Chapter 1253: Secondhand (2)

"I wonder why someone is secretly listening?"

Elara turned before she had decided to. She had taken the room for emptying, and it had only been thinning. A pair of second-years lingered over their satchels on the left, taking an unusual interest in the clasps. A boy by the door was reading the notice board he had passed on the way in. None of them were looking at her, which made it worse.

At the foot of the tiers, a few steps from the door, Priscilla stood with one hand on the strap of her bag, plainly not leaving.

Up close, her eyes were a deeper crimson than they had looked from across the room, and the dark lashes above them made them stranger still. It was a face made to be looked at, and she had clearly spent years learning to give nothing back. Elara could not have said why it still looked beautiful to her, only that it did. Then Priscilla blinked once, and her fingers moved on the strap.

"I apologize," she said.

Her voice was as low and even as ever, and the first word had caught on her breath. Elara saw it. So did Selphine, whose mouth twitched at one corner before she flattened it.

"There’s no need," Elara said, too fast. "We weren’t saying anything private. Sit if you like, or don’t." She heard herself and stopped.

’Why am I the one reassuring her?’

It was a strange thing to be doing. She had no standing to spare a princess embarrassment, and nothing Priscilla had done asked for it. She only found that she did not want the apology, from her, in this room.

"It is kind of you to say so." Priscilla’s gaze stayed on her a moment, then went politely to the wall. "I heard an incident in the Martial sector being discussed, and a name I have some reason to follow. I stayed to hear the rest. That was discourteous, and it would have been less so to say I was here." She drew a breath. "I will leave you to it."

Selphine had risen while she spoke. She inclined her head to the depth the occasion called for, and kept her face still from the chin up. "Your Highness."

Aurelian, a half-second late, bowed as well.

Priscilla nodded to the three of them, the silver of her hair swinging once against her back, and went out. Elara watched the door settle behind her.

"Well." Selphine sat down again, not quite straight-faced yet. "She stood through the whole beggar business, you know. Didn’t blink."

"Can we go back," Aurelian said, "to Reilan nearly drawing on someone?"

Selphine did not go back to the yard. She was still looking at the door, chin resting on her knuckles, long after it had stopped moving.

"Hm," she said.

"Selphine." Aurelian dropped onto the bench behind them. "Reilan."

"In a moment." She tapped her pen once against the desk. "She said a name she has reason to follow."

"Yes?"

"Only yes? We all know what she meant."

"...."

"She did not say any incident, nor the Martial sector. A princess who stays to eavesdrop isn’t curious about a yard fight." Her eyes came round to Elara. "It was his name that held her. Don’t you think?"

"Probably." There was no point pretending otherwise. "You were there, you and Aurelian, when he got her out of that mess. She’s not going to forget that."

"No. I doubt anyone would." Selphine said it lightly. "I keep thinking about how it looked from where we stood, though. He didn’t only get her out of it. He made it look easy, and she was the one left standing there with everything he’d done."

"It did look easy," Aurelian admitted.

"People forget being rescued by next week." The pen turned over in her fingers. "Some of them decide it was an introduction."

She said it to the room in general, but her gaze rested on Elara’s face the whole time, a little longer than the subject needed. Elara did not notice. She was busy noticing something else, a small tightness under her ribs that had not been there a moment ago, and that she liked even less than the word beggar.

’It’s none of my business.’

It was not. A princess could follow whatever names she liked. Elara found her hand on the clasp of her bag again and made it stop.

"If there is something, it’s their business," she said. "Can we do the yard? Please."

"Mm." Selphine’s mouth curved, for no reason Elara could see, and she sat back, looking pleased with herself. "Fine. So. He stopped, and nobody knows why."

"Which gets me to the part I actually wanted to ask." Aurelian leaned his forearms along the back of the bench. "Whoever said it, Reilan crossed a yard at him in front of half the Martial sector. Then he stopped, for whatever reason. So does Reilan have an enemy now?"

Nobody answered at once.

"That depends who said it," Selphine said.

"Who did?" Elara asked.

"Three names, depending on the telling. I won’t give you one I can’t stand behind."

"Then it depends what the quarrel was," Aurelian said. He rubbed his jaw. "If it was only a mouth, he’s made one more person who’d like to see him embarrassed, and that happens weekly. But if it was Lucavion’s quarrel, and Reilan walked into it, then he’s picked up everyone who wants Lucavion down. And they’ve just learned he’ll draw over a word." His voice went flat. "Those people don’t need a reason to like a new target. They’d only need the opening."

"You’re building a whole war out of a rumor," Selphine said.

"I’m asking whether I should be."

Elara had no answer for him. She sat with her hand on her bag and tried to sort what she had been given into what she could believe.

The word was easy. It was ugly and short, the sort of thing people repeat, so it had probably been said. Cedric across the yard before the sentence was done was easier still. That was the one piece that sounded like him, and she could see it, the speed of it and the hand already at the hilt. What she could not see was the stopping. Cedric did not stop for nothing. Someone or something had held him, and nobody in three tellings could name it. The more she sorted, the less she had that she could check.

And then there was Lucavion, standing in one version, owning the quarrel in another, and left out of a third. A name like that stuck to any trouble in the Block, because everyone already expected to find it there. It might be invention from the first word to the last. It might also be the one true thing in the whole account, and she would not know the difference from here. She noticed which she would rather it were, and left that alone.

Cedric had said nothing to her about any of it.

That decided it. Elara stood and slung her bag onto her shoulder.

"I’ll ask him myself," she said.

*****

Priscilla made it as far as the corridor before she let herself slow down.

The door had closed behind her without a sound, which she counted as the one courtesy the afternoon had left her. Walking on, she pressed two fingers against her bag strap until the leather stopped being something to hold and went back to being leather.

She had meant to leave: the tiers sloping away under her boots, the doorway ahead, her stylus already capped. Then a word had reached her from three benches back, and her feet had stopped on the last step without consulting her.

Beggar.

Then its full name. ’Salon beggar.’

She knew the phrase. It had never been aimed at her, because a princess could not borrow standing she already held, which was exactly why the court had needed other words for her. But she knew how it was built and what it was for. Someone had chosen it for Elowyn Caerlin, who sat capping her ink a few benches up and had plainly not heard it before today.

Priscilla could have walked on at that point. Instead she heard out the rest: the yard, the hand on the hilt, Reilan stopping for reasons nobody could name. Somewhere in the middle she remembered that Thalor’s bench had emptied halfway through the lecture, and that he had gone without a glance toward the third tier. She noted it and set it aside.

Then Lucavion’s name had come up, in three versions, and she had stayed for all of them.

’It isn’t mine.’

It wasn’t. She had no claim on a quarrel in a yard or a rumor with its edges still wet, and no reason to be standing at the foot of the tiers like someone waiting on a verdict.

Which version would he have—

She stopped the thought there.

"I wonder why someone is secretly listening?"

Selphine Elowen had said it pleasantly, to the side of the room, and Elowyn had turned before Priscilla could decide to move. The apology had come out before her breath was ready for it, and the first word had caught. Priscilla remembered that too, and decided the corridor was a poor place to examine it.

Ahead, the passage turned toward the east stair. She straightened her shoulders by a degree, the way she did before a long hall.

There were things waiting on her that had nothing to do with yards or rumors, and they would not move for being put off.