Page 130 of Raven’s Fight

"Six months," I confirm. "To finish bringing the eastern flights in, position Therun's forces, prepare the defensive line, and map Cassius's host network well enough to move on it the same moment the fighting starts."

"The same moment," Mina says from the relay.

"Amadeus can't answer two threats at once if he doesn't know both are coming. If the fighting begins and we move on his host network inside the same window — if we've already cut him off from the practitioners before he's had the chance to use them — then he's fighting a war without his primary tool inside it. He's down to the net itself, which Cassius can hold still while we⁠—"

"While we end him," Solaris says. "Both at once. The eggs and the hosts."

"Both at once," I say. "Before he sees us move."

Solaris goes still a moment, the stillness of someone who was inside the binding and knows exactly what that means from within. "It's possible," he says. "If the timing is exact. If Cassius's mapping is complete. If the strike on the hosts lands before Amadeus can turn."

"Then that's what we'll make certain of."

I lay out the opening. Three tracks running at once, each with its own deadline inside the six months. The eastern flights fully brought in and the alliance formally documented before month three. Therun's forces positioned and Keir's pack deployed in the western territories, giving us live reports on Magnus's movement from month two. Cassius's mapping complete by month four, which leaves eight weeks to prepare the simultaneous strike.

The room listens. Nobody argues.

Finlay arrives at the ninth hour, carrying the smell of northern snow.

He walks in while Thauglor is working through the defensive line — Thauglor's particular expertise, the lie of the land on the western approaches, the passes that can be held and the ones that can't. Finlay stops at the door and reads the room the way he always does, the whole of it taken in before he has moved off the threshold. Then he takes the open seat, pulls the northern archive from his case, and opens it to the map he's marked.

He has been in the air fourteen hours. Nothing about him suggests it.

"Magnus's primary route," he says, tracing it with one finger. "Not the eastern pass. He knows the eastern pass is what we'd expect, and he doesn't want the fight where we'd expect it. The western route, here, through the lower passes. It gives him the fastest line to Sovereign and misses the defenses we'd naturally set on the eastern approach."

"Sovereign," Mina says sharply from the relay.

"Not the Gathering itself. The approach to it. If he holds the approach, the Gathering can't convene. Three hundred and forty-seven flights scattered, no way to answer together, and he can hand the Marzana throne a choice between conceding the approach or answering alone. Either outcome serves him."

"Neither outcome is available to him," I say. "Because the Gathering isn't the piece he's moving. We are. We convene before he moves. Inside six months we formalize the alliance and document it, and we make certain that when he reaches the approach to Sovereign he finds three hundred and forty-seven flights already aligned and already holding his timeline."

Finlay looks at me across the table. Something moves in his face — not surprise exactly. Recognition. The look of a teacher watching a student use a thing he handed her and finding she has made it into something past what he gave.

"He won't expect that," Finlay says.

"No. He won't."

The war council runs until the second hour of the morning.

✦ ✦ ✦

Late.

The council has ended, and the war room has the quality it takes on afterward — the leftover warmth of a large group, the quiet that comes in behind them, maps on the table, documents stacked and marked. Abraxis is gone. Mina has dropped off the relay. Thauglor is in the east wing guest quarters, settled in like a man who intends to stay a while and has made his peace with it. Finlay is still at the table, going through the archive with the unhurried focus of someone finishing the paperwork before he sleeps.

He looks up when I pass. "Go," he says. Not a suggestion.

"The third track timeline. Cassius needs⁠—"

"I'll reach Cassius in the morning. Go."

I leave.

I find the nest in the main room.

All five of them are here. Corvus is in the chair that's become his, book open, reading the way he reads at the end of a long day — not fast, taking his time with each page, the kind of reading that's rest rather than work. Solaris is on the long seat with his eyes closed, not sleeping; great wyrms have an inward state that is neither sleep nor waking, and it's where he goes when the council is done and the thinking isn't. Keir sits cross-legged on the floor with the pack's western reports and his scent maps spread around him, wearing the focused satisfaction of someone doing the work he was made for. Hemlocke is at the window with his back to the room, looking out at the grounds in the slow careful way he looks at things he tends, as though the looking is itself a kind of keeping. Xero is on the sill above him, blood-red eyes open, tracking something in the mountain dark I can't see from here.

Nova is asleep in the next room. I can hear her through the wall, the slow rhythm of a two-year-old gone all the way under with nothing held back, the complete unconsciousness of someone who used everything today. Earlier she had asked, with the gravity of a two-year-old asking a serious question, whether the war council was the kind of thing that takes a long time. I told her yes. She considered it, and said she would wait. She was asleep by the seventh hour and hasn't moved since.