Chapter 1210: Where the Corridor Divides

"That will be all."

Selenne did not raise her voice for it. She lifted her palm from the instructor’s plate instead, and the light left the room in stages: first the recording plates, their pale lines dissolving from the center outward, then the pins along each station, then the threads beneath the floor. The stillness of the exercise went with it. Chairs scraped, notebooks closed, and sixteen students who had spent the morning attending to their own wrists began, audibly, to attend to one another.

Elara stayed seated long enough to square her notes. They were written for herself alone: abbreviations, a ratio beside the third trace, one question underlined twice about where her own correction had begun. She capped her pen before she looked up.

Lucavion was already on his feet, sliding the assignment sheet into the bag at his hip. He had come in carrying something she could not name, a quiet with no rest in it, and it had hung about him through the first hour like a coat he had forgotten to remove. It had not gone. But somewhere between the crooked line on his plate and Selenne’s question about the third boundary, his attention had returned to the work and stayed there. Now the heaviness sat beneath the interest instead of in place of it.

The black of his Martial uniform, the estoc at his hip, cut a hard line through the students streaming past him from the Magicians’ Block.

"Try to leave at least one movement alone before you improve it," she said as he shouldered the bag. "Outside this room, I mean. That is what she asked for."

"I’ll try being less helpful." He tugged the strap flat. "Fair warning, the habit doesn’t like being told."

"What happened before the lesson?"

She had not planned to ask it here. It came out plainer than she intended, and she let it stand.

His hand stopped on the strap. He looked at her, and it was clear that he had heard every word and would not pretend otherwise. The room went on around them: someone’s laughter, a stool dragged across stone.

Elara gave it one breath. "Is there anything at all you intend to tell me?"

"I heard you," Lucavion said.

That was the whole of it. He held her gaze a moment longer, not unkindly, then nodded once and turned toward the doors and the corridor that led to the Martial sector.

She watched him go, and the manner of it bothered her more than the silence had.

’A joke would have been easier. Even a bad one.’

Lucavion turned questions the way he turned a blade, aside and lightly, with something of his own left in the opening: a half-truth, a question back that she would spend the next hour answering. This time the opening held nothing. He had put whatever it was where she could not follow, and he had done it on purpose.

It did not follow that he distrusted her. It followed only that something had happened and that he did not mean to hand it over yet. She could hold that much. It did not make her less irritated, or less curious, and she carried both back to her notes.

Isolde had finished before most of the room. Her papers were squared in their case, her pen aligned to its edge, and she was closing a brief exchange with a girl from the next station in the same even courtesy she gave everyone. Then she went out, unhurried. Elara’s attention followed her as far as the door, the way it followed most things in that room, and stopped there. A student leaving a classroom offered nothing to carry away.

Of the whole morning, Elara kept two things, and neither needed a page.

’Lucavion tidies every current before it reaches the plate.... As for Isolde...’

Elara knew that she built her answers out of corrections meant for someone else.

The first she had told him in the library and Selenne had now shown him on a plate. The second she had only watched happen. She wrote them as two lines, closed the book and checked the time. Her next class would not wait for her.

The corridor beyond the doors was already full. Two routes parted at the first archway, one bending toward the Martial sector and the other running on into the Magicians’ Block, and the crowd sorted itself between them without anyone directing it. Down the first branch, the last black uniforms were disappearing around the curve. She did not look for his.

During the examinations she had never needed to wonder where he would be; the schedule had simply put them in the same rooms. She noted the fork the way she noted any change in the timetable, and took the branch that was hers.

Students closed around her, bags on shoulders, conversations resuming in the middle of their sentences, and the stream carried her on toward her next class.

The classroom Elara entered had nothing of Selenne’s discipline. Benches ran in shallow tiers instead of rings, and the room was already loud with a first-year Magicians’ Block that had not yet been told to be quiet: bags dropped on benches, greetings thrown across aisles, groups forming by friendship or rank or whichever had arrived first. Nobody had finished choosing a seat. Nobody expected to.

She was still composing replies to "I heard you" when the noise took the thought away.

"Elowyn." Selphine had turned on the second tier, one hand resting on the bag she had placed on the bench beside her. It was a practical signal, and Elara took it as one. "Sit before someone reasonable claims it."

"No one in this room is reasonable before the instructor arrives," Aurelian said from her other side. "Two weeks ago we shared a hallway. This morning a neighbor from 7-A and I passed on the stairs and nodded like colleagues at a funeral."

