Page 87 of Raven’s Fight

I don't look up.

She stops moving entirely. "Your family is in danger while you stand here. The Marzana line has been⁠—"

"Finish it. I'll weigh it without looking at your face."

She doesn't finish it. There was no claim. She was testing whether news about my family could make me flinch. It can't. Not at her.

She tries three more. A crouch and rise, meant to put her eyes below mine and bring them up through the middle. A circling movement using the east wall to work my back into a corner. A direct challenge delivered in the tone gorgons use when they're trying to make eye contact into a social obligation. None of it works. I have been thinking about all of it for three months.

The dragoness has waited through the whole of it. She is very good at waiting.

Then Samara commits.

Whole body, inside my guard, blade committed, close enough that any ordinary fighter would have to look at her. It's the best thing she has left and she does it cleanly. I respect it.

I take the blade.

Step inside the commitment, right hand turning the blade arm, left coming up under her guard — the shoulder screams, I override it — the blade out of her hand and reversed, her back against the east wall, edge at her throat, talons at her collarbone.

My eyes stay on her jaw.

Never above it.

She goes very still.

The snakes do not.

✦ ✦ ✦

"Here is where we are," I say.

My voice is level. The dragoness is fully present and unhurried and has been waiting for this since the bell, and now that it's arrived she isn't pushing. She's simply here, weight where it belongs, the talons extended and controlled.

Six inches from my face, the snakes keep working.

They can't reach past the line of her jaw with her pinned like this, and they know it, and they try anyway. Blunt heads stretching, weaving, opening and closing. One of them finds my cheek and rests there a moment, dry and cool, tongue flickering against my skin, tasting me. Another gets as far as my eyelashes and stays, patient as a held breath, waiting for the eye underneath to open upward.

Every one of them is blind. That's the thing they don't teach you until Year Three. The gaze is hers alone; the snakes hunt by heat and by air. Which is why they're all pointed at my face. They can feel where a person's eyes are.

I look at her jaw and nothing else.

"You can die here. The Purge permits it. You came at a student with a blade under cover of a precedent every tribunal on this continent would contest, and you tried to use the gaze on a student on academy ground, which the founding charter forbids outright no matter how vague the language around it. Every door you thought you'd opened is narrower than you counted on."

She doesn't answer. She's still calculating. I can feel it in the quality of her stillness.

"Or you tell me who hired you, and who Amadeus's contact is inside Magnus's court. Both. You give me both and I hand you to Klauth instead of taking the other option. He's a fair tribunal. He ruled for two hundred years before the shell and he made enough hard decisions in them to know how to weigh one properly. You'd survive his judgment."

"Why would I trust that?"

"Because I said it, and I don't need anything from you that I haven't already got. I have what I came out of this Purge with. You're the last thread. I don't need you dead. I need what you know."

A silence. Long enough that I feel the arithmetic finish. Long enough to understand she has arrived at it not because she believes me and not because she's afraid, but because she is thirty years a practitioner and can read a position accurately, and this position leaves her one thing.

"The hiring party is a faction in Magnus's court," she says. The classroom voice again, precise, as if presenting a case rather than surrendering. "The fire drake nationalists. They've been paying for work against the Marzana succession for two years. Anipe was their contact inside the academy. I was hired separately. They found me through the gorgon networks."

"The Amadeus contact."

The silence is different this time. Not calculation. The silence of someone who knows exactly what she is about to hand over and what it weighs.