Page 28 of Raven’s Fight

"I came here for tea," I say. "The checking on you is incidental."

Now she smiles. Small and real, the kind that reaches tired eyes. She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, warm from the cup.

"Okay," she says.

We finish our tea. The mountain settles around us. Outside, the western border keeps its patient silence.

And inside, for a few minutes, nothing is required of either of us.

It's enough.

Chapter 10

Raven

The first thing I do when I arrive at Dragonis Academy is put my contacts in.

I do it on the landing platform, in full view of the incoming students, because I'm done hiding that I wear them and I'm done pretending Samara is a problem I haven't already solved. The lenses are pale green, tinted to turn back whatever it is in a gorgon's stare that turns living things to stone. Over sapphire they read as almost nothing — you'd have to be close enough to count my lashes to catch the shift. Balor made them for me. He spent three months on it. The first two didn't work and the third one does, and I've been wearing them in private for six weeks to get used to the feel of them.

The feel of them is nothing. The light sits a hair differently in my eyes. That's all.

Samara's gaze won't reach me through that.

I blink twice to settle them and pick up my pack. The mountain air at Dragonis carries the old familiar mix of cold stone and pine and the particular weight of a place that has spent two centuries teaching predators how to be predators. I know this air. I grew up coming here, my parents on faculty, the academy running underneath my childhood like a note held so long you stop hearing it.

Year One I arrived afraid. Year Two I arrived knowing more. Year Three I arrive knowing exactly what I'm walking into.

I walk through the gates.

Anipe runs registration out of the administrative wing on the east side of the main building. I know this because I've made it my business to know where Anipe is at any hour of any day, a habit I started in the last two weeks of summer, and it has given me a pattern I could set a clock by.

She processes the Year Three registrations between the second and fourth hour of the first morning. I have a form to hand in — Flight Management added to my load at Thauglor's arrangement — which puts me in that corridor at the third hour without needing to invent a reason.

I get there early enough to watch her for six minutes before she knows I'm there.

Anipe at work is composed and quick and careful, and the care looks like ordinary administrative neatness until you notice what's underneath it. She's paying attention to more than one thing. Part of her is on the forms and part of her is on the corridor, and I notice because I do the same thing and I know the shape of it when I see it.

She's watching for something. Or someone.

When I hand over my form she takes it without any change in her face, works through it with the speed of a woman who has done this ten thousand times, and passes back my receipt without quite meeting my eyes. That last part is interesting. Staff don't avoid a student's gaze. There's no reason to, unless the student is something to you beyond a name on a page.

I am something to Anipe beyond a name on a page.

"Thank you," I say pleasantly, and take my receipt and go. She watches me leave. I feel it between my shoulder blades, that particular weight of being followed by someone's attention, and I don't look back.

I set the pattern down beside the three fire drake students and move on.

✦ ✦ ✦

My siblings find me at lunch.

Or rather, Orpheus appears at my shoulder in the lunch queue the way he has always appeared at my shoulder, with the silence of a basilisk who was told as a boy not to startle the horses and applied the lesson to every relationship he's had since. Bella comes in from the other direction, which means they coordinated, which is typical. Azalea is already at a table holding more seats than one person can reasonably hold, and the students nearby are giving the empty chairs the careful distance people give to things that might belong to someone they'd rather not inconvenience.

"Well," Orpheus says, sliding his tray beside mine. "You'll be up on the platform."

"I will."

"How do you feel about that?"