1. Chapter 1 A New Day #2
"The noble tables will have opinions about this by noon," Tesslyn said.
She said it to the table, not to anyone specifically, her green eyes on her tea.
"A Margrave and a Duskaran demon. That's two different conversations.
The ones who care about lineage will say one thing.
The ones who care about power will say something else. "
"Let them. I don’t mind being the center of attention for a bit," Liora said.
"I know. I'm just saying it's going to be a topic."
"Then it's a topic. Who cares?" Liora picked up a piece of sliced meat and ate it without looking at the noble table. She'd grown up at tables where people talked about her family to her face. Student gossip didn't matter a bit to her. "They'll find a new topic by the end of the day."
Lucien doubted that. He got the impression that the gossip circuit at Ardenth had a long memory for the specific combination of minor nobility and demon wealth.
But Liora knew what she was doing in social rooms, and he had roughly three centuries of practice at not caring what people thought, so between the two of them, the coverage was adequate.
"So," Lucien said as he tore a piece of bread in half. "Let’s change the subject, shall we? How are things with Hanna?"
Wulden's spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. His ears turned pink, fast, starting at the tips and working down. He put the spoon down, picked it up, put it down again.
"What about Hanna?"
"I asked how things were going. Was that not clear?"
"Things are fine. Things are normal. We study sometimes. She lent me a pen once." He picked up his spoon again and put it down again, a mechanical loop his hands had decided to run without checking with the rest of him. "It's not. We're not. That's not a thing."
Liora leaned forward. Her gold eyes had the look they got when she'd identified a target and was deciding how much fun the approach was going to be. "You've been spending your evenings in her section of the dormitory."
"She has good study spots."
"Every evening."
"She has really good study spots."
"You walked her to History three times last week," Tesslyn said, and the fact that she joined in told Lucien her composure was holding.
"History is on the way," Wulden said. His ears were now fully red. "It's in the same building. You walk to a building and other people are also walking to that building. That's not evidence of anything."
"You changed your route for this girl," Lucien said. "Your old route went through the north corridor. Now you loop through the east wing. The east wing adds two minutes."
"I like the east wing. It has better light."
"At seven-thirty in the morning?" Lucien asked, grinning.
"The morning light is nice to look at." Wulden stopped. Started again. "Look. Hanna is a friend. A good friend. We have things in common. She's from a merchant family, I'm from a milling family. We both come from backgrounds where people actually work for a living. That's all it is."
"You said 'Hanna is nice' on day one," Lucien said. "After she'd spoken to you for forty seconds."
"She was nice. She is nice. That's a factual observation, not a confession."
Liora put her chin on her hand. "Does she know you think she's nice?"
"Everyone thinks she's nice. She's objectively nice. You guys are very peculiar."
Tesslyn's laugh surprised the table. Short and unguarded, the dry sound she only made when she forgot to hold it back. Her hand came up and covered her mouth, but the sound had already happened.
Wulden pointed his spoon at her. "Don't. Don't you start too."
"I didn't say anything."
"You laughed. That's saying something."
"It's not."
"It is when you do it. You only laugh when you think someone's being ridiculous, which I'm not."
"You brought up a pen," Tesslyn said. "As evidence."
Liora's laugh was bold, open, and unapologetic. Tesslyn bit her lip and looked down at her tea, her shoulders shaking once. Lucien tore his bread in half and didn't say anything. He wasn't sure what to say.
"I'm being ganged up on," Wulden said. But the indignation had cracked. Underneath it, he looked embarrassed and pleased, the expression of someone who'd never been teased by these friends before and was figuring out in real time that it didn't hurt.
"You could bring her to lunch sometime," Liora said. She said it lighter now, the pressure eased, the offer genuine. "We don't bite."
"You might."
"I might. Tesslyn won't."
Tesslyn shook her head and looked at her demon friend. "I'll be very polite. I can bite too, though. What makes you think I can’t bite?"
Liora chuckled. “I’ve never seen you bite anything but food. I would like to see it, though. Please bite.”
“I just might. I can be sassy.”
Wulden looked at each of them in turn. His ears were still pink but the set of his face had shifted from cornered to considering. "I'll think about it. Hanna’s busy with her own stuff for most of the day anyway."
"Ask her," Lucien said.
Wulden's mouth opened and then closed. He picked up his spoon and looked at the porridge like it might have answers.
"I'll think about it," he said again, quieter.
The conversation drifted. Wulden mentioned that Hestwick's next written analysis was due on Thursday and the topic was the early reconstruction period, three chapters of reading he hadn't started.
Tesslyn offered to share her notes and then corrected herself: her second set of notes, not the first, which had margin sketches she didn't want anyone examining too closely.
"What kind of sketches?" Wulden asked.
"The kind that aren't relevant to Hestwick's essay," she replied.
"Are they good?"
"They're margin doodles. They aren’t oil paintings in a museum."
"That's not what I asked."
Tesslyn's quill shifted in her hair. She reached up and pushed it back into place. "They're fine. They're just not for public viewing."
Liora said she'd done the reading and Hestwick had gotten the Duskaran involvement wrong, which was Liora's assessment of most things Hestwick assigned, and she was usually right about it.
They argued about whether Hestwick's errors were charming or irresponsible, and Wulden took Hestwick's side on the grounds that anyone who talked about history with that much enthusiasm deserved some allowances.
Lucien just ate his bread while all this went on around him.
The morning light came through the tall windows and lay across the table in wide bars.
Students moved through the serving line and dropped onto benches and the noise built in layers, a dozen conversations becoming two dozen becoming the steady background of an institution running its morning program.
Wulden groaned. "We have Rask today."
"You have Rask every Tuesday," Tesslyn said.
"I know. And every Tuesday I remember that fact approximately thirty seconds too late to transfer schools." He rubbed his shoulder, the one that had been stiff since the dungeon. "He's going to make us run up the hill again. I can tell. He does the hill when he thinks we've had too much fun."
"The dungeon was fun?" Liora asked.
"Parts of it. Not the slime parts. Not the running parts. Not the parts where things tried to kill us." He considered. "The afterward part. The part where we were alive and eating dinner. That was fun."
"That's not the dungeon. That's dinner," she argued.
"I'm choosing to count it."
Corvath, who'd been sitting under the table since they'd sat down, flowed up onto the bench beside Lucien and settled with his tail wrapped around his paws.
He gave the table a long look: Wulden's empty porridge bowl, Tesslyn's annotated notebook, Liora's plate picked clean of everything except a crust she'd left for reasons that were probably strategic.
His gold eyes rested on each of them and moved on.
He said nothing. He didn't need to. His look of boredom said plenty.
Liora reached for the water pitcher with her left hand.
Her sleeve shifted. She adjusted it: a small motion, casual, fingers tugging the cuff back down to her wrist. She held it there a half-second before she poured.
The correction was habitual, not nervous.
A new piece of clothing management that hadn't existed before last night.
Nobody's gaze tracked toward the movement.
Liora set the pitcher down and reached for him under the table.
Her fingers laced through his, her skin running hotter than a human's, the demon blood doing its thing.
She didn't look at him when she did it. She was listening to Tesslyn explain a passage from Hestwick's assigned reading, her gold eyes attentive, her thumb tracing a slow line across his knuckle.
He let her.
Liora's hand stayed in his, and the table kept talking.