Page 79 of Raven’s Fight

I leave her standing on the south approach path and I move.

The shoulder hurts. I don't go back to it — I've assessed it, I've adjusted around it, I've closed it. Anything further is just attention, and attention spent on pain in the middle of a fight is attention not spent on the fight.

I put it down.

The first fire drake is still waiting in the armory corridor for something that got interrupted. The second is somewhere in the east corridor behind him. They've had twelve minutes to improve where they're standing.

Good.

Better positioning means more committed to a plan. More committed to a plan means less able to bend when the plan meets something it never accounted for.

They didn't account for me.

The shoulder hurts.

I don't slow down.

Chapter 27

Keir

I blink.

East wall corner — read it, clear, two seconds — blink. Upper east walkway — read it, clear, one second — blink. South end of the east corridor where it meets the training yard: there. First fire drake. He came out of the armory corridor twelve minutes ago and he's been moving since, which means whatever he set up in there didn't happen the way he wanted it to.

Good.

I blink to six feet behind him — far enough back that he won't feel the air move at my arrival, close enough to finish reading him before he shifts again. He's heading east, toward the wall. Not panicking. His movement is controlled and deliberate, the movement of a man working a second plan rather than making one up. A second plan means there's a place along that eastern wall where he's been told to be.

I take him in fast. Height, build, the way he carries his weight when he's moving with purpose rather than for speed. The right-hand grip Callan flagged, which I can't see from this angle but which I keep anyway. And the burnt-metal heat he leaves in the air behind him, which I can follow even after he's gone, because in still air it hangs around about six minutes.

I blink out before he knows anyone was there.

Thirty seconds in the gap between the east corridor and the outer wall to sort what I have. First: heading east on a fallback. Second — the one who works by scent — I had her ten minutes ago at the south face of the main building and lost her when she crossed the angle my blink range doesn't cover. Third: still nowhere. The third is the part that needs answering fastest.

The bond with Raven is warm and alive. It has the quality it takes on when she's been hit and is going on through it — a slight sharp edge under the warmth, like a string tuned a shade high. Not distress. Pain being managed.

She's hurt.

I file it and keep moving.

✦ ✦ ✦

Blink hounds don't fight fire drakes.

That isn't a preference. It's an honest measure of what I can do, made honestly, without dressing it up as something more flattering. Fire drakes run hot in a way that reaches into what a blink hound is — the heat gets into the space I move through when I phase, and it drags, and the drag makes the crossing slower and the arrival less exact. Up close with a fire drake I can still blink away from anything he starts. But slower than I could against anything else. In a fight where the whole of my advantage is speed and knowing precisely where I'll land, anything that takes from those two changes the sum considerably.

I also don't have the weight to take a fire drake's hit and keep working.

Those are facts. I've sat with them three weeks, since I knew this Purge would have fire drakes in it, and sitting with them hasn't altered them. What it has given me is clarity about what my job actually is. Not to fight, to track. Not to engage, to know. Not to be the blade — to be the thing that makes the blade land in the right place.

Raven has the blade.

I have the map.

I find the second one again a little past the hour.

She's holding at the south face of the east building, tucked in behind the drainage outcrop that makes a natural blind spot from the courtyard. She isn't moving. She's set, and waiting, and from the angle of her head she's facing the eastern wall rather than the courtyard.