22. Raven
Raven
The day before the night before, I wake up and I go to Tactics.
This is a choice. There are things I could be doing instead.
A last look at everything we have. A check-in with Keir on the border rotation.
Another pass over the four fire drake records to see whether I've missed anything.
The pre-Purge walk of the grounds that Balor has offered twice and I've declined twice.
I've declined because I already know those grounds — three years of training on them, every path and corridor walkable in the dark with my eyes shut — and walking them today with intent would tip me out of the present and into the anticipating. I need to stay present.
The Purge starts tomorrow night. Everything I need to know, I know.
Everything that needed doing before it starts is done.
The work now is not to keep working. The work is to still be the person who does what needs doing when the bell rings, rather than the person who spent the last day running every scenario until the scenarios crowded out the clarity.
So I go to Tactics. I sit in my usual seat. I watch Callan pin the scenario to the board.
I've seen it before — not this exact one, this kind.
A contested resource, several claimants, and incomplete knowledge of what each of them can actually do as against what they've let everyone believe they can do.
The classroom version of a problem I've been living inside for months, which means I could run the standard answer in about seven minutes, hand it in, and score well.
Instead I solve it three ways.
The first is the textbook answer, clean and elegant, spending as little as possible.
The second takes a deliberately worse road to the same place, to see whether the longer route changes anything about where you arrive.
It does, slightly — the long way turns up a consequence further down the line that the clean answer never surfaces.
I note that. The third treats the missing information as the actual problem rather than a condition to work around, and builds toward finding out what I don't know before committing anything. It's slower. It's far more certain.
I hand in all three.
Callan gives all three the same mark, which I only learn at the end of class when he tells me.
He reads them through in order, then looks up with the expression he wears when something has landed exactly where he built it to land.
"Same mark because all three do the job," he says.
"Different marks would say one method is better than the others.
It isn't. What's right depends on where you're standing. "
"I know," I say. "I wanted to see whether you'd say it."
"I know you did." He picks up the papers. "Get some sleep tonight."
I go.
? ? ?
Lunch is loud.
Bella has found something objectionable in the hot food and is making that known with the theatrical energy she brings to all food complaints — not actually upset, performing upset well enough to satisfy an audience, because the performance is where the fun is.
Azalea is defending the cafeteria with equal energy from the opposite direction, just as theatrical, just as uninvested in the actual question of the food, feeding off the friction the way she's fed off Bella's friction since they were hatchlings in the same nest.
Orpheus eats without objection and watches them both with the dry satisfaction of a man who enjoys other people's performances and has the self-control not to join in.
I eat my food. It's bad. That's fine. The food has been consistently bad for three years and the consistency is its own comfort, the known thing in the known place.
"The potato thing," Bella says, pointing at my plate. "That's not a potato thing."
"It's what they said when I asked."
"They're wrong."
"I think it's a root of some kind," Azalea says. "Not a potato. In the potato family."
"The potato family should be ashamed," Bella says.
Orpheus makes the sound that passes for his laugh. I eat the root thing, which is fine, because it doesn't taste of much, which means it doesn't taste of anything bad.
No strategy. No hand signs. No planning sessions dressed as meals, no briefings dressed as conversation.
Bella and Azalea argue about the cafeteria for eleven minutes and then swerve with no warning into a story about Allister, who is apparently in the middle of an elaborate situation with someone in his year that started with a borrowed book and has escalated far past anything a borrowed book should be able to cause.
The story is not tactical. It is funny. I laugh in the right places and in a few wrong ones, because it's funnier than they're telling it and Orpheus's commentary underneath is making it worse.
My siblings are exactly themselves today.
That's the most useful thing they could possibly be, and they have no idea it's useful, which makes it more so.
Nothing in it is performed — not the food, not Allister, not Orpheus running under the noise like a warm current.
They're just themselves, the way they always are, and I'm with them, the way I always am, and for an hour none of us is anything else.
I eat everything on my plate, including the root thing.
? ? ?
The stables in the afternoon hold the warmth they always hold at this hour — bodies and hay and the low autumn sun through the south windows, the smell of a place given over to keeping living things well.
I hear the foal before I see her, that high expectant sound a young horse makes when it recognizes footsteps and has opinions about them.
I didn't plan to come here. I finished lunch and my feet took the stable route the way feet do when the body has decided something before the mind catches up. That isn't a bad sign. My body is usually right.
Titan isn't in his stall. He's in the paddock at the far end of the block, where he goes when the weather is clear and the sun is low enough not to bother him.
I find him at the fence, holding the stillness that is specifically his — not resting, not alert, simply a very large horse who has decided this stretch of rail deserves his attention today.
His black coat takes the afternoon light and gives none of it back.
He absorbs it the way I do in dragon form.
He turns as I come. His dark eyes find me and stay.
I let myself through the gate. He doesn't come to meet me.
He never does. He waits, with the patience of something that learned long ago the approach is yours to make or not, as you like.
I cross the paddock and put my hand on his neck and feel the warmth of his coat in the sun and stand there a while before I do anything else.
He doesn't need anything from me except to be brushed.
That's what I came for, I understand now that I'm here.
Not the review. Not the border check. Not another circuit of things I've already been around until the going around stops producing anything new and starts producing dread.
Titan doesn't need my strategy. He doesn't need my anger or my plan or anything I've built.
He needs the brush to come from the right direction with steady pressure over the shoulder blade, and he would like the apple slice he knows perfectly well I'm carrying.
I take the brush off the hook by the gate, start at his neck, and work.
The motion is its own kind of thinking, the sort where the hands are busy and the mind gets permission to move slowly through whatever it wants rather than at the speed the other work demands.
I think about Nova leaning into the wind off Solaris's wings, learning the pull.
I think about Hemlocke and the foal and the twenty-seven candles in the great hall.
I think about Finlay at the front of the Protocol room saying the rite creates an edge with nine centuries standing behind the words.
I think about nothing in particular for a while, which is a skill I've been working at and which the brushing makes easier.
The foal comes to watch at some point, her head over the rail, all legs and bright chestnut, the white blaze down her face still too wide for the rest of her, studying me with the intensity of something young enough to find nearly everything worth investigating.
Titan ignores her the way he ignores anything that doesn't require him.
The foal watches me the way she watches everyone she hasn't finished deciding about.
I brush him for an hour.
The hour passes without any of it feeling like preparation, or like waiting. It's just an hour. When I'm done I put the brush back, give Titan his apple slice, which he takes with dignified efficiency, and press my forehead briefly to his.
"Thank you," I tell him.
He puts his nose against my palm.
I go.
? ? ?
Corvus finds me in the suite at the seventh hour. He comes through the door with a paper bag and the expression he wears when he's done something he knows will land, carrying the knowledge of it slightly ahead of himself.
The bag holds dark sea salt caramel chocolate, the kind from the town market three miles down.
It's the only place in the region that makes it properly, which I know because I once ate a badly made version in Corvus's presence and he spent four minutes explaining the difference — which at the time I thought excessive and now understand entirely, because the difference is real and the bad version is genuinely worse.
"You went to town."
"I had time between the fourth-year assessment and dinner."
"That's a three-mile run."
"Six, there and back," he says. "It's fine.
" He says it's fine in the tone that means it was six miles in the cold and he'd do it again unasked, because this is how Corvus loves people — practically, by fetching the correct version of the thing, by running six miles in the cold rather than buying the wrong one nearby.