Page 36 of Raven’s Fight

"Keir found eight." He turns from the window. His one eye carries the look it gets when he's about to hand over something he'd rather not have to. "I've found one more. And mine isn't on the border."

I go still.

"It's here. On academy ground, and it doesn't match the others."

The stillness turns into a different kind of stillness, the kind I hold when I'm running a great many possibilities very fast and need everything else in me to stay where it is.

"A student," I say.

"A third-year." He crosses to his desk, picks up a sealed note, and holds it out. "I've had the scent two weeks. It's faint. He's either very good at burying it or he came in quietly and recently. What it isn't is anything native to this range. Northern fire drake, not western — they run hotter, and you can smell the difference." He shrugs one shoulder. "I spent a week making sure before I said a word to anyone."

"The registration records," I say.

"Say he transferred out of a northern school that closed last year. On paper it's all in order." He meets my eye. "It's in order because someone was careful. But that school closed because a Blackhaven border survey named it for what it was, and nobody has gone back to tidy the paperwork."

"Keir's pack," I say.

"Ran that survey six months ago, yes." He nods slightly. "Which means this one came in after the place had served its purpose, wearing its papers. Whoever put him here was planning a long way ahead."

I take the note.

"The name is confirmed against four separate sources," Callan says. "I wouldn't bring you anything less."

"I know." I look down at the seal, his own mark, a small gryphon, impossible to copy without standing in his study. "Thank you."

He nods and turns back to the window, giving me room to leave without making anything of it, which is the most useful thing he can do for me right now.

I leave.

I open it on the tower stair, out of the light of the doorway.

I read the name.

Then I stand there longer than I need to, because I heard that name twenty minutes ago. In the debrief. Attached to the third-year who sits very still and misses nothing, who came to an inside-first answer by a different road than mine and got there clean, whose thinking I liked well enough to file him.

Worth watching, for reasons that have nothing to do with fire drakes.

It had everything to do with fire drakes.

I was in a room with him for two hours. I watched him work. He gave the second-best answer in that room and he gave it in front of me, which means either he doesn't know what I am to this or he is confident enough to sit two rows away and think out loud while I listen.

I fold the note.

That is the useful part and I make myself take it instead of the other part. He is good. Not adequate. Not competent. Good enough that I marked him before I had any reason to. Whoever put him here did not send a soldier.

✦ ✦ ✦

Orpheus is in the south corridor when I come down from the east tower. This is not a coincidence. He knows my Tactics schedule and he knows what I do after a session, and he has been my clutch-sibling for twenty-three years, which is long enough to know that when I have something that can't wait, I take a route between the east tower and the main building that's longer than it needs to be.

He falls into step beside me without a word.

We walk. The corridor is busy enough to require care and empty enough to give us room. I wait until we pass beneath the south window, where the noise coming up from the training grounds fills the air and swallows anything said close.

Then I start the hand signs.

The language is ours. Not formal Shadowcarve code, though it borrows from it. Mom built the bones of it before we were five and kept adding as we grew, and Orpheus and I have been extending it between ourselves ever since. It can say in three movements what a whole sentence would take, and to anyone who doesn't know it, it looks like nothing more than two people who talk with their hands when they're thinking.

I give him the name.