Page 102 of Raven’s Fight

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Finlay leaves on a Sunday.

He doesn't announce it. No farewell, no word to the student body, none of the paperwork that would ordinarily go with a faculty member's long absence. He tells me the evening before, in his office, that he goes in the morning — that Thessaly's confirmation has come through with the whole picture of what Aldric has had access to, that he spent four weeks preparing rather than four days because the work required what it required, and that he was not going north until he could go north properly.

He is ready now.

I ask what he needs from me. He says: nothing, for this. This part is his. His contacts, his people, the particular kind of arrival that only a phoenix of his age and history can make. Aldric Vane will understand what it means the moment Finlay appears in person. The showing up is the message, before anything is said. A hundred and twelve years of friendship, and the friend who comes to end it comes himself. That is not something you can send by any other hand.

"How long?" I ask.

"I don't know." The honesty of Finlay in a place where he can't be certain — false confidence would be more dangerous here than an admitted unknown. "He may talk as soon as he understands where he stands. He may need time to arrive at understanding that talking is all that's left. I'll move at whatever pace it wants."

"I'll be at the Gathering when you're ready to report."

"I know. The northern channel if something breaks. Don't expect it quickly."

He looks at me with the expression he has used in various forms across this year, the one that is not quite pride and not quite grief and sits between them the way all of Finlay's deepest feelings seem to sit between things that would be easier to name. The look of a man who has been watching someone become a thing and has arrived at the part where he watches her simply be it.

"Finlay."

He waits.

I want to say be careful. I want to say come back. I want to name what it would actually mean to lose him — not as a network, not as a source. As the man who sat in a chair while I learned to rule, and corrected my posture, and told me the true insufficient things and meant every one of them. The man whose fire got away from him when he read a name off a piece of paper, which told me everything I needed to know about what the betrayal cost, and who picked up his pen anyway.

I say, "The network is yours. Don't let what it costs you personally change how you work."

He almost smiles. "It won't."

And the tone of it tells me he heard all of the rest, and has taken it in the exact careful way he takes things in — completely, and without needing me to have said it out loud.

He leaves in the morning.

I watch him go from the upper flight platform.

He doesn't shift straight away. He walks the grounds to the north gate — the formal way out, the same gate students and faculty have come and gone through for the whole life of this institution. He walks it the way he walks everything, as though the ground underfoot deserves the full attention of whoever is crossing it. At the gate he stops. Then he shifts.

A phoenix in flight is not a dragon in flight.

It isn't the size, though the size is considerable — a phoenix is large without being wyrm-large, a different order of thing from Solaris or Thauglor. It's the light. Phoenix fire lives inside, and in the air it carries in the feathers, visible from a long way off in full morning sun. The gold of him. The particular quality of something that has been burning without pause for nine hundred years and has not gone out.

He clears the northern peak and is gone into the mountain sky.

I stay on the platform a while.

The academy runs its morning underneath me. Class bells. The far-off knocking of the training yard starting its first session. The kitchen block sending up the smell of the morning meal the way it does every day regardless of what happened yesterday. The institution continues. The routines continue. The mountain is the mountain.

The shoulder doesn't ache. The scar catches the light at an angle that makes it briefly visible at the inside edge of my vision, which I have come to understand as my body filing what happened among the ordinary things rather than shutting it away somewhere separate.

The Gathering is in three weeks.

The last fire drake is moving toward the abandoned zones in the west.

Finlay is flying north.

What comes next asks for patience rather than intensity — the patience of someone who has put the pieces where they belong and now waits for them to arrive. I have learned this year that patience is not the absence of action. It's the discipline of knowing which action is right and waiting for the moment when it becomes right.

I am patient.