16. Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
J essica
The girl behind me in the coffee queue is doing arithmetic.
I can feel it. She's been looking at my left wrist since I pushed my sleeve up to get my card out, and I can hear her not saying anything to her friend, and I know exactly what's happening in her head because it's been happening in everyone's head since yesterday afternoon.
Three.
There were two. Now there are three.
She doesn't know whose. Nobody's published a list. But there were two for months, and now there are three, and she's currently working her way through the male population of this academy in order of interest.
I pull my sleeve down.
"Morning," I say, without turning round.
"Oh — morning," she says, in the voice of a woman who has just been caught reading someone's diary.
I take my coffee and go.
Ander is at the far end of the dining hall.
I see him about four seconds before he sees me, which means I get to watch it happen: the exact instant he registers I'm in the room, and the exact instant his entire body decides to be somewhere else.
He doesn't leave. That would be obvious. He simply turns forty degrees toward whoever he's sitting with and stays turned for the next fifteen minutes.
Soren, three seats down from him, does not do that. Soren looks at me across a hall of two hundred people and holds it for a second and a half, which for Soren is a public declaration set to music, and then goes back to his breakfast.
Luke isn't there. Luke's been in a room with the lawyers since seven.
I try once.
I catch Ander on the stairs at the back of the history building at eleven, coming down while I'm going up, and there is nowhere for either of us to go.
"Ander."
"Not here."
"That's not—"
"I have somewhere to be."
"You've had somewhere to be every single time you've seen me since yesterday."
He goes past me down the stairs.
I stand on the landing with my hand on the rail and I do not go after him, and it is, I would like the record to show, extremely difficult.
The Leadership and Governance rotation has visiting practitioners this week.
That's the polite version. The actual version is that all three Great Houses have people on this campus at the moment, because somebody sent them a notification eight days ago, and the academy has cleverly decided to fold the resulting circus into a teaching opportunity.
So on Thursday afternoon I'm in the long room on the first floor of the administration building with about thirty second-years, a Draeven policy adviser, a woman from the legal office, and a Council staffer who has been talking about consultation frameworks for nineteen minutes.
And an Ardent delegation.
Which is how Linnea Vane comes to be standing at the back of my leadership rotation in a coat that fits, holding a folder.
"Oh, God," Sophia says beside me, with enormous satisfaction.
"Don't."
"I'm just observing the room."
"Sophia."
"It's a rotation , Jessica, I'm rotating. "
Here's what I get to do for the next fifty minutes: pretend to take notes about consultation frameworks while watching Ander Ardent and Linnea Vane run a room together.
Because that's what it is. They're not doing anything. They're standing at the back of somebody else's session being polite. And they are running it anyway, in a way that has nothing to do with the front of the room.
Linnea knows who Ander needs to speak to.
She moves him — not obviously, just a hand at his elbow and a half-step, and he goes, because he's been going for years.
She knows which of the visitors matters and which one only thinks he does.
When somebody corners Ander for too long she appears beside them with a question for the other man and Ander is free inside eight seconds and neither of them acknowledges that it happened.
He does it for her too. Somebody asks Linnea something and Ander answers half of it before she has to, and she picks up the second half without a beat, and it's so seamless that it takes me twenty minutes to notice they're doing it at all.
Leo. Of course he is. You could put that man in a room with four hundred strangers and within a minute the room would rearrange itself around him without anybody deciding to.
When the coffee comes round he takes two and hands her one without asking what she wants.
That's the one that gets me.
Not the hand on the elbow. The coffee.
Because he knows. He's known since they were children. And there's a whole architecture there — a hundred rooms like this one, a thousand of these afternoons, two families and a shared future that everyone has been quietly building since before either of them could object.
And I stand there with a notebook I've written nothing in, and jealousy goes straight through me.
Fuck. I'm jealous.
Not in a mature, self-aware way that I'd like credit for. I would like to put my coffee down and walk over there and stand between them, and I have absolutely no right to, and I want to anyway.
It would be so much more convenient if Linnea Vane were terrible.
She isn't. She's never once been terrible. She's funny , which is the part I still resent most.
Could she kick a puppy? One puppy. Just to help me out.
