Page 59 of Raven’s Fight

"I accepted it because I had no grounds at the time to doubt the paperwork itself. I run combat instruction. Checking the records isn't mine to do." He says it without heat. Not an excuse. A fact. "It is now."

I hold his gaze. Balor has been my mother's mate since before I hatched, my instructor since I came here, and my father since the year we learned what my blood actually was. He took that last one up the way dragons do — quietly, without rearranging anything to mark it. He was always there. He was simply never the one in the flight field the way Thauglor was, and neither of us has ever needed that to mean something it doesn't. For the last three years he has been the person in this institution who stands most consistently at my back. He has never pretended the hierarchy doesn't exist — he treats me as a student when the room requires it and as something else when it doesn't, and the change between the two is always readable and always correctly timed. What's on his face now is the second one. Not student and instructor. Something older than that.

"They stay enrolled until the Purge," I say.

He looks at me.

"If we move on them now, whoever is running them knows we've found them. The rotation outside changes, everything we have inside goes dark, and we're six weeks behind with two remaining." I hold his eyes. "I want them on the grounds. I want them believing the Purge is their day. And I want to be standing exactly where they expect to find me."

The flat expression doesn't move. "You're using yourself as bait."

"I'm the bait that bites back."

Silence. Balor has known me since the morning I hatched — the basilisk whose stone gaze kept a whole generation of Shadowcarve students honest, who spent two decades watching me grow up in the margins of this place. Visiting days. The summer combat clinics. The flight field, when I dragged my siblings through training none of them had asked for. The margins were where he stood. I understand now that he chose them. He has watched me become what I am with the particular attention of a man who loves you and is also your instructor and has to hold both at once.

What's in his face now is all of it together. The love, the professional judgment, and the arithmetic arriving where mine arrived. His red eyes hold mine across the desk.

"The Purge runs under its own rules," he says. "Once the bell goes I can't step in."

"I know."

"If you're wrong about any part of it⁠—"

"I'm not. But if I am, I have five mates and a dragoness who will make extremely poor decisions on my behalf, and any one of them is more than enough."

Something moves in his expression. Not amusement. Relief, maybe, wearing something drier. "Keep Orpheus close during the run. He isn't officially in it and he'll be in it anyway."

"I know." I almost smile. "I'm counting on it."

He nods once and picks up the files. "I'll open a formal review of the enrollments through Anipe's office this week. A routine audit — nothing that looks like it was prompted by anything." He looks at me over the stack. "When the Purge is done, I'll have the whole paper trail ready for Klauth."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," he says. "Get through the two weeks first."

I go.

✦ ✦ ✦

That evening I sit at the desk in my rooms at Malivore with five sheets of paper and five pens, and I write.

Not briefings. Not summaries or plans or the formal documents I've been producing in increasing volume for weeks. Letters. The kind that say the things I mean but don't say aloud, because there is always something else that has to be said first — a meeting, a plan, a next thing pressing into the space where the honest words would go.

I've been putting these off, and I know why. Writing a thing down is its own kind of declaration. It makes it real in a way that thinking it doesn't. And somewhere underneath the tactical part of me there's a superstition that says writing these letters is admitting something I'm not ready to admit. That the Purge might not go the way I've planned it.

It might not go the way I've planned it.

I pick up the first pen.

Corvus first. I tell him about the sea glass — that I still have the first piece he left me, the blue-green one, smooth on every edge, and that it lives in the inner drawer of my desk at Blackhaven and I look at it sometimes when I need to remember something I already know. I tell him what twenty-three years of his patient certainty about me has cost and what it has given, that those are two different things and I understand both of them now, and that I should have said it out loud years ago instead of finding other words. I tell him that watching him look at the wolves and the white unicorns on the Southern Isle — as things to be recognized rather than acquired, the way Therun put it — is the clearest picture I have of why I chose him. That he does that with everything he loves.

Hemlocke. I write about the foal, and the night he delivered her, and what it looked like from the upper field when I watched him work in the stall — his hands, the way he was present without crowding, the skill that looks like nothing because it's been practiced into invisibility. I tell him I know what he does for Blackhaven and that I see it every morning on the circuit. I tell him about Charron and Isolde, and that when the time comes I'll be there for whatever Leander needs to hear.

Keir. His is the shortest, because he doesn't need many words and the ones I give him I mean completely. I tell him I know what it is to be watched over by someone who never makes it feel like being watched over. That I've slept more soundly this past year than in the whole of my life, and that this is his doing. I tell him there's no one I trust more in the dark.

Finlay. I write about the rite — about the thing he said, that the loneliness is the mechanism, and that I understand it better for his having said it. I tell him what it means to have nine centuries of watching rulers walk this road, and to have the man carrying all of that choose to stand beside me while I learn to walk it. I tell him that when I write those acknowledgments after the Purge, the words will be mine, but what I understand about what they require will be his. That isn't a small thing to hand someone.

Solaris last. The longest. The hardest to begin and then the one I can't stop. I tell him about the thousand years — not what they cost him, he knows that better than I could put it, but what it means to me that he came out of them and chose ordinary. Chose the morning circuits and the flight field and Nova asleep on his chest and the paperwork I keep leaving on the corner of his desk and all the small accumulating weight of a life that is only a life. That he chose this, specifically. That every day I understand a little more completely what that means.