Page 88 of Raven’s Fight

She says the name.

I keep my eyes on her jaw.

But something happens in my chest that I don't have a clean word for — the particular feeling of information that rearranges everything standing around it. It isn't a name I would have guessed. It isn't anyone in Magnus's outer court or his army or among his envoys. It's older than that. Further back.

It's a name Finlay will know.

I'll give it to him privately, because what his face does when he hears it will tell me how deep this actually runs.

"Thank you," I say.

Both things are true at once: she came here to turn me into a fixture in a hallway, and what she just gave me is the thing the war has been missing for a year. I don't have to reconcile them. They're both real.

I hold her against the east wall. The snakes go on searching my face the entire time, tireless, patient, blind.

Four hours until the Purge ends.

The shoulder burns for all of it.

I don't move.

Chapter 30

Raven

The bell rings at hour seventy-two.

I hear it from the east wall. It sounds different at the end than it does at the beginning — the same iron, the same mechanism, the meaning turned entirely over. Done. Come out now. It's over. The bell at the start says begin. This one says stop, and the authority in it is absolute, and for the first time in three days I can feel everything I've been holding down come forward, now that I'm allowed to stop holding it.

The shoulder hurts. Properly hurts, now that I'm not overriding it.

I let it.

And the rest arrives with it, all at once. Blood dried stiff inside the collar of my jacket. The taste in my mouth, copper and stone dust and three days old. A tremor in the right hand that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with having asked too much of it. The particular cold of a body that has stood still for four hours against a stone wall in the dark. I take one breath all the way down and let every bit of it be there.

Balor's team reaches us within three minutes. He takes one look — Samara against the wall, the wound, four hours of held position written into what my arm is doing — and asks nothing. He has known me since I hatched. He can read it.

"I'll take her," he says.

"She talked without being made to. It goes in her file as cooperation."

He looks at me a moment. "Understood."

I step back. The dragoness settles. I walk toward the gate.

The gate opens.

I walk out on my own two feet.

This matters. I thought about it for six weeks — the importance of the walk, of being upright and visibly working when the academy watches the Purge end. The heir to the Marzana throne went into this Purge as the chosen target of something built out of four planted students, two members of staff, and a line of communication running to the fire drakes outside the western border. She walked out with all of it answered, a wound that's healing, and her bearing intact.

That's the statement. Not a speech. Not a declaration. The walk. What the body looks like after seventy-two hours. The decision to come through that gate the way I come through every space I've decided is mine.

My shoulder hurts.

I walk like it doesn't.

The air out here is different air. Three days of everyone breathing the same shut-in cold, and then this — woodsmoke and trodden grass and somebody's kitchen working away somewhere, and under all of it the sharp green smell of the mountain in the afternoon. Someone starts to cheer and thinks better of it. The sound dies halfway out and leaves a silence with edges on it.