Page 121 of Raven’s Fight

I put my hands on her shoulders. She leans back into them.

This is the thing about the two of us in private. Twenty-three years of knowing each other has made an ease that is different from the ease of any of her other bonds. Not better. Different. It's the ease of someone who knew you before you knew yourself, who was there for the becoming, who has a reference for every version of you there has ever been. When I put my hands on her shoulders in a closed room and she leans back, what she's leaning into is all of that — the whole weight of the time and the knowing.

We have a few hours.

What follows is the closeness of two people who know each other completely and have spent five days somewhere that had to be managed. The closeness of relief as much as anything else. Presence without performance. The warmth of finally having room to be the two people we are, with time to be them in.

✦ ✦ ✦

Reality asserts itself at the fourth hour.

She gets up while I'm still half asleep and goes to the desk and opens the calendar she keeps on paper, the one she writes in by hand, because she has always said writing it makes it more real than reading it. She goes through the next two weeks with the focused quiet of someone finishing the change from one part of her life into the next.

Classes resume tomorrow. The war planning resumes. The fire drake who fled is in the western territories with Keir's pack still on the trail. Finlay is somewhere in the north running something that will take as long as it takes and has sent no word, because he told her there wouldn't be word quickly. The eastern flights come to Blackhaven sometime in the next month. Cassius is reworking his research. And the name Samara gave at the end of the Purge sits at the center of all of it, the network working it, the thread that ties Amadeus's man to whatever comes next.

I watch her read the calendar from the bed.

Her back is to me. The afternoon light through the east window is at the angle it reaches late in the fourth hour, the particular slant of this academy in autumn — different from Blackhaven's mountain light, different again from Sovereign's. She's in the academy leathers she changed into before we left, practical rather than formal, the familiar shape of her, wings carried slightly forward the way she carries them when she's concentrating.

I've watched her read calendars and reports and briefings, and the faces of flight leaders who believed they were managing their expressions, and the whole landscape from the upper flight platform at dawn. I've watched her for twenty-three years. The attention she brings to whatever is in front of her is always the same attention, whether it's a Shadowcarve assessment or a war council or a page in a calendar.

She turns from the desk. Her sapphire eyes find me directly, the way they always do. Raven doesn't glance at things. She looks at them, with the whole weight of her attention.

"Classes," she says.

"Tomorrow."

"Let's eat first. Something that isn't the Gathering's catering."

"There's bread in the Shadowcarve kitchen. I restocked before we left."

Her face does the thing it does when she's handed something that cost me nothing and means a great deal to her. "You restocked before the Gathering."

"I knew we'd come back to an empty kitchen."

She looks at me a moment. Not the intelligence-gathering look. Not the heir apparent look. The one that is only for me, in the category of things that are mine and hers and nothing else.

"Come on," she says.

We go and find the bread.

The academy begins its next chapter.

Chapter 42

Raven

Nova visits on a Wednesday, and I haven't told the professors.

This isn't an oversight. I considered it and decided against it. The way a place reacts to something it wasn't warned about tells you things the official reaction never will. There's a second reason too, less tactical and more true: I have been managing how I exist in this academy for three years, and Nova is mine. I won't stage her arrival for an audience. She exists. She's here. The academy can respond to the reality of it.

She arrives mid-morning, in the break between first and second session. Solaris lands on the upper flight platform in wyrm form, the enormous fact of him making the platform feel briefly smaller than it is, then shifts and picks her up. Nova landed on her own just ahead of him, which she has decided is a point of pride and not open for discussion. Xero appears on his shoulder — she settled the question of her own attendance while the travel party was still forming at Blackhaven. Standard Xero. She goes where she has decided she should be, and the matter of an invitation doesn't strike her as relevant.

The moment Nova sees me she tells me she flew all the way from the big mountain and it was very fast and she did the whole entire mountain part by herself. I look at Solaris. He confirms, with the expression of a wyrm who is deeply proud and also deeply tired, that she did roughly a third of the mountain part by herself and the rest with help.

"Very fast," I tell her.

She nods with grave dignity, and the day begins.