Ghost tigers are the rarest form of Amícûs. Only seventeen have been documented in the history of Anglia. A ghost tiger that loses its owner undergoes a transformation that has never been fully understood: its eyes change colour, its stripes shift, and its temperament is altered permanently. What drives the transformation, and whether it can be reversed, is unknown.

Surain's Bestiarum, third edition, appendix

Chapter 15

The Raven

The weeks went by.

It sounds simple when you put it like that. The weeks went by. But inside them there were hours and minutes that each had their own weight, and some of them were light, and some of them were heavy, and they were never the same from one day to the next.

The light ones were the hours with Ahra and Retia. Breakfasts where Ahra told stories about his grandmother's training and illustrated them with wide sweeps of his arms that knocked over his tea, and Retia caught the cup before it reached the table without looking up from her book. Lunches where Retia solved problems in her head and said the answer out loud while she chewed, and Ahra said "how did you know that?" and she said "the market. You learn to count fast when the fishwives cheat on the scales," and he said he would never, ever trade with her. Evenings in the First-Year Room when we sat by the fire, all three of us, and Maka, who came down to play for his little brother, sat in the corner with a guitar that now and then changed key by itself, and Lynx lay on his back with his paws in the air while Ahra scratched his tummy, and Fulmen slept with its head under its wing on the arm of the chair. And Nihil in the armchair farthest from the fire, with a book and his legs drawn up, alone, but in the room.

And the moments that were hardest to describe, because they weren't anything. Just being there. Sitting beside two people and not needing to say anything. Feeling Retia's shoulder a couple of centimetres from mine and knowing she was there, without looking at her. Hearing Ahra take a deep breath before he said something stupid and knowing it was coming, and smiling before he said it.

Those are the things you only notice when you have never had them.

And there was Thea Lyndris.

I didn't know when I started noticing her. It wasn't a decision. It was just something my eyes did, without asking my head for permission. She sat at the far end of our table, by the north window, a long way from us, with hair so fair it was almost white in the light that fell in through the windows, and green eyes I could only see because I looked for far too long. I looked for so long that in the end I could make out the sign on her sleeve, a small stitched ear of stone. The Ushenhiener students were rare in ordinary lessons. They had their own teaching, their own classrooms, their own life behind closed doors. But in the dining hall they were there, and she was there, and her laugh carried across a whole room without being loud, just clear, and it landed somewhere in my chest I hadn't known was there.

I didn't know her scent. I was never close enough. I didn't know her voice. I had never heard her say anything meant for me. I only knew that she existed, and that my eyes found her every time she was in the hall, and it annoyed me that they did.

"You're staring," Ahra said one day over lunch.

"No, I'm not."

"Yes, you are."

"Shut up and eat your toast."

Retia said nothing. But one of her eyebrows went up a millimetre, and her mouth made the movement that is half a smile and half something else, and she looked down into her cup and drank her tea.

It wasn't falling in love. I was fifteen. I didn't know what falling in love was. It was just the thing teenage brains do with people they don't know: invent a mystery where there may only be a person with fair hair and a clear laugh. And that was fine. It was normal. It was the most normal thing that had happened to me since I came to Déynáir.

In spells there was Dario Fell, with the Toníâs emblem of a hand round a seed sewn on his robe sleeve, as if he would rather have torn it off. Close-cropped dark hair, a narrow face, and a confidence that sits in the shoulders and in the way you hold your head. He was good. Not good like Retia, who just knew things. Good in the controlled, practised way that says someone has trained at home, with a father in the grey cloak of the Tueriers who had wanted a warrior and got a son on the path for those who build and heal. He meant to show he could fight anyway. Our quiet rivalry in spells began the day we both produced "Ignis" at the same moment, and his was stronger, and he smiled, and I decided it wouldn't happen again.

Vessa Raknotu, Retia's roommate, was in history. The girl from the river on the first day, the one who had said "but we can't" in a voice that was frightened but honest. She was still frightened and honest. She asked questions in lessons that everyone else was thinking but nobody else dared to say: "What happened to the members of Section XIII after the War?" and "Why was the mountain forbidden?" and Professor Vetharin always answered with half-answers that said she knew more than she will say, and Vessa nodded and wrote it down and asked a new question that was a little sharper than the last.

I knew the names of every student in my year, and of several of the older ones, before the third week. It wasn't something I decided. It was something that happened because I looked, and because my head remembered faces and names with the same automatic ease with which my fingers found passages in dark corridors.

