Page 50 of Raven’s Fight

"Always."

She stops at a junction. I stop with her. She holds out her hand and I give her the map.

She unrolls it against the wall and reads it the way she reads everything, fast on the first pass and slower on the second, her eyes running the same route twice to confirm what the first pass caught. Forty seconds. Then she rolls it and tucks it inside her jacket with the care of something she means to sit down with later.

"Good work," she says.

Two words. Also the two words that mean it landed whole and it was what she needed.

"Stay for dinner. Corvus is in. I think Orpheus is coming for notes, which means he's coming for dinner and the notes are the excuse he picked."

"I know. I heard him tell himself the notes reason. He believes it."

She almost smiles. "Stay anyway."

"Obviously."

✦ ✦ ✦

Her rooms at Malivore hold four people the way a good camp holds four people — not comfortable because there's room to spare, comfortable because they're the right four and the space fits them. Corvus has the chair by the window. Orpheus has the floor, his back against the desk, legs stretched out in the manner of a man who has decided the floor is the better option and is correct. I take the far end of the desk. Raven sits on the bed with her legs crossed and a plate balanced on one knee and Xero draped across her shoulders like an opinionated scarf.

The food is Corvus's doing. He cooks when he's at the academy, because the academy kitchen turns out adequate food and Corvus considers adequate food a standing grievance to be answered with action rather than complaint. Tonight it's bread rolls and something with cheese that crisps at the edges, and the dark braised thing he makes with wine and root vegetables that I have asked him to name three times. Three times he has told me and three times I've lost it immediately, because the name doesn't stick the way the taste does.

It's good. I eat more than my share of the rolls and nobody says anything, because we've been sharing meals long enough that everyone's territory of appetite is settled.

Xero says something into Raven's left ear in the voice only Raven can hear. Raven says "no" to whatever it was. Xero rearranges herself across Raven's shoulders with the pointed dignity of a tressym who has been refused and is choosing not to press the matter at this time.

Orpheus is telling us about the thing that went wrong in his Advanced Shadowcarve session this week — a scenario, a mistimed step, and a second-year who turned out to have more experience with the technique than anybody had accounted for, the second-year included. It takes him three minutes in that dry exact voice of his and produces the particular laughter that comes from recognizing a mess you've been in yourself, handed back to you as somebody else's. Relief as much as amusement.

Raven laughs. It reaches her eyes.

I watch that and feel the bond go warm — not the sharp bright warmth, the slower kind that comes off something simply good being allowed to be good. This is what I want more of for her. Evenings that ask nothing of her except that she be in them. Laughter that doesn't arrive at the end of something heavy but just arrives, because Orpheus said a thing that was funny.

She gets fewer of those than she should. A good deal fewer, lately.

After a while Orpheus takes his notes and his empty plate and goes, with the quiet efficiency of a man who has timed his departure right. Corvus clears the rest of the plates onto the small table by the door where Raven puts things she intends to deal with later, then settles back into his chair with a book and a cup of something warm and the complete presence of a male who has decided this is where he is and needs nothing from the room to confirm it.

I stay where I am.

The three of us are good at this. Corvus and I found our balance around Raven in the first six months of the nest and it's been settling ever since. Neither of us performs ease around the other, which is how the ease turned out to be real. He trusts my nose in the field the way I trust his steadiness everywhere else, and neither of us has ever had to say so out loud.

✦ ✦ ✦

Later. Corvus is asleep in the chair — he does this, goes out sitting up with a book and wakes knowing exactly where he stopped, which I have always found remarkable and which he considers unremarkable. The rooms have gone quiet the way they do when most of the people in them are resting or near it.

Raven is at the window.

She's been there about twenty minutes. I know because I've been keeping track of her without looking at her, which is the hound's habit of always knowing where your people are without making a show of knowing. She isn't doing anything. Just standing in the dark with her arms loosely folded, looking at whatever the Shadowcarve grounds look like from this height at this hour.

I go to the window and stand beside her. She doesn't look over. That's fine. Looking isn't required.

The mountain cold comes through the glass, faint but there. Outside, the torches are burned down low, the training grounds empty, the stone buildings solid in the dark. The sky over the academy is high-altitude dark — nothing softening it, no city glow, just actual dark with actual stars in it.

"How are you actually doing?"

She's quiet a moment. Not the quiet of deciding whether to answer. The quiet of finding the accurate one, which is a particular stillness she has when she's being honest instead of managing. I've learned to wait for that one. Most people I'd prompt. Her I wait for.

"I'm angry," she says. "I'm very, very angry, and I'm saving it."