Chapter 80 — Three Days

Chapter 80: Chapter 80 — Three Days

~ Raven ~

They watched her cross the hall. Raven could hardly blame them. If their positions were reversed, she would have stared too.

"Rivers," the fourth-year said. "Garrick Holt. Captain, which mostly means I’m the one who gets shouted at afterward."

He tipped his head at the third-year. "Mara Ellison."

"Ellison’s fine."

"And that’s Dorian."

"Hale," Dorian said. "Second-year."

Raven looked at him.

"Not the important branch," he added cheerfully. "There are about nine Hales in my branch of the family, and I’m nowhere near the top of it. So if you were hoping I came with influence, don’t."

Raven frowned, confused. "I wasn’t."

"Everyone says that." He grinned. "Anyway. Four years of second place. We’re owed this one."

Raven looked at Brielle.

Brielle ignored both of them.

"We’re not owed anything," Mara said, without looking up from her slate. "Owed is how you lose."

"See, this is why she’s here. Somebody has to stop me enjoying myself."

Garrick let it run for about two seconds, then talked straight over it. "Right. Rivers hasn’t done this before, so we do the whole thing once, properly, and then nobody says I didn’t know on the third day."

He held up a fist and started counting.

"Founder Seals. Twelve of them, hidden across the Hunt ground, worth House Points on a sliding scale. You find one, you carry it. You carry it to dusk, it counts."

"How many are you supposed to get?"

"Blade’s Wing got five last year," Dorian said. "Which is disgusting."

"Second. Your own seal." Garrick tapped the registration disc at his collar. "It’s you. Break somebody’s seal and they’re out of the Hunt and everything they’re carrying is yours. Break yours and you walk home."

Raven’s hand went to her own collar before she could stop it.

"Third. Everything is watched." Garrick nodded vaguely upward. "The ward carries broadcast to the observation grounds. The entire academy will be sitting there with slates. So will your instructors, your Cardinal, and about two hundred people who bet on us."

"Wonderful."

"Fourth, the ward itself. Nothing lethal gets through it. The wardens can pull you out if you go down badly." He paused. "It stops you dying. It doesn’t stop it hurting. Don’t confuse those."

Mara finally looked up. "Last year a Prymont third-year had his arm broken in the first hour and finished the day with it."

"Did he win?"

"No."

"Then why—"

"Because he’s an idiot," Dorian said. "Keep up."

Garrick lowered his hand. "One more thing, and it’s the only rule of mine that matters. Inside the ward, I make the call and you move. You don’t like the call, you can tell me exactly how stupid it was over dinner. Not in the trees."

"And if you’re wrong?" Raven asked.

Brielle turned her head slightly.

Garrick didn’t seem bothered. "Then I find out I’m wrong quickly, and we change course before it costs us. That’s the job."

Raven decided she could work with that.

The joint preparation filled the equipment hall the following afternoon, all twenty of them under one roof with four sets of Wing colours and enough tension to make the wardens patrol the aisles.

Raven had spent most of the last day thinking about her own straps. Now she looked up.

Celeste Blackthorn stood at the Ashbourne benches with her sleeves pushed back, laying out gear.

Still there. Still real.

Raven had seen her at orientation and assumed she’d misread the collar.

She hadn’t.

Raven stared at her for a moment, then looked toward Rowan.

Of course.

For a man who treated every academy rule like sacred law, he had somehow looked across an entire Wing and decided Celeste was the sensible choice. Celeste who days ago had been walking around the corridor with a glowing paw mark on her forehead.

That was going to be irritating.

On what grounds. On what possible grounds.

She could think of exactly one, and it had a Blackthorn seal on it.

Money, then. Or her father’s name. Or both, because why not both.

Two benches down, Seren was checking a shoulder harness, and Rowan had his hand on the buckle.

He said something. Seren pulled the strap out of his fingers and rebuckled it herself.

He reached for it again.

"Rowan." Seren didn’t raise her voice. "If you touch that buckle one more time, I will strangle you with it."

He took his hand back.

Raven had to look at the wall for a moment.

So somebody talks to him like that.

He didn’t snap. He didn’t do anything except stand there with his arms folded and watch his sister work, and after about thirty seconds he moved half a step closer to read whatever she was checking over her shoulder.

Raven filed that away and turned toward the far side of the hall.

That was when she finally registered Isolde Marchmont among Blade’s five.

