Page 76 of Raven’s Fight

I take a breath.

I stay in the loft. I watch the grounds.

I can't fight this battle.

But I can be her eyes. And right now, that's what she needs.

Chapter 26

Raven

I don't go to Anipe.

I let Anipe come to me.

Hemlocke's mirror changes my route. Two sequences — the first means immediate threat, change direction. The second means south, high ground. Together they tell me everything. Anipe is setting up on the upper south walk, and she has something with her that earned the first sequence rather than a simple warning.

I adjust my approach to the armory corridor. Not away from it. I still have business in that corridor — the first fire drake plant is waiting in there for a fight he's been building toward for eighteen months and I fully intend to give him one. But the corridor has two ends. I was going to take the north entrance. I take the south instead, which puts me directly beneath the upper walk when I come out.

Directly beneath is a hard place to shoot at. A crossbow — which is what an immediate-threat signal from Hemlocke means, because Hemlocke doesn't exaggerate — needs a braced position and a clean angle. Firing straight down from that walk means leaning out past the parapet, which exposes the shooter and ruins the brace, and an unbraced crossbow shot is a bad shot. Balor spent two sessions in the spring of Year Two teaching me every way each common ranged weapon fails and exactly how to stand in relation to it.

I clear the south exit of the armory corridor. I move into the shadow under the walk, where the stone is still holding the night's cold, and I put my back against it.

I wait.

The wait is four minutes. Long enough for the plant in the corridor to start wondering where I've gone. Long enough for the second one, the one who works by scent, to check my traces against the direction she last had me going and find that they don't agree. Both of them adjusting. Both of them spending time I'm not spending.

Then footsteps on the south approach path.

✦ ✦ ✦

She comes down off the walk a little past the hour.

I hear her before I see her — the particular tread of somebody carrying a crossbow, which is always heavier than the person expects and puts a small hitch in one side of the gait. Twenty paces. Fifteen. The frost has gone off the stone by now and her boots make a flatter sound than they would have at dawn.

She comes around the corner of the south building and she sees me and she stops.

For a moment neither of us does anything at all.

She's in her office clothes. That's the part that lands strangely — the same plain dark wool she wears behind the enrollment desk, the same neat collar, the sleeves buttoned at the wrist the way she buttons them to work through a stack of transfer records. Nothing about her says today. Only the crossbow, held low across her body in both hands, spanned and loaded, the bolt seated and the fletching bright against the dull wood.

Somewhere off past the west range someone is still fighting. It sounds very far away.

Thirty feet between us. Open ground. No cover on either side.

"Anipe," I say.

"Lady Raven." Her voice is exactly the voice she uses at the desk.

Anipe is a hundred and fifty-three years old. I know because I pulled her record last month — all of it, not the employment summary. Sixty-one years at Dragonis. Enrollment, student records, faculty support. She was behind that desk when my mother was a student here. She processed my siblings' enrollments and then mine, and she has been handing me forms across that counter since I was small enough to need lifting up to see over it. The file is spotless. Of course it is.

What the file doesn't hold: the family name she gave up eleven years ago. The community she came out of, in the western territories bordering the ground where Mina's early campaigns ran two decades back. The hamlet listed in the old flight records as a fire drake–allied settlement — one of several that took consequences when Mina's forces came through.

I've known for three weeks. I've spent three weeks deciding how to say it when the moment came.

"You brought in the three students," I say. "You've been feeding the fire drakes for two years. But the work isn't the heart of it, is it. The heart of it is older."

Something goes through her face. She expected this conversation — I think she has rehearsed it — but something under the rehearsal gives way. Not surprise. Closer to relief. The look of someone who has carried a thing a long way and has just reached the place where she can set it down.