Page 40 of Raven’s Fight

"Aye."

"Again."

I beat my wings again. She leans forward into it. The pull takes her wings and lifts her a fraction — that same not-quite-flying from the field, but larger now, stronger, made by something heavy enough to move real air.

She makes the sound again. Not a word, not a rumble. Something between. Something that might, with years and practice, become a roar.

I hold very still while she finds out what wind feels like when it means it.

In my chest, between the cold weight of what I found in the archive this morning and the particular warmth that is only ever Nova, there is a place that holds both at once. This is not, I have decided, a contradiction. It is only what it is to be alive in a complicated world with people you love in it.

I beat my wings again.

She leans in.

Soon.

Chapter 14

Raven

*

Balor runs his night exercises the way he runs everything — no announcement, no preamble, and with the particular enthusiasm of a basilisk who finds daylight adequate for his needs and honestly prefers the dark.

The instruction arrives as a single note pushed under the door of every Advanced Shadowcarve student at ten in the evening, when most of us are in some state of being done with the day. It says: Grounds. Shadowcarve. Now. Bring nothing you wouldn't carry into a real fight.

I am already dressed.

I've been dressed since the end of dinner, because I've been doing this long enough to know that Balor runs his night exercise in the third week of term, every year, on the theory that complacency is a slow poison and the third week is exactly when it starts to settle. The first week everyone is sharp. The second week the sharpness holds because everything is still new. By the third, the body begins to assume nothing unexpected is coming, because nothing unexpected has come yet.

That is when Balor makes something unexpected happen.

I lace my boots, pick up my pack, and go.

✦ ✦ ✦

The Shadowcarve grounds at night feel different from the rest of the academy. Older. Heavier. The stone worn in ways that suggest generations of students practicing for things they would actually need to live through. The torches in the main courtyard are the only steady light. Everything past them is managed dark, the kind a place develops when it has been used for this long enough that the buildings themselves cooperate — walls without ledges to catch the moon, paths that are level underfoot and impossible to read by eye. The whole of it built to make you rely on something other than sight.

Balor is in the courtyard when we arrive, fourteen of us, assembled in the time it takes a note under a door to be read and acted on. He looks us over the way he does when he's judging readiness. Not approval. Not disapproval. Just taking the measure of what he has.

"Tracking and evasion," he says. "The grounds are the field. You have two hours. Five of you are hunters. The other nine are prey. Prey get a three-minute start. Any prey still free at the end gets full marks. Any hunter who doesn't make a single tag reports for extra work. Questions?"

Nobody asks questions. That is the correct answer.

He divides us. I'm prey. Orpheus is prey. The still third-year from Callan's class — the one who would have fed his enemy false word rather than hunt him — is on the hunters' side, and I have to work not to look at him, because his is the name that was inside Callan's sealed note.

I set that down carefully and leave it where I can reach it.

Balor put him on hunters. That might mean Balor judged him better suited to chasing than to hiding. It might mean Balor wanted his tracking tested against mine. Balor teaches in layers, and his assignments usually mean at least two things.

The three-minute start begins. Orpheus and I don't discuss it. We move.

✦ ✦ ✦

The advantage I have in night exercises is one I've never advertised.

My right ear is deaf. My left has been making up the difference since I was a hatchling, the way a body will pour everything it has into one side when the other side is gone. In the dark, with nothing much for my eyes to do, my left ear is worth about three of anyone else's. On stone, at night, I can follow footsteps at distances most creatures couldn't manage with every sense they own working properly. I can pull apart overlapping sounds the way a good musician pulls single instruments out of a crowded piece — not deliberately, not with effort. It simply arrives already sorted.