Raven had walked past her twice during orientation without noticing which block she belonged to, mostly because the Ashbournes had been taking up an unreasonable amount of her attention. Now, with Isolde standing among Cassian’s representatives, the oversight felt fairly stupid.

"Of course he picked Marchmont," Brielle said.

She was coiling a length of line around her forearm. The first few turns were neat. The next two went tight enough to leave pale marks against her skin before she noticed and loosened them.

Raven looked at the line, then at her.

"You sound thrilled."

"I’m perfectly indifferent."

Raven looked at the white marks on her arm.

"Obviously."

Brielle ignored her and started winding the line again.

Raven left it.

Dante’s five were at the near end of the hall. She got as far as counting them — two she didn’t recognise, a fourth-year with cropped hair, someone who kept laughing — and then stopped, because Dante was standing at the end of the bench with his back to the wall and his head already turning.

Raven found something extremely interesting on her own bench and stayed with it.

"Boot," Brielle said.

"What?"

"Give me your boot. You’ve laced it like a stable hand."

"I was a stable hand."

"It shows."

Raven handed it over and watched Brielle unthread the whole thing and start again, two eyelets tighter at the ankle than Raven would have gone.

"Why are there four straps on this," Raven said. "It’s a forest. People have been walking through forests for thousands of years with no straps at all."

"They weren’t being broadcast."

"So this is fashion."

"This is your ankle not folding on a root at speed while somebody is trying to break your seal." Brielle held the boot up, considered it, and tightened one more. "Stand on it."

Raven stood on it. It was better. She declined to say so.

"The harness sits higher than you’ve got it," Brielle said. "And you’ll want the knife strap on the left."

"I’m right-handed."

"You cross-draw. I’ve watched you do it since the drill court."

Raven had not known that about herself.

She swapped the strap.

The next three days went quickly, which surprised her, since she’d expected to spend them dreading things.

They trained in the lower woods behind the Wing every afternoon and learned each other the way people did when there wasn’t time to do it properly.

Garrick called the decisions and expected everyone to move. Mara kept track of their equipment and drilled the fallback point into them until Dorian claimed he was repeating it in his sleep. Dorian turned nearly every exercise into a race, including one that very specifically was not a race, and still managed to lose it.

Brielle took everything personally.

If somebody outran her once, she wanted another attempt. If Mara caught something she missed, she checked it twice the next time. On two evenings Raven came back downstairs after dinner and found her still in the training ground alone.

Raven mostly followed instructions, made mistakes, and got quicker at not making the same ones twice.

Around them, Valerius lost its mind.

The betting boards in the south hall had Blade’s Wing so heavily favored that there was barely any profit in choosing them. Hale students had started saying this year to one another in the corridors with the dangerous confidence of people trying to convince themselves.

A Prymont second-year and an Ashbourne fourth-year had to be pulled apart outside the refectory after an argument that, according to both of them afterward, had apparently been about nothing.

Then the Bellringer published predictions for all twenty representatives.

Raven was nineteenth.

Beside her name were two words.

Charming. Doomed.

"Nineteenth," Dorian said, delighted. "Who’s twentieth?"

"Nobody’s twentieth," Mara said. "It stops at nineteen."

"That’s not—" Raven took the slate. It stopped at nineteen. "Why would they—"

"Because it’s funnier," Brielle said.

Somewhere in the middle of the second day, Raven noticed she’d stopped thinking about how to survive the Hunt and started thinking about how to take it off Cassian Blade.

She didn’t examine that too closely.

On the final evening the five of them collected their gear from the wardens under signature, and Garrick made them lay it all out on the floor of the Wing hall and go through it piece by piece while Mara read the list aloud. It took an hour. Nobody complained. Even Dorian went quiet toward the end.

"Sleep," Garrick said, when it was done. "Whatever you think you’re going to do tomorrow, you’ll do it worse tired."

Hunt morning came in loud.

Raven could hear the observation grounds from inside the dormitory, a sound like weather. Slates were activating along the corridor, one after another, each one carrying the same rising noise. Somebody two doors down had started chanting and been told to shut up by three different people.

Brielle sat on the edge of her bed working her heel into the second Hunt boot, testing the fit with small, precise movements. Raven pulled her chest strap through the buckle and hauled it tight.

The question had been sitting in her head for eight days.

She kept her eyes on the strap.

"Brielle."

"Mm."

"Is it actually possible? For someone to get into another person’s dreams."

Brielle worked the boot for another second.

Then her hands stopped.

She looked up.

"Possible?" she said. "Raven, that’s what Dreamwalkers do."