8. Chapter 8 Her Room
Liora hadn't come to dinner.
Lucien ate without her while Wulden argued out loud with his botany reading, lost, and started over.
He left when the hall began to empty. Corvath had installed himself by the kitchen door two hours earlier and gave no sign of having business anywhere else that night.
The walk across the quad took five minutes in the dark, past lamps set at intervals by someone who had wanted the path to feel safe more than they had wanted it lit.
The east residence held its heat better than the west. Her hall was on the third floor, at the end, behind a plain door with nothing on it.
He knocked.
The door opened.
Liora stood in the gap with one hand still on the latch, and the light behind her put her in outline before it put her in detail.
Her hair was down and unbrushed on one side where she had been lying against it.
It fell past her shoulders in a loose silver weight, and the lamplight ran down its length and pulled the color closer to white than to gray.
She wore a tank top that had given up any pretense of being loose.
It sat high on her ribs and low at the neck, and the red of her skin ran uninterrupted from her collarbones down across her stomach to where the fabric started again.
The shorts were the kind she wore under training gear, cut short at the thigh and riding the curve of her hips without much conviction.
She was barefoot on cold stone and unbothered by it. Demon blood ran hot. It always had.
Lucien took the rest of it in the order it arrived.
Her hips carried real weight and she carried them well.
Rask's PT class had done nothing to soften her thighs and everything to define them.
She had never once in five weeks let a uniform hide the line of her waist. Her horns swept back through the loose hair, dark and polished, sitting exactly where they always sat and looking different with nothing pinned around them. Her tail hung low and slow behind her.
Her left forearm was bare.
The mark sat where it had sat since he’d put it there, raised and angular against the red, the color of old blood, and darker than her skin by two shades. Nothing covered it and she made no move to change that. She leaned on the door frame with the arm turned outward and she didn't touch it once.
"You're staring," she said.
"I am."
"Good." She stepped back and pulled him through by the front of his shirt. "Come in before someone walks past and gets ideas."
The door shut behind him.
Her room was a single. He had known that in the abstract, and the abstract hadn't prepared him for how much floor there was.
One bed stood against the far wall where two should have been bunked against opposite ones.
A desk sat under the window and it had actual drawers.
A thick, dark red rug covered most of the stone, and nobody at this academy had issued it to her.
"Sit anywhere," she said. "Not the chair. The chair is load-bearing."
The chair held a tower of clothing that had achieved structural stability. Lucien sat on the end of the bed.
Three books lay open and face-down with their spines cracking.
None of them were assigned. A brass lamp burned at the corner under a green glass shade, and Lucien suspected no student in the history of the institution had ever been issued one of those.
A stone weighted down a stack of letters.
She kept good ink in a good bottle, and beside it sat a cheap steel nib holder with the varnish chewed off the end.
The tea things took up a tray, the pot expensive and the cup chipped.
On the shelf above it, wedged between a common-tongue dictionary and something with a broken spine, sat a small cloth animal with one ear missing. It had been repaired at the shoulder in thread that didn't match.
"Don't," Liora said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You looked at Bramble and you had an entire conversation about him in your head. He’s pitiful, I know, but he’s important to me. Maybe more important than you."
"His name is Bramble?"
"His name is Bramble and he is older than you." She dropped onto the bed beside him, cross-legged, and the mattress moved under her. "Don't take that literally. I know what you are."
"You know some of what I am."
"I know enough to be smug about it." She reached past him for the cup on the tray, checked it, made a face, and set it back down. "Cold. That sucks."
"You skipped dinner. I didn’t approve of that course of action."
"You didn’t approve of it? Really? What do you think this bond means?
You have to approve things? I think not.
" She laughed and lay back across the bed on her elbows, and the tank top rode up off her stomach.
"I sat down at 2 with the Vharen text and I looked up and it was 7.
I was too tired to walk all the way to the dining hall. I ate an apple. It was a good apple."
"Just an apple?"
"A whole apple, Lucien. Core and all. I'm not a delicate woman," Liora said, smiling.
