22. Seb
SEB
They’d skipped the bout, both of them. He and Tori fought regularly, sometimes like it was its own sport, but she’d never skipped a match, and it stung more than his recent loss ever could. He wanted to go straight home to apologize, but there was a red-clad figure blocking his path.
“Sebastian! Fancy meeting you here.”
“Hey, Gemma.” His insides uttered a grievous sigh.
“It’s a shame about the alchemy assignments. I feel like we’d be so much better off together.”
Her words sparked a light in his memory.
“Sure, yeah. Speaking of, though, you do have Lily’s number, right?
I really need it.” He’d tried and failed to get it Thursday, having found quickly that entering Gemma’s dorm room was a terrible mistake.
He’d decided to cut his losses before he accidentally ended up naked.
“You don’t want her number,” Gemma purred.
He frowned at her. “Isn’t she friends with your sister?”
“Hardly. What a weirdo.”
“What’s so weird about her?” He adjusted his duffel, realizing that there was no quick getaway here.
Gemma laughed throatily. “What isn’t?” She began ticking a list off on her fingers. “She hardly talks, she’s always lurking somewhere like the woods or, I swear it, inside the walls; she’s weirdly good at spontaneous magic; oh, right, and she’s cursed.”
Seb blinked his frown away. The woods were hardly strange, but inside the walls?
“So, do you have her number?”
“How about this.” Gemma’s cornflower eyes flashed. “I’ll trade you her number for dinner.”
He was beginning to regret their hookup. Deeply.
“Fine.”
She whipped out her phone and scrolled through her contacts, holding it so that he could copy it down. She smiled. “Catch you later.”
He waited for her to flounce away before he headed for the woods.
The woods weren’t particularly large, but they were imposing enough that he wasn’t quite sure where to begin. Once he passed the lake, which was really more of an ambitious pond, he followed the creek. After tromping along the edge of the stream for a few minutes without luck, he called her.
A phone rang. He followed the sound.
“Lily?”
After a moment of rustling, he caught sight of motion on the far side of the stream. Lily’s head appeared around a massive tree trunk.
“Allsaires?” She stepped forward, her aura darkening the air around her, sending the trees into sudden twilight.
He looked at the creek between them, then at a fallen log twenty feet downstream. Her eyes followed him as he crossed, and for a moment he was nervy and sure that he was going to fall in while she watched.
“Sebastian,” he said, once he stood in front of her.
“What.” She stared.
“You can call me Sebastian.”
She didn’t respond to that, her lip caught in her teeth, thoughts clearly elsewhere. “What are you doing here?”
He wasn’t entirely sure himself. “I was thinking about the ring, those symbols, and what you said. I printed off some stuff, if you wanted to look through it together.”
Her eyebrows screwed together. “You want my help?”
“I…no.” Her frown deepened. “Maybe? I don’t know, really. I just…you seemed like the person to talk to.”
“What about Vis and Beaumont?”
Lily watched his face carefully as he spoke. “They’re…we’re in a fight, I guess. It’s dumb.”
“They weren’t at the match,” she said, moving around the tree. He followed her, suppressing a grin as he saw her backpack and jacket spread between the massive roots.
“You were there?”
“It was a good win.” She didn’t look at him while she said it. “I hope Liesl makes it to nationals, though.”
“Me too,” he agreed. “You like Cantrèa?”
“I love it,” she said, once more evading eye contact.
“Ever played?” His words surprised both of them. “I have an extra foil in my bag.”
Her face moved through what seemed like a hundred microexpressions as she stared at the ground. She was going to say “no,” he realized, even though she wanted to say the opposite.
“Here.” Before she could disagree, he stooped and unzipped his bag, pulling out the thin, black cases that held his foil and a practice blade.
“I’ll just show you a few things and you can decide if you like it.
You let me interrupt your dance practice, after all.
” He looked up, checking for opposition.
“You can use my practice foil. It’ll be long on you, but it’ll work. ”
He thought he might be starting to differentiate between her frowns. This one seemed steeped in confusion, but at what, he wasn’t sure. So much of her, it seemed, happened internally.
She took the offered foil, carefully testing its balance, then slipped her middle finger through the grip. Fastening the wrist strap with the non-dominant hand took practice, and as she fumbled it, Seb reached for her wrist to help.
She leaped backward as his thumb grazed her skin, jerking her hand upward out of his reach and accidentally sheathing the foil. The tree caught her, and when she looked up, her cheeks were flushed.
“Sorry, I—”
“It’s okay.” She shook her head, bangs brushing her forehead, and offered her arm. “Sorry.”
“This is a good tree,” he said, for something to break the heavy silence as he fastened the strap around her wrist, avoiding a delicate bracelet.
