Page 77 of Raven’s Fight

"You're very much your mother's daughter," she says.

"My mother didn't order strikes on civilians. The Ragnar campaigns went after installations and supply. Whatever happened to your family, it wasn't the thing you believe it was."

"You weren't there."

"No." Her hands haven't moved on the crossbow. I watch them anyway. "But I have the records. Both sets — the Marzana archive and the independent accounts from the same seasons. The hamlet your family came from was being used by the fire drake command as a staging ground. When the staging ground was taken out, the hamlet caught the edge of it. The target was the installation. It was never the people."

"My grandmother lost four children."

The words land the way she means them to.

The grief is real. It is specific and it is twenty years old and it does not care in the slightest whether it has been aimed correctly. It has been pointed at Mina and at the Marzana line and at me for two decades, and the pointing feels true to her no matter where the cause actually sits.

I understand that. I understand it completely. It changes nothing about what happens in the next thirty seconds.

"I'm sorry for your grandmother," I say, and I mean it, and I can hear that I mean it. "What happened to that community was real. The people who were hurt were real. The grief your family has carried is real. All of that is true." I hold her eyes. "Mina didn't order it. And you have spent two years placing students in this school to kill me on a day when the killing would look permitted. Both of those are also true."

"The Purge permits it."

"The Purge permits students. You're staff." I let that sit for a beat. "The founding charter you photographed in the archive doesn't give you what you think it does. The language is vague enough that any tribunal would throw it out in an afternoon, and you're clever enough to know that. Which means you didn't come out here to stand on a right." Another beat. "You came out here because you've been building toward it for twenty years, and you stopped caring what it would be called some time ago."

The silence after that goes long.

I can hear her breathing. I can hear my own. Thirty feet of open stone, the sun higher now and taking the last of the cold off the wall behind me, and a woman in office clothes standing at the end of a path with a loaded crossbow held across her body.

Long enough that I think she might set it down. Long enough that I let myself think it.

Then her weight comes forward onto the front foot. Her left hand slides four inches up the stock. She takes one short breath in through her nose and holds it.

She raises it.

✦ ✦ ✦

She's fast.

Faster than I allowed for. I expected the hesitation of someone who has spent twenty years walking toward a moment and finds, arriving, that it doesn't feel the way she imagined. There isn't any. The crossbow comes up in the clean practiced motion of a woman who has drilled this exact movement, alone, many times, and has no intention of letting a conversation slow it down. She rehearsed the talking. She rehearsed this more.

I move.

I move as she fires, not before — moving before the shot only tells her where to send it, and I've had three years of being taught not to tell people things. I move on the release, in the sliver between the string letting go and the bolt arriving, which is not much time and demands that the movement be given everything, no hedging, no half-commitment.

Not far enough.

The bolt takes me across the top of the left shoulder — the graze of someone who read the direction of my move and put the shot ahead of it. Her range was better than I'd credited her with. It scores through the jacket, through the scale underneath, and the dragon's bane on the tip goes to work immediately.

It burns cold first.

That's the thing about dragon's bane, the thing that separates it from anything else made to get through scale. Cold on contact, then turning over into a deep heat as it finds dragon in the blood. The cold means it's working. The cold means I have about ninety seconds before the heat starts taking things away from me.

I don't give her ninety seconds.

She's already reaching for the reload. Practiced there too — the speed of the span, the second bolt coming up to follow the first. She isn't panicking. She isn't looking at my shoulder. She's looking at the crossbow, threading the next one, and that is the mistake.

The contacts do their work.

My dragoness comes to the surface. Not the half-shift I use for pressure. The full directed gaze. The stone from a skull dragon with basilisk in the line isn't the same as the stone from a true basilisk, but at fifteen feet with everything behind it, it is more than enough for one woman mid-reload whose attention is on a mechanism rather than on my eyes.

Anipe freezes.