26. Raven
Raven
I don't go to Anipe.
I let Anipe come to me.
Hemlocke's mirror changes my route. Two sequences — the first means immediate threat, change direction.
The second means south, high ground. Together they tell me everything.
Anipe is setting up on the upper south walk, and she has something with her that earned the first sequence rather than a simple warning.
I adjust my approach to the armory corridor.
Not away from it. I still have business in that corridor — the first fire drake plant is waiting in there for a fight he's been building toward for eighteen months and I fully intend to give him one.
But the corridor has two ends. I was going to take the north entrance.
I take the south instead, which puts me directly beneath the upper walk when I come out.
Directly beneath is a hard place to shoot at.
A crossbow — which is what an immediate-threat signal from Hemlocke means, because Hemlocke doesn't exaggerate — needs a braced position and a clean angle.
Firing straight down from that walk means leaning out past the parapet, which exposes the shooter and ruins the brace, and an unbraced crossbow shot is a bad shot.
Balor spent two sessions in the spring of Year Two teaching me every way each common ranged weapon fails and exactly how to stand in relation to it.
I clear the south exit of the armory corridor. I move into the shadow under the walk, where the stone is still holding the night's cold, and I put my back against it.
I wait.
The wait is four minutes. Long enough for the plant in the corridor to start wondering where I've gone.
Long enough for the second one, the one who works by scent, to check my traces against the direction she last had me going and find that they don't agree.
Both of them adjusting. Both of them spending time I'm not spending.
Then footsteps on the south approach path.
? ? ?
She comes down off the walk a little past the hour.
I hear her before I see her — the particular tread of somebody carrying a crossbow, which is always heavier than the person expects and puts a small hitch in one side of the gait.
Twenty paces. Fifteen. The frost has gone off the stone by now and her boots make a flatter sound than they would have at dawn.
She comes around the corner of the south building and she sees me and she stops.
For a moment neither of us does anything at all.
She's in her office clothes. That's the part that lands strangely — the same plain dark wool she wears behind the enrollment desk, the same neat collar, the sleeves buttoned at the wrist the way she buttons them to work through a stack of transfer records.
Nothing about her says today. Only the crossbow, held low across her body in both hands, spanned and loaded, the bolt seated and the fletching bright against the dull wood.
Somewhere off past the west range someone is still fighting. It sounds very far away.
Thirty feet between us. Open ground. No cover on either side.
"Anipe," I say.
"Lady Raven." Her voice is exactly the voice she uses at the desk.
Anipe is a hundred and fifty-three years old.
I know because I pulled her record last month — all of it, not the employment summary.
Sixty-one years at Dragonis. Enrollment, student records, faculty support.
She was behind that desk when my mother was a student here.
She processed my siblings' enrollments and then mine, and she has been handing me forms across that counter since I was small enough to need lifting up to see over it. The file is spotless. Of course it is.
What the file doesn't hold: the family name she gave up eleven years ago.
The community she came out of, in the western territories bordering the ground where Mina's early campaigns ran two decades back.
The hamlet listed in the old flight records as a fire drake–allied settlement — one of several that took consequences when Mina's forces came through.
I've known for three weeks. I've spent three weeks deciding how to say it when the moment came.
"You brought in the three students," I say. "You've been feeding the fire drakes for two years. But the work isn't the heart of it, is it. The heart of it is older."
Something goes through her face. She expected this conversation — I think she has rehearsed it — but something under the rehearsal gives way. Not surprise. Closer to relief. The look of someone who has carried a thing a long way and has just reached the place where she can set it down.
"You're very much your mother's daughter," she says.
"My mother didn't order strikes on civilians. The Ragnar campaigns went after installations and supply. Whatever happened to your family, it wasn't the thing you believe it was."
"You weren't there."
"No." Her hands haven't moved on the crossbow.
I watch them anyway. "But I have the records.
Both sets — the Marzana archive and the independent accounts from the same seasons.
The hamlet your family came from was being used by the fire drake command as a staging ground.
When the staging ground was taken out, the hamlet caught the edge of it.
The target was the installation. It was never the people. "
"My grandmother lost four children."
The words land the way she means them to.
The grief is real. It is specific and it is twenty years old and it does not care in the slightest whether it has been aimed correctly. It has been pointed at Mina and at the Marzana line and at me for two decades, and the pointing feels true to her no matter where the cause actually sits.
I understand that. I understand it completely. It changes nothing about what happens in the next thirty seconds.
"I'm sorry for your grandmother," I say, and I mean it, and I can hear that I mean it.
"What happened to that community was real.
The people who were hurt were real. The grief your family has carried is real.
All of that is true." I hold her eyes. "Mina didn't order it.
And you have spent two years placing students in this school to kill me on a day when the killing would look permitted. Both of those are also true."
"The Purge permits it."
"The Purge permits students. You're staff.
" I let that sit for a beat. "The founding charter you photographed in the archive doesn't give you what you think it does.
The language is vague enough that any tribunal would throw it out in an afternoon, and you're clever enough to know that.
Which means you didn't come out here to stand on a right.
" Another beat. "You came out here because you've been building toward it for twenty years, and you stopped caring what it would be called some time ago. "
The silence after that goes long.
I can hear her breathing. I can hear my own. Thirty feet of open stone, the sun higher now and taking the last of the cold off the wall behind me, and a woman in office clothes standing at the end of a path with a loaded crossbow held across her body.
Long enough that I think she might set it down. Long enough that I let myself think it.
Then her weight comes forward onto the front foot. Her left hand slides four inches up the stock. She takes one short breath in through her nose and holds it.
She raises it.
? ? ?
She's fast.
Faster than I allowed for. I expected the hesitation of someone who has spent twenty years walking toward a moment and finds, arriving, that it doesn't feel the way she imagined.
There isn't any. The crossbow comes up in the clean practiced motion of a woman who has drilled this exact movement, alone, many times, and has no intention of letting a conversation slow it down.
She rehearsed the talking. She rehearsed this more.
I move.
I move as she fires, not before — moving before the shot only tells her where to send it, and I've had three years of being taught not to tell people things.
I move on the release, in the sliver between the string letting go and the bolt arriving, which is not much time and demands that the movement be given everything, no hedging, no half-commitment.
Not far enough.
The bolt takes me across the top of the left shoulder — the graze of someone who read the direction of my move and put the shot ahead of it.
Her range was better than I'd credited her with.
It scores through the jacket, through the scale underneath, and the dragon's bane on the tip goes to work immediately.
It burns cold first.
That's the thing about dragon's bane, the thing that separates it from anything else made to get through scale.
Cold on contact, then turning over into a deep heat as it finds dragon in the blood.
The cold means it's working. The cold means I have about ninety seconds before the heat starts taking things away from me.
I don't give her ninety seconds.
She's already reaching for the reload. Practiced there too — the speed of the span, the second bolt coming up to follow the first. She isn't panicking. She isn't looking at my shoulder. She's looking at the crossbow, threading the next one, and that is the mistake.
The contacts do their work.
My dragoness comes to the surface. Not the half-shift I use for pressure.
The full directed gaze. The stone from a skull dragon with basilisk in the line isn't the same as the stone from a true basilisk, but at fifteen feet with everything behind it, it is more than enough for one woman mid-reload whose attention is on a mechanism rather than on my eyes.
Anipe freezes.