Page 29 of Raven’s Fight

"High up. Good sightlines."

He makes the sound that passes for his laugh, short and dry and contained, the laugh of a man who finds things funny and has never once felt the need to prove it. We walk to the table, where Bella drops into the chair next to me with the flair that is entirely her own, managing to look graceful and like a slow-motion disaster at the same time.

"You'll have frightened half the Year Ones before Klauth finishes his first sentence," she says. "Well done in advance."

"I haven't done anything yet."

"You're going to sit at Klauth's right hand," Azalea says. "For a Year One, that's plenty." She hands me a bread roll with the easy efficiency of a woman who has been feeding siblings since she was a child herself. "How's Nova?"

"Enormous. She's started using whole sentences when she wants something and one word when she doesn't."

"That's you," Bella says.

"It isn't."

"It's so you."

I eat the roll. Orpheus has produced a schedule from somewhere and is reading it with the attention of someone who memorized it days ago and checks anyway, because checking is how you confirm you memorized it right. He turns to the back page, taps it once, and slides it across to me without a word.

I look. He's circled the date of the Purge in red, and underneath it, in that small precise hand of his: I know. Tell me when.

I pocket the schedule and we don't talk about it, because we don't have to. That's twenty-three years of shared language, the shorthand of two people taught by the same parents who learned the same way to fold what matters into as little space as possible.

Bella launches into a long account of something that happened on the summer flight circuit involving Azalea, a failed harness, and an extremely patient gryphon instructor. I eat my lunch and listen and laugh in the right places, and I feel the plain uncomplicated warmth of sitting with people who knew me before I was anything except Raven, their sister, who had opinions about everything and could hold her breath underwater longer than any of them.

It doesn't last long. It doesn't need to. It's enough to carry into the afternoon.

✦ ✦ ✦

The welcome ceremony is different this year.

I don't stand with the student line. Klauth's office sent instructions three weeks ago: I'm to be seated on the platform with the faculty, at his right hand rather than in the crowd looking up at him. It isn't a preference. It's a rule. The heir apparent of the Marzana Empire does not sit below the throne she's going to inherit.

I knew this was coming, and I still feel it when I take the platform — the way the whole courtyard shifts key. I watch it happen. The first row notices, and then it travels backward through the gathered years as people lean into each other, she's not with the students this year moving through the crowd the way water finds its level. Some of the faces are easy to read. Year Ones who have heard the name Raven Mrithun and haven't had time to attach it to a person yet. Year Twos who remember me from last year and are visibly working out what it means that I've moved. Year Threes who have been here long enough to know exactly what the heir apparent at Klauth's right hand means for the year in front of them.

I keep my shoulders easy and my eyes forward and I let them look.

Samara is in the front row of faculty.

I know it before I look, because I know her habits — the same seat at every ceremony, right side of the row, two in from the end. She has done it for eleven years, long enough that it's habit now rather than strategy. Old habits are useful things to know about a person.

I look at her directly, and she looks back. Her eyes hold mine for a full three seconds, and the lenses do their quiet work, and I feel nothing. I see nothing except Samara's face, carefully blank in the way of someone who has just met a target's eyes and is deciding whether the target knows what she is.

She doesn't know about the contacts.

After three seconds I look back at Klauth. Natural, unforced, the way you look away from a room you've finished reading.

Something settles behind my sternum. It works. It's real, the Purge is six weeks out, and I am not afraid of Samara.

Klauth opens the welcome address in the voice of a man who has given it many times and still finds something new to mean each year. He talks about challenge, about the weight of the coming months, about what Year Three asks of a student in ways the first two years never do. He isn't wrong. Year Three asks for the Purge. Year Three asks you to survive it or not, and to understand that the not-surviving is an outcome this place has already made peace with.

I listen and watch the students at the same time, and what I'm watching for is narrow. Three fire drake plants, standing in the Year Two section now that they have a year behind them. I find the first two quickly, tracking their scent more than their faces — that faint burnt-metal heat Keir picked up on the western border, carried in here among the press of bodies in the courtyard. It's thinner in the open air, cut by distance and mountain wind. But it's there.

The third one takes longer. He's good at disappearing, keeping taller students between us, never turning his face toward the platform. That he's working this hard to stay out of my attention tells me he either knows I'm aware of him or has been told to assume it.

I find him at the back of the Year Two section, wedged between two students who are both broader and taller than he is. Deliberate cover.

I don't look straight at him. I look a few degrees to his left and hold it long enough for the edge of my vision to finish the job — height, build, the way he carries his weight, which hand he leads with when he shifts. All of it stored away.