The walk back from the chess room took longer than it should have, mostly because Aurora kept finding reasons to slow down, and by the time she finally pushed open the door to her room, she found the Princess had beaten her there by a considerable margin — already out of her uniform, already halfway into an opinion about what pair of heels to wear, and had already, apparently, laid Aurora's own dress across the second bed.
"There you are," The Princess said, without looking up from the heel in question, as though Aurora's absence had been a minor scheduling error rather than two hours spent on club searching. "I was starting to think you'd fallen in a moat somewhere."
"That'd be a long walk to the nearest moat." Aurora braved a joke. "I was at chess club."
"I know. I know. I knew you'd go to chess club. Resonant Research is too risky for your cover, and the rest were either run by weirdos or super boring." The Princess set the heel down and turned her full attention instead to the dress laid out across the coverlet — blue, as requested. Deep, saturated, the color of water at a depth where the sun stopped reaching it, cut off at the shoulder in a way that left her collarbones and the long line of her neck entirely undefended. Aurora had tried it on once, three days ago, alone, and had spent a full minute in front of the mirror deciding whether she had the nerve to actually wear it in front of other people before folding it carefully back over its hanger and not thinking about it again until now.
"You're thinking too hard," The Princess said, from behind her, fingers working through the last section of Aurora's hair with the experience of someone who had done this many times before, for herself if no one else. "I can practically hear you overthinking. It's a very specific kind of quiet."
"I'm not overthinking. I'm building courage. There's a difference."
"Is there?" The Princess pinned the final section into place and stepped back to survey her work with a critical eye. "There. Now the finishing piece."
She crossed to her own dressing table and came back with a small velvet box, offering it without ceremony, the same way she offered most things — like a fact rather than an occasion, though her eyes gave her away, right and a little hopeful in a way she probably didn't know she was showing.
Inside sat a sapphire hairclip, small and old-fashioned, wrought in silver filigree that had clearly been made by hand a very long time ago and loved enough since to catch the light without a scratch on it.
"It was my grandmother's," The Princess said, before Aurora could ask. "Technically it's mine now, which means I can do whatever I like with it, and what I like is for you to wear it tonight." She was already reaching for it, already sliding it into place against the dark sweep of Aurora's hair without waiting for permission. Aurora was used to it by now, her roommate's behavior tended to follow a precise script: Decide first, explain after, apologize never, because there was rarely anything to apologize for.
"I don't have anything to give you back."
"I didn't ask for anything back, silly." The Princess adjusted the clip a fraction, stepped back, and made a small, clearly satisfied sound. "There. Perfect. Stop arguing with a compliment, it's unbecoming of a lady."
Aurora looked at herself in the mirror — dark hair swept up with a dead grandmother's sapphire catching the last of the window light, the dress waiting on the bed behind her like something she still hadn't fully decided to put on yet — and her hand drifted, without her quite meaning to, to her ear. To the earrings that framed both sides of her face. Small, old, a teardrop of sapphire, the kind of thing that would have looked plain beside the hairpiece.
"My father bought these for my mother," she said, and head her own voice come out quieter than she'd meant to. "Before I was born. He never got to give them to her. She died before he had the chance."
The Princess went very still behind her, the particular kind of someone who understood, without being told, that the wrong response here could close a door that had only just cracked open.
"He gave them to me instead. When I was old enough to have them fit on my ears." Aurora turned the earring gently between two fingers, an old habit, rarely used, her hands seemed to remember better than her mind did. "He said she would have wanted me to have something of hers, even secondhand. Even like this." A small, rare, humorless breath, not even quite a laugh. "I wore them every day. For years."
She didn't say the next part. She had never said this next part to anyone, not even Julian, who had read the Bureau's clinical account of her health report and never once asked her to fill in what the reports had left tactfully blank. But some things, she'd found, could be said sideways, in the space between sentences, and the Princess — who was still standing behind her, hands holding the brush lightly, waiting — seemed like the kind of person who knew how to hear that too.
"I hid them for a few years. I kept them sown into the hem of whatever I was wearing, wherever I could hide a seam without it showing. I never wore them, not once, for six years." Aurora met her own eyes in the mirror rather than looking up. "I didn't trust anything I loved to survive being seen."
Oxygen ceased within the room.
"I start wearing them again the week Julian signed my registration papers for the Bureau's Advanced Magic School," Aurora said, and this part came out a bit steadier than the rest of it, almost matter of fact. "It felt like — deciding something. A first in a long time. That I got to wear them now. That no one was going to take them if I let them be seen."
The Princess didn't say anything for a moment. Then her hands tightened, very slightly, on the brush, and she leaned down and pressed her forehead briefly against the crown of Aurora's head — not a hug, not quite, she knew Aurora didn't like those, just a weight and a warmth held there for a moment.
"Thank you for telling me," she said and straightened, and cleared her throat with the directness of a girl who had decided, quite firmly, that if she let herself feel the whole size of that story right now, they would both be late. "Now get in the dress before I put you in it myself. We have a ball to attend, and I refuse to be the reason we're unfashionably late."
