Page 91 of Raven’s Fight

Or I dream and don't keep it — the dragoness working through what I was too busy to work through while it was happening. The green dragon in the stairwell. Anipe's face as the crossbow came up. Samara's face when she said the name, and the particular look of giving away something that can't be taken back.

When I surface, the room is warm and the light through the high window is the flat white of late morning, and somewhere below a class is being let out — that ordinary roar of a great many people going somewhere at once, which is a sound I did not hear a single time in three days.

Corvus is in the chair.

He's reading, which is what he does when he's waiting for something that wants patience and doesn't want activity. He reads, and he's present, and he doesn't perform the waiting. He looks up as I come awake, and the change from waiting to being here happens smoothly and without announcement.

"Fourteen hours," he says.

"Was it restful for you?"

"Yes." The word carries all of being in this room with you across from me is the most rest I have had since the bell rang three days ago.

I sit up. The shoulder is stiff, and the burn is much reduced — dragon healing working through the sleep, clearing what the dragon's bane left, starting the scar. It will be narrow and pale and visible. I've looked at it in the small mirror by the bed. It runs at a clean angle across the top of the shoulder where the bolt scored.

I find I don't mind it.

Scars are information. They record something real. This one records Anipe and the crossbow and the arithmetic she did about me that was almost right, and eight inches, and the fact that I kept moving.

"What's today?"

"Thursday. Eleven in the morning."

I sit with that. The first Thursday after the Purge. It's already moving — Balor sent his first report to Klauth last night, before I slept, and the review of every enrollment that passed through Anipe's hands is running through the records office. Finlay is in his office deciding how his people move. Keir is somewhere on the trail of the one who went out through the south wall.

The war isn't over. It's only in a different part of itself.

"I need to find Bella and Azalea today," I say. "And Orpheus. And send word to Blackhaven."

"They all know you're alive and whole," Corvus says. "I told them last night. Hemlocke sent word to Blackhaven through the bond."

I look at him.

"You were asleep," he says. "Someone needed to."

The feeling that produces — being looked after by a man who does it quietly and correctly and doesn't need it noticed — sits in my chest a moment.

"Thank you."

He nods once and picks up his book.

I get up.

The Purge is over.

The war is not.

There is work to do.

Chapter 31

Finlay

The name on the paper is Aldric Vane.

I read it once. I fold the paper. I put it in my inside pocket. I thank Raven and I tell her I need some time before I begin, and she reads that correctly and leaves me with it. She is very good at reading what a person needs. She has become, across this year, remarkably good at reading what I need, which is a form of attention I find I am not entirely used to after nine centuries of managing my own weather without anyone else noticing it was weather.

She leaves.