14. Raven
Raven
*
Balor runs his night exercises the way he runs everything — no announcement, no preamble, and with the particular enthusiasm of a basilisk who finds daylight adequate for his needs and honestly prefers the dark.
The instruction arrives as a single note pushed under the door of every Advanced Shadowcarve student at ten in the evening, when most of us are in some state of being done with the day. It says: Grounds. Shadowcarve. Now. Bring nothing you wouldn't carry into a real fight.
I am already dressed.
I've been dressed since the end of dinner, because I've been doing this long enough to know that Balor runs his night exercise in the third week of term, every year, on the theory that complacency is a slow poison and the third week is exactly when it starts to settle.
The first week everyone is sharp. The second week the sharpness holds because everything is still new.
By the third, the body begins to assume nothing unexpected is coming, because nothing unexpected has come yet.
That is when Balor makes something unexpected happen.
I lace my boots, pick up my pack, and go.
? ? ?
The Shadowcarve grounds at night feel different from the rest of the academy.
Older. Heavier. The stone worn in ways that suggest generations of students practicing for things they would actually need to live through.
The torches in the main courtyard are the only steady light.
Everything past them is managed dark, the kind a place develops when it has been used for this long enough that the buildings themselves cooperate — walls without ledges to catch the moon, paths that are level underfoot and impossible to read by eye.
The whole of it built to make you rely on something other than sight.
Balor is in the courtyard when we arrive, fourteen of us, assembled in the time it takes a note under a door to be read and acted on. He looks us over the way he does when he's judging readiness. Not approval. Not disapproval. Just taking the measure of what he has.
"Tracking and evasion," he says. "The grounds are the field. You have two hours. Five of you are hunters. The other nine are prey. Prey get a three-minute start. Any prey still free at the end gets full marks. Any hunter who doesn't make a single tag reports for extra work. Questions?"
Nobody asks questions. That is the correct answer.
He divides us. I'm prey. Orpheus is prey. The still third-year from Callan's class — the one who would have fed his enemy false word rather than hunt him — is on the hunters' side, and I have to work not to look at him, because his is the name that was inside Callan's sealed note.
I set that down carefully and leave it where I can reach it.
Balor put him on hunters. That might mean Balor judged him better suited to chasing than to hiding. It might mean Balor wanted his tracking tested against mine. Balor teaches in layers, and his assignments usually mean at least two things.
The three-minute start begins. Orpheus and I don't discuss it. We move.
? ? ?
The advantage I have in night exercises is one I've never advertised.
My right ear is deaf. My left has been making up the difference since I was a hatchling, the way a body will pour everything it has into one side when the other side is gone.
In the dark, with nothing much for my eyes to do, my left ear is worth about three of anyone else's.
On stone, at night, I can follow footsteps at distances most creatures couldn't manage with every sense they own working properly.
I can pull apart overlapping sounds the way a good musician pulls single instruments out of a crowded piece — not deliberately, not with effort. It simply arrives already sorted.
Orpheus knows. He's known since we were eight and I told him during an exercise where he needed to know, and he has held it since with the reliability of a basilisk who treats anything about family as belonging to the family and to nobody else.
He angles left, drawing attention toward the outer grounds, making noise — not obvious noise, not clumsy noise, just enough that a tracker following him will feel like he's on something real. He's the decoy. I'm the ghost.
I take a different line through the inner grounds, close to the wall where stone swallows a footfall differently than open path does.
My boots are the shadowblade leather Mom drilled into all of us, silent by design, the soles treated so they don't whisper against stone, the uppers cut close so the leather doesn't sigh when you move fast. I keep count of what my left ear brings me.
Two hunters heading northeast after Orpheus's trail.
One sweeping the western edge in a pattern that's a search grid rather than real tracking. Two more I haven't placed.
Three placed, two still loose. Five hunters against nine prey — long odds for the hunters, which is the point.
Balor doesn't set fair problems, he sets instructive ones.
The ones most likely to fail are the ones walking grids — that's what you do when you have no scent and no sound and are hoping to blunder into somebody.
It works eventually. It doesn't work inside two hours against people trained specifically to make it not work.
I find a place in the lee of the inner archive building, where the historical records are kept — open to senior faculty, closed to students — and settle into stillness.
Stillness is a skill. Mom taught it by example.
She's the only person I've ever watched be completely still and completely present at once, not the stillness of somebody gone somewhere else but the stillness of something that has stopped spending anything on being seen. It took me years. It comes easier now.
I wait.
And then I hear it.
? ? ?
Footsteps inside the archive building.
That isn't possible tonight. Students aren't permitted in the archive at any hour, and no part of this exercise touches the inside of any Shadowcarve building — the grounds are the field, Balor said so.
These aren't a hunter cutting through. These belong to someone who has a reason to be in a restricted archive that has nothing to do with what's happening outside.
My left ear places them exactly. One floor up, moving slowly, the rhythm of somebody reading spines in the dark or working from memory rather than heading anywhere in particular. Searching.
I know this walk.
I go to the side door — locked to students, not to faculty — and test it.
Locked. I test the window above it, which is not, because nobody keeps up the latches on the archive's second floor.
Students aren't supposed to be up there and faculty don't come in through windows.
I'm on the ledge and inside in eleven seconds without a sound.
The second level is a long corridor of shelved records, the spines marked in the ordering system Balor handed out at the start of term.
The torches in here are cold. My dragon's sight makes nothing of that — the shelves come to me as warmth and its absence, the markers faintly luminous, and the clear warm shape of a person working along the far wall.
Pulling files. Reading. Putting them back.
Samara.