She finds me at the break.
I'm at the window pretending to check my phone, and she comes over with two of the small pastries the academy puts out when there are visitors, and hands me one without asking whether I want it.
"You're being watched by pretty much all of the people," she says pleasantly.
"I'm aware."
"You're doing it well. The trick with your phone is good. It gives you a reason not to have a face." She takes a bite. "Also your left sleeve is up."
I look down.
It is. It's ridden up somewhere in the last hour and there they are, all three of them, clear as anything against the inside of my wrist.
Linnea Vane looks at them.
She doesn't pretend not to. She doesn't do the thing where you snap your eyes away and both people have to live with it. She looks, once, for about a second, and I watch her count exactly the way that girl in the coffee queue counted.
And her expression blanks.
And then it’s gone so fast that if I weren't watching for it I'd have missed it.
"Sleeve," she says.
I pull it down.
"Thank you."
"They'll be talking about it anyway. You may as well make them work." Linnea turns so she's facing the room instead of me, which puts us side by side, which I understand about four seconds later is deliberate — because now nobody can see either of our faces. "Are you all right?"
"That's a big question."
"It's a small one. I'm not asking about the Council." She eats the rest of the pastry. "I'm asking whether anyone's checked on you this week."
My friends have, but my friends are supposed to.
"That's a horrible thing to do to a person," I say.
"What is?"
"Being kind to me. I was doing extremely well hating you."
"Oh, don't stop on my account," Linnea says. "I'd hate me. I've had the easiest possible run at everything and I'm standing at the back of a room where nobody has to explain anything to me. It's genuinely infuriating."
"It is."
"Yes."
We stand there for a second.
"Linnea—"
"Don't," she says. Not sharply. "Not because I mind. Because you'd be apologizing for something you didn't do, and I'd have to be gracious about it, and I've been gracious for about four hours today and I'm running low."
And then she smiles at me, and goes back to work, and I stand at the window and think, God, this would all be so much easier if she was a bitch.
I hear it on the way to the cloakroom.
Not deliberately. There's a corridor behind the long room and a doorway that isn't shut, and I'm going past it with my coat over my arm when I catch Ander's voice, low and clipped, and then a second voice I recognize from a round chamber.
Caspian.
I should keep walking. I don't.
"—not the political question," Caspian is saying. "The political question is being handled by people who are paid to handle it. I'm asking about the other one."
"There isn't another one."
"There is, and everybody in that room this afternoon knew there was." A pause. "Linnea deserves clarity."
"Nothing has changed."
"Ander."
" Nothing has changed. "
"Three of them," Caspian says, quietly. "Yesterday there were two. Your father's asked me twice this week what I think, and I've told him twice that I don't know, and I'd very much like to stop lying to my brother about my own nephew."
Silence.
"Your responsibility isn't only to yourself," Caspian says. "That's all. That's the whole of what I came to say, and I've said it badly, and I'd like it noted that I argued for the Miller girl in the chamber last week and I'll do it again."
"I know you did."
"Then think about it. Not tonight. Think about it properly." Something shifts — a hand on a shoulder, maybe. "And speak to the girl. Whichever girl. Both of them, ideally. They've each got exactly as much information as I have, which is none, and neither of them deserves that."
I get about ten steps down the corridor before the door opens behind me.
"You heard that," Ander says.
I turn around.
"Some of it."
"How much?"
"Enough."
He stands there in the corridor with his coat in his hand and his jaw clenches, and I watch him decide.
"Fine," he says. "Say it."
"Say what?"
"Whatever you've been holding since yesterday. You've been carrying it around like a hot plate. Say it and let's be finished."
And that — after three days of not here and I have somewhere to be — is what finally does it.
"Okay," I say. "You're angry at me."
"I'm angry at this. "
"You keep saying that while looking directly at me."
"Because you're the one standing there!"
"Yes! I am! I'm standing here because I have been standing here for a year and a half while you decide whether that's acceptable to you—"
"That's not what this is."
"Then tell me what it is, Ander, because from where I'm standing you've spent three days pretending I don't exist because a mark appeared on my arm that I didn't ask for—"
"Because I watched it happen," he says.
That stops both of us.