Chapter 168 — Four-Wing Run

Chapter 168: Chapter 168 — Four-Wing Run

~ Raven ~

Nikolai stared at her.

"Spill what?"

Raven said nothing. She simply kept her arms folded and looked at him.

His eyes dropped briefly to her posture before returning to her face. "You’re going to have to give me slightly more than that."

She continued staring.

For several seconds, Nikolai maintained the confused expression remarkably well, but eventually something in it cracked. A tired laugh escaped him as he leaned his head back against the stone.

"Goddess, you’re scary when you do that."

Raven did not smile.

That only earned another laugh from him, quieter this time. He rubbed both hands over his face before looking at her again.

"Fine. What exactly am I supposed to be spilling?"

Raven had several questions she could have started with, but only one had been following her around since before the Hunt.

"What happened two years ago?"

The amusement left his face almost at once. He did not look away, but his gaze settled on her differently, quieter and much harder to read, and for several seconds he said nothing.

Raven waited.

Then, without warning, something Cassian had told her flashed through her mind.

"Were Cardinal heirs given mental training when you were young?"

Nikolai blinked.

For once, Raven seemed to have caught him completely unprepared.

"What?"

"Training against mental attacks. Were all of you taught how to resist them growing up?"

His brows drew together. "No?"

Raven closed her eyes for a second.

"That bastard."

Nikolai frowned. "What?"

"Nothing."

"That didn’t sound like nothing."

"It isn’t important."

He stared at her for a moment before a laugh escaped him. "Did you just call a Cardinal wolf a bastard?"

Raven opened her eyes. "What exactly makes that unusual?"

"Most people have at least some survival instinct."

"Please. Being a Cardinal doesn’t make any of you less annoying." She waved one hand dismissively. "If anything, you guys are pricks."

One of Nikolai’s eyebrows rose.

Raven caught the look and paused.

"Well." She shifted slightly. "Except you, obviously."

His eyebrow climbed even higher, and the disbelief on his face was so blatant that Raven frowned.

"Don’t look at me like that."

"I didn’t say anything."

"You didn’t need to. Your face did."

The corner of his mouth twitched.

Raven pointed at him. "Focus."

"Yes, ma’am."

Her eyes narrowed until the smile finally left his face.

Nikolai sighed and leaned back against the stone. For a moment he looked across the courtyard instead of at her. Students still moved through the far archways in small groups, none of them paying much attention to the two of them beneath the colonnade.

"Why do you want to know?" he asked.

There was no teasing in his voice now. Mostly, he sounded tired.

Raven opened her mouth, but he spoke again before she could answer.

"Actually, it doesn’t matter." He dragged a hand down his face. "There’s a reason you haven’t been able to get a straight answer from anybody who was here."

Raven’s attention sharpened.

"Valerius made everyone directly involved promise not to speak publicly about what happened."

Raven stared at him.

For a second, Nikolai only looked tired.

Then his own wording seemed to catch up with him.

His eyes narrowed slightly.

Raven felt the smile begin before she could stop it.

"No."

She blinked. "Now I didn’t say anything."

"I know that face."

"What face?"

"The one you make when you find a technicality and immediately decide it was put there specifically for you."

Her smile widened.

Nikolai let his head fall back against the stone and groaned softly. "Raven."

"What?"

"You know exactly what."

Raven ignored that and glanced around the courtyard instead. The nearest group of students had already disappeared beneath the opposite archway, while everyone else was far enough away that none of them could possibly hear a normal conversation.

She looked back at him.

"There’s nobody close enough to hear us."

Nikolai followed her gaze, unconsciously checking for himself. His eyes moved across the courtyard, lingered briefly on the few students still passing through, then swept the empty stretch beneath the colonnade as though he was hoping someone might suddenly appear and give him a reason to end the conversation.

Nobody did.

When he finally looked back, Raven had already moved closer.

His attention snapped to her immediately.

Raven leaned down slightly, bringing herself close enough that she would not need to raise her voice, then lowered it anyway.

"You could whisper."

Nikolai’s eyes widened.

The reaction was small enough that she nearly missed it, but then he shifted several inches away from her and cleared his throat.

Raven stared at him.

He cleared it again and looked anywhere but directly at her.

"Okay. Fine."

Her eyebrows rose.

Nikolai glanced back. "I said I’ll tell you."

Something dangerously close to amusement pulled at Raven’s mouth, and she pressed her lips together before it could show.

Nikolai Hale was shy.

Of all the things she had learned about him since coming to Valerius, that might have been the most unexpected.

