Page 37 of Raven’s Fight

His jaw tightens. Barely. He's very good at holding his face still, and the jaw is the only thing that has ever given him away, which I know because I've been watching him work at it since we were eight.

He gives me one sign back. Understood.

Then he peels off at the next junction toward the east dormitory wing, and I go on to the main building, and we don't speak again until dinner, and over dinner we talk about nothing at all.

The name is in his head now. The name is in mine.

Three fire drakes on these grounds became four while I stood in that classroom. Eight on the western line, and now a ninth scent that never went near it. The fourth came in on papers built for him out of a school that was already a lie, and he has spent this afternoon two rows from me arguing tactics, and he is very likely watching me the way I watched the other three at the opening ceremony — sideways, patiently, three degrees off center.

The problem I solved on Callan's board an hour ago just got harder. Four of them inside means four places this can start during the Purge instead of three. It means the men on my western line and the students in my classrooms are woven together more tightly than we thought. It means whoever built this was two moves ahead of us before we started counting.

I stop in the corridor and breathe for one full second.

Then I set it into the shape I've been building. The fire drakes on the border are a watch. The four students are the hands. The teachers, Anipe and Samara, are steering something. The Purge is the window — the moment the four move and the watch comes in, if it comes at all, if this is the schedule they're keeping and not a longer one.

Unless I'm wrong about the Purge being the window. Unless there's another day coming that I haven't found yet.

Unless the draw doesn't work here at all, because the man inside is keeping a schedule of his own.

I think about my own answer on the board. The way it fails.

I walk to my next class.

Four weeks.

Chapter 13

Solaris

The memory lives in the blood.

This is not a figure of speech. Dragon ancestral knowledge is not stored in the mind the way most creatures store what they know, in something that can be struck, or clouded, or simply worn away by years. It lives in the body. It runs down the bloodline, passed from parent to child not by teaching but by inheritance. The older the line, the deeper the well. The deeper the well, the harder it is to find your way down it.

Twelve centuries and more of my own to draw on, a thousand and twenty of them spent in the dark. Beneath that sits something far older — everything known by every dragon in my direct line, running back to the founding of it, centuries before I hatched. That older store is not memory and does not behave like memory. I cannot simply call it up. I have to go down after it, and going down is slow work, and what I bring back is not always what I went looking for.

I have been looking for three weeks.

The room I've taken in the Blackhaven archives is a modest thing by the standards of what I once kept — a table, good light from the high window, whatever histories I've been able to pull from the academy library and from Finlay's considerable private shelves, and the quiet this kind of work requires. The going-down itself happens somewhere between meditation and deep thought. Not sleep. Not quite waking either. It takes practice to hold, and I can hold it now for perhaps four hours before the effort demands I stop.

I was two hundred and fifty years old when they sealed me in, and I had a thousand and twenty years in the dark to get good at it. I am choosing not to think too closely about what that means.

Nova is with Hemlocke today, which means she is in the stables, which means she is very happy and will come back smelling of horse and hay and wanting to tell me everything she has learned, in a mixture of Old Dragon and the common tongue and the gestures she invents when neither will do. I am looking forward to it. The looking-forward sits in a part of my chest I had no use of for all those centuries in the shell and am still, carefully, learning the shape of.

I go back to the work.

✦ ✦ ✦

The trouble with the old blood is that it does not answer a question directly.

When I go down after something particular — a name, an event, a working of a certain kind — what comes back is not a record. It's a palimpsest. Layers. The same stretch of years seen through a dozen sets of eyes across a dozen lifetimes, each account bent a little by what that dragon knew and understood and feared. To find what actually happened I have to look for what stays the same across the layers, and treat the differences as a description of the witnesses rather than the event.

I have been working the years, near three centuries back, when the bloodlines began to fail.

What the layers agree on is that something changed. Lines that had bred strong for generations started throwing weak young — scales that never fully hardened, breath weaker than the parents', full-grown bodies that came up short of what the line should have produced. It came on slowly, spread over decades, and at the time it was read as ordinary drift. The kind of wandering any population does if you watch it long enough.

What the layers disagree on is why. Some say sickness. Some blame the waters, the minerals in the hot springs changing as the mountains changed. Some blame the mixing that came after the war, when flight territories opened up and lines that had been kept apart for centuries stopped being kept apart.

Not one of the layers I have found so far suggests that anyone did it on purpose.