By the time Aurora reached the Great Hall, the club sign-up boards had already been half-buried under an avalanche of ribbon. Just great.
Someone — several someones, in fact, judging by the enthusiasm — had taken it upon themselves to string the vaulted ceiling with silver and pale gold in advance of that evening, and the effect was that every conversation in the hall, regardless of its original subject, seemed to eventually collapse back into the same one.
"—And Priya says the kitchens have been baking since dawn; you can smell it from the east stair—"
"—If my hair doesn't hold, I will actually cry, I'm not being dramatic—"
"—Apparently Lady Vandenberg's dress is green, can you imagine, with her coloring—"
Aurora let the noise wash past her without engaging with any particular current of it, which had become, over the past few weeks, something of a survival skill. The whole Academy had known about Prince Damien and Eira for exactly nine days now — not from Aurora, who had kept her promise with the rigor of someone guarding a state secret, but from an unknown third party who had apparently seen them walking together twice and decided to start the rumor mill back up. The resulting gossip had acquired quite the momentum for being derived from such a small moment. Aurora had listened to no fewer than four separate, confidently inaccurate accounts of how the Prince had asked. Her favorite so far involved a sonnet.
She did not correct any of them for two reasons. First, she was too scared to speak up for fear of embarrassment, and second, she had promised the Princess silence. And besides, the truth — a formal request under the guise of a political deal, delivered like a negotiation — was funnier than anything the rumor mill had produced, and she intended to keep it that way.
The sign-up board itself listed six options that still had some slots let, painted in the same looping formal hand the ball notice had used, as though the administration owned exactly one calligrapher and rationed, or as Aurora liked to put it, slaved, her out accordingly. Resonant Research Club. Dueling & Sparring Society. Grimoire Restoration Society. Debate & Rhetoric Society. The Isaria Ensemble. Chess Club.
Dueling was something her tiny body couldn't handle. She'd die. Grimoire Restoration sounded intriguing, until she found out it was run by a bunch of creepy nerds. She'd die. Debate was exactly as its name suggested. She'd die. The Ensemble required speaking loudly. She'd die. And she knew nothing about chess, which left only one option. Besides, she had already decided, days ago, on the first.
The Resonant Research Club met in a lecture hall on the third floor that smelled faintly like chalk dust and old parchment, and Aurora took a seat near the back with the specific eagerness of someone hoping to never be seen or heard. By anyone.
"Right, settle in, settle in—" The woman at the front of the room clapped her hands twice, a small Bureau liaison pin catching the light at her collar as she moving. "Maret, regional liaison, delighted to be filling in for the term." Aurora had never seen her before in her life, as far as she could tell, and gave the introduction no more attention than she'd give any new instructor — which was, admittedly, rather a lot of attention.
"I know it's ball day, I know, I promise I'll keep this moving," Maret continued, already unrolling a chart at the front board with the enthusiasm of someone who had clearly waited all week. "But I couldn't let today's session go by without sharing this, because it is, frankly, the most interesting thing to cross my desk in a year, and some of you are going to want to impose your opinions about it before the Proceedings prints the full peer commentary next month."
She pinned the chart flat. Aurora recognized her own handwriting before she recognized the diagram itself, which was a strange, vertiginous sensation, like hearing her own voice through a mimic spell.
"A follow-up piece," Maret said, "from the Arcana Witch."
The room made a sound that Aurora could only describe as a collective intake of breath and several students actually sat forward in their seats, which was gratifying in a way Aurora couldn't explain. On the other hand, her soul was currently leaving through her windpipe.
"Short. Dense. Absolutely enlightening in the best way." Maret tapped the chart. "As rising scholars, you'll recall from previous works that she left the Hybrid Frequency phenomenon almost entirely underdeveloped — one paragraph, essentially a dare. Well, she's taken the dare." She traced a line on the chart with obvious relish that Aurora was repulsed by. "This piece proposes an actual framework for predicting where a hybrid frequency might stabilize on the Wheel, based on Harmonic Layer saturation. It's speculative. It's also, if she's right, going to change how we teach elemental pairing within the decade."
Aurora bit the inside of her cheek and fixated on her own notes. It wasn't that speculative. She ran the saturation calculations four separate ways before inevitably saturating her draft paper with her tea.