He did a double-take at the thick concentration of AEther around it.
Her pulse raced under his thumb, and he could see the blue of her veins beneath her skin.
He had to fasten the strap on its tightest setting.
“I usually hang out with my—in the grove, but these are nice woods.”
They wandered over to a small clearing with even ground and stood facing each other.
A light breeze stirred Lily’s hair, the rusty color of November leaves.
Her cheeks were still faintly pink. Seb felt self-conscious, suddenly, standing in the woods with this strange girl, who stood perfectly still as she waited for his instructions.
“You can unsheathe—” he broke off as Lily flicked her wrist to the side, extending the foil. “Well, that’s lesson one down. Normally that takes people a while, and you’re not even using your own equipment.”
She shrugged, though her mouth twitched in silent pleasure. “Now what?”
Seb raked his free hand through his hair as he considered. Cantrèa came so naturally to him that he wasn’t entirely sure where to begin.
“I guess let’s just go through some footwork and basic blade-play? The movements of Cantrèa are circular in nature, so try to match my path. Step heel-toe.”
He began to move clockwise, and Lily matched him immediately, keeping her foil at a good height, watching him and not her feet. The leaves whispered beneath them, and he was suddenly reminded that she was a dancer. Even on dry leaves, her steps were quiet.
“Let’s try some parries and lunges. To lunge, extend from the elbow. Don’t worry about technique, just feel it out and try to block.”
She nodded, perfectly serious, and it was hard not to laugh at her concentration, tongue poking through her lips. He lunged, gently, telegraphing his intention before his attack, and she knocked it aside with something approaching form.
“Nice, go ahead and try a lunge yourself, when you’re ready.”
He watched her arm, looking for the cues and bad habits she’d need to unlearn over time. When she lunged, it was balanced, and he blocked it softly, with just enough force to send it outside.
“How’s it feel?” he asked after a few repetitions.
Lily nodded, not taking her eyes off his foil arm.
“Let’s try some back and forth.”
They shuffled in their circle, and Seb made the first attack.
Lily parried neatly and tried for a riposte.
He wondered, guiltily, if he should have let her hit him, but he wasn’t wearing pads, and she didn’t seem like the type of person who wanted someone to let her win.
Together, they fell into a rhythm against a backdrop of crunching twigs, rattling leaves, and the occasional birdsong.
The cloud cover cleared, and golden light slanted through the trees, dissipating Lily’s curse aura and warming her hair to a luminous copper.
Lily feinted. He wasn’t expecting it, lulled by the forest sound and the sun.
As he fell for it, rushing to parry, she came around, lunging for real.
Seb forgot that they were merely sparring and spun in a twisting evasion.
Lily’s weight, though, expecting to meet resistance, met none, and her momentum hurtled her forward. Instinctively, Seb’s foil arm shot out.
He caught her around the middle, diverting her linear force into his circular one.
They spun together, one of Seb’s feet dragging a loop on the ground to slow them.
When they stopped, his heart was pounding, and Lily was half in a dip, her hand clutched around his shoulder to keep from falling.
They stared at each other for a handful of heartbeats, both of them breathless, before Seb came to his senses and hauled her to her feet.
“Sorry,” she said, blinking.
“No,” he said quickly. “It was good. You’re good. I wasn’t expecting a feint.”
She sheathed her foil, as if she’d done it a million times, and managed to unfasten it on her own, even with trembling hands.
“Thank you.” He wasn’t sure if she was thanking him for the session or the compliment, but he didn’t care. Her lips pursed, and her brow furrowed, as it always seemed to do. What Gemma took for rudeness, he thought might be caution—a silent battle playing out on her face.
“This was nice,” she admitted. He waited, to give her time to decide whether she wanted to say what she was thinking. No wonder she hung out with Daphne, who wouldn’t talk over her, and Gemma, who always would. “You’re not what I expected.”
It caught him off guard, and he grinned once he realized it was a compliment. “You’re not what I expected either.”
Neither of them asked what it was they had expected, but they didn’t need to. So many people thought they knew the both of them.
“I have to go home, but we could look at what you found…later, if you wanted?”
He did, badly. “Yes. Yeah.” Seb felt like he’d slipped sideways into someone else’s life. “How’s eight? Metaphysics library?”
“That works.”
They packed their things and walked out of the woods together in something approaching companionable silence. Seb walked with her to her bike, parked near the lake.
“Which dorm are you headed to?”
“I live off campus.” He cocked his head at her. Oh. “I grew up here.”
“No wonder you know all the best places on campus.”
Her cheeks pinked as she ducked her head and smiled, and he smiled back, one for feeling seen, the other for seeing.
“Something like that. Eight?”
He nodded and watched her pedal off, realizing that he couldn’t see her curse aura at all.