Page 90 of Raven’s Fight

Earlier, at the debrief table, Balor read over my shoulder at one point. "You did right with the acid," he said. "Stopping a shift halfway is dangerous for the one being stopped. It's considerably safer than letting it finish in a stairwell."

"I know. You taught me."

"I taught you the technique." He looked at me over the page. "You chose where to use it, under pressure, correctly. Those are different things." A pause. "You made seventeen correct decisions in this Purge in circumstances where the wrong one was available and easier. The record will say so."

He put his hand briefly on my good shoulder, removed it, and went back to reading. This is Balor's version of I'm proud of you — said once, exactly, and then filed.

I receive it.

✦ ✦ ✦

I give Finlay the name privately.

Not in the debrief. This doesn't go into the record yet, not until he's had time to work through what it means and decide how his people move. I find him in his office at the end of it and close the door and hand him the paper I wrote the name on while I stood holding Samara against the east wall.

He reads it.

His face does something I have never seen it do.

Finlay's face, ordinarily, is the controlled surface of a man who spent nine centuries learning not to let it tell stories he hasn't chosen to tell. The control is real and deeply practiced and almost never gives. What I see is not the control giving. It's the thing underneath it, visible for one second before the surface comes back. Something I don't have a clean word for and understand anyway, because I've felt it — the particular recognition that arrives when a thing you trusted turns out never to have been what you believed.

He knows this person.

He knew this person. Present and past at once.

"How long?" I ask. Quietly.

"A century," he says. "At the least."

I sit with that. A century of contact, inside Amadeus's net, working the same rooms Finlay was working. A century of standing next to someone who should have been an ally and never was.

"You didn't know," I say.

"No."

"Then you didn't fail at anything. You trusted someone who chose to break it. Those are different things."

He looks at me a long moment. The expression that isn't quite pride and isn't quite grief, the one that's been there in various forms since he started teaching me things that mattered. "You sound like me," he says.

"You taught me that as well."

He folds the paper and puts it in his inside pocket. "I'll start tonight. Quietly. Nothing that moves the ground under him."

"I know."

"Give me four days."

"Take what you need."

I leave him with it. There's nothing else to give him right now except time, and I have time, and whatever he does with those four days will be right and thorough and will not need me looking over it.

✦ ✦ ✦

I sleep for fourteen hours.

What a dragon does after seventy-two hours of work on very little rest isn't ordinary sleep. It's closer to the body shutting down everything that faces outward so it can go through itself properly. Solaris told me once, and Mina told me at a different time, both with the certainty of great wyrms who have done it far more often than I have, that the depth of it answers to whatever came before. Three days of Purge, a dragon's-bane graze, and four hours of holding a full gaze produce, apparently, a very deep one.

I don't dream.