7. Chapter 7 Study Hall
Tesslyn had taken the window table.
She sat with her notebook open and two loose pages beside it, weighted down with a slim reference text she wasn't reading.
The quill in her hair had already started its migration south, the pin losing ground against the weight of blonde hair that had never once, in five weeks, accepted being held in place.
Ink stained her right index and middle fingers in the dark lines of someone who wrote too fast to wait for the page to dry.
Lucien crossed to her table and pulled out the chair across from her.
"You're late," she said, without looking up. Her quill moved in the margins. Quick lines, the beginning of something architectural.
"Lunch ran long."
"Liora?"
"How did you know?" Lucien snickered.
“I would say Liora will make you late a lot from here on out.”
“I suppose. Liora is a difficult woman to leave.”
She nodded and smiled.
"You missed the first twenty minutes of Study Hall," she said. "I've been productive without you. I finished the Aldessi reading and started on the Velleck chapter Gallen assigned last week." She flipped a page without looking at it. "You'll notice I'm not falling behind."
"I never thought you were."
"You thought it once. When we collided, I scattered my papers across the hallway and you helped me pick them up."
"I thought you were having a bad morning. That’s all. You were adorable."
"You were very diplomatic about it. I don’t know if I was adorable or not." She glanced up. Green eyes, steady, the corner of her mouth carrying something she might not have known was there. "Thank you for that, by the way."
“Of course. It’s always nice to hear nice things about oneself. Adorable describes you perfectly.”
Tesslyn blushed and looked at her book.
Room 108 held its usual quiet. A handful of other students sat scattered through the space, heads down, pencils moving.
Tables and chairs sat in loose clusters unchanged since the first day of the semester, and the lack of an instructor's desk made the room feel less like a classroom. It was a good environment.
Lucien opened the Aldessi supplementary text that Renvaya had assigned that morning, Appendix C. The notation proposal was dense and self-important, written by a man who'd been right about something significant and wanted everyone to know it at length.
"His footnotes have footnotes," Tesslyn said.
She'd returned to her own reading, the quill in the margins doing something Lucien couldn't see from his angle.
"I've been reading the same paragraph for six minutes.
Every time I think I understand a sentence, the footnote underneath it contradicts the sentence above it and I have to start over. "
"That's the Aldessi experience, which isn’t a pleasant one, unfortunately."
"It's terrible."
"He was the worst dinner companion in the history of academic conferences." Lucien caught the sentence as it left his mouth and quickly adjusted. "So I've read."
She didn't pick at the edit. She never did.
"The continuous spectrum section is the important part," he said. "The rest is Aldessi arguing with a dead man about who got credit for mathematics neither of them invented."
"That's academia for you,” Tesslyn replied.
"You'll fit right in with those academic types. Your knowledge and dedication to learning are incredible."
She looked at him. The glance carried surprise and the surprise carried warmth, and she wrote something in her notebook before the expression could settle.
Tesslyn asked a question about the Velleck chapter's treatment of lattice anchoring points. The question was specific enough to tell Lucien she'd already worked through the first three possible answers and discarded them. He gave her the fourth.
"That's the two-anchor model," she said. Her pencil moved fast in the margin. "If you set the secondary anchor to handle directional load instead of volume, the junction doesn't have to process both variables at once. I tested it. It held for ten seconds."
"I remember."
"I know you remember. You kept saying it would hold like it was obvious, and it was not obvious."
"It was obvious to me. You’re a natural."
She blushed once more. "Because everything is obvious to you."
The quill lost another quarter-inch. She didn't fix it.
In the margin of her open page, a second drawing had appeared beside the lattice diagram: a small arched window, the stone frame rendered in clean cross-hatching that caught the play of depth and shadow.
She drew between paragraphs the same way she breathed between sentences, the lines appearing without apparent decision.
"How is he?" Tesslyn asked.
The question came without preamble. She closed her textbook with one finger holding her place and looked at Lucien across the table.
"Corvath, I mean," she added.
"He's recovering. The attitude is back. The commentary is back. He spent this morning's lecture counting how many minutes Renvaya held her ears still. He’s napping somewhere in the sunlight, I’m sure."
