Page 62 of Raven’s Fight

Raven can. She makes tea.

She does this when she wants her hands busy without her mind having to be, and I've learned over the past year to let her make it rather than offering, because the making is the point.

I sit on the floor with my back against the bed. The floor at Malivore is stone and cold, and I've solved this by keeping a folded blanket on the lower shelf of the desk, which I take out now and put under me. Small adjustments. A year of learning the geography of her rooms.

She brings me a cup and sits down beside me — on the floor rather than in the chair, her shoulder against mine, the warmth of contact without any ceremony around it. I wrap both hands around the cup and let the heat into my palms.

"The one at the briefing," she says. "Did you see his left hand?"

"The grip. Harder than the room called for."

"He's right-handed. The left is his weaker side and he gives it away under strain." She drinks her tea, which is still hotter than any reasonable person would make it. "I'll know him in the dark by the sound his left hand makes when he reaches."

"How?"

"People take hold of things differently when it's the weaker hand doing the work. He'll be a little slower with it. A little louder." She pauses. "A tenth of a second. In the dark that's enough."

I believe her. I believe her because I've watched her do this for a year now, the slow gathering of very small facts about very specific people, and because Raven's read on what a body gives away has never once been wrong in my experience.

"That's enough," I say.

"Yes."

Quiet. Her shoulder against mine. The scale in my chest is warm the way it goes warm when she's this close, the bond entirely present, nothing thinned by distance. I think about saying something and decide not to. What I would say I've already said, in one form or another, over the past three years. She's received all of it. And what's true right now doesn't need words — it's already in the contact, in the cup warming my hands, in the particular quality of the evening.

The tea goes cold. Neither of us moves.

Eventually the night does what nights do. We move from the floor to the bed and the strategy gives way to something older — two people who know each other completely, who know what's coming, choosing presence over preparation, because the preparation is finished and presence is what's left.

The bond runs very bright.

✦ ✦ ✦

I wake at that hour between night and morning when the sky in the east window is going from black to the dark blue that comes before gray.

She's already up.

She's at the window, and she's dressed — not in what she sleeps in, in her leathers, which means she's been awake long enough to dress and standing there long enough to stop needing to move. The early light turns the edge of her the same dark blue as the sky. Her wings are folded and still, the leading edges carrying that slight forward tilt they take when she's thinking.

I watch her a while without speaking. This is a thing I have done — the kind of watching that is only holding someone in your attention, being aware of them without wanting anything from the awareness — for twenty-three years. Since before she knew I existed in the way I existed for her. Since before the bond had a name. I have more hours of watching Raven than of nearly anything else I've done with my life, and not one of them has been wasted.

She knows I'm awake. She always knows. Even before the bond, before the scales, she had the awareness of someone who keeps track of the people in a room as automatically as breathing.

"Two weeks," I say quietly.

She doesn't turn. "Twelve days, actually."

"Twelve days."

Silence. The sky shifts another shade toward morning. Somewhere below, the first of Keir's patrol is starting its run — I can hear the faint disturbance in the air that blink hounds leave behind when they phase, so slight most creatures would never catch it.

"I'll see you on the other side," she says.

Not a question. Not reassurance fishing for reassurance back. A statement, the kind she makes when a thing has settled all the way through her and she is declaring rather than discussing. The same tone she uses for this is the decision, and means completely.

"I know you will."

She stays at the window a moment longer. Then she picks up her pack — already packed, because she does that the night before, always — and opens the door and walks out into the academy's early morning without looking back, because she knows I'm here and looking back isn't required.