Page 85 of Raven’s Fight

Raven

Hour sixty-eight.

Orpheus sends at the sixty-sixth hour — two taps through the bond, our pattern for done, nothing further required. The last fire drake still on these grounds. I don't know the details. What I know is that Orpheus used stone gaze, which is poetic in a way I'll appreciate more fully once I've slept, and that everything I've been tracking for six weeks has resolved except one thing.

That leaves Samara.

Sixty-eight hours in. I'm not tired the way a human student would be tired — a dragon handles sustained work differently, and I've taken rest in the short windows the Purge allows. But I'm not untouched. The shoulder is a low constant I stopped counting somewhere around the fortieth hour. The left arm's shortened reach has been worked around long enough that the working around is automatic now. The anger I carried in here has burned clean, and what's underneath it is quieter. A kind of readiness I've been building toward without naming.

I know where Samara is.

I've known three hours. She moves like someone who has spent decades being both a practitioner and a teacher, switching between the two — hunting out of the teaching register, which is slower and more methodical than plain predation and much harder to read, because it doesn't look like hunting at all. She believes she's been tracking me without my knowing. She has been tracking me. But I've been watching how she works long enough to have the whole map of it: how she reads a space, how she moves against what she reads.

I know the exact moment she decides to close.

I let her.

✦ ✦ ✦

I hear the snakes before I hear her feet.

That's the part nobody warns you about. A gorgon has no hair. What grows from her scalp is a crown of living serpents, and in a classroom she keeps them bound flat and hooded under linen, and you spend a year forgetting what is under the wrapping because forgetting is more comfortable than the alternative. Out here she hasn't bothered. What comes down the walk ahead of her is a dry continuous rustle, dozens of bodies sliding over one another, and underneath it the small wet click of mouths opening and closing on nothing.

The smell arrives with it. Warm scale and old copper, the smell of a reptile house in summer, and under that something faintly mineral. Stone dust. The smell of what she leaves behind her.

She comes from the right.

Of course she does.

She knows about the contacts. She's spent a year watching me in class, and she's a gorgon, which means she understands her own gaze better than any other creature alive could, and she has worked out that something in my eyes is turning it back. What she hasn't worked out is which eye. Which means she believes one of them is covered and one is bare. If she can make me look at her with the bare one, she has me, and I become something they carry off the grounds on a board and stand in a corridor somewhere.

She set up on my right because my right ear is deaf and she believes deaf means blind. She believes I'm slower to know what comes from that side. She believes she can talk me into turning — make me look up, make me look at her, produce the one unguarded second she needs.

What Samara doesn't know:

I have spent three years training the left ear to carry both. It doesn't hear adequately. It hears better. Three years of everything routing to one side builds a sense of direction most creatures never develop. Her approach from the right isn't quieter to me. It's louder. Her step in the hunting register — she carries her weight differently when she's hunting than when she's teaching, and I have been cataloging that difference since the first week of Year Three — arrives at my left ear perfectly clean. I know where she is to within two feet. I know when she's about to move before she moves.

I also know every approach she is likely to try, because I spent eleven Tactics sessions working this exact fight and Callan gave me the same mark for all of them.

And the contacts cover both eyes.

She's been assuming one is bare. She's wrong. Her reading of what her gaze is made of was accurate. What she concluded from the reading was not.

I have been deliberately not looking right for three months, to give her a weakness worth aiming at.

She stops ten feet to my right and slightly behind.

I don't turn.

"Lady Raven." The classroom voice. Measured, precise, the tone she uses for material she finds genuinely interesting rather than merely required. That's the provocation — the familiarity of it, the suggestion that we are still in a room where her authority means something, that what stands between us is still teacher and student.

"Samara."

I keep my eyes on the east wall forty feet ahead. Not toward her. Not away. My left ear gives me her position, her stillness, the slight forward lean of someone ready to move. She's assessing. So am I.

Behind the words, the rustling never stops. It changes pitch when she does — a ripple running through the whole crown of them whenever her shoulders shift, and once, when I don't turn, a low chorus of hissing that rises and falls and settles again like something disappointed.

"The Purge is a fascinating institution," she says, and moves — a few steps right, working for an angle where looking at her would feel natural. I track her. I don't move. "The founding language leaves real room on the question of faculty. I spent considerable time in the archive establishing the precedent."