10. Raven
Raven
The first thing I do when I arrive at Dragonis Academy is put my contacts in.
I do it on the landing platform, in full view of the incoming students, because I'm done hiding that I wear them and I'm done pretending Samara is a problem I haven't already solved.
The lenses are pale green, tinted to turn back whatever it is in a gorgon's stare that turns living things to stone.
Over sapphire they read as almost nothing — you'd have to be close enough to count my lashes to catch the shift.
Balor made them for me. He spent three months on it.
The first two didn't work and the third one does, and I've been wearing them in private for six weeks to get used to the feel of them.
The feel of them is nothing. The light sits a hair differently in my eyes. That's all.
Samara's gaze won't reach me through that.
I blink twice to settle them and pick up my pack.
The mountain air at Dragonis carries the old familiar mix of cold stone and pine and the particular weight of a place that has spent two centuries teaching predators how to be predators.
I know this air. I grew up coming here, my parents on faculty, the academy running underneath my childhood like a note held so long you stop hearing it.
Year One I arrived afraid. Year Two I arrived knowing more. Year Three I arrive knowing exactly what I'm walking into.
I walk through the gates.
Anipe runs registration out of the administrative wing on the east side of the main building. I know this because I've made it my business to know where Anipe is at any hour of any day, a habit I started in the last two weeks of summer, and it has given me a pattern I could set a clock by.
She processes the Year Three registrations between the second and fourth hour of the first morning. I have a form to hand in — Flight Management added to my load at Thauglor's arrangement — which puts me in that corridor at the third hour without needing to invent a reason.
I get there early enough to watch her for six minutes before she knows I'm there.
Anipe at work is composed and quick and careful, and the care looks like ordinary administrative neatness until you notice what's underneath it.
She's paying attention to more than one thing.
Part of her is on the forms and part of her is on the corridor, and I notice because I do the same thing and I know the shape of it when I see it.
She's watching for something. Or someone.
When I hand over my form she takes it without any change in her face, works through it with the speed of a woman who has done this ten thousand times, and passes back my receipt without quite meeting my eyes.
That last part is interesting. Staff don't avoid a student's gaze.
There's no reason to, unless the student is something to you beyond a name on a page.
I am something to Anipe beyond a name on a page.
"Thank you," I say pleasantly, and take my receipt and go. She watches me leave. I feel it between my shoulder blades, that particular weight of being followed by someone's attention, and I don't look back.
I set the pattern down beside the three fire drake students and move on.
? ? ?
My siblings find me at lunch.
Or rather, Orpheus appears at my shoulder in the lunch queue the way he has always appeared at my shoulder, with the silence of a basilisk who was told as a boy not to startle the horses and applied the lesson to every relationship he's had since.
Bella comes in from the other direction, which means they coordinated, which is typical.
Azalea is already at a table holding more seats than one person can reasonably hold, and the students nearby are giving the empty chairs the careful distance people give to things that might belong to someone they'd rather not inconvenience.
"Well," Orpheus says, sliding his tray beside mine. "You'll be up on the platform."
"I will."
"How do you feel about that?"
"High up. Good sightlines."
He makes the sound that passes for his laugh, short and dry and contained, the laugh of a man who finds things funny and has never once felt the need to prove it.
We walk to the table, where Bella drops into the chair next to me with the flair that is entirely her own, managing to look graceful and like a slow-motion disaster at the same time.
"You'll have frightened half the Year Ones before Klauth finishes his first sentence," she says. "Well done in advance."
"I haven't done anything yet."
"You're going to sit at Klauth's right hand," Azalea says. "For a Year One, that's plenty." She hands me a bread roll with the easy efficiency of a woman who has been feeding siblings since she was a child herself. "How's Nova?"
"Enormous. She's started using whole sentences when she wants something and one word when she doesn't."
"That's you," Bella says.
"It isn't."
"It's so you."
I eat the roll. Orpheus has produced a schedule from somewhere and is reading it with the attention of someone who memorized it days ago and checks anyway, because checking is how you confirm you memorized it right. He turns to the back page, taps it once, and slides it across to me without a word.
I look. He's circled the date of the Purge in red, and underneath it, in that small precise hand of his: I know. Tell me when.
I pocket the schedule and we don't talk about it, because we don't have to. That's twenty-three years of shared language, the shorthand of two people taught by the same parents who learned the same way to fold what matters into as little space as possible.
Bella launches into a long account of something that happened on the summer flight circuit involving Azalea, a failed harness, and an extremely patient gryphon instructor.
I eat my lunch and listen and laugh in the right places, and I feel the plain uncomplicated warmth of sitting with people who knew me before I was anything except Raven, their sister, who had opinions about everything and could hold her breath underwater longer than any of them.
It doesn't last long. It doesn't need to. It's enough to carry into the afternoon.
? ? ?
The welcome ceremony is different this year.
I don't stand with the student line. Klauth's office sent instructions three weeks ago: I'm to be seated on the platform with the faculty, at his right hand rather than in the crowd looking up at him.
It isn't a preference. It's a rule. The heir apparent of the Marzana Empire does not sit below the throne she's going to inherit.
I knew this was coming, and I still feel it when I take the platform — the way the whole courtyard shifts key.
I watch it happen. The first row notices, and then it travels backward through the gathered years as people lean into each other, she's not with the students this year moving through the crowd the way water finds its level.
Some of the faces are easy to read. Year Ones who have heard the name Raven Mrithun and haven't had time to attach it to a person yet.
Year Twos who remember me from last year and are visibly working out what it means that I've moved.
Year Threes who have been here long enough to know exactly what the heir apparent at Klauth's right hand means for the year in front of them.
