Page 68 of Raven’s Fight

We eat on the floor, because four of us spread across the available furniture would require negotiations, and the stone at Malivore is cold and we've all sat on worse. It's fine. It's better than the furniture would have been, in the way that the right people make any space better than its furniture.

The food is good. The wine from the nonexistent cellar is also good. We eat without any agenda — no planning, nothing exchanged, nothing required of anyone except to be here and eat and talk about whatever arrives.

"The worst thing the cafeteria ever served," Bella says, in the tone of a woman opening a competition, "was the gray thing. Third week of Year One."

"The gray thing was porridge," Azalea says.

"Porridge is not gray."

"That one was."

"That is my point."

Orpheus: "The soup in second semester. The one with the⁠—"

"We agreed we don't discuss the soup," Bella says.

"You agreed. I never signed anything."

"The soup is a closed matter," I say. "It's been three years. It needs to rest."

"The soup should rest," Azalea agrees. "Possibly permanently. In the ground."

We discuss the soup for six minutes anyway, reaching nothing, because the soup is the kind of shared experience that resists analysis and rewards description. Then Bella finds the seam between topics and slides through it the way she always does, into the winter Allister decided to teach himself to cook.

Orpheus has additions I didn't know about. He was there for meals I missed, and the ones he describes are worse than the ones I remember, which I would not have thought possible.

"He was trying to impress someone," Azalea says.

"He impressed everyone with something," Orpheus says. "Just not the thing he was aiming at."

"The second attempt was actually edible," I say.

"The second attempt was barely edible," Bella says. "We ate it because we love him."

"That's what family is," Azalea says.

The room goes quiet a moment after she says it. Not a heavy quiet. The warm kind that comes after something true and doesn't want anything added to it.

I look at my three siblings on the floor of my rooms the night before the Purge and I think: I have everything I need. Not the preparation — I have that too, but that isn't what I mean. I mean this. People who know me specifically, who came without needing to be told why, who ate the bad cafeteria food and the good braised thing and the wine from the cellar that doesn't exist and argued about soup for six minutes and are not afraid of tomorrow, because they trust me and I have given them reason to.

It is enough.

We finish the food. We finish the wine. The academy's overnight quiet settles into the corridors outside.

"We should go," Azalea says. She always reads that first.

They go. Bella squeezes my shoulder on the way out, one quick firm press, which is her version of a declaration. Azalea stops at the door and looks at me with the look that means she has something to say and has decided this isn't the night for it, and keeps it for another time, and the keeping is its own kind of love.

Orpheus last. He stops in the doorway and looks at me once — the look that holds everything we've said in signs across the term and everything we've never needed to say, because we've known each other since we were hatchlings in the same nest. He nods. I nod back.

He goes. The door closes.

✦ ✦ ✦

I sit in the quiet a while.

This isn't the anxious quiet of before-something. I've sat in that one enough times to know the difference, and this isn't it. This is the quiet of a thing that has been made ready and is only waiting for its hour, with the patience that comes of having done everything there was to do. The preparing is finished. The decision is made. The night has its hours and they'll pass and in the morning the bell will ring and I will be exactly where I need to be.