22. Raven #2
We sit on the floor. He doesn't ask about the chair. He knows this is a floor conversation, the kind where neither of us has to perform anything. We eat the chocolate slowly, the way it deserves, small pieces, letting each one finish before the next.
"Callan gave me the same mark for all three."
"Of course he did."
"I knew he would. I still needed to check."
"You always need to check." Not teasing. Warm — the warmth of someone who finds a habit endearing because he's watched it produce right answers for twenty-three years. "It's one of your better qualities. You never take a thing as true just because you expected it to be."
"The root thing at lunch wasn't a potato."
"I know. It's the northern variety Hemlocke brought in for the lower garden last spring. It tastes of very little, which means it takes on whatever you cook it with. The cafeteria cooked it with nothing interesting, which is the cafeteria's fault."
"Hemlocke should take over the kitchen."
"He'd be extremely good at it and extremely unhappy," Corvus says. "He'd do it perfectly and never once mention that he hated it."
Which is accurate. I eat another piece.
The window goes dark. The conversation drifts with no destination — the foal, Callan and his three identical marks, something Finlay said in Protocol about the difference between mourning and witness that I've been turning over since, whether the town market has the good bread on Thursdays or only Saturdays.
The particular drift of two people who know each other well enough not to need the conversation to arrive anywhere.
When the chocolate is gone and he moves to go, I hold on a beat longer than usual.
He doesn't remark on it. He doesn't reassure me or ask about it or do anything with it except hold on back — that bit of extra pressure through the arms that says I know. I have you. Go.
Then he goes, and the suite is quiet, and I am alone.
I lay everything out on the desk.
Not to review it. I know every item, know where each sits on my body, know how each blade comes out and in what order and what my hands do first when more than one thing arrives at once.
I lay them out because this is what I do before something that matters.
I put the things I'm carrying in front of me and let them be real and physical instead of abstract in my head.
Four blades. The contacts in their case. Two things I'm not going to name even here. And the one written list — Orpheus's name, the signal he'll be watching for, the plan if it goes wrong in one specific way. Folded small, carried against the inside of my left wrist.
I count the blades. I check the contacts. I fold the list.
I put everything away.
Xero has been on the windowsill the whole time, keeping out of the counting because the counting needed the room. Now that it's done, she comes.
She drops to the desk with the soundlessness of something built for exactly that, wings flaring once to steady the landing and folding away against her back so neatly they might not be there at all.
Then she crosses the desk with her tail straight up and walks directly into my hand.
Not near it. Into it, forehead first, the way cats do, hard enough that my knuckles rock back.
She drags the length of her cheek along my fingers, jaw to ear, then turns and does the other side, marking me with the thoroughness of a creature laying claim to something in front of witnesses.
Whiskers against my wrist. The bony little skull under all that fur, butting again, insisting.
Tomorrow.
"Tomorrow," I agree.
Raven wins.
"Yes."
She holds my eyes a moment longer. Then she steps up onto my forearm — small precise weight, claws finding the leather and not my skin, a habit she learned early and has never once forgotten — and walks up to my shoulder, wings opening halfway for balance and folding again the moment she arrives.
She turns twice. Kneads once, twice, three times into the muscle where my neck meets my shoulder, front paws working, entirely absorbed in it, and then settles all at once the way cats do, as though standing was a thing that happened to someone else.
Her tail comes around the back of my neck and curls under my chin, warm and heavy and faintly ridiculous.
Then she puts her face against my jaw and purrs.
It isn't the contented purr. I know the difference — the contented one is loose and irregular and stops when she thinks about something else.
This one is steady and low and deliberate, and it goes into the bone.
It doesn't say I am comfortable. It says I am here.
I have you. We are together. She keeps it up while she pushes her forehead under my jaw and rubs, cheek to jaw, again and again, until the fur is going the wrong way along her temple and she doesn't care and neither do I.
I reach up and scratch behind her ears. She tips her head into my fingers, and the purr climbs.
"Get some sleep," I tell her.
When Raven sleeps.
I close the curtain. I turn off the light. I lie down, and she comes with me, arranging herself against my ribs with her wings tented over her back and her chin on my collarbone, still purring.
I am not afraid.
I am present.
I sleep.