"That's not what I'm asking."
Lucien set his book down.
Tesslyn's composure held, but her attention had shifted. She'd been in the corridor. She'd asked about the cat before she'd asked about anything else.
"The snake fear is real," Lucien said. "It's old, and it's involuntary. He was trapped in that hallway with nowhere to run, and the experience cost him more than he'll admit."
"He wouldn't talk about it?"
"He made a joke about wanting snakes to be extinct and he had an arsenal of snake insults ready to fire. He was waiting for the opportunity eagerly."
Tesslyn was quiet. She pulled the quill from her hair and set it on the notebook, her hair falling across one shoulder now that the pin was gone. She held the quill between her ink-stained fingers and turned it once. Lucien was briefly awed by her cuteness.
"In the courtyard, before. Weeks ago, when Valt first brought the snake out.
Corvath went under the bench." She looked at the quill in her hands.
"I watched him go. The speed of it. Like his body made the decision and the rest of him was just a passenger.
I didn't understand what I was seeing until the corridor. "
"Not many people would have put those two moments together or even remembered that incident."
"It was the same crouch. The ears, the fur, the way he pressed himself low. Identical. The courtyard was the rehearsal. The corridor was the one where he couldn't leave. I felt so sorry for him. The terror in his golden eyes broke my heart."
"He'll be all right," Lucien said. "The recovery is real. Like I said, he was already back to his snarky self the last time I saw him. You should hear his story about his turf war with a rival stray cat. It’s entertaining."
A small laugh left her. "He has turf wars with other cats?"
"Corvath considers every warm surface on this campus to be sovereign territory under his jurisdiction. Challenges are met with maximum diplomatic force."
"Staring or dishing out insults?"
"Staring until the other cat leaves or dies of embarrassment. I’m not sure if he has tried insults yet. It might be a good strategy for the future."
Tesslyn laughed a little harder this time and her eyes sparkled. She picked her quill up from the notebook and put it back in her hair.
"The corridor," she said. "What do you think brought it on? I mean, you and Valt haven’t had any sort of run-in since the courtyard incident. I thought all that had been squashed."
"You were there. You saw just as much as I did, Tesslyn."
"I was there. That's why I'm asking." She turned her hands over on the table, palms up, then back down.
"I saw Corvath on the floor. I saw the snake coiled around him.
I saw you grab it, and I saw your eyes. They weren't your eyes, Lucien.
They were red, solid red, and they stayed that way.
Not a flicker. Not a flash. You stood in that hallway with crimson light in your eyes and you burned a handprint into a snake's body with your bare hand. You didn’t just throw the snake like last time. It was kind of scary."
"I don't have a good explanation for it," he said.
"That's the truth. When I saw Corvath on the floor with that thing wrapped around him, something responded.
I couldn't tell you the mechanism. I grabbed the snake because I needed it off him, and what came through my hand came from a place I don't know how to explain. I’m glad it did, though. "
"Is that what you told Renvaya after class?"
"Close to it. She got the version with more hedging."
"I don't need hedging. You can be honest and comfortable with me… always."
"I know, and I appreciate that more than you know," Lucien said honestly.
She held his eyes, green and steady. The sparkle was still there and it was still alluring to Lucien.
"Okay. Just always please be honest," she said.
That was all. She took the answer he gave for the incident and its inadequacy and put them in the same place she kept everything else about Lucien that didn't fit, and she left them there.
She picked up her book and opened it to the page her finger had held.
The Aldessi reading occupied the next stretch for Lucien. Tesslyn caught a notational inconsistency between Aldessi's original proposal and the version in Morren's supplementary materials.
"The Korrath wave-function notation he adapted," she said, leaning forward over the diagram in the text. "Look at the variable set. Compare it to what Renvaya drew on the board this morning."
She turned the book toward him. Lucien leaned in to read the notation. Their heads were close now, close enough that he could smell the ink on her hands and a pleasant aroma—the soap the academy stocked in the washrooms, perhaps.
"She simplified it," Lucien said. "Renvaya dropped two of the constraint variables. The full notation is more flexible but harder to work with."