"You are the least delicate woman I have ever met, and I have met a great many women."
She raised her eyes. They were gold in the lamplight, half-lidded and entirely awake.
"Say that again but be careful about the second half."
"I have met a great many women," he said. "None of them ate the core. That’s…different."
She laughed. It was the version she only did in here, lower and less produced than the one she used at the table in the dining hall, and it ended with her rolling onto her side toward him.
"How was Study Hall?"
"Productive for about twenty minutes."
"That's not an answer. That's a report." She poked him in the thigh with one finger. "Tell me about your afternoon like an actual normal person would tell it."
“I’m as normal as they come. I’m absolutely boring to everyone because I’m so normal. That’s a fact.”
“Lucien, stop it. You are so full of shit and you know it. You aren’t fooling anyone like you think you are. I see right through you.”
“I certainly hope not.”
He told her about Tesslyn taking the window table and being smug about finishing the Aldessi reading first. He told her about the quill that had never once stayed in her hair and had made it eleven minutes on its best day.
He told her about the footnotes having footnotes, and Liora said something unkind about Aldessi in Duskaran that he understood and pretended not to.
"And then Corvath arrived," he said.
"Of course he did. I bet he searched for the red carpet when he waltzed in the door."
"The door opened and he came through it like the room had been holding a seat for him."
"Sounds like Corvath." She propped her head on her hand. "Did he behave?"
"He spoke to her."
Liora went still in a small way, and nothing in the stillness looked defensive.
"Directly to Tesslyn?"
"Directly. Out loud. He told her he knew she'd drawn him in her notebook, and told her the proportions were correct. He told her that he was handsome.”
“He did, did he? Handsome? That’s rich.”
“Corvath is one of a kind. Life would be bland without him.”
"What about me?" She sat up. "How would life be without me? Deplorable, I hope."
“Life wouldn’t be worth living. Is that what you want to hear?”
“Yes, that sounds great.”
"There was more. Corvath told Tesslyn that she asked the right question in the corridor.
She asked about him before she asked about anything else.
According to him, people don't do that for cats.
" Lucien turned the chipped cup around on the tray with one finger.
"Then Corvath called Tesslyn his blonde beauty, praised her ward framework, and accepted a head rub from her. "
"Did he purr?" Liora asked with a brow raised.
"Purred, and then announced out loud that it was nice."
Liora put both hands over her face and laughed into them.
"He's smitten." She pushed her hair back off her face. "He's completely smitten with her."
"That is what he told me on the way out."
"He told you." She dropped her hands. "He said the words."
"His words. Very smitten by her. Beautiful and kind, he said."
She was quiet for a second. Her tail moved once across the blanket behind her.
"That's not nothing," she said.
"No."
"Corvath doesn't like people. Corvath tolerates people and rates them and files complaints about them.
" She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, and the mark sat plain on her forearm against the red of her shin.
"He picked her. Out of everybody in that building, he picked the girl who asked about the cat first."
"Yes. He loves Tesslyn."
"She's in love with you, you know."
She said it in exactly the tone she had used about the apple.
"I know. You really know how to change subjects quickly and flawlessly," Lucien said wryly.
"Good. I was worried I'd have to explain it." She rested her chin on her knees. "She looked at my hand on your arm in the Crucible on Sunday and she put it away so fast I nearly lost it. She had ideas about us before we announced we were a couple."
"She told me today that I'm a good guy and that you're a lucky girl."
Liora lifted her head.
"She said that? "
"On her way out the door."
"That's brutal." She said the words with something close to admiration.
"That's the bravest possible version of that sentence.
She looked straight at the thing she wants, told you she approves of you having it with somebody else, and then walked out before anybody had to respond to her.
" She shook her head slowly. "Duskaran girls are not that brave.
Duskaran girls poison the drink of the other woman. "
"Should I be concerned about the drink?"
"You should be concerned about a great many things.
The drink is fourteenth on the list." She reached over and took his hand.
Hers was hotter than his. "I like her. That's the problem with the whole arrangement.
If she were awful, this would be much simpler and I would be much better company about it. "