Page 93 of Raven’s Fight

I breathe.

The door opens.

✦ ✦ ✦

Raven doesn't knock.

Which isn't rudeness — she has knocked on this door many times. Tonight she reads it correctly from the other side. A knock is what you do when you're asking permission, and may I come in implies that no is available as an answer, and no is not the right answer to what this is. She comes in, and closes the door, and looks at me with the attention she uses when she intends to offer nothing at all until she has finished looking.

I am sitting at my desk with my hands in front of me and the air too warm and the fire just under the skin.

"I don't need platitudes," I say. The warning is automatic. I have given it to a great many well-meaning people across nine centuries who arrived at moments like this carrying comfort I had no use for.

"I know," she says.

She crosses the room and sits on the edge of my desk.

That is a choice. Not the chair across from me, which is the formal position, the one that leaves the desk between us as a piece of territory. The desk itself. Two feet from where my hands are, with nothing in between, in the posture of someone who has decided the barrier isn't useful tonight.

She doesn't say anything. She sits there.

The fire slowly stops trying to surface.

I did not expect that. I did not expect that a young woman sitting on my desk in silence would do more than nine hundred years of breath work. I note it as a fact, and also as something I have no adequate explanation for and will think about later, when I am not sitting in the approximate wreckage of what I believed about a hundred and twelve years of friendship.

We sit in the quiet a while.

Eventually she says, "He chose his side a long time ago. He just hid it."

"I should have seen it."

"You weren't looking for it. You were trusting him." A pause. "That isn't a flaw."

I consider that. The distinction between a failure of perception and the act of trusting is one I have been drawing for students for nine hundred years, and I find, having it turned around and set in front of me, that it lands differently when the situation is your own. The distinction is real. I know it is real. Knowing it doesn't finish the feeling.

"The failure isn't in having trusted him," I say. "It's in what I couldn't see because I was trusting him. The blind spot the trust made."

She's quiet a moment. Then: "Yes. That's what I said."

I look at her.

"Trusting someone makes blind spots," she says. "That's what trust is — you stop examining certain things. A century of trust makes a century of blind spot. That isn't a failure. That's the shape of the thing."

She is twenty-three years old.

She is also not wrong.

"You are going to say that to people for the rest of your reign," I tell her, "and they are going to find it exactly as insufficient and as accurate as I find it at this moment."

"I know. I learned it from someone who says true things that feel insufficient."

The fire settles. Fully, finally — the light gone, the room cooling, the thing I have been holding down for hours resolving into something quieter.

Not resolved. Quieter.

We sit in it a while longer.

At some point I say, "I'll go north."