I knew them all. I knew their habits and their places and their little routines. Kael, who touched his scar with his thumb when he was nervous, always the same slow movement along the white line, as if he were checking it was still there. Torin's red hair and loud laugh. Jorin, who stood on tiptoe to reach the top shelf in the library and refused to ask for help. Sera, who knitted, and whose yarn was blue when she was calm and turned orange when she was annoyed, and she didn't know, but everybody else did. Dario, who walked through the corridors with his chin up and his shoulders back, but if you looked at his hands they were always clenched, and that said something his posture didn't. Mira Solvik, who always sat with her back to the window and a book thicker than her head. And Nihil, whom I heard breathing every night, and who sat alone at the end of the bench with a book almost as thick, a little way from Will and Marcus, and never looked up when they laughed.

And they knew me, slowly, bit by bit. "The one who walked on the water." "The one with the white fox." And in the end, just "Chris" or "Godrand", depending on how well they knew me. It was a place with people, and I remembered them all.

Lira Ashvane from the second year showed me the drawing one Wednesday evening. She sometimes came down to the First-Year Room to draw, because the light from our fireplace was better than theirs, she said, and she always sat on the windowsill with ink on her fingers and a sketchbook full of moments that were alive.

That evening she came over to my chair with her sketchbook pressed against her chest and a face that was half proud and half apologetic, and she said, "I've drawn you. I hope that's all right."

She opened the book. And there I was. Not the face I saw in the mirror. A different face. A face sitting in a chair with a fox in its lap, looking into a fire, and it was open in a way my face was never open when I knew someone was looking. Vulnerable. Still. And the drawing moved: the fire flickered, Alôpex's tail stirred faintly, and my eyes blinked slowly.

"That's me?" I said.

"That's you when you don't know anyone's looking," said Lira.

I looked at the drawing for a long time. It was strange to see yourself through someone else's eyes. Strange and uncomfortable and beautiful at the same time.

"Thanks," I said.

"Can I keep it? For my collection?"

"Yes," I said. "But don't draw me when I'm asleep."

She grinned. "No promises."

Vessa Raknotu stopped me in the corridor after history the following Thursday.

"Godrand." She was standing with her books pressed against her chest and her hands shaking slightly, the same shaking she always had when she was about to say something. "Can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"The symbol in the book. The seal of Section XIII. You were staring at it. I saw you. You looked at it for ten minutes and closed the book and didn't look at anything else for the rest of the lesson." Her eyes were wide and sharp behind her glasses. "Do you know it?"

I hesitated. One moment. Two. Vessa waited with the patience of people who are used to asking questions nobody wants to answer.

"Yes," I said. "I've seen it before."

"Where?"

"I can't tell you that."

She nodded. Not disappointed. Accepting. "My mum works in the Council's archives," she said. "She says Section XIII officially doesn't exist any more. But she says it the way my mum says things that aren't true: with half a smile and a look that says you shouldn't ask any more."

"Like everyone else," I said.

"Yes." She looked at me. "Like everyone else. But Chris, if you find out more, will you tell me? Not everything. Just enough for me to know that someone's looking."

"Why?"

"Because whoever doesn't ask, doesn't know. And whoever doesn't know is vulnerable."

It sounded like something she had heard many times. Something her mother had said. And it sounded true.

"Yes," I said. "I will."

She nodded. Walked on. Her steps were quick, and her books were pressed hard against her chest, and her hands were still shaking. But she walked with her back straight.

Everyday life had its own conversations.

The important conversations, about Kalmin and Section XIII and the cave and all the dark things, we saved for the quiet evenings when nobody else could hear. But the conversations that took up the most room, the conversations that were the glue between the three of us, were the others. The ones that were about everything and nothing.

Ahra asked me one Wednesday at lunch: "What would you have been, if you hadn't come here?"

I thought about it. "A swimmer, maybe. Or just... someone who worked outdoors. With my hands."

"With your hands?"

"Yes. Something you can feel. Something real."

"You'd have been a carpenter," said Retia, without looking up from her book. "Or a gardener."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you're always touching things. Walls, wood, stone, bark. Your hands are never still." She looked up. "That's an observation, not a criticism."

I looked down at my hands. She was right. They weren't lying still. They were touching the edge of the table, the cup, the crust of the bread. Always moving. Always on their way towards something.

"What about you?" I asked her.

"I don't know," she said. And it was the most honest thing she had said in a long time. Retia, who always knew everything, who always had answers, who never hesitated. "I don't know what I want. I only know what I don't want."

"What don't you want?"

"To be my mum." She said it quietly and looked down into her cup, and there was a silence afterwards that was too big to fill with words.

