Page 128 of Raven’s Fight

That is Balor's clean bill of health for a year. Closed file, one look, gone.

✦ ✦ ✦

Klauth's formal review is that afternoon, and not in the throne room but in the working office, which is where he holds reviews that are substantive rather than ceremonial. I know the difference and I appreciate the choice. The throne room is for declarations. The working office is for the real accounting.

He goes through the year's outcomes methodically.

The fire drake infiltration is resolved. Three students are in custody awaiting tribunal, one is at large and tracked, and the investigation is closed. Balor is overseeing the reforms to how enrollments are checked. Anipe and Samara are moving through their separate proceedings — Anipe's tribunal date is set for next month, and Samara's waits on the continental judges finishing their review of the founding charter, which will return a finding within six months.

Balor's team traced the dragon's bane back through three middlemen to its maker in the outer western territories. Klauth's enforcement division has shut the maker down. Two of the middlemen are in custody. The third is under active investigation, with closure expected inside the month. The tips recovered from Anipe's bolts match the maker's production marks, and the chain of evidence is complete.

The Gathering brought three eastern flights under Blackhaven's protection, and the paperwork is filed with the continental registry. Therun's wolf trackers are producing their first reports out of the western zones. The eastern bloc is actively part of the alliance now rather than neutral. Solaris's private session, and the exchange about Amadeus's net that I authorized, produced what Klauth calls one of the most effective pieces of alliance-building in a decade of Gatherings.

Cassius's research is updated. The host network is clearer, the way to end Amadeus is better defined, and what the eastern flights know about their missing has filled gaps he couldn't close on his own.

And Finlay's work is finished — the northern intelligence confirming Magnus's timeline, his assembled forces, and the primary incursion route.

Klauth closes the review. He's quiet a moment, in the particular quiet of a man who has spent a great deal of his life making assessments and has arrived at one that satisfies him.

"You've done well," he says.

"We're not done."

He looks at me. His eyes hold mine with the expression that is Klauth's expression for something correct.

"No," he says. He smiles. "But you've done well."

I take that with me.

Then I go and pack my room.

✦ ✦ ✦

The Malivore suite at the end of the year.

I'm not sentimental about leaving. I have Blackhaven, which is mine in a way this room has never been — not because I haven't lived in it fully, because I have, but because Blackhaven is the place I built rather than the place I was assigned. There is a real difference between those two kinds of belonging, and I know which one I prefer.

Still. I pack carefully. Not quickly. Carefully, the way packing matters when you're packing for three years rather than a term.

The desk first. The notes and the files, the assessments that will go to the Blackhaven archive, and the small things that arrived here through the accumulation of daily life rather than by any decision. The contacts case, cleaned. The field kit from the Purge, restocked. Orpheus's schedule from the first week of term, with the date circled in red and I know. Tell me when underneath it in his small precise hand, which I kept and am not going to stop keeping.

The walls are bare when I'm done. A room becomes a room again when you take out what made it yours. The smell of the stone and the mountain air through the window stays, because that belongs to the academy and not to me, and it will still be here after I go.

I think about the three years.

Year One was the beginning of understanding what I was becoming, which was not what I was supposed to become, and it took most of the year to tell the two apart. The circuit. Corvus on the flight platform before dawn. The first time Balor put me into a scenario built for someone older and I understood that I was being measured against something other than my classmates.

Year Two was the submission, and what it cost, and why it was right. Blackhaven starting to be mine. The nest starting to be what it actually is rather than the thing I was managing or the thing I was performing — the thing it had been building itself into in all the time I spent not looking. The bonds deepening past the point where I could control how they felt, and my deciding that was acceptable.

Year Three was the fire drakes, the Purge, the Gathering, the war council, Finlay going north. Nova working her landings over Blackhaven at dawn. Leander's hand in mine on the platform above the hatchling parade. Three eastern flights choosing to come to us. The coastal elder telling me we decided correctly.

Year Three was the year I stopped becoming the dominant dragoness and started being her.

I stand at the window. The Shadowcarve grounds are below and the mountains beyond, and the light is at that particular angle on the eastern face of the peak that I have seen hundreds of times across three years — always at a different hour, always carrying the quality of the day I saw it from. Today it carries the quality of the last day of term. Of something completed.

The war is coming. Finlay's letter is at Blackhaven. The war council is forming. The next thing is already the next thing, and it is large, and it will take everything I have and more.

I am not afraid of it. I am also not blind to its weight. Those are different states, and I have learned across three years to keep them separate.