Page 14 of Raven’s Fight

Giselle closes the door, and for the first time since we arrived, the formal composure shifts. It doesn't break. It loosens at the edges, the way a thing does when it no longer has to be armor.

"How long?" Mom asks. She means the healing center. She means all of it.

"Thirty-one years for this building. The island has been a sanctuary for sixty-two." Giselle sits. "I inherited it from my predecessor, who built the first structure on the southern shore. When she handed it to me there were forty-three residents. There are two hundred and seventeen now."

The number settles into the room.

"Magnus," I say.

"Magnus," she confirms. "He has sent four delegations in three years. Each of them framed differently — welfare checks, repatriation, cultural preservation." The corner of her mouth moves, and it isn't a pleasant movement. "The fourth was explicit. He wants his females back. That was the phrase. His females."

"And you refused."

"I refused, I doubled the watch on the approaches, and I sent him a letter setting out at considerable length the legal basis for sanctuary under continental compact." She looks at me directly. "He sent a fifth two months after that. Not official. They came at night in unmarked boats and tried to take three specific residents by force."

The cold thing that lives in my chest these days sharpens.

"What happened?" Mom asks. Her voice has gone flat. I know that flatness.

"My gate-keepers met them. The residents were unharmed. The delegation went back to northern water in considerably worse condition than it arrived in." Giselle's expression doesn't move. "I have heard nothing formal from Magnus since. I don't take that to mean he's changed his mind."

"It means he's changing his method," I say.

"Yes."

I look at my mother. She's already looking at me. We've had years of practice reading a room from the same angle, and what we're both reading is the same thing.

This matches. Pressure escalating, the shift from official channels to unofficial ones, the willingness to use force when the polite version fails. This is how Magnus works. This is what Finlay's letters have been describing from the other end of the continent.

"What else?" I ask. "What do you know that you haven't told us yet?"

Giselle is quiet a moment. Not hesitating, I think. Deciding how to put it.

"My network is small. It runs through the females and omega males who come here out of the northern territories, and they carry information the way people carry everything they own when they run — not deliberately, not in reports. In what they saw and heard and can't stop remembering." She pauses. "What has come through it consistently for eighteen months is movement. Forces gathering in the northern passes. Supplies going along roads that haven't been used for war in forty years. And a name attached to Magnus's court that I don't know from any recent record on this continent."

She says it.

Amadeus.

Mom goes still. I keep my face where it is through an act of will that costs more than I'd like.

Finlay's letter. The name in Finlay's letter that I haven't had a chance to raise with anyone since it arrived, because I was here, on this island, and the timing wasn't right, and I was still turning it over deciding what it meant.

It means the same thing whether it comes from Finlay or from Giselle. It means this is larger than one king with an appetite for territory.

"You know this name," Giselle says. She's watching us both.

"We're becoming acquainted with it," I say carefully. "Do your sources have anything on how he sits with Magnus? Whether he's advising, directing, or something else?"

"What comes through is impression, not intelligence." She folds her hands on the table. "The impression is that Magnus isn't the one at the top. That whatever Amadeus is, Magnus is working in service of him rather than the reverse."

Mom lets out a breath. It's very controlled and it contains a great deal.

"That fits what we have," I say. I'm looking through the window at the water, the morning light on it, a horizon that looks entirely peaceful from here. "Which means removing Magnus doesn't end this."

"No," Giselle says. "It doesn't."

The three of us sit with that. Outside, the island goes about its morning — the ordinary sounds of two hundred and seventeen people living lives they should never have had to fight for.