26. Raven #2
The crossbow stops half-spanned. Her hands stay exactly where they are, the motion caught in the middle of itself, one finger still hooked over the string.
Her eyes stay open. She will stay like this for days — that is what a full lock holds at my strength and at that range.
The retrieval teams work the grounds in rotation and this path is on their circuit; she'll be found long before it wears off. She won't be harmed.
What she experiences inside a frozen mind, for as long as it holds, is hers. I choose not to spend time thinking about it.
I hold the gaze three full seconds to be certain the lock has taken.
Three seconds is a long time when your shoulder is going from cold to hot and you are standing in open ground in the middle of an active Purge with two more people looking for you.
But letting go early risks a partial lock, and a partial lock means she comes out of it in hours instead of days, and hours doesn't guarantee she's still standing here when the sweep reaches this path.
Three seconds. Complete.
I look away.
? ? ?
The wound burns.
I take stock of it the way I was taught by a mother who considered field medicine a basic skill and a father who learned it in circumstances I prefer not to look at directly.
Left shoulder, across the top. I can map it without touching it — the quality of the burn tells me most of what I need.
The dragon's bane has done what surface contact does.
Burning in a narrow track, the scale disrupted along the line of it, nothing gone deep, because the bolt went across instead of through.
That distinction is the reason the Purge didn't end on the south approach path.
A real hit would have been aimed at the middle of me. She put it where she calculated I'd be after moving — right about the direction, a little generous about the distance. Her reading was very good. Her timing was a fraction off.
The difference between a graze and a kill was about eight inches.
Eight inches.
I file that for later, when I'm somewhere I can afford to think about how close today's arithmetic has been running.
The bolt has to come out. It didn't bury itself — it scored across and caught in the broken scale rather than in meat, which is the one piece of luck in it, because catching in scale means I can take it out clean instead of working around muscle.
I brace my back against the south wall, plant my feet, reach across with my right hand, and take hold of it.
I pull.
The sound it makes is not pleasant. My dragoness produces a long low note that expresses precisely how she feels about dragon's bane and about the people who choose to put it on a bolt.
I agree with her entirely.
The field seal is the one Balor taught me in the third month of Year Two — a controlled acid closure, mixed weak enough not to do damage of its own, applied fast rather than slowly, because slow gives the body time to understand fully what is happening to it.
I apply it fast. The burn changes character. Still there. Contained. Closed.
I test the arm.
Overhead reach is down by about a third. Rotation is worse. Forward reach and grip are untouched, which is most of what matters. I go through everything I might need in the next hours and set aside what I can no longer lead with.
Workable.
I take the crossbow.
I empty the quiver off her belt — she's frozen, she doesn't resist, and there is something in doing this in front of her open eyes that I don't examine — and I look at the bolts.
Dragon's bane on every tip. Properly made, not something anyone put together in a shed.
The fletching carries a maker's mark I don't know, which means it didn't come through any continental supplier.
Western territories, most likely, from someone who doesn't ask what it's for.
They go into my jacket with everything else I'm carrying out of today.
I cut the string. Not the frame. I'm not destroying anything anyone will need to look at later — I'm making sure nobody picks this up while she's standing there and finishes what she started. The weapon stays whole. The weapon stays useless.
I look at her a moment.
A hundred and fifty-three years old. Sixty-one of them in this building.
Twenty of them carrying this. She never had to place herself anywhere — she was already here, had been here since before my mother sat in these classrooms, and all that was required of her was to turn.
Everything she built afterward was patient and quiet and made of paperwork, and it was more careful than most of what I've faced in the past year.
I don't feel good about this. I also wasn't going to let her kill me.
Both things are true.
I leave her standing on the south approach path and I move.
The shoulder hurts. I don't go back to it — I've assessed it, I've adjusted around it, I've closed it. Anything further is just attention, and attention spent on pain in the middle of a fight is attention not spent on the fight.
I put it down.
The first fire drake is still waiting in the armory corridor for something that got interrupted. The second is somewhere in the east corridor behind him. They've had twelve minutes to improve where they're standing.
Good.
Better positioning means more committed to a plan. More committed to a plan means less able to bend when the plan meets something it never accounted for.
They didn't account for me.
The shoulder hurts.
I don't slow down.