Page 89 of Raven’s Fight

The ground outside the gate has the feel of a long wait ending — people who have been holding tension for three days letting go of it in all the different ways people do. Some moving toward the gate at once. Some standing completely still. Some doing small tight tasks because their hands need something. Hemlocke is near the stable entrance. He's still watching from where he held for three days, or near enough to it — he must have moved, but his eyes have the quality of eyes that have been pointed one direction a very long time. I give him the brief nod that means I'm well, it's over. He closes his eyes for a moment. Then he opens them and nods back.

Keir is somewhere I can't see, but I can feel him — the warmth of a hound who is close and is deliberately leaving the space that Corvus is about to take, without competing for it. I'll find him shortly. He knows that.

Corvus is the first person through the gate.

He doesn't run. He comes through at the fastest walk I have ever seen him walk, controlled and deliberate, and covers the distance between us in fewer seconds than that pace should allow. He stops in front of me and puts his hand on my face.

Both hands, in fact. One on either side. The way you hold something you've been waiting to hold.

His hands are cold. He has been standing outside a gate for three days and his hands are cold, and mine are colder, and the difference between the two is the first thing that has felt entirely ordinary since the bell.

He looks at me.

Not the quick sweep of a man checking for injury. The whole look, the one that takes in everything — how I'm carrying the shoulder, the angle the left arm has settled into, what three days and four hours of standing very still with someone pinned to a wall have done to my eyes. The look of a man who knows exactly what he's reading and is reading all of it.

He's making sure I'm real.

I let him. I stay still and let him look, and I look back — at the twenty-three years in his face, at what seventy-two hours outside a gate leaves on a person, at the thing that has been carefully held since the bell rang and is now, in front of the person it was held for, being set down.

"Shoulder," he says.

"Dragon's bane graze. Sealed. It'll scar."

"Scar," he says again.

"I don't mind."

His thumbs move slightly. Not quite a caress — the motion of someone confirming that what's under his hands is solid. Something in his face does what it does when he puts down a thing he's been carrying. Not visible to most people. Visible to me.

I put my hand over his right hand.

We stay like that a moment. The gate behind me. The academy around us. The Purge over, the war not, and this one moment that is only you're here and I know and nothing else required of either of us.

Then it ends, because it has to. There's a debrief waiting and Klauth's assessment and things owed to people who are owed them, and I have always understood that this is how it works. The moments are real. They're also short.

We walk to the debrief together.

✦ ✦ ✦

The debrief takes four hours.

Balor runs the collection. Anipe, still frozen — she'll stay frozen for two more days, which is what a full lock does rather than anything I chose, though I'm not unhappy about it. Samara, in formal custody now, cooperative in the way of a woman who made her calculation days ago and is simply carrying it out.

Four fire drakes, accounted for as follows.

The transfer, taken out of the east tower at minute twelve — concussed, unconscious for several hours, nothing permanent, and the sending device in pieces.

The one from Bella's stairwell, stopped mid-shift with acid, recovering in the medical wing. He shouldn't be able to shift for about a week. I file that one separately: not a lethal engagement. A medical outcome.

The first, taken at the pinch when I came back through it.

The last, the one who worked by scent, is the only one not in the building. She broke away during the collapse at the pinch and went out through a maintenance access in the south boundary wall during a gap in the watch. Keir has her trail. It's a question of time.

The green dragon from Bella's stairwell goes into the record under the Purge's lethal provision. I write the acknowledgment that night, in my own words, at the Malivore desk with the lamp low. I do what Finlay described. I write what was there before and what is gone, and I write it honestly.

The lamp burns down twice while I write it. The pen sits wrong in my hand — the shoulder puts the whole arm at an angle it isn't used to — and I write the first page three times before the words stop arranging themselves into reasons. Outside, the academy goes quiet in stages, the way a building does.

It takes two hours.