Page 23 of Raven’s Fight

I look at Solaris. He's been still since I said the name Amadeus — the stillness that's different from his usual composure, the kind that means something is happening inside him that he's managing rather than burying.

"Tell me what you know," I say. Not a request. He understands the tone.

"I know Amadeus built the cursed egg binding," Solaris says. His voice is level and careful, the Scots lilt more pronounced when he's measuring his words. "I know it because I was one of his first subjects. Not by name at the time — I didn't know whose work I was inside. But the signature of it, the particular quality of that kind of imprisonment—" He pauses. "I would know it anywhere. And what you're describing — a mage who survived a reported death, who works through representatives, who is specifically hunting omega males and chimera bloodlines — matches the way he works. He doesn't improvise. He builds systems. Long, patient systems."

"A system running how long?" Mom asks.

"The binding is older than I am, and I am twelve centuries," Solaris says. "He sealed me a thousand and twenty years ago and I was among the first. Whatever he began, he began it before that." He meets her eyes. "What's newer is this. Dragons have been weakening for three centuries. If that's his hand as well, then he stopped waiting three hundred years ago and started building toward something."

"He's been at this since before I was born," Klauth says through the device, in the flat tone of someone who has just done arithmetic he doesn't like the answer to.

"Yes," Solaris says.

Nova has been sitting in my lap with the focused silence of a hatchling who has learned that talking-around-the-table time means she should be quiet. She reaches up and pats my jaw with one small hand. I cover her hand with mine without looking away from Solaris.

"Strategy," I say. "What do we need before we can move?"

We work through it for the next hour. More allies. Therun's forces are pledged but conditional on my visit, which needs to happen before winter. Cassius's research, which means a return trip to the Eastern Isles — I intend to make it as soon as the academy schedule allows. Finlay's northern network needs to be pointed specifically at anything connecting Amadeus's representatives to the fire drakes on our western border. If that link exists, it changes the threat on our doorstep from opportunistic revenge into one operation with one mind behind it.

Nova shifts in my lap and resettles herself with the unconscious precision of a hatchling who has learned the adults will keep talking for a long time and one may as well be comfortable. I adjust my arm around her without breaking the thread of the conversation.

"The fire drakes aren't here for Mina," I say, when that line of discussion runs out. "They're here because Amadeus sent them."

Nobody argues.

"Which means the academy infiltration wasn't opportunistic either," Finlay says. "The Purge is in six weeks. If they have plants embedded in the student body⁠—"

"They do," I say. "I've already counted them."

Another quiet. Klauth's echoing voice breaks it. "Of course you have."

"Three students. Fire drake bloodline, enrolled through Anipe's office in the last two years. They've stayed away from my siblings, which is discipline rather than accident. They're not here for sport. They're here for one target, during a period when the rules allow killing and the staff are supposed to stay out of it." I hold Finlay's gaze. "Except that Anipe won't stay out of it. Neither will Samara."

"You're certain about Samara?"

"Certain enough." I look at the map spread across the table. "Which means I have six weeks. Six weeks to let all of them believe I don't know they're there, and to prepare for a Purge where the staff is hunting me too."

"You're going to use yourself as bait," Mom says. Flat. Not a question.

"I'm going to be the most obvious target on the grounds. Let every threat converge on me instead of scattering across a hundred students." I look at her. "If they're hunting me, they're not hunting my siblings. And I'm harder to kill than my siblings."

Mom looks at Solaris. Solaris looks at me. Neither of them says anything, which is its own kind of agreement.

I close the council with a list. Finlay re-points the northern network. Solaris keeps pulling at his memory. Keir tightens the watch on the border. And I schedule the Therun visit for three weeks out, the earliest the academy calendar allows.

Mom catches my eye as the council breaks up. She nods once — the nod that means well run, and we'll talk later, and underneath both of those something that has no words but that I've been reading since I was old enough to read faces. Something like you're all right.

I nod back.

✦ ✦ ✦

The briefing room empties slowly.

Finlay takes his notes to his study. Mom phases back to Sovereign with Ziggy, who materialized at some point in the last hour without my noticing, which is a Ziggy specialty. Klauth's device goes dark.

Solaris stays.

Nova is asleep on the bench beside me, curled into a ball with her wings folded over herself like a blanket and one small fist against her cheek. She went under about twenty minutes into the strategy discussion, which is either evidence that she trusts us to handle things or evidence that dragon strategy sessions are deeply boring to a two-year-old. I suspect both.