Page 49 of Raven’s Fight

I crouch down beside her and we watch the gold shape shrink toward the southern sky, and I think about Old Dragon in a hatchling's mouth, arriving with no one having put it there, and what it means that Therun heard it and his face did what it did.

I file it next to everything else.

The light is going amber when I pick her up and carry her inside.

Chapter 17

Keir

Ten weeks of watching makes a map.

Not a figure of speech. An actual one, drawn on the heavy paper Finlay keeps in his study for letters that have to survive a journey. I've been at it three days. The pack's patrol logs went in first — every scent hit, every marker, every hour, set against the western boundary in the shorthand Finlay uses for this kind of record. I've been learning it because it's faster than writing everything out, and he was willing to teach me on the condition that I never tell anyone he did. He called it a professional standard rather than a favor. Both things are true.

The map is exact. Twelve fire drakes, and I can tell them apart now. Each body burns a little differently, and the difference shows in the scent the way one hand's writing differs from another's writing the same letters. Look at enough handwriting and the hands separate themselves. It went the same way with these once I'd smelled enough of them side by side.

Twelve. Shifts of four, turning over on a cycle of roughly six hours. The northwest and southeast ends of the rotation overlap for about forty minutes, and in that window I can hold eight of them in my nose at once and name each one. The other four are on the far side of the circuit while that's happening, which is how I know the number is twelve and not eight. You count what you can smell, then you count what's missing from what you can smell, and the gap tells you the rest.

It took four weeks of sampling before I'd stake a number on it. Dax checked me — ran the same samples without seeing what I'd found, came out at the same twelve. When two hounds reach the same count separately, the count is right.

Three of those twelve also turn up at the academy.

I found all three myself, setting the border samples against traces I've been collecting on academy ground these past four weeks. The method is simple enough. Blink hounds leave a mark when we phase, and I can lay something down on a surface we've touched without anyone knowing it's there. I've done it every visit, once a week, working the corridors and training grounds a section at a time. Slow work. The kind that doesn't feel like anything until it suddenly does.

Three on the border, three inside the walls, the same three, matched across four weeks of sampling.

The fourth one — Callan's third-year transfer, the name in the sealed note — doesn't show up in my rotation at all. Either he isn't part of the border operation, or he came in some other way, or he's good enough at burying his scent that I haven't caught him in the overlap. I have a notion about which. I'm not taking it to Raven yet, because a notion wants another week of testing before I'll call it anything.

What I am ready to tell her is this. What's happening outside the boundary and what's happening inside the academy are the same operation. Three men are holding a place in the border watch and a seat in a classroom at the same time, and that takes more than nerve. Somebody is keeping the schedule. Somebody is carrying the messages. Somebody is making the paper look right — which means somebody inside that institution knows its workings well enough to enroll a student on invented papers, and has been doing it long enough that nothing about it reads as strange.

Anipe.

I don't have her scent on anything yet. But the pattern fits the notion and the notion fits the pattern, and the week I said I needed for the fourth plant I'm also going to spend starting on her. When I bring them to Raven they'll arrive connected instead of separate. She thinks better when the picture is whole.

I fold the map and take it to her.

✦ ✦ ✦

The academy in the fourth week of term feels different from the first. That first week everybody is performing adjustment — the version of themselves that handles new places and new expectations, pitched to look capable and to settle any question of belonging before someone thinks to ask it out loud. By now the performance has worn off. What's underneath is showing. Some students are harder than they looked. Some are softer. The ones who are exactly what they were in week one are usually the most interesting, because they were already telling the truth when it was harder to.

I blink in to the Shadowcarve landing in the late afternoon, which is the way Raven and I agreed on at the start of term. No main gate, no signing in, nothing that runs through Anipe's office. The pack seal she arranged with Balor reads as an ordinary faculty visitor's mark. It's legitimate. It's also quieter than a normal one, because Balor put it through the training-adjunct list rather than the general visitor list, and those are kept in different books.

Raven thinks of these things early. She thought of this one before I asked.

She's in the east corridor when I get there, coming down from Callan's tower with her jacket half done up and a sheen at her temples from drill. She sees me and changes direction without breaking stride, which is as close to a greeting as either of us needs — she comes toward me instead of waiting, which means she's glad I'm here and doesn't have to say so.

I fall into step. "Map's done."

"How many?"

"Twelve. Shifts of four, six hours to the cycle. Three of them match scents inside the academy."

She's quiet for a few paces. We move through the inner corridor, student traffic thin at this hour, the afternoon light coming through the high windows at the angle that means the day is going amber outside.

"The fourth one," she says.

"Doesn't show in the rotation. I've got a theory. It needs another week."

"Keep going."