Page 95 of Raven’s Fight

Thauglor on her right. Nobody asked him to sit there. He did it anyway, because his presence at her right hand says something about what he believes regarding the Marzana succession, and he has decided to make it visible.

Mina across from Klauth. She gave her dominance to her daughter a year ago, and she sits now with the quality of a queen who has accepted her daughter's authority and found in it, I think, something close to relief. At forty-five she is, her daughter aside, the youngest person at this table by a wide margin, and she carries competence the way people do who achieved remarkable things early — not loudly. Simply always there.

Balor beside Mina. Finlay beside Thauglor. Abraxis at the far end, the ancient black dragon, Lily's father, who was a general before the injury that ended his fighting and who still carries all of that in the way he occupies a room. He does not speak often in council. When he does, everyone listens.

And me. At Raven's left hand, where she asked me to sit, which I understand to be a different statement than Thauglor's — not a declaration about her succession, but a declaration about where her nest sits among the things she trusts.

I am aware that I am the least politically significant person in this room by a considerable distance.

I am aware that she asked me to be here anyway.

Those two facts together are, for me, the shape love takes in a setting like this. Not the private warmth of our nest. The choice to put the person you love in the room where the consequential things happen.

✦ ✦ ✦

She opens with what we know.

No preamble. No ceremony over the council convening. She stands at the head of the table and lays it out in the precise, layered way of a woman who has been ordering this in her head for three days and is now setting it down with the clarity that three days of ordering produces. She starts with what is established and moves to what is inferred, marks the line between them plainly, and never presents a conclusion as a certainty she doesn't have.

That, I have come to understand, is the thing that separates good intelligence work from bad. The willingness to say this we know, this we believe, this we don't yet know, instead of folding all three into one confident account. She is twenty-three and she already has the discipline of it. I watch the room take it in, and I watch the room answer it — the particular attention that honesty about your own limits produces, people leaning in because they trust they're being handed the real picture rather than a tidied one.

What they know: Amadeus's contact in Magnus's court is Aldric Vane, a flock elder placed for at least two years and likely longer, pending what Thessaly sends back. The fire drake nationalists have been paying for work against the Marzana succession for two years, running it through both the drake network and Amadeus's wider reach. The academy was infiltrated by four planted students, two members of staff, and a line of word going out to the border rotation as it happened.

"The Purge was not a serious attempt on my life," she says. "It was a test. They were measuring how I answer pressure, how much I see coming, and what I've built around myself. They wanted to know how I move, what I can do, who I lean on and how — before they commit to something larger with a different purpose."

The room is very quiet.

"The serious attempt is coming," she says. "We don't know when and we don't know in what shape. What the Purge told us is that they are more patient than we thought, better supplied than we thought — dragon's bane in quantity, properly made, not improvised — and running a chain that reaches from the border rotation through the academy's own offices to a man inside the northern flock. This is not a faction making noise. This is a campaign, and someone competent is running it."

Klauth: "Aldric Vane. Finlay."

Finlay's face doesn't change. "It's begun. Thessaly is moving. I'll go north myself once we know what he's had access to."

"Yourself," Klauth says.

"Yes."

A silence. Klauth looks at Raven. She nods once — the nod of a thing already decided. He doesn't press it.

I give them Amadeus.

I have been preparing this for three weeks, since before the bell, since the evening Raven and I sat down with everything I'd brought back out of the old blood and everything Finlay's people had and everything Cassius has built across eleven years, and agreed the council would need the whole of it. I give it the way I've learned to give complicated things to a room where some people know a great deal and some know almost nothing: in order, in layers, assuming nothing.

What I tell them: Amadeus gave up his body more than a thousand years ago to fuel a binding so large it could not be fed from outside itself and needed a fire burning within. He built that binding so that what he was would remain inside it rather than end with the flesh. What he became is scattered — spread across the whole net of cursed eggs that holds the binding up, and living in no single place. He cannot be killed in the ordinary way. Killing a host or breaking an egg wounds the net. It does not end it.

"To end Amadeus," I say, "you break every egg in the net at once. Or you cut the net off from the mage-blooded men who carry him. Both together is the surest way. Either one alone leaves a real chance that something survives."

The room goes quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when a very large problem has been stated plainly for the first time.

Mina says, "How many eggs?"

"Cassius puts it between forty-seven and sixty-three. He's still narrowing it."

"And breaking them all at once means⁠—"

"Doing it across ground we haven't mapped. Yes. That's the difficulty."

Abraxis, from the far end, in the voice he uses when he has been thinking about a thing since before anyone raised it: "The hosts are the easier half. If Cassius can name them, cutting him off from them is careful work rather than impossible work."