Page 53 of Raven’s Fight

"You've written this rite," I say.

He's quiet a moment. "Four times."

I look at him. "Was one of them a student?"

"One," he says. "A very long time ago. A different world, a different institution." He looks at his hands, the look of a man opening a room he doesn't usually go into. "I wrote that acknowledgment for three days before I thought it honest enough to file. The requirement that the words be your own is harder than it sounds, when the words keep coming out as justification instead of witness."

"What's the difference?"

"Justification explains why the decision was right. Witness describes what happened." He looks up. "The rite asks for the second. It doesn't ask whether you were right. It asks what was there before, and what is gone."

I write that down. I don't know why. It's not on the syllabus and it won't be marked. I write it anyway.

"I don't know if I can do that," I say. Quietly. Not performing the admission. Actually making it, which is a different thing and one I do very rarely outside the people who already know everything.

"You can," Finlay says. "The question is whether you'll recognize that you need to. Most rulers who fail the rite fail because they've persuaded themselves the cost doesn't need witnessing — that it was purely necessary, purely correct, and nothing was lost that mattered. The rite exists because that is never entirely true."

I sit with that.

The light through the east tower windows has moved since the class began. We've been in here longer than I realized. Finlay is patient with the silence the way he's patient with everything, with the patience of a man who has learned that some things want room to settle before they can be said.

"The loneliness of it," I say. Not quite a question.

"Yes." Simply.

"You can put the grounds to your council. You can arrange the witness. But the acknowledgment of cost⁠—"

"Has to be yours," he says. "Yes. Nobody can carry that particular weight with you, because nobody else held the authority. The decision was one person's. So is the record of it." He's quiet a moment. "Nine centuries of watching rulers make these decisions. The ones who do it well, who can still bear looking at honestly after a long reign, are the ones who work out early that the loneliness is the point. Not something to be managed around. The thing itself."

"Because if you could share the weight you'd be sharing the responsibility," I say. "And then the edges blur."

"Yes." He looks at me with something that isn't quite pride and isn't quite grief but sits between them, the way those two things always seem to sit when I'm being watched by someone who knows how this ends. "You understand it faster than most."

"I've had better teachers than most."

The corner of his mouth moves. Barely.

"Finlay."

"Yes."

"After this is over." I look at him — not the student look. The one I give him when I want him to know I mean the whole of it. "When it's all done. I'm going to need you to help me write some of those."

He holds my gaze. "I know. I'll be there."

✦ ✦ ✦

The door opens.

What happens is this. It opens about four inches, and there's a pause, and then it opens all the way, and Bella is in the doorway with Azalea right behind her, and Bella's face runs through three separate states in roughly a second — first the urgency of someone arriving with a purpose, then the quick reassessment of someone who has walked in on something and is working out what, then the decision, which comes down on the side of pressing on, because Bella's decisions almost always do.

"We need help with the second Shadowcarve assignment," she says, without preamble. "The one due Thursday. Azalea did the first part wrong and now the second part doesn't work and she's been explaining it to me for forty minutes in a way that doesn't help, because she keeps starting from the wrong place, and we need someone who can—" She stops and looks between us. "Are you in the middle of something?"

"Yes," I say.

"But are you almost done?"

I look at Finlay. He looks at me. Something moves in his face — not quite amusement, not quite resignation. The look of a man who has spent nine centuries learning that family does not wait for gravity, and has made his peace with it.