Page 69 of Raven’s Fight

I don't need to go through it again.

Xero comes down off the sill.

She lands on the desk without a sound, wings flaring once and folding flat, and crosses to me with her tail straight up and the tip of it curled over. She sits at the desk's edge, close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her, and looks at me with those blood-red eyes that don't reflect the lamp so much as take it in and keep it.

Tomorrow Raven wins.

I look at her. She is attending to me completely, the way she does when she has decided a thing and means to say it.

"Tomorrow Raven wins," I say.

She holds my eyes another moment. Then she pushes her whole head into my hand, forehead first, and drags her cheek along my palm — one side, then a full turn, then the other side, thorough about it. Her whiskers catch on my thumb. She butts once more, harder, in case I missed the point.

Then she steps onto my forearm, claws in the leather and not the skin, and walks up to my shoulder. Wings half open for the balance. Wings folded again the moment she arrives. She turns around twice, kneads three times into the muscle at the base of my neck, and drops into place all at once, tail coming around under my chin.

She presses her face against my jaw and purrs.

Not the loose contented one. The other one — low and steady and deliberate, the one that travels through the bone and doesn't stop. I am here. I have you. We are together. Nothing that matters is alone.

I reach up and scratch behind her ears. She tips into my fingers and the purr climbs, and she keeps rubbing her forehead under my jaw, again and again, until the fur along her temple is standing the wrong way.

We sit in the quiet together. The night runs out its last hours. The lamp burns low. In the morning the bell will ring, and I will stand in the center of the grounds, and I will be the most dangerous thing on that field.

I already know how this ends.

Chapter 24

Raven

The bell rings at dawn.

I'm already in position.

Klauth's voice comes across the grounds the way it always comes at an opening, carried further than any voice should carry, the formal declaration in the words that have been read at the start of every Purge since Dragonis established the tradition. I have heard it three times now. The first time it stood the hair up on my arms. The second time I'd been training a year toward it and I listened differently. This time I hear it the way you hear a starting bell. The signal. Not the ceremony.

The gates close.

The sound they make is old iron on old iron, a mechanism built for this one purpose and used twice a decade, and every student on these grounds feels it in the chest rather than the ears. Not loud. Final. The vibration comes up through the soles of my boots and out through the stone and dies somewhere under the east tower.

Around me, the student body moves.

Most of them scatter — the instinct for high ground, for a wall at your back, for someone who'll watch the side you can't. Some were paired before the bell. Some are running to be paired now, and the running has a particular sound to it, boots slapping fast on frost-slick stone, breath going out in visible bursts in the cold. The ones who prepared know where they're going. The ones who didn't are finding out that the grounds look different with the gates shut.

I don't run.

I walk to the center of the Shadowcarve courtyard and I stand there.

The courtyard is one of the most exposed places on these grounds. Wide open stone, no cover worth the name, no height, four ways in. There is no defensive sense in standing here at all.

Which is exactly why I'm standing here.

I'm not defending.

I cross my arms. I look at each approach in turn — north, east, south, west. The morning light is still low and coming in flat, throwing long shadows that lie across the flagstones like something spilled. Frost has silvered the seams between the stones and hasn't burned off yet; it will in an hour, and the courtyard will go from white-veined to plain gray, and anyone who crosses it before then will leave prints. The western approach is the hardest to read, because the light from that side is behind me — which means anyone coming from the west takes the sun in the face and I don't. I note it. I shift my weight a fraction to give myself the fastest turn that way if I need it.

Then I wait.

The cold sits on the back of my neck. Somewhere off toward the kitchens a chimney is going, and the smoke comes across the courtyard in threads, woodsmoke and the mineral smell of wet stone warming, and underneath both the cold iron of the shut gates. My breath is visible. So will everyone's be.