Nobody at Isaria had asked why the Duke of Aurelio's grieving new ward had been assigned quarters directly beside the First Princess of Astoria's. Nobody had asked, in fact, why the two of them shared a room at all, when the dormitory's own charter promised every second year a private one.
Princess Alara had requested it — had, according to the flustered under-steward who'd delivered the news, insisted on it rather fervently — and there was, as it turned out, no clause in Isaria's four-hundred-year-old charter that outranked a princess's preference. The Headmistress had signed the reassignment personally. Nobody had complained where Aurora could hear it. Nobody, Aurora suspected, had dared to complain anywhere at all. Besides her, she complained about it constantly in her head.
Despite her grievances, it was rather convenient. She was meant to be near the Princess at all hours outside of classes regardless, and a shared room solved a problem the Bureau would otherwise have needed to solve with considerably more subterfuge and considerably less charm.
Tonight, at least, she had the room to herself. The Princess was two floors down in the east common hall, losing spectacularly at some card game Eira had invented rules for on the spot, and Aurora had begged off with a headache real enough that she hadn't needed to perform it.
She sat at the narrow desk beneath the window, a single candle burning low, and stared at the letter she had rewritten twice.
J — I heard about the birth of your daughter, congratulations! I'll be sure to send one of my favorite physics textbooks over as a present for the little one. Isaria continues without incident. Our Heritage Instructor had us say some folktales, I couldn't find any to say. The Princess certainly had an interesting one. No further movement to report as of tonight. — A
It was, by her standards, a perfectly serviceable report. Julian had never once commented on the quality of her correspondence, which Aurora chose to interpret as approval.
She read it back once more anyway, out of habit rather than doubt. It wasn't a good report, strictly speaking — Julian's own instructions on correspondence format had been fairly strict, and this satisfied none of them — but she'd meant every word of the part that wasn't mission business, which was, if she was being honest with herself, most of it. She was genuinely glad about the daughter because it meant Julian would be off her back for a little bit.
She finished writing the last paragraph and breathed out. Her letters to Julian always ran this way, whatever he privately thought of it. Half mission, half whatever was at the forefront of her mind when she picked up the pen. He had never once told her to stop.
I couldn't find any to say. That line, at least, she hadn't had to think twice about writing. It was simply true, and it still bothered her, a day later, that it was.
"You've let the candle burn crooked," Arden informed her, hopping in through the gap she kept propped for exactly this purpose. His feathers were disheveled, whether it was from the cold wind outside or a recent escapade with a particular Miss Raven, Aurora would never know. "It's going to gutter," he continued. "You'll ruin your eyes squinting at whatever stupid nonsense you're writing this time."
"It's not nonsense," Aurora puffed her cheeks slightly. "It's a report."
"A physics textbook," he said, with the particular flatness of a creature deeply unimpressed by human notions, or more, Aurora's notions, of infant literacy. "For a newborn."
She didn't even have to look up at the windowsill to know Arden was shaking his little feathery head. "She'll grow into it."
"She is, at present, incapable of even holding her own head up."
"That's rather the point of a foundational text. You start early." Aurora smirked, something she saved for only her most trusted companions.
Arden decided there was little point arguing further. Aurora possessed an almost supernatural confidence in her own educational philosophy. He settled on the bedpost, ruffling himself into a black, disapproving lump, and fixed her with one baleful eye.
"Where were you tonight? I went looking. You weren't in the hall with the others."
She turned to him fully in her chair but refused to look him in the eye.
"Headache."
"You don't get headaches. You get quiet and then call it a headache, so no one asks further questions." He said it without any sort of malice, the way he said most things — a truth wrapped in a bottle of insults. Such is the way of an old bird. "What's actually wrong with you?"
Aurora looked down at her letter rather than answer directly, which Arden, of course, correctly interpreted as an answer in itself.
Ah, the Princess's little fairy tale. He nodded his little bird head with the air of a creature who just confirmed his own suspicions and was dead accurate about the outcome.