"You are exaggerating." Selphine had already laid her timetable flat on the bench.

They compared schedules in the time it took Elara to sit: the midday meal coincided on three days, the evenings on none unless someone reserved a room, and the library reserved nothing for people who forgot to ask. Selphine marked the overlaps with a pen and settled the matter the way she settled most things. "Coordination is only accident with a schedule."

"Does Thursday count?" Aurelian asked. "I keep losing Thursday."

"Thursday counts." Selphine looked up from the page a moment longer than the timetable needed. "You came in with a frown you have not put down."

"The last class ran long."

"Magister Marisse’s?"

"Yes." It was true, and Selphine accepted it as she accepted most things, provisionally, and returned to her pen.

"Lady Caerlin?" A boy from the row behind leaned forward, a page already in his hand. "Did the second problem close for you? Mine keeps folding back on itself."

"Not on the first attempt," Elara said. "Begin from what the problem fixes, and see what remains free to vary."

He thanked her a shade too formally and bent over his page. ’A week ago he would not have asked.’

She was turning back to the front when the noise near the door changed. If she were to gently describe how it happened...

’It certainly have gotten stiffer.’

And as if to answer her thoughts, the culprit, if she were to be called that made her appearence.

Silver-white hair fell straight to her waist, unbound and unadorned, and against it her eyes were a deep crimson that no one else in the room could have claimed. The uniform was the same as everyone’s, worn without the small ornaments the students around her had added to theirs. Nothing at collar or cuff announced her, and the restraint did the announcing instead.

Entering alone, Priscilla looked around. A boy by the entrance bowed to exactly the depth owed and rose into a conversation with someone else before the greeting could become one. A girl asked whether she had finished the reading, listened to the answer, thanked her, and left the exchange precisely where it ended. Priscilla thanked her in return. No one was rude. Everyone was correct.

She took a seat on the third tier. Both benches beside her stayed empty, and the room filled around the gap without appearing to see it. She had chosen the place with the door in view. Elara had seen the same choice once before, in a corridor, from a distance she had not closed.

Most of the space was fear. Elara could read it in where the eyes went: not to Priscilla but past her, across the room, toward whoever might be counting how long a greeting lasted and with whom. Those students would have offered her a chair if no one had been watching.

A boy and a girl by the windows were not watching for anyone. Elara knew them only by whom they sat near, and that was enough. They had greeted the students on either side of Priscilla by name and looked at the space between as though it were a draft. When Priscilla passed their row, the boy said to the girl, pleasantly, "They say the Academy admits on more than ranking these days," and the girl laughed at exactly the volume that could later be called private.

Priscilla did not check her stride. She reached the end of the row, turned, and waited until the girl’s eyes had to meet hers. Then she inclined her head to precisely the degree owed a fellow student and sat. The girl’s smile stayed where it was, arriving a moment behind the rest of her.

Elara understood then what the room had been doing. Priscilla was treated correctly in every formal sense, bowed to, consulted, addressed by title, and denied everything formality was not obliged to give. The frightened ones looked at consequences. The two by the windows looked at Priscilla, to see whether it landed. Both produced the same empty benches, and they were not the same thing, though from the third tier they would look identical.

Aurelian tilted his head toward her without taking his eyes off the front. "You have been looking at the third tier for a while now."

"I know."

"Everyone else has been very careful not to." He said it lightly, but he did not smile. On his far side, Selphine turned a page that did not need turning.

’Not yet. Not until there is somewhere to stand that does not make it worse for her.’

The door banged against its stop before the room had finished settling, and a student stumbled in breathing like someone who had taken the stairs two at a time.

"Did you see what was posted on the bulletin board?"

Heads turned along the tiers, though not all at once. The boy from the row behind Elara looked up from his page. "No. Is it about the lectures? The sessions?"

"Man." The newcomer stared at him. "Is the lectures all you ever think about?"

"What else is there?"

The newcomer opened his mouth, shut it, and glanced around the room as though he had only now noticed how many people were listening. When he spoke again he had dropped his voice, which only made the room lean closer.

"The wager. Magister Marisse’s wager against that Martial commoner. If her student beats him, he’s out of the Academy. She’s named who it is."

Elara set her pen down.

"Oh...."

The reactions immediately arose from the whole classroom.

"Who is it?" the boy asked, finally giving voice to their thoughts.

"It is Thalor Draycott."