Page 101 of Raven’s Fight

A dragon's body works in bursts rather than steadily — deep overnight stretches where the scale comes back visibly, then quiet days where nothing seems to happen at all and the work goes on underneath. By three weeks the scar has finished forming. A narrow pale line across the top of the left shoulder, clean-edged, the scale around it slightly raised where the healing pushed against what was already there.

I test the arm at four weeks. Not with an assessment — with a full training session, the kind that would have found the wound if the wound were still there. The whole Advanced Shadowcarve rotation, the Year Two sequence with the overhead work in it, and the movement from the stairwell in the south dormitory that I wanted to know I could still do cleanly.

I can.

Balor watched without being asked. At the end he said, "Full rotation. You worked around it during the recovery without building a habit of working around it. That's correct." Then he left.

That is Balor's clean bill of health. Two sentences, accurate, nothing further.

The scar doesn't bother me. I look at it sometimes. Not with regret, and not with the backward kind of thinking the Purge invites — what would have happened if her arithmetic had been two inches different, if I'd moved half a beat slower. I've decided I'm not spending time in that direction. What happened is what happened. The scar is the record of it. The record is accurate, and that's enough.

✦ ✦ ✦

Keir brings me the western territory report on a Thursday.

We're in the east corridor after the circuit, early enough that it's empty and we can be specific without minding who might hear. He has the map with him, the paper one his pack makes for a long chase, updated every day by whichever hounds are on the trail.

"South-southwest," he says. "Same bearing since the second week. She isn't wandering. She has somewhere to be."

"Which territory?"

"If the bearing holds—" he traces the line "—the outer edge of the old fire drake ground. Not the settled parts. The abandoned zones, the ones they were pushed out of when Mina's campaigns came through two decades ago."

I look at the map.

The abandoned zones. Someone who knows that country — who grew up on stories about losing it and carries the way through it in her head — going home. Or going to something she believes is home. Or going to something that has been waiting there for her.

"Don't intercept," I say.

Keir looks at me.

"Not yet. If she's going to a second position, I want to know what the position is before we pull her out of it. Map where she stops. Find out what's there. Then we move."

He turns that over. "That's three more weeks, at least."

"Yes."

"The Gathering is in three weeks."

"I know."

A pause. "You want her tracked while you're at Sovereign."

"I want to know exactly what I'm walking back into when the Gathering ends," I say. "Three weeks of trail tells us more than taking her now and getting half a picture. Can your pack hold it that long?"

"Yes."

"Good."

He rolls the map and holds it out. I take it.

"You think there are more of them," he says.

"I think there was a reason they wanted us counting three planted students instead of something larger. I think the Purge was a probe, and the probe was meant to learn how we answer, and now somebody is walking home to report what she saw."

Keir is quiet a moment. "If that's right⁠—"

"Then wherever she stops tells us the shape of the real thing." I put the map inside my jacket. "Three weeks."