Ahra rescued it. He always did. "I'd have been a cook," he said. "A really good cook. Not one who cooks with magic. One who cooks with his hands, like your gardener, Chris. With things you can taste and smell and touch." He waved half a pancake about as he talked. "My grandmother does everything with spells, and it tastes fine, but it doesn't taste of anything. It tastes of efficiency."

"Your pancakes would be awful," said Retia.

"My pancakes would be legendary," said Ahra.

And we laughed, all three of us, the kind of laughter that isn't about something being funny but about being in a place where you belong, with people you know, and not needing more than that.

Other conversations were different. Deeper. Quieter. The ones that came at night, when Ahra crept in after lights out and sat on the floor with his back against my bed, and I lay staring up at the ceiling. The floorboards were cold, and he always wore socks and had my blanket pulled down over his knees.

"Chris."

"Yes."

"Do you think the Thirteen are real? I mean, that they still exist?"

In the other bed Nihil's breathing changed. It didn't get faster. It just stopped for a moment, the way it does when someone is listening. He said nothing.

"The symbols are real. The passages are real. The cave was real."

"Yes, but the people. Do you think there are still thirteen people out there somewhere holding it all together?"

I thought about Surain. About his shaking hands. About the way he had said "Godrand. Yes. That makes sense."

"Yes," I said. "I think they're out there."

"That's a bit scary," said Ahra. His voice was half buried in the blanket. "And a bit brilliant."

"It's mostly scary."

"Yes." A pause. "But a bit brilliant."

Lynx growled in his sleep in Ahra's lap, and Alôpex touched my neck with her cold nose, and we were quiet in the dark, and the night was long, and the castle creaked around us, and it was good to have someone to share the dark with.

And there were the walks.

On Sunday afternoons the three of us wandered round the school grounds, along the river and through the garden and out to the edge of the forest and back again. They weren't hikes. They were strolls, slow and aimless, because we had nowhere to be and didn't need anywhere either.

The forest behind the castle was old. The oak trees were so big that three people couldn't reach round them, and their leaves were yellow and brown now in late November, and they fell slowly, one at a time, with the slow grace of things that are in no hurry. The path was soft with leaves, and our footsteps made the whispering sound leaves make when they are wet and you tread on them. The air smelt of earth and mushrooms and the cold, clean smell winter has when it is on its way but hasn't arrived yet.

I always walked in the middle. Retia walked on one side with her hands in her pockets. Ahra walked on the other, and Alôpex zigzagged ahead of us, and she stopped at every tree and every stone and sniffed intently, as if every single spot in the school grounds held a story only she could read.

We talked about lessons and teachers and other students and food and who had said what to whom, and about Torin's hair, which had turned green after a potion went wrong, and about the fact that at least it wasn't me who had run out of the room this time, and about the look on Professor Meriken's face when it happened, and about Retia's latest stratego victory and Ahra's latest stratego defeat, and about Will, who had started going out with a girl from the third bench, and about Nihil, who still sat alone at meals, but who now let his lamp burn until I had fallen asleep.

We talked about all the stupid things and the unimportant things and the funny things, and that was the most important part of all, because that was what said we were friends. Not friends who were friends because they carried secrets together. Friends who were friends because they liked being with each other, even on the days when nothing important happened.

One afternoon Retia picked a conker up off the path and turned it over in her hand. It was shiny and brown and smooth, and it glowed faintly in the grey November light.

"My dad used to collect conkers with me," she said. Quietly. Not sadly. Just a memory. "We put them in a bowl in the hall, and in the evenings we played with them. You threaded them on strings and took turns bashing them together, and the one that cracked lost." She turned the conker between her fingers. "I always won. Because he let me."

Ahra said nothing. I said nothing. We walked on. Retia kept the conker. I saw it later on the windowsill of her and Vessa's room, brown and shiny and small.

The heavy ones were the hours alone. Not because there were many of them. But because they came at night, when the others were asleep, and when my head wouldn't keep still. I wasn't entirely alone. Three metres away Nihil was breathing, slow and even, and on some nights that sound was the only thing in the room that wasn't my own thoughts.

I lay in my bed looking at the black feather on the wall, and thought about the things I knew and the things I didn't know, and the things that lay somewhere in between. Section XIII. Kalmin's secret meetings. Retia's father hiding in Tés Aváir. The passages pointing towards the mountain. The history teacher's words about bones under safe walls. And my own bank vault with the sealed papers I still hadn't opened.

I thought about the person I had felt crying in the portal at Surain's. I didn't know who it was. I knew nothing, and that was what kept me awake.

Magical stratego became a regular part of our evenings.

