Perhaps her eye had been drawn to the embroidery that ran around the edge of the garment: a repeating pattern of crows’ heads. In reenactment groups it was customary for each participant to adopt a persona, or, at a bare minimum, a nickname that wouldn’t sound too jarringly anachronistic when called out in the heat of action. Corvallis had become Corvus, which was just the Latin word for “crow.” It was partly an obvious contraction of his real name and partly a reference to his coloration. One of his parents had been half Japanese, the other South Asian. Noticing this, and calling it out in a nickname, wouldn’t have been polite by modern standards. But there was no getting around the fact that, in a Roman legion, he’d have stood out as some sort of exotic from the Eastern provinces. The other Romans would have slapped some such name on him. Corvus it was. At first he’d been mildly uncomfortable with it, as he’d associated such birds with Edgar Allan Poe and goth culture in general. With time and repetition his thinking had adjusted. He now saw it through a hybrid of Pacific Northwest aboriginal myths and Roman aviomancy. The only birds you saw in Seattle were seagulls, crows, and eagles. Seagulls were ubiquitous, mindless consumers. Eagles were spectacular, huge, badass, but comparatively rare; people would actually stop what they were doing and look up when an eagle flew by. Crows, or ravens (the distinction was unclear), were set apart by their extreme intelligence, memory, and resourcefulness; but no matter how well they embodied those fine traits, no one appreciated them.

Of crows, people tended to predicate the same traits that they did of Asians when they had forgotten politically correct habits of speech, or never acquired them in the first place. Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn’t tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable. But living inside of his own head, Corvus well knew his own motives. There was nothing wrong with those motives and he didn’t need to justify them to anyone else.