Page 94 of Raven’s Fight

She doesn't react.

"Not now," I continue. "Not until we have the whole picture, until Cassius has looked again, until we know precisely what Aldric has had access to and what he's handed over. But when we're ready, I'll go. Not another contact. Not a delegation. Me."

She's quiet a moment.

"He'll know what it means when I arrive," I say. "He'll know the hiding is finished. And I want him to know it's me. I want to have the conversation he has been avoiding for however long this has been going on."

"You want to ask him why."

"Yes."

"He might not tell you."

"He might not. But I want to ask." I look at my hands on the desk. "Nine centuries is long enough to know which questions matter whether or not they're answered."

Raven looks at me for a long moment — the look she uses when she has received something and is deciding what to do with it. Then she nods.

Once.

She doesn't argue. She doesn't add conditions or caveats or strategic concerns. She nods, with the particular nod of someone who has understood that this isn't a tactical decision but a necessary one, and has recognized that some necessary things are not hers to overrule.

I find I am grateful for that.

"Four days," I say.

"Take what you need."

She gets up from the desk and crosses the office. At the door she pauses, and I think she's going to say one more of the things she said tonight that were true and insufficient and necessary.

She doesn't. She simply goes.

The office is quiet. The fire is under control.

Outside the window the grounds are dark and still. The Purge is finished. The investigation has begun. The network is moving. The war is not over, and I have four days, and a decision I made twenty minutes ago that I will not be reconsidering.

I pick up the pen.

I begin.

Chapter 32

Solaris

The war council meets at Blackhaven three days after the Purge ends.

Raven chose the place deliberately. Not Dragonis, which is still working through the aftermath and is nobody's neutral ground. Not the Marzana palace, which carries too much of Klauth's authority for a meeting where she needs these people sitting as peers rather than subjects. Blackhaven is hers. Made, claimed, held — hers in the sense that everyone in this room will feel her authority not because of her title but because they are standing inside the thing she built and can see for themselves what she has made of it.

It is a deliberate choice and it is the right one. I know it as such because I have spent a year watching her make choices like it — decisions that account for what people feel as much as for what a plan requires, that read a room and set the conditions accordingly.

She is twenty-three years old.

I settle into my chair at the council table and wait for it to begin.

The room.

Raven at the head of the table, where she belongs, sitting with the ease of someone who stopped waiting for permission to be at the head of things several months ago.

Klauth on her left — the only person here whose standing sits above hers, arranged with the careful deliberate deference of a king who has understood that this is her council and not his.