The game was played on a table in the First-Year Room that was transformed into a landscape in miniature: mountains and valleys and rivers and forests, all of it no bigger than a dining table, but alive and detailed and moving. Each player set out their troops by the power of thought, and the little figures marched and fought and laid traps, and all of it was invisible to the opponent until it was too late.

Retia almost always won. Not because she was aggressive. Because she was patient. She laid her traps early and waited, and her troops moved with a discipline that said she was always three steps ahead. When she won her fifth game in a row one Wednesday evening, the others in the room began to protest.

"You're cheating," said Torin.

"You can't cheat at magical stratego," said Retia, without looking up. She set out her troops for the next game with a calm efficiency that was more provoking than any answer.

"You can't win five times in a row either."

"Apparently you can," said Retia.

I sat beside her and said nothing and was proud in a way I didn't know if I was allowed to be. Ahra sat on her other side, looking down into the game with a face that said he was trying to understand something he would never understand.

But it was Nihil who surprised me.

He had been sitting in the armchair in the corner every evening for a week, watching the game over the top of his book. He never turned a page. The following evening he stood up. The fire was burning low, and the room smelt of warm beech and the faint remains of supper hanging in the curtains. It was the first time he had sought any of us out of his own accord. He stood by the table with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the board with the closed intensity he brought to everything. I knew his scent. I had slept three metres from it for weeks: winter wind and bare iron. Cold and sharp and clean. Not a scent I had ever met on anyone else. On his sleeve sat a single white hair, winter fur from the ermine, who hadn't shown herself for days but was evidently still living in there.

"May I?" he said. His fingers drummed faintly against his trouser pocket.

Retia looked up. Looked at him. Nodded.

Nihil sat down. And played.

It went on for forty minutes. It was the longest game any of us had seen. Nihil's troops moved differently from Retia's: not patiently but strategically, not defensively but with controlled aggression, and his traps were laid with a malice that was almost beautiful. He didn't attack her fort directly. He attacked her supply lines. He forced her to spread her troops out. He bought time for his own.

Retia won. But only just. Ahra sat beside me with Lynx in his lap and had held his breath for the last five minutes, and now he let it out in a long, slow breath that blew a lock of his fair hair up off his forehead. I had been sitting with my hands clenched round my knees and now noticed that my fingers were stiff from holding on too hard.

When it was over, Retia gave Nihil the look she gave people who had surprised her.

"Again?" she said.

"Yes," said Nihil. And it was the first time I had heard him say yes to anything since the island.

Nightmare.

It came in the middle of the night, the night after we had come home from Tés Aváir, at the end of the third week. Not like a dream that slowly builds up. It came like a crash.

Rain. Everywhere. Cold rain falling in a darkness with no sky, and I stood in the middle of it, soaked through, and the cold was the kind that doesn't sit in the skin but in the bones. Somewhere far away something was burning, and the smell reached me through the rain: copper and ash and something sweetish that stung my nose. There was no sound. That was the worst of it. Only the rain, falling without making a noise. The same rain as in the portal, but closer now.

And this time I felt more.

Hands. Cold hands closing round mine in the dark, fingers that gripped as if they wanted to hold on to something they knew they had to let go of. And under the smell of burning a scent, faint, almost gone, that I couldn't place, but that touched something in me older than remembering. Someone was close. Someone crying without making a sound. Someone who knew who I was.

And then the hands let go. Slowly, one finger at a time. The rain took them, and everything went black.

I woke with a jolt. My face was wet. Tears. Not weak crying. Real tears running down my cheeks and into the pillow. Alôpex lay pressed against my neck with her cold nose against my cheek.

"You dreamt about her again," she said inside my head.

"Who is she?" I whispered.

"I don't know yet," said Alôpex. "But she knows you. And she's looking for you."

Something scraped across the floorboards. A glass of water stood beside my bed, and Nihil's hand was pulling back under his blanket. He said nothing. I drank all of it. The water was cold and tasted of chalk and of the jug that always stood on his windowsill.

I lay still in the dark, looking up at the ceiling. The tears slowly dried on my cheeks. My heart was still hammering, but it slowed, beat by beat, and Alôpex's warm breath against my neck slowly pulled me back to the place where dreams are dreams and real things are real.

But the line between the two was getting thinner. I could feel it. Every dream brought me closer to her. And her closer to me.

Shortly before it got light, I woke again. It was Nihil. He was talking in his sleep, in the thick voice people have when they aren't there themselves, and I could only make out two words.

"The round table."

Then he turned over and breathed deeply and said no more. I lay awake for a long time afterwards and didn't know why those two words gave me the shivers.