"It isn't relevant to anything."
"You've been chewing on it for a day like it owes you money." She rather wished it did. Arden shifted his weight, talons scraping softly against the bedpost. "For what it's worth — and you may take it for exactly what it's worth, which is very little, because I am a bird and not a scholar — something about the way she told it didn't sit right with me either. I felt something, when she got to the part about the light. Small. Wrong-shaped. Gone before I could look at it properly."
Aurora sat up slightly higher. "You felt something? Spirit Familiars do have heightened senses where the Heartbeat is concerned, so that makes sense."
"I said small. I said wrong-shaped. I did not say I understood it, and neither, I'd wager, does she." Arden peeked at her with one eye before switching to the other one. "I'm only telling you because you'll sit here stewing it in silence otherwise, and frankly, I'd rather you stew about it at me. At least then I can tell you whatever thought you come up with is stupid."
"That's remarkably generous of you."
"I have my moments."
Without another word spoken, Arden soared out through the window, likely going to spend the night with some raven girl he'd met at one of those inexplicable gatherings of ravens.
Despite him leaving, Aurora was still turning his words over — small and wrong-shaped — when the door opened without a knock, the way it only ever did for one person in this entire academy, and the Princess swept in trailing cold hallway air and the particular energy of one who had, against all odds, actually won something tonight.
"You will not believe what Eira did to poor Tony at cards," she announced to the room, already halfway to her side of the living space, tugging pins out of her hair as she went. "Aurora, you missed an absolute massacre—"
She stopped. Aurora hadn't moved fast enough to fold the letter shut, and Alara's gaze caught on it for the precise amount of time it took her to register what it was, and then — deliberately, Aurora presumed, with the same tact she used for most things that weren't hers to press on — moved past it entirely, as though it were no more remarkable than a disregarded stocking.
"Feeling better?" Was all she asked, pulling her hair loose the rest of the way, and there was something in the delicate lightness of it that told Aurora she hadn't been fooled for a moment — only that she decided, tonight was not the night to press about it.
"S-Somewhat," Aurora said, her thoughts elsewhere. Likely to the exact moment her head would be rolling off the chopping block for hiding things from a princess.
"Good. Because you'll need to be functional tomorrow." Alara dropped into her own bed with theatrical exhaustion, one arm flung over her eyes. "Student Council's holding introductions for the new term appointments after morning classes." A pause, just enough to be deliberate. "Damien's presiding, obviously. You haven't met my brother yet, have you?"
Aurora closed the letter the rest of the way and with careful steps, walked over to her own bed. She did not look forward to finding out what tomorrow was going to require of her.
Morning classes ended in a way Aurora could only describe as suspiciously prompt, as though even the instructors were eager to get to the main event. By the time Alara dragged her to the assembly hall, it was already half full, noise echoing under the high, vaulted ceiling.
"You're doing that thing again," Alara said, tapping her finger on Aurora's forehead before steering them both toward a bench near the back with the confidence of a girl who had never once in her life worried about finding a seat.
Aurora rubbed her forehead softly; her other hand being dragged by Alara's grasp. "What thing?" She whispered, barely caught above the crowd of voices around them.
"The thing where you try to count how many people are between you and the door." Alara sat and patted the space beside her. "There are forty-one. I counted for you. You're welcome."
Aurora sat next to her with pursed lips and her thumb pressed hard against the inside of her sleeve. Eira found them almost immediately, sliding in on Aurora's other side with her notebook already half out of her sleeve, radiating the delight of a girl who considered any gathering more than seven people to be a personal event.
"I saved you both a good view!" She said, as though she had personally arranged the seating rather than simply arrived last. "Front enough to see faces, back enough that nobody expects anything of you. Aurora, you'll thank me."
"T-Thank you!" Aurora said all too hurriedly, even if she didn't know why. Eira was the last to arrive, why was she taking credit for where they sat.
A hush circulated through the room from front to back, and Aurora understood before she'd even properly looked up that the First Prince of Astoria had entered.
