Page 80 of Raven’s Fight

She's waiting for the first one to reach wherever they've agreed on.

I go to map the eastern wall.

This is the work hounds do better than anybody. Ground covered fast, at a scale nothing else manages. I take the eastern wall in twelve blinks, three seconds at each position, building the whole shape of it — where everyone is, what the ground looks like from every angle that matters. Twelve blinks. Thirty-six seconds. Two hundred feet of wall and every approach that feeds it.

Three places along it would serve as somewhere to converge. The recessed maintenance door at the midpoint. The corner where the wall meets the north outbuilding, which makes a sheltered pocket. And the shadow the wall throws at this hour, running east to west along the ground.

The maintenance door: empty.

The outbuilding corner: a third-year who is definitely not a fire drake and who is doing the sensible thing, which is sitting the Purge out somewhere nobody will look. I blink past without disturbing what he's built.

The shadow line: the first one, arriving just about when I'd worked out he would. He takes the east end of the shadow and settles in. Checks what he can see from there — the south approach, the eastern way into the courtyard, the gap between the main building and the training yard boundary.

He's at the pinch.

The ground clicks together. The shadow line runs east from him. The drainage blind spot, where the second one is holding, runs north. Between them they make a corridor about forty feet wide that anyone crossing from the main courtyard toward the eastern training yard has to pass through. Anyone going west to east across the central grounds has to go through it.

A dragoness coming back from the south approach, having finished her business down there, walks straight into it.

They know her route. They've watched her long enough to know where she goes next.

I blink to Orpheus.

He's waiting where I land, the way he always is — present, still, entirely unsurprised, as though he arrived slightly before I did. I give him what I have in the shorthand we set up before the bell: hand positions for the first one, for the second, for the forty-foot corridor between them and how it sits against Raven's likeliest way back from the south.

He takes it in without interrupting. That's one of the things about Orpheus. He doesn't ask for more when what he has is enough, and he works out that it's enough very fast. By the time I've finished telling him, he's already put it wherever he puts things.

"She knows about the pinch," I say.

"She'll have mapped that wall in the first twenty minutes," Orpheus says. "She maps everything."

"Her shoulder."

He looks at me. "How bad?"

"The bond reads like a graze she's managing. Nothing that went through. But the left arm's down — she'll be leading right for the rest of it."

"She's trained to lead right for two years, specifically because she knew the left shoulder was where anyone would aim if they worked out she favors it." A pause. "She'll be fine."

"I know." I'm not the one who needed to hear it. He is.

He takes that too. There's a small change in how he's standing, which means something has moved in him — not visible to most people, visible to me after a year. "The corridor. I'll get to her."

"Confirm both of them are still where I put them before she comes back through. Even if she already has the ground, she needs to know they've held."

He nods. He goes. I blink back to the eastern wall.

✦ ✦ ✦

The fight I don't step into happens at eighty minutes.

The alley between the north outbuilding and the west face of the kitchen block. Two fourth-years. I don't know either of them by face, which means they're either older students I've never had cause to learn or students who've been careful about being seen. The fight has nothing to do with Raven's war. Nothing to do with fire drakes or anything I'm tracking. This is the Purge doing what the Purge does once you give it permission — two people with something between them using the window to settle it.

The bigger one has a weapon, a flat-edged training blade, legal here because it tags without going through. The smaller one has her hands and her speed and whatever she's been taught, which is enough for about sixty seconds before the blade decides it.

I blink to where I can see. I watch. I don't intervene.

The bigger one wins it in ninety seconds. The smaller one goes into the kitchen block wall hard and stays down. The fall is bad — she takes it at an angle that could be a concussion and could be worse.