Chapter 51 — Someone Saved Me

Chapter 51: Chapter 51 — Someone Saved Me

~ Raven ~

"What really happened that night?"

Raven kept walking.

"You already know the part that matters. They were my mates. Both of them. They’d known for two years and said nothing, and I rejected them in front of the whole House."

"That’s not what I’m asking."

"I know."

"Raven." Thalia had to skip a step to stay level with her. "You rejected two Blackthorn heirs standing in the middle of their own House. And this morning I heard four different people say you were hunted, and one of them said you weren’t, and I don’t know which is true."

Raven did not stop. She had no intention of standing still in a colonnade full of people to talk about the worst night of her life.

"Celeste tried to stop me leaving," she said. "It escalated."

"Escalated how?"

"I hit her. Then I put a knife to her throat."

Tessa’s foot came down wrong and she nearly went into a pillar.

Thalia’s head turned so fast her hair swung.

Brielle just stared.

"It was very useful," Raven said, to the middle distance. "As a way of getting out of the House alive, I mean. She’s quite popular. People were reluctant."

"You held Celeste Blackthorn at knifepoint."

"Briefly."

"Briefly?"

"She survived," Raven said. "She’s fine. You saw her yesterday, she was extremely fine, she was so fine she nearly took the roof off—"

"Is that meant to improve the story?" Tessa asked.

"It’s meant to make it accurate."

They went up the shallow steps toward the academic hall. Raven took them one at a time because her leg had opinions.

"The Alpha swore in front of the whole banquet that I’d get a head start before anyone came after me. So I took it and I ran."

"And when it ran out?" Brielle said.

"He let the hunters go."

Nobody said anything for a few paces.

"How in the hell did you survive that?" Thalia burst out.

Raven opened her mouth.

Melissa. Grey hair, mourning ribbons, a Valerius uniform in a portrait she wouldn’t explain. A name that made four armed hunters back off a girl they had cornered.

She had no idea what that name was worth. She had no idea who wanted it, or what happened to the woman if it started travelling through an academy full of Great House children with linkslates.

"I almost didn’t," she said. "They caught up with me. It got worse in the forest." A breath. "Then someone stepped in."

"Who?"

"Someone."

Thalia looked at her for a moment.

Then she nodded and let it go, and Raven liked her enormously for it.

Tessa let it go too.

Brielle didn’t. She walked beside them with her eyes on the side of Raven’s face, and Raven could feel her counting the shape of the hole where a name should have been.

But what Brielle finally said was:

"He swore in front of witnesses that you’d have time."

"Yes."

"And the moment it ran out, he sent trained hunters after a girl with no wolf and no supplies."

"Yes."

Brielle’s mouth went thin.

"That wasn’t mercy. That was a hunt with paperwork." She stepped around a knot of students without looking at them. "He needed to be able to say he gave you your chance. So he gave you one and made sure you couldn’t use it."

Raven didn’t answer.

She’d worked that out somewhere around the quarry, with her hands torn open and the beam giving way under her, and she had never once said it out loud.

They walked.

Thalia hated it. Raven could see her hating it, glancing between the three of them, hunting for anything else to put in the air.

"At least," Thalia said desperately, "we’ve got months before the Concord Trials."

"The what?"

All three of them turned.

"You don’t know about the Concord Trials," Tessa said.

"Tessa. Until nine days ago my education was overhearing nobles talk while I carried their soup." Raven shifted her bag off her sore shoulder. "I know eleven ways to get wine out of silk. Ask me about that."

Thalia brightened so fast it was almost indecent.

"Right! Right. So." She got both hands going. "The Trials are the big inter-race competition. Wolves against vampires. It’s part of how the peace works — both sides send selected competitors from their academies, everyone watches, honour is satisfied, nobody starts a war."

"Months away," Tessa said. "First-years don’t compete. Doesn’t stop anyone talking about it since spring."

"Vampires," Raven said.

Thalia turned to her with an expression that promised something Raven was not going to enjoy.

"Obviously I know vampires exist," Raven said quickly. "Servants talk. I’ve heard stories my whole life. I have never seen one and nobody mentioned that this academy invites them in."

"Unfortunately," Tessa said.

Raven glanced at her. "You don’t like them."

Thalia gave her a look that suggested the question answered itself.

"Our races spent about six centuries using each other," Tessa said. "One tournament every few years doesn’t fix that. Anyone who says otherwise didn’t lose anybody."

"Some of what you’ve heard is rubbish," Brielle said. "Most of it, probably. But not all."

She said it evenly, the way she said most things.

"They can live on beast blood. Preserved essence. Their own kind. Wolf blood works too, and historically they used it, and that’s most of the problem right there." A shrug. "The peace laws forbid feeding from an unwilling wolf. They also forbid forced Bloodscript."

"Blood what?"

"Bloodscript. Blood’s a component in their sigil work — contracts, tracking, binding, worse things than that if someone’s willing. Take enough of a wolf’s blood and you can do a great deal to them afterward, from a long way away." Brielle’s shoulder rose and fell. "Houses remember that."

"My grandmother had stories," Thalia said. "Whole packs drained. Sigils cut into people while they were still—"

"Half of what adults tell pups is exaggerated," Brielle said.

"They only wrote laws against it," Tessa said, "because somebody was doing it."

Thalia shut her mouth.