Page 60 of Raven’s Fight

I fold each letter. I seal each one.

Xero is on the windowsill, watching me with those blood-red eyes, her leathery wings folded close. She's been there since I started, silent, present. When I finish she crosses the room without being asked and sits in front of the five letters.

"Only if something goes wrong," I tell her.

She looks at them a moment. Then she looks at me with the focused regard of a tressym who has decided something. Nothing goes wrong, she says, in the voice that presses warm against the inside of my skull. Raven is strongest. She lifts each letter carefully and tucks it into the small satchel she wears when she's carrying things that matter.

I watch her settle back on the sill with the letters safe against her side.

Two weeks.

I close the desk.

I go to sleep.

Chapter 21

Corvus

I have known what she's planning since she came back from the Eastern Isles.

This isn't a boast. I have no advantage over the others — Keir's nose and Finlay's network are both far finer instruments than whatever it is I do when I watch her. What I have is twenty-three years of Raven specifically. The way she takes in a threat. The way she builds a plan. The particular quality of her attention when she's decided something she isn't going to explain yet, because explaining it would set off responses she doesn't want to manage before she's ready. I've been watching that quality for a month now.

She's going to stand in the middle of the Purge grounds and let all of it come to her.

She told the war council she'd draw them in, and she will, because it's the right answer and she reached it honestly. Hand me the same problem and I'd reach it too. What she hasn't said out loud is the rest of it. She isn't only choosing this because it's the best move. She's choosing it because she is angry, and because this is the right moment for the anger, and because the Purge is the one event where she gets to be the most dangerous thing on the field and nobody is permitted to tell her to stand down.

I understand that completely.

I spent the first week after I understood it quietly terrified. I spent the second making my peace.

What I came to, at the end of that second week, is this. The fire drakes on the western border have been watching Blackhaven for months and they still don't know what Raven is. Not really. They see the dominant dragoness, the heir apparent, the threat to be measured — but those are categories, and she is not a category. She is specific. She is twenty-three years old, trained by her mother and by Thauglor and by Balor and by Klauth, and by the particular education of growing up knowing exactly what she would one day have to become. What all that training and knowing and anger and love have made is a thing the fire drakes have no name for.

They walked into the wrong Purge.

They just don't know it yet.

I hold onto that and let it do its work, and after two weeks the terror settles into something quieter. Not gone. I'll be on the outside of the bell for however many hours it runs, unable to reach her, knowing exactly what is happening on those grounds. That is not a comfortable place to stand. But comfortable isn't required. Useful is required, and useful I can manage.

✦ ✦ ✦

Two weeks out, Balor runs the pre-Purge staff briefing.

Every faculty member and permanent staff member who'll be on the grounds attends. The main hall, formal rows, Balor at the front with the composure of a male carrying out an institutional requirement that is also, this year, covering something he knows and cannot say.

I'm in the second row, where the adjunct faculty sit, which gives me the whole room. The senior Shadowcarve staff in front. The faculty rows behind them. The outer ring of Year Two observers who sit in on this as preparation for their own Purge when it comes. It's a large room when it's full. It's full.

Balor works through it all: what the Purge permits and doesn't, what makes a tag valid or invalid, the staff's obligation not to intervene and the narrow exceptions for genuine medical emergency. How word gets passed. What has to be written up afterward. The circumstances under which the bell can be rung early to end the whole thing. He covers it in the level, complete tone of a man who has given this briefing many times and finds it exactly as serious every time. If he has private thoughts about this particular year's Purge, none of them reach his face.

I read the room while he talks.

This is the skill twenty-three years of watching Raven from a careful distance built in me — following several things at once without appearing to follow any of them. You learn to let your eyes rest at the front while the edges of your attention do the work. You learn to notice without showing that you've noticed.

The student observers are the easiest to read. Nervous energy carries from here: the held breath, the too-much stillness, eyes that can't find anywhere to land. Some of them are nervous about their own turn, which is the correct response to sitting in a room formally preparing for an event in which some of your year will die. Some are nervous a different way — the nervousness of people carrying something hidden into a room full of people who don't know about it.

That second kind I note carefully.

The fourth plant — the transfer with the invented papers — is in the outer row, twelve feet to my right. He has been still since the briefing started. Not the stillness of paying attention, which looks different, all small shifts of weight and controlled breath. This is the stillness of a man holding himself in check, managing a tension that would otherwise show in his hands. His left hand in particular, gripping his knee harder than anything in this room warrants.