Page 35 of Raven’s Fight

How you do that depends on what he wants. If he wants what the outside threat wants — if the two of them are working together — then he wants the outside to succeed, which means he'll act when the outside gives him the best opening. And that moment is predictable. Your border fully committed, your attention everywhere else, noise and movement in every direction.

So you build him that moment. You show the outside a border that looks stretched to its limit. You show the man inside an opening that looks perfect. And you stand at the center of both pictures, in the one place he has to come if he's coming at all.

Then you wait.

You are the bait. You are also the trap.

The trick is making sure you're more trap than bait.

I write the last of it down, set my pen aside, and look up.

Callan is watching me. So, I realize, is most of the class. I've been at this for — I check the clock — twenty-two minutes. Eight left. Around me most of the papers still have a good deal of white on them. The boy at the end of the second row who takes careful notes has more written than most, but his pen has slowed, which means he's hit the same wall the rest of them hit: the outside-first instinct the textbook rewards and this scenario was built to expose.

I don't react to being watched. I fold my hands and wait out the thirty minutes.

✦ ✦ ✦

The debrief takes the rest of the session.

Callan works around the room, asking each student to lay out their approach in two minutes or less. Most of them built everything around the outside threat — the predictable mistake, the textbook answer, the one that feels right because it's the danger you can see. Callan listens to every version without correcting a word of it. He asks one follow-up question each, and every question walks the student right up to the edge of their own blind spot and leaves them standing there. He's been doing this thirty years, and it works, because a gap a student finds is a gap that student closes, while a gap an instructor points out is a gap the student argues with.

Two of them tried to handle both threats at once. It works on paper. In practice it costs more than either single approach, because splitting your own attention makes you worse at both jobs instead of better at one. Callan asks the second of them to walk through her numbers. She gets to the problem herself, three-quarters of the way down. He nods. The gap is hers now.

One student — a third-year, older than most, who sits very still and misses nothing — came to an inside-first answer like mine, but got there through deception instead of construction. He'd feed false word to the man inside through the channels he's assumed to be listening on. It's elegant. It also breaks badly if the man inside checks what he's told and doesn't believe it. But the thinking underneath is sound. Inside first, draw instead of hunt, the enemy's own mind as the lever.

I file that away. The still one is better than his seat suggests. Worth watching, for reasons that have nothing to do with fire drakes.

When Callan gets to me, he doesn't ask me to present. He says, "Tell me what you'd change about your answer."

The room goes quiet in a particular way. It isn't a criticism. It's the harder question, the one that takes for granted that the answer is already good and asks what the person who wrote it can see past it. Some of the students who didn't get that question look relieved. Some of them look like they're rethinking the relief.

"The draw only works if he's waiting for an opening," I say. "If he's on a schedule of his own, if he's going to move whether or not the moment looks good, then building him a window does nothing. You've bet everything on him thinking a way he isn't thinking." I pause. "In that case you drop the draw and go back to hunting. But you can afford to, because you never spent those men on the border in the first place. You were already holding them for this."

"What makes you think this one has a schedule of his own?"

"I don't. I'm describing how it fails. If I'm wrong about him waiting for an opening, that's what breaks it."

"And if you're wrong?"

"Then I change the plan. The plan changes, but I still have my men and the thinking still holds." I meet his eye and hold it. "You can't get rid of not knowing. You can stand where being wrong costs you less."

Callan looks at me for a moment. Then he turns to the class. "That," he says, "is what this course is about."

The session ends. The class files out.

I stay where I am, because Callan hasn't dismissed me, not in so many words, and because he isn't packing up his things. When a one-eyed tactics instructor who has been one of your mother's mates since before you could walk doesn't pack up his things after a session, it means something.

The last student goes. The door shuts.

Callan moves to the window and looks out over the east grounds for a while, the training fields below, students from other sessions working through their afternoon. His profile in the light has the particular set of a man deciding how to start.

"Your report on the western border," he says. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Eight scents. Fire drake musk. A rotating watch."

"Yes."