Page 33 of Raven’s Fight

Then I sit down in my chair and think.

I have spent the better part of my life inside one intelligence network or another. I have watched regimes announce their intentions before they were ready to act on them, and I have watched regimes hide their intentions until the blow landed. What I have rarely seen is a change of mind halfway through — the moment an operation that was running quiet and careful simply stops caring who sees it.

There are two explanations. Either the timeline has moved, the quiet work is finished, and being seen is now worth more than being hidden because it shows strength to anyone watching. Or something has gone wrong inside, hiding has become impossible or useless, and the open alliance is a response to pressure rather than a choice.

Neither explanation gives us more time than we thought we had.

Both explanations mean that whatever Amadeus's men said to Magnus in the eastern wing, Magnus has now agreed to it in front of witnesses. A public alliance is far harder to walk back than a private one. Whatever comes next, he has no graceful way out of it.

I think about what that means for Raven, and for the rest of us.

An enemy who can't retreat has two choices: advance or collapse. Magnus's army is built for the first. And Amadeus, from everything Solaris has dragged back out of his memory, has never once let one of his proxies collapse. He moves to a new one before the old one falls.

The question is whether he intends to let Magnus carry this all the way through, or whether the open alliance is itself a feint — a way to pull our eyes north while the real weight comes from somewhere else.

I don't know. I know enough to know that I don't.

I add the letter to the archive and go to find Raven.

She's at dinner in the hall beside the Shadowcarve training grounds, eating with Orpheus and two of the Shadowcarve third-years, the talk at the table carrying the easy rhythm of people who have worked alongside each other long enough to drop the polite padding.

I take the seat across from her. She looks up from her food and reads my face as fast as she reads everything.

"After," I say quietly.

She nods and goes back to her meal.

We eat. The conversation moves around us. Orpheus is describing something that went badly wrong in a training exercise with the dry precision that passes for his version of a funny story, and the third-years are reacting with suitable horror, and Raven answers in the right places without ever losing the thread of whatever she's already turning over.

I know that quality of her attention. She's preparing.

After dinner I take her out to the small courtyard off the south corridor, where the torches don't quite reach and the cold keeps the space to ourselves, and I give her the letter's contents. Not summarized. Exactly as written. The representatives are in the throne room. Open alliance. Nothing hidden.

She's quiet a moment.

"Good," she says.

I look at her.

"The more openly he moves, the easier he is to find." She's watching the dark above the courtyard, the first stars coming out along the edge of the mountain. "A hidden threat makes you go looking. A visible one comes to you."

"That is a remarkably cheerful reading of a report that says our time is shorter than we thought."

"Yes." She looks back at me, and the corners of her mouth move in the way that means she knows the argument is provoking and has chosen it anyway. "Is your contact safe?"

The turn from strategy to the man himself is so like her that it nearly makes me laugh. Nearly. "For now. I've told him to stay away from the throne room sessions. What we'd learn isn't worth what it would cost him."

"Good." She puts her hand on my arm, briefly, the way she does when she's reassuring and being reassured in the same motion. "We'll take the timeline to the next council. Bring the letter."

"I will."

She squeezes once and lets go, and steps back with the composure of a woman who has put something dangerous where it belongs and returned to the evening.

"Thursday," she says.

It takes me a moment. "Royal Protocol meets Thursday," I confirm.

"That's what I said."