Page 100 of Raven’s Fight

I had thought, before the Purge, that if I came back I would burn them. That the writing was the part that mattered and the delivering wasn't, that they were for me and not for them — a way of knowing I had said what needed saying to the people who matter, even if the saying stayed private.

Standing on the balcony holding them, I knew that wasn't quite right.

What I wrote is true. It was true the night I wrote it and it is true tonight and it will go on being true for as long as the people it's addressed to are alive and I am alive and what runs between us is real. The emergency didn't make it true. The emergency only made me willing to put it on paper.

I took the letters inside.

I put them in the inner drawer of my desk, beside the sea glass.

Not burned. Not delivered yet. But not private either — not mine the way they were the night I wrote them. The right moment for each will come. I'll know it when it does, because I know these people, and I know what it looks like when the moment is right.

I can wait. The Purge taught me a great deal about what patience can hold.

I closed the drawer.

I went to find Hemlocke.

I was home.

Chapter 34

Raven

Four weeks after the Purge, the academy looks like itself again.

That isn't as simple as it sounds. The Purge leaves marks, and they aren't physical ones — the grounds are repaired inside the first week and any damage from three days of sanctioned violence is dealt with quietly. The marks are in the people. Who avoids which corridor. Which students eat with different people now than they did in September. Which third-years have come out with that particular stillness in the way they move, the habit of reading a room before they walk into it. The look of someone who has seen something real and been altered by the seeing.

The Year Three population that came out of the Purge is not the population that went in. That is, by design, the point of it. I know it's the point, and I know I'm in the category of people it changed, and I have spent four weeks deciding what kind of change I intend to let it be.

The answer I've reached is: precise.

The anger I banked before the Purge and spent during it has settled into something sharper and narrower. Not less. Differently aimed. The Purge showed me the shape of what is being run against me, and everything I do next is built on that. Precise is better than angry. Angry gets things done. Precise gets the right things done.

I walk the morning circuit.

It's the same circuit I've walked since Year One. The same stones, the same angles, the same mountain light falling the same way at the same hours. I have changed a great deal in three years. The circuit hasn't. That's what I come to it for — the one thing that holds steady across the girl who arrived here and whoever I am now. A reliable anchor. I have learned to value reliable anchors.

Keir runs it with me on the days he's here, which is three of five this week.

The formal investigation closed three weeks ago.

Balor took the report to Klauth himself. All of it: Anipe's record, the invented enrollments, the word going out to the border rotation as it happened, and the dragon's bane, which his people traced back through three separate middlemen to a maker in the outer western territories who works well outside the continental trade. Properly made, properly bought. That kind of buying takes money and it takes knowing which doors don't ask questions.

Four fire drakes. Three of them are in Klauth's custody now, waiting on formal charges. The fourth — the one who works by scent, the one who broke away at the pinch and went out through the south wall — is still loose.

Samara is in custody and has been cooperative since the moment she made her calculation against the east wall, her statement on record in full. The question of the founding charter sits with the continental judicial panel, which moves at the speed it moves and will hand down something in months. I've submitted my account of the engagement. I have nothing further to add to that process.

Anipe's freeze released after three days, which is toward the long end of what a full lock holds. Balor tells me she came out of it calmly. That she sat up, took in the officials waiting for her, and asked, precisely, to speak with someone who could tell her what she was formally charged with. The correct and intelligent response. I put it in the file, noted it, and moved on. Her case belongs to Klauth's tribunal. My part is finished.

The academy had a letter from the continental body three weeks ago acknowledging the outcome and confirming that what the investigation found will be folded into the next review of how the Purge is run. Which is the official way of saying: what happened at Dragonis this year was not standard, and the standard needs rewriting. I am mentioned three times, by title and never by name, which is the official way of saying something I have chosen not to decode.

The academy looks like itself.

The people inside it are not who they were before the bell rang.

✦ ✦ ✦

The shoulder heals.