Page 70 of Raven’s Fight

My dragoness is fully present. She's been present since I woke — not restless, not pushing toward the shift, simply here, the way she is when she's decided something is about to deserve her whole attention. She doesn't speak. She watches with me. The contacts are in. The blades are where they belong. My left ear has settled into the low, wide sensitivity it finds in this kind of silence, sorting the ordinary from everything that isn't.

The first hour is quiet in the way that isn't actually quiet.

I can hear the grounds working. Engagements starting out at the edges — the particular sound a body makes meeting stone, the footfall of someone moving with intent rather than moving somewhere, the short scraping ring that means a blade has come out of a sheath. All of it arrives at my left ear as one continuous map. I'm not searching for threats. I'm counting everyone who moves toward me and everyone who is carefully not moving toward me, and watching the space between those two groups.

The fire drake plants are watching me.

I know because I've spent six weeks learning the weight of their attention, and two of those weights are on me now, and both of them have a direction.

The first is in the eastern approach, fifty feet back, moving in a pattern that is almost — not quite — the pattern of a student picking a route. Too even. He isn't going anywhere. He's holding a distance.

The second is in the north corridor near the archway, using the shadow of a pillar. She took the shadow at a slight angle off the pillar's mass rather than directly behind it, which is good instinct — it makes her harder to pick out from straight on. But the shadow's edge gives her away to the side of your eye, if the side of your eye knows what it's looking for.

The third I haven't found. His scent is buried better than theirs.

My dragoness is very interested in the third one.

Missing is information. Missing means he's either coming from an angle this position doesn't show me, which is possible, or he was never meant to fight at all. Something else.

I smile at the north corridor pillar. Deliberately. Straight at the shadow where she's holding.

The shadow moves. Barely. A hand's width. She wasn't expecting to be seen and the being-seen startled it out of her.

Good.

✦ ✦ ✦

The first engagement finds me at thirty-seven minutes.

I hear him before I see him. A fourth-year I know by face and not by name — nothing to do with the fire drakes, nothing to do with anything I've been tracking, just a fourth-year who has decided that the heir apparent standing alone in the middle of an open courtyard is an opportunity. He's made several correct observations. I'm exposed. I'm not moving. I look like I'm waiting for something, which might mean my attention is elsewhere. He's made one fatal one: he's reading me as a student who got unlucky with her position instead of a dragoness who chose it.

He comes fast from the south and he's gone quiet in the way people go quiet when they believe quiet is enough. Footfall softened, breathing under control. But not the whisper of his jacket lining against his arm as it swings, not the small shift in the air ahead of him as he closes. None of that is loud. All of it arrives at my left ear perfectly clear.

I don't turn.

I let him come to seven steps. Then I pivot, smooth, nothing telegraphed, and the blade is at throat height when he arrives, and the half-shift comes half a second behind it. Scales rising along my forearms, black and cold-looking in the low sun. The dragoness making herself visible without fully arriving. The pressure of her fills the space between us like weather changing. He can feel it. Most creatures can feel it at this distance even when they couldn't name what they're feeling.

He stops. His hands come up at once. He's clever enough to read the position and to know that being clever right now costs him nothing while arguing would cost him everything.

"Tag," I say.

He goes down. The convention — tagged, down, wait for retrieval. He does it correctly, which tells me he was briefed properly and isn't going to make a performance out of losing. I appreciate that. Performances waste time.

I step over him and keep walking. Behind me his breath is loud in the cold, and steadying.

The dragoness eases back out of the half-shift as I go. She isn't disappointed. She never expected the fourth-year to be interesting and he wasn't. What he was is the first fact of the day: the grounds are live, the engagements have started, and the fire drakes watching from their corners have now seen me take a fourth-year in two seconds from a standing start without appearing to try.

The message goes out into the courtyard air with the woodsmoke.

Come find me.

I keep walking.

✦ ✦ ✦

Orpheus finds me at forty-three minutes.

He doesn't announce himself. He is simply there, matching my pace two feet to my right with his hands in his pockets, carrying the quality he uses when he's moving through a place without touching it. A basilisk's trick — being visible without being present, occupying a space without claiming any of it. People look at Orpheus and their eyes slide off. He has been doing it since he was eight. It's considerably more useful now than it looked then.