The next morning the raven was sitting on my windowsill.

It was big. Bigger than any raven I had ever seen. Its feathers were completely black, but in the morning light they shone with a bluish sheen that reminded me of the blue fire Retia made with Ignis. Its eyes were black and deep and looked at me with an intelligence that was more than an animal's.

I sat up in bed. Alôpex lifted her head and looked.

"It's been here before," said Alôpex. "I can smell it. It's sat there many times. At night, while you're asleep."

I slowly reached my hand out towards the window. The raven didn't move. It looked at my hand, at my fingers, and then it looked up at my face, and its gaze held mine for what felt like a long time.

Then it opened its beak. Not to cry out. To let go of something. A single black feather fell from its beak and landed on the windowsill. The feather was long and smooth and shone with the same bluish sheen.

And then it flew. A single wingbeat, silent and powerful, and it was out through the gap in the window and up towards the grey sky and gone.

I picked up the feather. It was warm. Not from the sun, because there was no sun. Warm from something else. And it had a scent, but not like the first one, not of leather and old metal from the vault. It smelt of something I couldn't place, but that touched the deepest place in me: not memory, not thought, something older than both. Something that felt like the smell a home has, if you have forgotten you have one.

Nihil was sitting up in his bed with the blanket round his shoulders, looking at me. He had seen the raven. He had seen all of it.

"You didn't shout last night," he said. "You held your breath."

I didn't know what to say to that. I looked down at the feather in my hand. Warm and black and smelling of something that felt like home.

"My mother," I said. Quietly. Hardly a word. Hardly more than a thought that fell out.

Nihil said nothing. He just looked at me, and there was something in his look that wasn't surprised. Then he lay down again with his back to me. He wasn't asleep. I could hear that.

I went over to the wall above my bed. The first feather was already there, black against white limewash. I put the second one beside it. Two feathers now. Two signs from someone who knew who I was, and who couldn't or didn't dare say it.

Two feathers. A beginning that was starting to look like something more.

At breakfast I told Ahra about the raven. He put his toast down and sat still for so long that Lynx looked up at him.

"It isn't just keeping an eye on you," he said. "Someone's trying to tell you something. Someone who isn't allowed to say it out loud."

In the evening I told Ahra and Retia about the nightmare. About the rain and the cold hands. About the smell of burning. About the scent under it, which was the same as the one on the feather.

We were sitting in the First-Year Room, the three of us, close together on the sofa at the end of the room, with our voices low. The fire was burning low and throwing orange shadows up across the ceiling, and it smelt of beech and ash and that particular warmth old fire has, the kind that doesn't burn but glows. The other students had gone to bed, and the only light was the fire's. Retia sat with her legs tucked up under her and Fulmen in her lap. Ahra sat leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his teacup between his hands, and his scent of bark and honey mixed with the smoke from the fire.

"It's the same as in the portal," I said. "At Surain's. When we went through to the Amícûs island. The rain. And someone crying."

Retia sat with Fulmen in her lap, slowly stroking the bird's feathers with her thumb. "Who do you think it is?"

I thought of the two black feathers on the wall above my bed.

"My mother," I said. "I think it's my mother."

Ahra looked at me. He was sitting with Lynx curled up against his leg and his cup of tea between his hands, and his face was serious.

"If your mother has a raven as her Amícûs," he said slowly, "then she's an Engel. And if she's sending you feathers instead of letters, then she's hiding. And if she's hiding, there's someone she's hiding from."

"Or someone she's protecting," said Retia quietly. "By staying away."

We sat still. The fire crackled. Alôpex lay on the floor at my feet with her muzzle on her paws and her eyes half closed.

"We don't know enough yet," I said. It was what I always said. It was turning into a habit, and I hated it.

"But we know more than we knew yesterday," said Retia. "And that's enough for today."

She got up and laid her hand briefly on my shoulder as she went past. Ahra followed with Lynx at his heels, and I heard them go up the stairs towards our corridor.

I stayed where I was. Alôpex laid her head in my lap.

"She's right," said Alôpex. "That's enough for today."

"When is it enough for ever?" I said.

"It never is," she said. "But you can learn to live with it."

I stroked her fur. Soft and warm. Her heart beat slowly and steadily against my wrist.

And I sat there in the quiet room with the dying fire and thought that my mother was out there somewhere in the dark, and that she knew who I was, and that she was sending me feathers because she couldn't send me anything else. And that was more than I had had in fifteen years. It was infinitely more. But it still wasn't enough.

It's never enough to know that someone loves you, if you can't feel them.