24. Raven #2
The wind comes up the corridor from the east training ground, carrying hay and horse and cold. I redraw the picture. The first is still holding in the east. The second — the one who works by scent — is in the north.
"She's broken position," I say.
"Four minutes ago. Moving."
We walk. The grounds are busier in the second hour.
Pairs settling old business, small groups working the edges of the marked zones.
Somewhere behind the west range someone is shouting, and the shout cuts off.
The courtyard has thinned out. Most of the people who had business here have taken it elsewhere.
"Anipe," Orpheus says. Flat.
I look at him.
"South grounds. Moving. She has a crossbow."
Faculty. Armed. During the Purge. Either the founding language Samara went digging for, or something less careful than that — something that never needed legal cover because it was never going to be inside the rules at all.
I file the difference and keep moving. Moving is always right when what you know is incomplete.
"Taking a position?"
"Upper south walk. Elevated. She'll see most of the central grounds from up there."
Height and a long-range weapon. A crossbow from that walk reaches most of this courtyard. It's a deliberate placement. She doesn't want to be near me. She wants to own the ground I'm standing on.
"How long until she's set?"
"She was moving when I left the tower. Eight minutes ago. She'll be set by now."
I redraw it again. The watcher gone. Two on the ground converging on the armory. One still unaccounted for. Anipe above the south walk with a crossbow. Samara somewhere I can't see.
"Find Hemlocke," I say. "Stable loft. He can see the south walk from up there. Tell him to signal me if she moves."
"Hemlocke doesn't have a signal—"
"He'll work one out." I glance at him. "He always does. And stay out of her line yourself."
He gives me the look he gives when I've told him to do something he was already doing. Then he peels off, smooth, beside me one moment and not the next.
I go on toward the armory corridor.
? ? ?
The first plant makes his move at fifty-eight minutes.
He comes from the east — the one who was holding in the eastern approach, the one whose pattern was too even to be a route.
He's angling for the armory corridor, which runs between the main courtyard and the east training ground.
Narrow passage, stone close on both sides, ceiling low enough to take vertical options off the table, floor worn to a shine by centuries of feet.
The kind of space that forces you in close, cuts every sight line to arm's length, and gives a shifted dragoness nowhere to put her wings.
He's studied these grounds. He's found the one place that suits me least and he's moving to make the fight happen there. That is good thinking.
What he doesn't know is that I have been through that corridor three hundred times.
He doesn't know about the slight left curve at the midpoint that makes a blind angle from the entrance, or the drainage channel cut along the eastern wall that works as a step if you know it's there, or that the third torch bracket from the far end has been empty since my first year and leaves eleven feet of dark.
He doesn't know that I know all of it, because he has been here eighteen months and I have been here three years, and there is a specific difference between knowing a place and having trained in it long enough that the knowing lives in your body instead of your head.
He wants me in the corridor, in the small space, with fewer options. He's going to get me in the corridor. Everything else he's assuming is going to need revising.
I change direction. Not away. Toward. I set my path to meet his at the corridor mouth, and I time it so I get there first. He expects to be waiting when I arrive. I intend to arrive differently than he's planned for.
Same unhurried pace. I don't look at him. I telegraph nothing.
"The corridor," Orpheus says, at my right.
"I know."
"He's faster than the others."
"I know that too."
"Are you going to—"
"Yes."
A beat. "Good." The word carries the warmth of someone who trusts you completely and has decided not to prove it by being careful.
I reach the armory corridor mouth. Cold air comes out of it, older than the air in the courtyard, smelling of damp stone and lamp oil and the iron-and-leather smell that lives in every armory ever built.
I stop just outside.
Three seconds. Four. Long enough for him to register that I've stopped, that I'm not walking the line he laid out for me. Long enough for the doubt to arrive and start doing its work.
The one who works by scent is forty feet behind me in the east corridor. She's his backup. When he takes me inside, she seals the mouth behind me. Two points, no exit. It's well built. If I were walking in unaware, it would work.
Then his scent reaches my left ear on the cold draft — faint, unmistakable, that burnt-metal heat Keir found on the western border. The same thing. Here. Inside these walls. Inside my walls.
The anger I have been banking for six weeks goes very warm.
My dragoness comes forward. She has been waiting for this since the bell.
I let her come.
I step into the corridor.