Page 114 of Raven’s Fight

In the last eighteen months, two members of the coastal elder's flight have gone missing. Not died. Missing — removed, she believes, in the way of people who are taken rather than people who leave. The first was a young male who had been studying mage-bloodline traditions in the eastern archive, working through records of mage-blood lineage that predate the continental period. The second was an elder female who had begun, on her own, to notice patterns in the flight's recent disruptions of communication. Small things, each of them explicable alone, forming a shape only visible if you laid a decade of records side by side.

"She came to me," the coastal elder says, "and she said: something is arranging this. Not Magnus. The pattern is older than Magnus's expansion. Something older and patient."

"And then she went missing."

"Three weeks later. We found nothing. No struggle. No sign of leaving. She was there, and then she was not."

The second and third flight leaders give their own accounts, separately, neither having known about the other's until the three of them began comparing notes at this Gathering. The second flight: a young practitioner who had been working on what she called the egg problem — how a mind might be anchored to a scattered net of objects. Missing eight months ago. The third: a historian of pre-continental mage traditions who had been corresponding with Cassius. Missing four months ago.

I go very still.

"He is taking the people who can understand what he is," I say. "The ones who could describe how he exists well enough to work out how to end him."

The coastal elder's face confirms it before she speaks. "Yes. We believe so. It is also why we stopped writing anything down."

"Amadeus," I say.

"That is your word for it," she says. "We have our own. The thing that persists after the body is gone. The practitioner who gave up the body to fuel something larger than himself and remained — not the way a ghost remains. The way a fire remains when the wood it started in is long gone. Held up by the net. Not ending."

For people who have kept an older vocabulary alive in isolation in the eastern territories, with no access to Cassius's work or the war council or anything of ours, it is a remarkably accurate description of a thing I know from the inside. They arrived at it out of their own tradition, through the people they lost.

"You've been putting this together alone," I say.

"We did not know who to trust," she says simply. "We do not know what the net can hear. We do not know who else it is already inside. So we stopped talking, and we started watching, and we came to this Gathering to decide whether Lady Raven is someone we can bring it to."

I look at them. Three flight leaders who have been frightened and careful and alone for eighteen months while Amadeus took their people, and who came here not to oppose her but to find out whether she could be given what they know.

"She is," I say. "And she can give you something back."

I tell them about Cassius. About the research. About the war council and the three lines of work and the fact that we have been building toward precisely the thing they have been trying to survive.

And then: "Do you know what I am?"

"A great wyrm," the coastal elder says. "Twelve centuries. The MacLeod line."

"Do you know where I spent a thousand and twenty of those years?"

She goes very still.

"Inside Amadeus's binding," I say. "Held up by the same net you are afraid of. I know what it is from the inside. I know things about how it is built that nobody who has not been inside it can know, because I spent ten centuries learning the shape of it from within."

The room is extremely quiet.

"I was released by Lady Raven's mate-bond," I say. "Which means I am permanently and specifically invested in her succeeding, in a way that has nothing to do with politics or alliance or anything I stand to gain. And I am telling you that she is enough. Not because of the acid or the stone gaze or the Purge. Because of what I watched her do at the war council at Blackhaven, where every ancient creature in the room deferred to her judgment and was right to. Because she sees the whole shape of what Amadeus is, and is building against that shape rather than against the part of it she can see."

The three of them say nothing.

"Come to Blackhaven," I say. "All three flights. If he is hunting isolated communities who know too much, then isolation is the thing that kills you. Come where we can all see each other, and you will have the whole of what we know and what we intend to do about it."

✦ ✦ ✦

I bring it to Raven after the formal dinner.

The dinner ran long, as the fourth day's always does — the point in the Gathering where people have been in each other's company long enough to stop performing their positions and start having the real conversations. I watched her manage seven of those at once from across the room, the way she manages any formal evening: whole attention on the person in front of her, the temperature of the room tracked at the edges, every individual exchange leaving its person convinced they had all of her, while underneath it the assessing never stops.

She is very good at this.

She was not always this good at this. I have watched her work at it across the year, watched Finlay's protocol turn from a thing she applied into a thing she is, watched the gap between the performing and the being close and close again until what is left of it is very thin. She is twenty-three. In thirty years she will be extraordinary at this. She is already well past adequate.