I keep my shoulders easy and my eyes forward and I let them look.
Samara is in the front row of faculty.
I know it before I look, because I know her habits — the same seat at every ceremony, right side of the row, two in from the end. She has done it for eleven years, long enough that it's habit now rather than strategy. Old habits are useful things to know about a person.
I look at her directly, and she looks back.
Her eyes hold mine for a full three seconds, and the lenses do their quiet work, and I feel nothing.
I see nothing except Samara's face, carefully blank in the way of someone who has just met a target's eyes and is deciding whether the target knows what she is.
She doesn't know about the contacts.
After three seconds I look back at Klauth. Natural, unforced, the way you look away from a room you've finished reading.
Something settles behind my sternum. It works. It's real, the Purge is six weeks out, and I am not afraid of Samara.
Klauth opens the welcome address in the voice of a man who has given it many times and still finds something new to mean each year.
He talks about challenge, about the weight of the coming months, about what Year Three asks of a student in ways the first two years never do.
He isn't wrong. Year Three asks for the Purge.
Year Three asks you to survive it or not, and to understand that the not-surviving is an outcome this place has already made peace with.
I listen and watch the students at the same time, and what I'm watching for is narrow.
Three fire drake plants, standing in the Year Two section now that they have a year behind them.
I find the first two quickly, tracking their scent more than their faces — that faint burnt-metal heat Keir picked up on the western border, carried in here among the press of bodies in the courtyard.
It's thinner in the open air, cut by distance and mountain wind. But it's there.
The third one takes longer. He's good at disappearing, keeping taller students between us, never turning his face toward the platform. That he's working this hard to stay out of my attention tells me he either knows I'm aware of him or has been told to assume it.
I find him at the back of the Year Two section, wedged between two students who are both broader and taller than he is. Deliberate cover.
I don't look straight at him. I look a few degrees to his left and hold it long enough for the edge of my vision to finish the job — height, build, the way he carries his weight, which hand he leads with when he shifts. All of it stored away.
Six weeks to the Purge.
The courses lay out cleanly.
Tactics and Warfare with Callan in the east tower.
He's already pinned a scenario to the board when I arrive five minutes early, which tells me this year is going to move faster than last. Good.
The Year Two problems had started to feel like exercises I was solving rather than problems I was working, and I learn better when I can't see the shape of what I'm meant to be learning.
Today's board is a war on two fronts with a compromised source feeding one of them, which is not an academic question for me and is going to make for an interesting class.
Advanced Shadowcarve with Balor on the training grounds.
The advanced track is small — fourteen students drawn from Year Two and Year Three, chosen by Balor and nobody else.
No appeals, no exceptions. I know every one of them, have trained against most of them, and have a working read on all of them.
Balor looks around the group that first afternoon like a male who has decided this is a good year and has no intention of saying so, because saying so would make them soft.
Flight Management with Thauglor, a new course built for this year, which my father is treating with the intensity he saves for things he invented himself.
Twelve of us, ranging from dragon to blink hound to black unicorn — exactly the mix that makes up Blackhaven's flight.
He didn't design it for the academy. He designed it for me and then offered it to the academy, because the knowledge is useful and he is constitutionally incapable of making something useful and keeping it to himself.
I told him so once. He didn't deny it.
And Royal Protocol with Finlay.
That one deserves its own consideration.
Finlay in a classroom is a different creature from Finlay at home.
I understood that in theory and lived it in Year Two, but Year Three is going to test it in a new way, because I'm no longer only his student.
I'm the woman whose conduct will shape how the continent gets along for the next hundred years, and he will mark me accordingly.
I've already decided to give him nothing to mark down and everything to mark precisely, and to make sure he knows I'm doing it on purpose.
I think he'll find that entertaining.
I think I'll find it entertaining.
The rest of the day runs through all four.
By the last bell I've found three holes in my own tactical thinking that Callan's scenario opened up, marked two students at Shadowcarve I didn't know were there and want to watch for different reasons, and set aside a question about Thauglor's flight teaching that I intend to ask him in private.
I may also have caught Finlay being precisely as professional as he set out to be and answered him in kind, which produced the most technically correct diplomatic exercise I have ever taken part in and a look on his face that I plan to revisit in detail later.
? ? ?
My rooms at Malivore are the same rooms.
The same ones Mom had in Year One. The paintings of her mates are still on the far wall, my father's face rendered in the brushstrokes of someone who was in love while she painted it.
I stand in the doorway a moment and look at them the way I look at them every time I come back — the faces, the love worked into the detail of them, the reminder of what it looks like when someone builds a thing that lasts.
I unpack quickly, change into something comfortable, and sit down at the desk.
The paper I take out is blank. I write in clean columns, the way Finlay taught me to lay out what you know when the list of names is short and the time is not.
Anipe. What I know. What I've seen. The pattern of her watching, the small tells, the timing in the corridor, the shape of her attention, the way she wouldn't meet my eyes.
Samara. What a gorgon can do. Her access to the archives.
The lenses that close off her stare. What Callan told me about where she goes in the hours she isn't teaching.
And what the lenses don't cover, because they stop the stone and nothing else, and I've spent time listing the rest of her separately.
The three fire drake students. Names, year, the courses I traced through the enrollment records. Where they'll be during the Purge, if they hold to the way students of their standing usually move.
I read it back once, fold it once, and put it in the hollow behind the desk's back panel that I cut in Year Two and that nobody knows about except Corvus.
Then I take out a second sheet and write one thing on it.
The date of the Purge.
I look at it for a moment. The number sits on the page the way it has been sitting behind my sternum for six months — exact, real, mine. I circle it, put it away, and close the desk.
Year Three has begun.