"Now, some of the peer commentary I've seen argues the saturation threshold is too conservative," Maret went on, and Aurora's hand had risen almost to her chin before she caught it and brought it back down to her lap, refusing to look intrigued. She forced herself to abstain from correcting the visiting Bureau officer's summary of her own paper in front of thirty classmates. This is not a hill. There is no hill here. Sit still.
She sat still. It cost her a little piece of sanity though. She noticed her face had done something during the last several minutes that was probably visible from the front row, something bright and forgetting-to-be-careful, before she caught it and slammed it back down into careful blankness. She hoped no one had been looking.
Antonio, three seats over, had been looking. She was beginning to think either he had a crush on her or was a creepy stalker with the face of a handsome man, or perhaps both. She did not turn her head to confirm if he was staring.
"Anyway." Maret rolled the chart back up, glancing at the clock with visible regret. "We'll spend proper time on it next session, I promise. For now, I'll end early for today — go, be excited about your ball, I certainly would be at your age." She paused, and something briefly crossed her face, distant and unplaceable. "Funny thing, actually — this whole business reminds me of something I saw once, a few months back. Southeast of here. A certain witch doing something with a spell that I still can't fully explain in the report I filed." She shook her head, like a woman dislodging a thought that wasn't going anywhere useful. "Anyway. Go on. Dismissed."
Aurora did not breathe again until she was three corridors away.
She absolutely did not sign the club roster on her way out, though her hand hovered over the parchment for a full two seconds before she made herself walk past it. She found she rather liked being praised for her work. But it would have involved sitting in that room every week, watching Maret circle closer and closer to a truth Aurora could not afford her to reach, however good-naturedly the Bureau officer was. Just another thing Aurora couldn't have in protection of her own secret. Unfortunate.
The Chess Club met two floors down, in a low-ceilinged room lined with boards in various states of use, and Aurora had chosen it for the profoundly unscientific reason that Eira had once mentioned, in passing, that it was quiet, and quiet had sounded appealing after the lecture hall.
"First time?" The girl behind the nearest table didn't look up from the board she was resetting, but she'd clearly clocked Aurora's hesitation at the doorway from several yards away. Aurora internally jumped, she was getting better at not outwardly jumping. The girl before her was tall, Aurora could tell by how far her legs stuck out under the table. She was also dark skinned, with close-cropped hair and the calm of someone who had spent a great deal of time watching others think. A small enamel pin on her collar read P. LOXLEY — PRESIDENT, in letters small enough that Aurora suspected she'd made it herself specifically so people would ask what her title was again.
"I-Is it that obvious?" Aurora looked down at her feet and twiddled her thumbs in small horror.
"You're standing like you walked into the wrong room." Perrin Loxley finished setting the pieces as she gave a small chuckle and gestured at the empty chair across from her without further preamble. "Sit. I'll teach you in ten minutes, badly, and then we'll see what you do with it. That's how everyone starts."
In the corner, an older man in Academy robes looked up from a paperback with the mild interest of someone who had seen this scene play out a thousand times before and expected to see it a thousand times more. "Master Ellery Finch," he said, by way of introduction, not moving from his chair. "Faculty sponsor. I do not teach the game. I referee disputes, bet coin on matches, and I have an opinion about the tea, which no one asks for." He returned to his book as Aurora bowed and struggled to even get her name out before giving up and sitting down. He probably wouldn't care much for her name anyways. She introduced herself to Perrin, however, who seemed to appreciate the name.
Perrin explained the pieces with brisk movements that offered surprisingly good explanations — how each moved, what captured what, the general shape of an opening, the idea of the king's safety as the central priority throughout — and Aurora listened with total attention, the kind she reserved for absorbing anything genuinely new and interesting, turning each rule over once and setting it into place beside the others like she was cataloguing a shelf. Aurora had long ago concluded there wasn't enough room in her head for everything. If something wasn't interesting, it wasn't worth keeping. This was interesting.
"That's the shape of it," Perrin finished, sitting back with a small exhale. "Questions?"
"You said something about the king and rook swapping places?"
"Castling. A quick defense for the king. We'll get to it as it comes up." Perrin nodded to the board. "You're white. You take first move."
