— Aldric POV —
He had rehearsed this.
Three times, actually. Once in the mirror — which felt stupid but he did it anyway — once walking to class, and once in his head during a particularly boring lecture on magical theory where Professor Vane drew the same circle diagram he always drew and called it new insight.
The speech was good. He knew it was good. It was honest and clear and said exactly what he meant without being too much. He had even run it past Lirien, who had made a face he chose to interpret as encouraging.
He found Seraphine in the east garden after her afternoon class. Perfect. She was alone, which he had been counting on, standing near the stone bench looking at nothing in particular the way she sometimes did — like she was watching something nobody else could see.
He walked over.
She looked at him.
He opened his mouth.
The speech evaporated. Completely. Every word. Gone. He stood there for two full seconds with nothing in his head except the vague awareness that he had prepared something.
"Aldric," she said. Not unkindly. Just — acknowledging that he existed and was standing in front of her with no apparent reason.
That helped. He found a sentence.
"I'd like to talk to you," he said. "About — us. About what I—" He stopped. Started again. "I think you know that I — that there's something I've been wanting to say for a while and I—"
"Aldric." Her voice was still gentle. That almost made it worse. "I know what you're going to say."
"Then—"
"The answer is no."
He heard the words. He processed them. He understood them.
His brain, helpfully, offered: maybe she means something else.
His brain was wrong. He knew it was wrong.
"Can I—" he said.
"I'm not interested," she said. Simple. No cruelty in it. "I'm not going to be interested. This isn't about timing or circumstance, it's just — no. And I think you deserve to hear that clearly rather than have me keep being vague about it."
He stood there.
He was not used to things not working out. Not because he was arrogant — he didn't think he was arrogant — but because things generally did work out. He was the hero. That was the thing about being the hero. The story moved toward you.
Seraphine was looking at him like she was waiting for him to finish processing. Patient. Calm. Like she'd been ready for this conversation for a long time and had given up on him starting it.
"Is it Ashveil," he said.
Something changed in her expression. Not much. Just a small careful shift, there and gone.
"It isn't not Ashveil," she said. Which was not a yes but was also aggressively not a no.
The thing that happened in his chest — he didn't have a good word for it. Not heartbreak, not quite. Something more like vertigo. Like he had been standing on ground he trusted and it had turned out to be a painting of ground.
"He's a clerk," Aldric said. He heard how it sounded. He hated how it sounded. He said it anyway because he had no better argument ready.
"Yes," she said. "He is."
"He has nothing. He's—"
"Aldric." She said it quietly. "Don't."
He stopped.
Because she was right. He could hear it. Don't finish that sentence, don't be that person, don't take the thing you're feeling and turn it into something ugly about someone else.
He breathed.
"Okay," he said.
She nodded. She looked — sorry. Actually sorry, not performance of sorry. That almost made it better and worse at the same time.
He walked away.
He made it to the end of the garden path before he sat down on a low wall and put his head in his hands and thought: so that's what that feels like.
It felt terrible. He did not recommend it.
— Seraphine POV —
She stood in the garden after he left and felt like a person who had just done something necessary and correct and completely awful.
In the novel Aldric confessed on page eighty and she — the original Seraphine, novel-Seraphine, the one who hadn't read the book first — had felt warm and uncertain and had gone home and written about it in a diary like a normal seventeen year old.
She had never kept a diary in her life. Either life.
She sat on the stone bench.
Okay. Thinking about it clearly. Aldric was hurt. Aldric was going to be unhappy for a while. That was real and she wasn't happy about it — she wasn't a monster, she had functioning empathy, she just also had a former life as an assassin and a current life inside a novel she'd already read and neither of those things left much room for pretending to feel something she didn't.
She didn't feel it.
She thought about who she did feel something for, which was a thought she immediately grabbed by the collar and threw out of her brain.
Not yet.
Not — she wasn't ready to poke at that yet. It was there. She knew it was there. She was leaving it alone the way you leave alone a bruise you don't want to know the size of.
The real problem — the actual problem — was the isn't not Ashveil she'd said.
She had not planned to say that.
It had come out because Aldric had asked and she was tired of being careful and it was the truth so her mouth had just — produced it. Without consulting her. Rude of her mouth.
Aldric now knew something.
Aldric was hurt and knew something.
In her professional experience — both lives — hurt people with something to be angry about were significantly more dangerous than people who were simply angry. Anger had a shape. Hurt with a target was messier.
She needed to tell Caelum.
She thought about telling Caelum.
She thought about how she would word it. Hey, the hero of this world just got rejected partly because of you, you might want to watch your back. Casual. Easy. Totally fine.
She thought about his face when she said isn't not Ashveil and he didn't know and couldn't hear it.
