't. Most species can't — anger is pressure, and pressure wants out, wants to push toward whatever caused it.

She can. She's been doing it since the day we met, and I don't think she knows how rare it is. Most creatures in the middle of something that big either spend it or break under it. She does neither. She files it.

"Okay," I say.

She lets out a breath. Not relief. The breath of someone who has been heard and doesn't want anything more from the moment than that.

I put my head on her shoulder. She lets me. Her hand comes up and her fingers find the back of my neck, light and steady, the touch that says I know you're here and asks nothing back.

"I hate that they're in my school," she says, quietly. "In my building. Sleeping in rooms that should be safe."

"I know."

"I hate that all I can do is watch. Map them. Let them think I don't know."

"It's the right call. You know it's the right call."

"Yes." A pause. "That doesn't make it less hateful."

I press my mouth briefly to her hair. Nothing more particular than that. The acknowledgment. She makes a low sound somewhere between a sigh and a purr and leans into me a fraction more.

"Stay," she says. Not a question. A decision she's already made and is telling me about.

"Yeah."

She turns from the window and I turn with her. The room is warm and Corvus is asleep in his chair and the bond runs the warm register that belongs to the two of us in the late hours — all of it present, no distance in it, the thing I do with my whole self instead of the part of me that manages.

The fire drakes are on the border.

The Purge is in two weeks.

Tonight, for a while, none of that is the point.

Chapter 18

Raven

Finlay teaches mourning rites on a Tuesday.

He doesn't announce the topic beforehand. He never does. He posts the week as a unit heading only, so you know you're covering formal state occasions without knowing which ones until you're in the room. I've come to understand that's deliberate. He wants us arriving with general preparation rather than having crammed for a subject, because what he's testing isn't recall. It's response. How you sit with a thing set in front of you without warning tells him more than how well you readied yourself for it.

This week's heading was State Protocols — Terminal Events. I assumed execution protocols. I did not assume mourning rites, which are a different matter entirely, covering what a ruler is required to do when the death in question is one she ordered rather than one that happened to her. The distinction matters. The ceremony is different. The record is different. The weight of it is different, and Finlay teaches it that way — unsoftened, not academic, with the careful honesty of a man who has watched rulers walk this road for nine centuries and has firm views about what walking it properly requires.

I sit in the third row and I take notes.

That's new. I've sat in the third row for a month without taking notes, keeping it all directly. Today I write it down.

✦ ✦ ✦

The formal mourning rite, as Finlay lays it out, exists for a reason that isn't obvious at first. It isn't for the person who died. It's for the record, and for the ruler, and for everyone who watches the ruler afterward.

"When a ruler orders an execution," he says, standing at the front with his hands clasped behind him in the way he stands when the material is serious, "she is using the most consequential authority she possesses. The rite exists to see that the using is documented, witnessed, and acknowledged — that it cannot be done quietly, or conveniently, or without the ruler standing in front of it in the full light of her position."

He pauses. The room is very still.