Page 32 of Raven’s Fight

She's at the front of the room before I have finished deciding to move toward her. It is one of the things I have come to love in her, that there is nothing at all between the decision and the doing.

Her hands find my lapels. Mine find her waist. What distance is left closes.

"Full marks," she says, against my jaw.

"You earned them."

"You didn't write a comment."

"There was nothing to correct."

She makes a sound against my skin that lands somewhere between a laugh and a purr, the one she makes when she's pleased and isn't bothering to hide it. I feel it through my collar and my shirt and whatever space is left between us, which is not much.

"The margin notes," she says.

"Were correctly observed."

"You didn't grade them."

"They weren't part of the assignment." I pull back enough to look at her properly. Her sapphire eyes are bright with the particular delight she saves for things she finds truly funny, which is rarer than she lets on, and which I have decided to spend a sizable portion of my remaining centuries trying to cause as often as possible. "If you want extra credit, write them up formally and submit them."

"Or," she says, "I could do this instead."

The kiss she gives me has no interest whatsoever in protocol. It tastes of the tea she had between classes and of cold mountain air and of something under both that is only her, and two hours of discipline goes to nothing, and I stop thinking about anything that isn't this.

My phoenix is extremely pleased with all of it.

When we part, her hands are still on my lapels, and I keep mine at her waist because taking them away is not something I'm prepared to do just yet. She looks up at me with that expression.

"Same time Thursday," she says.

"Royal Protocol meets Tuesday and Thursday," I confirm.

"That's what I said."

She straightens my lapels — which she disarranged herself, which she knows — with two precise movements, picks up her bag, and walks out of my classroom with the unhurried composure of a woman entirely in command of herself and always has been.

I stand at the front of the room a moment after the door closes.

Professional.

✦ ✦ ✦

The letter arrives before dinner.

My contact uses a route that goes nowhere near the academy's messengers, a phoenix-fire method I won't describe here, because describing it makes it possible to copy and copying it defeats the point. The letter shows up on my desk in the Shadowcarve faculty wing the way all my correspondence shows up: waiting when I come back to the room, seal unbroken, still warm from the fire that carried it.

I read it standing.

Last month he wrote that Amadeus's representatives were meeting Magnus privately in the eastern wing, away from the court proper. Hidden. Handled with the discretion of men who understand that what they're doing does not benefit from witnesses.

This letter says something else.

The representatives are no longer in the eastern wing. They are in the throne room. At court, at formal sessions, seated at Magnus's right hand through the last three audiences. Nothing hidden about it. Nothing discreet.

An open alliance. Publicly, visibly, deliberately, in front of every visiting dignitary and every man in Magnus's court.

I read it twice, then fold it and seal it into the phoenix-fire archive I keep, which holds correspondence safe from rot and from anyone I haven't allowed near it, and which I have been adding to for two hundred years.