Penelope had been avoiding a conversation with me.
This would have been easier to ignore if I had not also been avoiding the same conversation.
It had been a week since the Crucible, and we had spoken every day of it. About Selene's four pages, which Penelope read over my shoulder without being invited and corrected in two places. About the rope across the northern path. About whether anything could be done about Cedric, which we had been discussing in one form or another since the second day of term and which neither of us expected to win.
We had not once spoken about the clearing.
The morning after the Crucible, I had decided that I would be the one to bring it up, and that I would be bad at it. I had spent the week since then proving myself right about the second part by never getting as far as the first.
I found her after lunch on Tuesday.