Aurora stared at the board for less than a second before moving her queen's pawn forward two squares, because it seemed, on brief reflection, like the piece with the least restricted future.
Perrin's eyebrows went up slowly and very slightly. "Not the usual first instinct for someone who's never played." She answered with her own pawn, mirroring, and the game began.
It went, from Aurora's side of the board, roughly the way things went when she stopped being nervous about them: Her mind settled into the problem the way water settled in a glass, within a dozen moves she was no longer thinking about the individual pieces so much as the whole shifting architecture of the board — pressure there, weakness three moves from now if that knight stayed there, a diagonal that would open beautifully if she could bait the bishop into moving first. She sacrificed a knight on the fourteenth move for a position so aggressive that Perrin actually laughed out loud for a small moment, there and gone.
"You've genuinely never played," Perrin said, not quite a question as she stared at the board with an expression somewhere between delight and mild personal crisis.
"N-No... I'm sorry."
"Don't be." Perrin shook her head. "That's — deeply unfair to the rest of us, honestly." She moved her rook, buying time, and Aurora watched the shape of the trap Perrin was building and decided to build one underneath it. By the thirtieth move, Perrin's king had been chased into the corner of the board with nothing left to hide behind but a single pawn and a diminishing lack of optimism, and a small, curious crowd had gathered around the table, much to Aurora's dismay — three other club members, arms folded, with a quiet interest that only chess enthusiasts could bring.
"You're going to mate her in two," Antonio said, somehow appearing from just behind Aurora's shoulder. "Queen to g7, king has nowhere left. Clean finish."
"I see it." Barring the fact that he probably followed her all the way to this room and was now "breathing" down her shoulder, she had in fact, already seen the pattern that had been sitting fully formed in her mind for three moves already. She reached for her queen with the private pleasure of someone about to close a proof.
She moved the queen to g7.
Perrin looked at the board for a long moment. Then she looked up, and there was something suspiciously close to a suppressed laugh. "That's not check."
Aurora had to double take. It was not, in fact, check — the queen sat exactly one square removed from where the check would have landed, close enough that her mind had apparently filled in the gap on instinct and satisfaction rather than actual calculation — and worse, in denying her own king any square to retreat to, she had also, with the mathematical precision of a dimwit, denied it every other legal move on the board. No captures available. No blocks required, because there was no threat to block. Nothing to do at all.
"That's stalemate," Perrin said, and did laugh this time, delighted and a little disbelieving. "You just — Aurora, you had me dead to rights for six moves and then you handed me a draw out of pure enthusiasm for the game."
"Oops," Aurora said, with real, wounded indignation, staring at the board as though it had betrayed her trust. "The king isn't on danger. Why does it matter that he had nowhere to go if nothing is threatening him?"
"Because that's the rule." Master Finch said from the corner, without looking up from his book. "Chess has always had a soft spot for strange rules."
"It's an elegant rule, actually," Perrin said, resetting the pieces with the air of a woman who actually enjoyed almost losing. "You'll appreciate it in about a week, once you've done it to someone else on purpose and watched their face." She glanced up. "Sign the roster. I'm not asking twice. I haven't had a game like that since I made president."
Aurora signed it. It felt easier than the lecture hall roster had — a smaller thing, a quieter thing, a room where the only secret she was keeping was that she'd apparently never once, in sixteen years, played a game for its own sake before this afternoon.
"Next week," Antonio said, signing the paper directly after her. "You and me. I'd like to see what you do against someone who isn't being nice about it."
Aurora glanced at him for a moment — the pleasant, patient smile, the eyes that gave away rather less than the smile did — and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she was looking forward to it. She then looked down.
"I'll try not to stalemate you by accident," she said.
"Please don't," Antonio replied. "I'd like to lose properly, if I'm going to lose at all."
Behind them, someone by the door said something about the hour, and the room shifted all at once into motion — chairs scraping back, boards being covered, half a dozen quiet conversations revolving themselves around the same single fact the entire Academy had been orbiting since breakfast.
"Two hours," Perrin said to no one in particular, glancing at the window where the light had gone long and gold. "Merciful Founders, is it really two hours already."
Aurora looked at the window too, and felt something in her chest tighten pleasantly, the way it always did before something she hadn't yet decided whether to fear or anticipate.
She went to go find the blue dress.