She thought: this is fine. Everything is completely fine.
She went inside.
— Lirien POV —
Aldric came back from the garden looking like someone had gently removed something from inside his chest and handed it back to him in pieces.
Lirien had been sitting on the common room steps with a book, which she wasn't reading, because she had seen him head toward the garden twenty minutes ago with the expression of a person who had rehearsed something and she had known, with the specific knowing of someone who had been watching Seraphine Valdros deflect for a year, exactly how this was going to go.
She had hoped she was wrong.
She wasn't wrong.
She closed her book.
"Aldric," she said.
He looked at her. She had never seen him look quite like that before. Not destroyed — Aldric was too sturdy for destroyed — but genuinely, honestly bewildered. Like the world had malfunctioned and he was waiting for someone to explain the error.
"She said no," he said.
"I know."
"You knew she'd say no."
A pause. She chose honesty because she always chose honesty even when it was inconvenient. "I thought it was likely, yes."
"You could have said something."
"I thought you needed to hear it from her." She moved over on the steps. He sat down. "I'm sorry. That it hurts. It's okay that it hurts."
He put his elbows on his knees and looked at the ground.
"She mentioned Ashveil," he said.
Lirien stilled.
"She said it wasn't not him," Aldric said. "Which means—"
"I know what it means."
"He's a clerk, Lirien."
"I know what he is." She said it quietly. "I also know he's interesting. I talked to him last week. He's — not what I expected." She looked at Aldric sideways. "He told me I have a bad habit of apologizing for things that aren't my fault."
Aldric stared at her.
"He said that to you."
"And I laughed. And he looked alarmed by the laugh." She hugged her book to her chest. "He's odd. But not in a bad way. He's—" she searched for the word. "Real. In a way that's hard to explain."
Aldric was quiet for a long moment.
She could see him trying. That was the thing about Aldric that she could never fully let go of — he tried. He kept trying. He got things wrong and he was stubborn and he had a blind spot about himself the size of a small country, but he tried.
"I was wrong," he said finally. "About the alcove. The spell. That was wrong of me."
"Yes," she said. No softening. He didn't need softening, he needed agreement.
"I don't know how to fix it."
"I don't think you can fix it. I think you can just — not make it worse." She stood up. "Don't go after him, Aldric. Whatever you're feeling right now, don't take it there."
He looked up at her.
"I wasn't going to," he said.
She looked at him.
"I wasn't," he said again. Less certain.
She gave him the look she gave him when he needed to sit with something uncomfortable. He gave her the look of a man who was going to sit with it but wasn't happy about it.
She went inside.
She thought about Caelum Ashveil eating lunch alone on the east steps last Tuesday, reading a document, completely unbothered by the world around him in a way that looked like peace but probably wasn't.
She thought: I hope this doesn't get worse for him.
She thought: it probably will.
She felt bad about that. She apologized to the air on his behalf, then remembered he had told her she had a bad habit of doing that, and stopped.
She almost smiled.
Almost.
— Caelum POV —
He heard about the rejection from the junior clerk.
Of course he did. The junior clerk had the information-gathering instincts of a very enthusiastic crow and approximately the same subtlety.
"Lady Valdros turned down Solenne," the junior clerk announced, setting down a stack of forms with the energy of someone delivering headline news. "In the east garden. Apparently it was very — he paused for drama — clean about it. Like she'd been ready for ages."
Caelum said nothing.
He was doing enrollment forms. He was going to keep doing enrollment forms.
"And apparently—" the junior clerk leaned in, which Caelum found physically uncomfortable, "—she said something about you."
Caelum's pen stopped.
"Did she," he said.
"Not your name specifically. But — implied. There was an implication. Everyone's saying—"
"I need you to go file the equipment returns," Caelum said. "All of them. Now."
"But—"
"The ones from last month too."
The junior clerk went.
Caelum sat at his desk.
He thought: she mentioned you in a rejection. There was an implication. Apparently.
He thought: this is — a lot of information to have secondhand from someone who gets all their news from corridor gossip.
He thought: but if it's true—
He stopped thinking that.
He was an orphan clerk. She was a duke's daughter. He was in her employment. She was — she was interesting and strange and had told him she believed him without needing the evidence and had ordered him dinner and knew his schedule and—
He stopped thinking all of that.
He was going to talk to her. He was going to ask her directly what she said, because he was not the kind of person who made decisions based on corridor gossip filtered through an enthusiastic crow.
He was also — and this was the part he was having trouble with — slightly terrified of what she might actually say.
He picked up his pen.
He put it down.
He picked it up again.
He was going to finish these enrollment forms first. Then he was going to find her. Then he was going to ask her directly.
He lasted seven minutes before he gave up on the enrollment forms entirely.
* * *
End of Chapter Nine