Page 73 of Raven’s Fight

The one who works by scent is forty feet behind me in the east corridor. She's his backup. When he takes me inside, she seals the mouth behind me. Two points, no exit. It's well built. If I were walking in unaware, it would work.

Then his scent reaches my left ear on the cold draft — faint, unmistakable, that burnt-metal heat Keir found on the western border. The same thing. Here. Inside these walls. Inside my walls.

The anger I have been banking for six weeks goes very warm.

My dragoness comes forward. She has been waiting for this since the bell.

I let her come.

I step into the corridor.

Chapter 25

Hemlocke

I made the decision about the stables three days before the Purge.

Not the decision to be here — that one was made the moment I understood what the Purge was and what my part in it could sensibly be.

I am not a fighter. Not the way most of the students on these grounds are fighters. I'm fast when I need to be. I'm stronger than I look. And my unicorn can do things to living creatures that some people would call useful in a fight. But my instinct is not to fight. My instinct is to tend — to watch, to manage, to make the conditions under which the people I love can do what they need to do.

You can spend your whole life building an instinct and still not be able to change it in a crisis. I've stopped trying to.

The stables are where I can be useful. They're easy to hold — Titan alone makes the place nearly impossible to enter for anyone who doesn't have the particular understanding with him that I have. They're high — the loft above the main block lets me see about half the academy grounds. And they hold the things that are going to matter before this is over: water, the medical supplies I moved here quietly over the past week, and a mirror I borrowed from the Shadowcarve teaching cupboard and will return afterward.

I also have the two signals Orpheus taught me. He taught them to me casually, sitting in this loft three weeks ago, in the tone he uses when he has decided you need something and is making it feel like nothing.

And I had him draw me a map of the places on the grounds that matter in a fight. I asked a month ago, making it sound like curiosity about how the Purge lays out. He drew it without comment. I have memorized it.

I am not a fighter.

I am prepared.

✦ ✦ ✦

The bell rings at dawn.

I'm already in the loft, settled at the gap in the south wall where the boards don't quite meet and the view of the main courtyard opens up.

Titan is below me. I can hear him moving in the deliberate way he moves when he has decided something needs his attention — the low stamp of an enormous horse who has registered that the morning feels changed and is not alarmed, only noting it.

The horses know the Purge is happening. Not the way we know it, but they understand that the morning feels wrong and that the humans who usually move in predictable ways are moving in different ones. I explained what I could to Titan. He took it in his own way: ears forward, eyes on me, the full weight of his attention present.

He will not be easy with strangers near the stable today. This is fine. This is useful.

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

My heart does something complicated.

I have spent a year managing the particular feeling that comes from loving someone far more dangerous than you are — the mix of pride and fear, and the thing underneath both that I've never found the right word for. The thing about watching someone you love be exactly what they are, in a situation that asks for all of it.

I manage it well most of the time. I've learned to feel it and keep going.

Standing in the loft at dawn, watching her choose the most exposed spot on the grounds and wait there with her arms crossed and her wings half-furled and her body carrying the weight of someone who has made all the decisions and is now inside the doing of them, I manage it only moderately well.

She moves wrong for a target.

This is what I keep coming back to as I watch her. Most of the students I can see from up here move with the tense, careful energy of people who know they can be hunted — eyes scanning, pace either too fast or too controlled, the posture of people holding fear down.