His eyes narrowed almost immediately. "Don’t."

Raven blinked innocently. "I’m not even doing anything."

"You’re enjoying this Raven."

That nearly broke her.

Raven pressed her lips together harder and looked away for a second, but when she glanced back, Nikolai was still watching her with open suspicion.

He rolled his eyes and turned his face away, as though refusing to give her anything else to work with.

Which, unfortunately for him, only made it worse.

She had spent weeks watching him move through conversations as though he had been born knowing exactly what to say. Nikolai spoke to upper-years, Wardens and strangers with the same easy confidence. Half the academy seemed to know him, and the other half behaved as though they wanted to.

And all Raven had needed to do to unsettle him was stand a little too close.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

"Are you finished?" he asked.

"I still didn’t say anything."

"That somehow makes it worse."

Raven finally allowed herself a small smile before stepping back.

"Go on."

Nikolai gave her one last suspicious look, then exhaled and rested his forearms against his knees.

The amusement faded.

When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.

"What happened two years ago isn’t exactly what most students think happened."

Raven leaned against the stone beside him. "What do they think happened?"

"That depends who you ask." His mouth twisted slightly. "Shadow wolves broke into Valerius. A competition went wrong. Nobody broke into Valerius at all and the whole thing happened somewhere else. I’ve heard some creative versions."

Thalia would have been delighted to know at least three of those were still circulating.

"And the real one?"

Nikolai went quiet for a moment.

"The Founders’ Hunt wasn’t called the Founders’ Hunt back then."

Raven looked at him. "What was it called?"

"The Four-Wing Run."

She frowned.

Nikolai glanced over. "Very imaginative, I know."

"Same competition?"

"Mostly. The Wings competed against each other across different routes and objectives. House Points, rankings, bragging rights. Every year the academy pretended it was about teamwork and tradition, and every year all anybody actually cared about was who beat who."

"That sounds exactly like the Hunt."

"It was."

"Then why change the name?"

Something shifted in his expression.

He looked back across the courtyard.

"After that year, there were a lot of things Valerius wanted to change."

He did not elaborate, and for once Raven decided not to push immediately.

Nikolai continued after a moment.

"Hale was good then. We still are, obviously."

Raven gave him a look.

He ignored it.

"Blade usually finished ahead of us, but never by much. Going into the Run that year, everyone expected the same thing they always did. Blade and Hale fighting for first while Prymont and Ashbourne tried not to embarrass themselves."

"Does Dante know you describe it that way?"

"He doesn’t need to."

Raven almost smiled.

Nikolai’s expression, however, had already drifted elsewhere.

"For me, beating Blade mattered more than it probably should have."

"Probably?"

His mouth curved faintly. "Fine. Definitely."

Raven remembered the Hunt orientation and the way Nikolai had spoken about Cassian then. Routes. Timing. Formations. Cassian watching a strategy unfold until he knew exactly where to press.

Four years of finishing behind someone probably did things to a person.

"But that wasn’t the only thing I cared about that year," Nikolai said.

Something in his voice made Raven look at him more closely.

His gaze had fallen to his hands.

"There was someone else competing for Hale."

Raven stayed quiet.

For a moment, Nikolai seemed to drift somewhere else.

Then a small smile touched his mouth.

"He was the only person I knew who could spend the entire morning telling me we were going to beat Blade, then complain the second I started taking the competition seriously."

Raven looked at him. "Were you taking it too seriously?"

"Absolutely."

A quiet laugh slipped out before she could stop it.

Nikolai looked down at his hands again, the smile lingering for another second before fading.

"We’d known each other for years. Long before Valerius. Long enough that the Hale name stopped impressing him sometime around the age most children learn not to insult people stronger than them."

Raven raised an eyebrow. "That young?"

"He was exceptionally irritating."

The complaint should have sounded annoyed.

It didn’t.

There was too much affection underneath it.

Nikolai fell quiet after that, and Raven let him. Whatever ease had been there a moment ago slowly disappeared, leaving him staring down at his hands as though he could still see something there that she couldn’t.

When he finally looked back at her, the exhaustion around his eyes seemed heavier than before.

"He was my best friend."

Raven’s amusement vanished.

She already knew enough to understand where this was going.

Seven Ardens had died.

Nikolai Hale had survived.

And whatever happened that day had been buried deeply enough that even two years later, most of Valerius still only traded rumours about it.

So she said nothing.

Nikolai drew in a slow breath.

"His name was Jaden."

He paused briefly before adding,

"Jaden Arden."