She shouldn't be here. She's faculty and faculty may use the archive, but the exercise is running on the grounds outside and the hour is well past anything ordinary, and there is no academic reason for a gorgon to be standing in the institutional records at this time of night.
I stay still. I watch.
She takes a file from the far left section, the oldest shelves, the ones holding the institution's own records rather than students'.
She opens it and reads with the efficiency of a woman who knows what she came for and has found it.
Then she photographs it — two pages, quick, the phone held flat and steady above the paper, the screen throwing a small cold light up onto her face.
She replaces the file, moves three shelves right, and does it again.
I read what she's pulling by the markers, which my sight can just make out at this range.
The first is coded to the founding documents — the original charter records from Shadowcarve's establishment.
The second carries an annual review code and a year I'd need longer to read exactly, but the decade mark is old. Very old.
She's reading the original Purge documents.
The founding rules. Not the current ones. The rules as they were first written, before decades of revision softened some things and clarified others. Whatever the founders originally permitted and forbade, which the version we all study may or may not have carried forward honestly.
She's looking for what the rules actually allow.
She photographs a third page, replaces the file, and starts for the door with the unhurried composure of a woman working through a plan she made some time ago.
I'm out the window and onto the ledge before she reaches the corridor, down to the ground without sound, moving off along the wall before she comes out.
I put distance between us and stop.
What she was reading: the founding charter of the Purge provision, and review records from the institution's earliest decades.
The founding charter would hold the original language — what was allowed, what was forbidden, and what fell into the gaps the drafters never thought to close, because the situations they imagined were narrow and the situations that have actually happened across two centuries are not.
Institutions grow their rules over time. Readings pile up. Precedents get set. And sometimes the current version of a rule and the original version differ enough that knowing both gives you room that knowing one does not.
Samara is a gorgon. She has taught here eleven years. She knows the current rules by heart. She already knows exactly what they permit and forbid.
What she was photographing is what the old rules permitted that the current ones may not.
A gap. An old precedent. Something the founders wrote in that has since been quietly ignored or deliberately edited out, but that still stands in the original charter, and that a clever argument could claim was never formally struck down and therefore still holds.
The Purge permits students to kill students. Faculty are not supposed to take part.
What Samara is hunting for is the original language on faculty conduct during the Purge — whether that prohibition was written in at the founding, or added later, or whether the founding documents say nothing about it at all.
If they say nothing, and she can argue that silence isn't prohibition, and she can find someone in this institution willing to read it her way—
I file all of it and go to find Orpheus.
? ? ?
I find him forty minutes later in the north end of the outer grounds, crouched behind a stone formation with the patience of a basilisk who has been there long enough to have become part of it.
Two hunters already gave up on this stretch.
He watched them go. When I come up beside him he doesn't startle, because he knows my approach the way I know his.
I crouch. My hands move.
Samara. Archive building. Copied the founding Purge rules.
He goes very still. His eyes shift sideways, which is what he does when he's working rather than reacting. Then his hands move.
Looking for what's permitted. A statement, not a question. He got there on his own.
Yes, I sign. Then: Nothing yet. Let her look. I'm looking too.
He studies me a moment. Then he signs one more thing.
She doesn't know about the contacts.
No, I sign. And she won't. Then: The stone gaze is dead to me. Whatever she found in those papers doesn't change that.
His exhale is barely a movement at all. For Orpheus, that's considerable relief.
We spend the last hour in the outer grounds, slipping the hunters with the ease of two people raised by the same people who trained them. At the two-hour mark, when Balor calls it, five of the nine prey are still free. I'm one. Orpheus is another.
Balor takes that in without expression and tells the two hunters who made no tags to be on the grounds at six in the morning. We're dismissed.
? ? ?
Malivore is quiet when I reach my rooms. I'm still carrying the night in my body — that sharp alertness a long stretch of careful thinking leaves behind, not quite the rush itself but the state on either side of it, where every surface feels a little more present than it should.
My door is open.
I stop. Then I catch him: bread and smoke and the warm-metal note of silver scale, familiar enough now that my body knows before my mind does. The alertness changes key. Not a threat. The opposite.
Corvus is in the chair by the window in his shirtsleeves, one of the books from my desk open in his lap, the moonlight turning his silver hair into something with no equivalent in any natural material.
He looks up. "Instructor duties," he says. "As of this morning. Balor asked me to run the fourth-year combat assessment this week."
"He didn't mention it."
"He mentioned it to me." Corvus closes the book. "I thought I'd let you find out the good way."
I look at him in the moonlight, in my rooms, in the entirely unreasonable comfort of finding someone you wanted there already there.
The exercise is still in my body. Samara is filed.
What Solaris found about Amadeus sits at the back of my mind like a stone dropped in still water, everything else rippling around it.
And Corvus is here.
I drop my pack and cross the room, and his arms open and I fold into them, and the scale in my chest pulses warm where his answers it, the bond running bright the way it does when nearness settles an absence.
For a moment I'm not thinking about Samara or Amadeus or the count of weeks or any of the rest of it.
"How was the exercise?" he asks, against my hair.
"Informative."
He hears the weight in the word. He always does. His arms tighten. "Tell me later."
"Later," I agree.
His hand moves to the back of my neck, warm and grounding, the steadiness that is entirely his.
The scale in my chest pulses once, matched to his.
The bond settles into a warmth that is nothing like the tension of the exercise and nothing like the cold of what I watched in the archive and nothing like the rest of what today has been.
Just this. Just him.
The moonlight through the window dims as a cloud crosses it and the room goes briefly darker, and neither of us moves.
Later covers a great deal of ground.