Aurora huffed something that was almost a laugh, and reached for the blue dress, and did not, this time, hesitate.
The Great Hall had been transformed.
Aurora had walked through it a hundred times in the past weeks — chalk dust, ribbon, the low murmur of ordinary school life — and none of that had prepared her for what it looked like lit for the evening: Every chandelier blazing, silver and pale gold catching candlelight until the whole ceiling seemed to shimmer like something underwater, the long windows thrown open to a courtyard strung with more of the same, and beneath it all, a crowd of Isaria's finest arranged in their best clothes and manners. Several hundred conversations buzzed around them, which Aurora suspected were rather less about the ball and more about connection.
"—if your father's willing to discuss the shipping tariff before the Council session, my mother would be very glad to—"
"—a formal introduction, nothing more, I only think our houses have been overdue a proper alliance for some—"
"—well, if the Veldric holdings are truly for sale in the eastern parcel, I know several parties who'd—"
Aurora had expected romance, or something adjacent to it — nervous dances, whispered confessions, the general fever of several hundred pent up teenagers dressed up and hoping. What she had not expected, standing at the edge of the waiting hall in a dress that left her feeling considerably more visible than she was used to, was quite how much of the room sounded like a trading floor wearing silk. These kids have truly been brainwashed by their parents.
"Everyone's networking," she muttered, more to herself than anyone else.
"Everyone's always networking," The Princess said, entirely unbothered by the chaos of voices around them. "It's simply better dressed tonight. Come on. We're announced in five minutes, and I refuse to let you spend any more time hovering by the door looking to escape."
"I am planning an escape route."
"I know. That's why I said it."
The Opening Processional formed at the top of the grand stair, couples arranging themselves by some order of precedence Aurora didn't fully understand and didn't have time to ask about, and she felt her pulse pick up somewhere around the third pair ahead of them — Prince Damien, immaculate in formal blue-and-gold, Eira on his arm in green that suited her exactly as well as the rumor mill had insisted in would.
"They're going to announce us..." Aurora said, with the sinking realization of having to go in front of the eyes of hundreds, without a cloak or staff to hide behind.
"Yes."
"B-By name. In front of everyone."
"That is generally how it works, yes." The Princess took her arm gently and unhurried, and Aurora felt the small effect it had on her chest that had been rattling loose since they got dressed. She knew she would be fine. She just had to breathe. Breathe and allow her heart to settle.
"This is a different category of danger."
"Is it."
The herald's voice rang out the hall before Aurora could formulate a comeback to that, calling names in pairs, each one met by a ripple of applause and a fresh surge of murmured rumors being confirmed — Prince Damien Cayne and Lady Eira Vandenberg, met with a warm applause that the entire school had, in fact, been rooting for it — and then, two pairs later, Aurora's own name arrived to her ears with the surreal, underwater quality of hearing something important being announced about someone else.
Princess Alara Cayne and Lady Aurora Ashcroft, ward of the House of Partridge.
The room turned to look. All of it, all at once, a field of grass turning due to a single gust of wind — and it did not look away quickly. Aurora caught pieces of it, in-between her drowning anxiety, as she came down the stairs, fragments she'd missed if she hadn't spent years learning to read a room in half a second: A woman's hand pausing halfway to her mouth, a cluster of upper-year boys going silent, someone near Aurora's pipedream of a punch table murmuring something to their neighbor that ended in the Partridge ward? with an inflection Aurora couldn't place. She felt every muscle in her body attempt several contradictory instructions — stand straighter, don't look nervous, don't be too regal either, don't trip, don't breathe too hard, but don't forget to breathe, why is everyone looking still — and settled, with some relief, on the working theory that the room was simply putting a name to a face finally, the other theory she liked rather less — that it might have had considerably less to do with politics and more how the dress hugged her body.
The Princess's hand found hers properly, fingers lacing through instead of merely resting, and squeezed once before letting go as they continued their descent down the grand stair together into a wall of candlelight and attention that Aurora somehow, against every prediction she'd made about herself in the mirror three days ago, did not die from.
"See," The Princess murmured as soon as they reached the floor, and the applause had rolled onto the next pair. "Still alive."
"Barely."
"You look wonderful. For the record."
Aurora, who had not been fishing for that and was annoyed at herself for how much it was working on her, said nothing, and hoped the low light was doing enough work to hide whatever expression her subconscious decided to throw on her face.
The floor opened for dancing not long after, and the crowd rearranged itself onto the loose current of a party finding its shape, and Aurora — having successfully survived the worst of it and was mentally preparing to speak to people — allowed herself, for the first time all evening, to actually look around the room instead of simply enduring it.