He never had himself announced. He didn't need to. Damien Cayne crossed to the front of the hall with the unhurried movement of someone who knew he owned the room. Tall and lean in a fencer's build, dressed in the Isaria Academy school uniform — no house colors on display beyond a single small pin at the collar, he was the definition of a perfect Student Council President.
"Thank you all for your patience," he said, his voice matching the plainness of his uniform. "We'll keep this brief. The Student Council has three new appointments to formally welcome this term, and I know most of you have somewhere better to be."
A ripple of polite laughter. Damien did not smile, but something in his face acknowledged the crowd's reaction.
"He's like this at breakfast too," Alara muttered, leaning slightly toward Aurora without taking eyes off her brother. "I used to find it funny. Mostly I just find it exhausting on his behalf."
Two names were called first — A Thornate representative and a quiet Crestmark girl Aurora didn't recognize, both of whom crossed the front of the hall, exchanged a few formal words with the Prince, and returned to their seats to scattered applause.
"Lord Antonio, of Rosaria."
Antonio rose with the unbothered grace he seemed to always radiate, as if he were walking toward a compliment. He crossed the hall in full view of everyone, and Aurora watched — closely, the way she always watched untrustworthy things — as he offered Damien a bow calibrated to precisely the correct depth for a foreign noble greeting a prince who wasn't his own.
"Lord Antonio." Damien's hand went, briefly, to the edge of the podium in front of him — squaring the corner of a stack of papers that needn't be squared, a small, contained motion that Aurora attributed to a nervous tick. Easy to spot because she was well versed in nervous ticks. "The Council welcomes you. I understand you've made quite an impression already."
"I do try," Antonio said warmly, a wide smile spreading across his face, showcasing his dimples to the crowd. "Though I'll admit, Your Highness, I was hoping to make a rather better one on you specifically."
"You have my undivided attention," Damien said, which was, Aurora noticed, not actually an answer to anything, it was delivered in a tone so pleasant that it took her a moment to realize it had been a deflection at all. Antonio's smile did not waver, but something behind his eyes suggested he picked up on the deflection.
He returned to his seat to a roar of applause.
With Damien's closing remarks, the assembly broke apart into a loose, drifting chaos, and it was in that chaos that Damien found them — or rather, found his sister, the way siblings find each other in a crowd without ever seeming to look at all.
"You survived," Alara said, meeting him halfway with a grin.
"Barely. Antonio derailed the whole schedule." Something in Damien's face eased now that he was speaking to family rather than a crowd of people. His gaze moved to Aurora next, much to her dismay, and lingered there with polite attention. "You must be the Duke's ward. I'd hoped to introduce myself sooner."
Aurora made a noise, unknown even to her what it could be compared to, before attempting to introduce herself with a curtsy, "A-Aurora Ashcroft, your... highness."
She was keenly aware, at that moment, of every anxious habit she owned arriving all at once — the urge to twist her sleeve, the urge to look at the floor, the urge to simply not be looked at or stand anywhere near the heir to the Astorian throne. She fought all three to a draw and settled her gaze somewhere in the vicinity of his collar instead.
"Damien Cayne." He bowed, as formal tradition dictated any man do when greeting a lady. Aurora froze; she had never expected to be on a first name basis with the Prince, trying to call the Princess by her name was already hard enough. Before she thought any further about crawling into a hole, she noticed his hand find the signet ring on his opposite finger and turned it once, before he spoke again. "My sister speaks high praises of you. Which, I should warn you, she does rarely enough that it's worth enjoying in the moment."
"I do not!" Alara exclaimed with a huff. Her embarrassment was evident in how her cheeks lit up slightly, something that usually happened when anyone close to her complimented anything about her.
"You absolutely do," Eira said, delighted at the prospect of seeing her best friend flustered.
Aurora, caught between the three of them, found she had nothing at all prepared to say, and settled, as she often did, to stare at the floor and keep her mouth shut. She hoped it read as composure and not what it actually was.