— Caelum POV —
It rained on Thursday.
Not the polite kind of rain that stopped at a reasonable hour. The heavy, opinionated kind that arrived at noon and clearly had plans through the evening. The academy courtyard turned into a shallow lake. Three of the groundskeeping staff stood at the entrance looking at it like a personal insult.
Caelum's walk between the administrative office and the library had been planned for two-thirty. He stood at the covered entrance, looked at the rain, looked at the folder he was carrying, and accepted the situation with the resignation of a man who had long stopped expecting the universe to cooperate.
He went back inside.
The office was quiet in the afternoon. Most senior clerks were at a staff meeting that Caelum had not been invited to, which suited him fine — staff meetings were forty minutes of people explaining to each other what they had already put in writing. He sat at his desk and worked through a backlog of enrollment verifications and tried not to think about the corridor encounter two days ago.
He was not entirely succeeding.
Not because of Aldric — that situation he had mapped out and filed. That was a problem with a shape and a likely progression and several possible responses. He knew how to handle problems with shapes.
It was the fifteen seconds against the wall afterward that kept coming back.
The hands being steady. The gladness about that. The specific flavor of alone that came with having no one to tell that the hands had been steady, and also no one who would have cared.
He had been alone for four years. He was used to it.
He wasn't sure when used to it had started feeling different from fine with it.
The office door opened.
He looked up.
Seraphine was standing in the doorway with her hair damp at the edges and an expression that suggested she too had underestimated the rain. She was carrying a book and a small cloth bag that smelled, faintly, of something warm.
"Your light is on," she said, by way of explanation.
"Most lights are on when it's raining," he said.
"I meant—" She stopped. "I was passing. I had things for the library. The path was wet."
"The path is extremely wet," he agreed.
She looked at him. He looked at her. The rain made a lot of noise on the roof.
"Can I sit down," she said. Not quite a question.
He gestured at the chair across from his desk, which was technically for visiting students with administrative problems and was currently holding a stack of equipment returns he hadn't sorted yet.
She moved the equipment returns to the floor without comment and sat down.
She put the cloth bag on the desk between them.
"It's from the kitchen," she said. "I had them pack something before I left the manor. There's — I don't actually know what's in it, I just said warm and portable."
He looked at the bag. Then at her.
"You brought food," he said.
"The kitchen packed it. I transported it." She pushed the bag slightly toward him. "It's not a thing. Don't make it a thing."
It was absolutely a thing. He opened the bag anyway.
Two cups of something that turned out to be a thick grain drink he didn't know the name of, and a wrapped portion of something that smelled like pastry. He handed her one of the cups and took the other.
He took a sip.
It was aggressively mediocre. Like someone had described tea to a person who had never had tea and that person had done their best.
"This is terrible," he said.
"The academy kitchen makes excellent food," she said, sipping hers. A pause. "This is not from the academy kitchen. I think the manor kitchen misunderstood the assignment."
"What was the assignment?"
"Warm and portable." She looked at her cup. "I think they interpreted that as: make something that is technically both of those things."
He almost smiled. He felt it coming and managed to reduce it to a slight shift at the corner of his mouth, which was as far as smiles usually got with him.
She noticed. She always noticed. She didn't say anything about it, which he appreciated.
They sat for a while. The rain kept going. He went back to the enrollment verifications because they weren't going to do themselves and she opened her book and read, or appeared to read — he had learned to check whether her eyes were actually moving.
They were. She was actually reading.
This was, he realized, the first time they had been in the same room without an agenda. Every previous meeting had been the roof, terms, the library, strategy. Something to accomplish.
This was just — rain. Bad grain drink. Separate work in the same space.
He found it unexpectedly comfortable.
That was alarming in a quiet way he decided to examine later.
"The corridor," she said, without looking up from her book.
He kept his eyes on the enrollment form. "What about it."
"Aldric's scholarship review got delayed. Administrative backlog." She turned a page. "I'm letting you know in case you noticed and were wondering."
He was quiet for a moment.
"You didn't have to do that," he said.
"It's in the contract. Protection clause."
"You could have told me first."
Now she did look up. Brief.
"Would you have told me not to?" she said.
He thought about it honestly.
"Probably," he said.
"Exactly." She went back to her book. "So I didn't tell you first."
He stared at his enrollment form.
He thought: this person is going to be a problem.
He thought: she already is a problem.
He thought: the problem is that she handled it and then told you after so you'd know you were handled without being able to object, which is actually extremely good maneuvering.
He thought: stop admiring the maneuvering.
He went back to the enrollment form.
Around fourth bell the rain eased. Not stopped — eased, the way rain does when it's tired but not done.
She closed her book and put it in her bag. Stood up.
"I should get back," she said.
"The path's still wet."
"I have boots." She paused, looking at the desk. "You have forty more of those verifications to do."
"Forty-three," he said.
A pause.
"Do you want—" she started.
"Go," he said. "I'm fine."
She looked at him for a second. The focused attention. He met it and waited.
"Okay," she said. And then: "The drink was bad."
"Remarkably bad."
"I'll tell the kitchen to try harder next time."
He looked up.
"Next time," he said.
She was already at the door. She said nothing. But the corner of her mouth did something small and private and she was gone before he could fully see it.
He sat in the empty office with forty-three enrollment verifications and the two empty cups on his desk.
He picked up his pen.
He was smiling. Just slightly. Just at the edge.
Nobody was there to see it, which was good.
He went back to work.
— Nessa POV —
Lady Seraphine came back from the manor library errand forty minutes later than expected, with damp hair, no library books, and the expression she wore when she was not thinking about something very deliberately.
Nessa had learned this expression. It meant she was thinking about that thing constantly.
"How was the library, my lady?" she asked, receiving the wet outer robe.
"Fine."
"You don't have any books."
"The path was wet. I stopped somewhere dry." A pause. "Don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were constructing a sentence."
"I was going to ask if you'd eaten. You missed afternoon tea."
Lady Seraphine looked at her.
"I had something from the kitchen," she said. Then, after a brief pause where she appeared to decide something: "Tell the kitchen that grain drinks should taste like something other than warm disappointment."
"I'll pass it along," Nessa said.
She watched her lady go to her study. The door clicked shut.
Nessa stood in the hallway with the damp robe over her arm.
She thought about the disaster contingency plan. She had been refining it for a week. It was now four pages and had three branching scenarios depending on how fast things moved.
She thought about the word next time, which she had not heard but had been, in her professional opinion, absolutely said.
She went to inform the kitchen about the grain drink situation.
She also, quietly, moved the contingency plan from the back of her personal drawer to the front.
Just in case.
* * *
End of Chapter Seven