Nearly everyone she'd met in the past months seemed to be somewhere in it. Perrin Loxley stood near the refreshment table in dark green, mid-argument with another club member about something that involved a great deal of hand gesturing, and was, Aurora was fairly certain, still somehow about chess. Professor Rennick and Master Finch had installed themselves in chairs near the wall, discussing amply about something with glasses of something quite similar to the color of hard liquor and the satisfaction of professors who considered chaperoning to consist entirely of sitting down. Magister Rendall was deep in discussion with himself at a table it seemed, mostly likely arguing with himself about the history of Dire Wolves in the Ardac Plains.
Maret was there too, in Bureau formal dress rather than field colors, deep in conversation with a cluster of upper-year Resonant Research students who were, from the shape of their gestures, still arguing about Harmonic saturation thresholds even here.
"You survived the walk down. Surprising," said a voice at her elbow, and Aurora turned nervously to find Antonio, immaculately handsome as always, a glass of something pale in one hand and a smile that seemed to finally touch his eyes a bit. "I had you fifty-fifty odds-on tripping."
"Y-You did not." Aurora looked at his feet with slightly puffed cheeks.
"I did. I would have caught you though. Purely as a gesture of goodwill."
"How reassuring." Aurora finally looked at him with an expression that, while not quite disgust, was certainly renting an apartment in the neighborhood. It conveyed the feeling that she thought of him as if he were a rat scurrying around the ballroom floor.
He paid it no mind as he inclined his head toward the dance floor, where Damien and Eira were turning through the first proper dance. Eira could be seen laughing at something, surprising, considering Damien's sense of humor. "They look happy."
"They do."
"Good." He said it simply, without the usual practiced warmth underneath it, and for one brief moment, Aurora thought she might have glimpsed into something deeper about Antonio. Then his easy smile slid back into place. "I'm still owed a chess match, by the way. Don't think the ball's bought you a reprieve."
"I wasn't aware I needed one." Aurora spoke with a calm that only came from discussing things that she rather quite enjoyed.
"You will," he said, and drifted off toward the refreshments with confidence, not even saying goodbye, leaving Aurora with the distinct taste of displeasure in her mouth.
"Lady Ashcroft."
The voice that replaced him caused her to jump slightly, not the best thing to do in heels. It was crisper and lighter on the ears, and belonged to a girl Aurora recognized — vaguely, from council announcements she'd half-listened to weeks ago — but had never actually spoken to. Dark hair braided back with more practicality than elegance for the occasion, sea-grey eyes, sun-warmed skin that read as faintly foreign against the pale Heartland crowd around her, and a small silver brooch at her collar shaped like a lighthouse, worn with deliberate visibility, like a flag planted on contested ground.
"Isla Rourke," she said, extending a handout. "Thornhaven. My mother sits the Vice Governor's chair, for now — I'm meant to inherit it, assuming I don't commit something spectacularly foolish first." A faint curve of the mouth that might have been humor. "I sit council with Prince Damien. He speaks well of you, from what little he has said."
"That's — kind of him."
"Exactly. He isn't always." Isla's eyes moved over her once. "I understand that you're Duke Partridge's ward now. From what I hear, he's not a man who extends that sort of protection lightly."
"He isn't," Aurora agreed. It was the one sentence she could say firmly without stutter or anxiety because she had practiced it so much. She had gotten quite good at circling that question in six slightly different ways over the past few weeks and giving away nothing while appearing to give away everything. "I'm very fortunate."
Isla made a sound, not entirely satisfied with that answer, though she seemed to have let it go, probably thinking about different avenues she could take later on. "Thornhaven's spent a great deal of energy trying to be taken seriously by rooms like this one. I find it's usually more production to ask direct than to wait for gossip to answer them badly. Forgive my bluntness."
Her stare caused Aurora to look down slightly.
"There's nothing to forgive," she said quieter than she had hoped.
"Good." A small nod, entirely businesslike and already turned toward the next interesting thing. Aurora was content with no longer being the object of great interest. "Enjoy your evening, Lady Ashcroft. I suspect we'll speak again."
She moved off into the crowd with the same purpose she'd arrived with, and Aurora watched her go, filing the girl away in the same mental drawer that housed people she very much did not want to get involved with. That drawer was becoming rather more crowded than she would have liked.
"Making friends?" The Princess appeared at her side, flushed and bright from an earlier dance, sliding an arm through Aurora's without asking, which felt strangely good rather than repulsive.
"Making a list." She found herself slightly leaning into the Princess's touch, which was utterly foreign to her when dealing with anyone else.
"Of what?"
"Problems." Aurora watched Isla Rourke fold seamlessly into a conversation with two visiting merchant guild representatives on the far side of the room, already gesturing toward something that looked, from her, suspiciously like a trade proposal. She's going to make for one scary Vice Governor one day. "It's a longer list than I'd like."
"Welcome to court," The Princess said, with a cheerful, weary fondness of someone who'd been making the same list her entire life. "Come dance with me instead. I refuse to let politics win over your entire evening."
Aurora, albeit a little reluctantly, let herself be forcibly pulled on the floor, sapphire catching candlelight in her hair, and for the length of one dance, at least, allowed the list to wait.