Page 117 of Raven’s Fight

The first is Klauth. We don't speak. There's nothing between us that needs a dance to say it; what needed saying was said in the processional, in the placement. The dance is the visible part. He leads with the authority of a man who held a throne for two hundred years and took it up again, and I follow without appearing to follow, and the floor watches the king dance with his heir and reads it correctly.

The second is Therun, the gold of the Southern Isle. He came, which I did not take for granted, and he is considerably livelier on a floor than his political manner suggests. He makes three remarks that genuinely amuse me and I let them, because Therun's gift is making the people near him easier in themselves, and that is useful when the people near you are reading your face for signals. We are visibly comfortable together. The floor notes it.

The third is the senior flight leader from the western coastal territories, who has been careful all Gathering and whose carefulness I've been tracking. I ask him about a boundary dispute that has been running in his territory for forty years and is conspicuously missing from the papers he filed for this Gathering. His answer tells me whether the omission was deliberate. It was. I file it, and I close the dance with the warmth of someone who has noticed and isn't going to make it a problem tonight.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth are three more flight leaders, each one a conversation with a purpose. By the sixth I've closed four gaps the reception line didn't fill, and the obligation is finished.

The floor opens.

Orpheus finds me twenty minutes in. He appears at my elbow the way he always does — no approach, simply there, the basilisk trick of arriving without being seen to arrive. He's in the Blackhaven formal, the dark gray the males of my nest wear, and he looks the way Orpheus always looks at these things: entirely composed, slightly dangerous, and deeply unimpressed by the occasion.

"Dance with me," he says. Not a request. Orpheus doesn't ask for things he has already decided.

"The circuit⁠—"

"Has been running four and a half days," he says. "You have been diplomatic for four and a half days. Five minutes."

I look at him. He looks at me.

"Five minutes."

We dance.

It's nothing like the required six. Those are structured, the steps set, the movement a message to the room. This is Orpheus and Raven, who have known each other since we were hatchlings in the same nest, who spent a Purge moving in coordinated positions across the academy grounds, who talk in the shorthand of twenty-three years and a bond that is all sibling and nothing else. He leads when I'm off the beat and I lead when he is, and neither of us is performing, because there is nobody in this dance to perform for.

He says something in the old nest tongue — the one Mom started for us before we were five and the two of us kept adding to. I don't speak it as easily as I used to. I get enough of it to answer.

He laughs. I laugh.

The continent's assembled flight leaders watch the heir apparent spin with her brother in the middle of the Winter Formal floor, laughing, entirely informal, entirely themselves.

Five minutes.

He bows with an excess of theater, which he finds funny precisely because he doesn't mean a moment of it, and disappears back into the crowd.

I go back to the circuit. I feel better than I did before.

Corvus is at the edge of the floor at the second hour.

He's been here all evening the way Corvus is at formal events — not in the center, in the places where watching works best. I've had him at the edge of my awareness through the bond all night: the low steady warmth of knowing where he is, the feel of what he's attending to, the small shifts that mean he's seen something worth keeping. He reads a room the way he does because it is both the work and the instinct.

He comes to the edge of the floor. He doesn't ask.

I go to him.

There's no diplomatic purpose in this one. He isn't a visiting dignitary or a flight leader or a symbol of anything. He's Corvus. My mate, the man who was there before I knew what that meant, who came through the gate after the Purge with both hands on my face making sure I was real, who runs six miles for the right chocolate. The person I chose deliberately and keep choosing.

The room gives us space. Not a crowd parting — quieter than that. The attention a room gives when it stops watching the political figure and starts watching the person. The heir apparent has been visible all evening. Now they're watching Raven choose where she goes once the obligation is done, and what she's choosing is Corvus, and the room understands exactly what that means.

He dances the way he does everything. Complete, precise, entirely present. His hand at my waist, holding me at the distance formality asks for while making it perfectly clear to anyone watching that neither of us is performing.

"The three flights," he says quietly. Five days have trained us to trade information briefly and on the move.

"Formally requested tonight. Solaris arranged the framing with Mina."

"Finlay."

"Nothing yet. I'm not expecting speed."