Chapter 1238: The Name Before The Offer (4)

"Wow. I did not know I had a fan."

Just as she’d predicted.

"I am not your fan." The words came out flatter than she meant them to, which only seemed to please him more.

"Then explain why you are here."

"I have nothing to explain to you."

He made a small sound, half sigh, half yawn, and let his gaze drift past her shoulder in search of better company in the corridor. "...Boring."

"..." She said nothing, refusing to give him the reaction he was fishing for.

"Oh..."

As if something had just occurred to him. His gaze came back to her, sharp enough that she nearly stepped back.

"Let me guess, then."

"Guess?"

He didn’t answer right away. He only studied her, as he had across the tournament grounds at Andelheim, cataloguing something she couldn’t see. Then, quiet, certain:

"Disciplinary Committee."

The remark landed where he’d aimed it. Valeria tried not to let it show on her face and failed, by a margin small enough that she could tell he’d caught it anyway.

His smile widened by a fraction, satisfied in a way that had nothing gentle in it. "Indeed. I am right."

"...."

"Don’t look at me like that. Everyone knows the Pink Knight---" He reached out, closed the last of the distance between them, and tapped two fingers once against the token still folded in her palm before she could pull it back. He didn’t finish the sentence where she’d braced for it to end.

"---straightens the instant someone’s actually read her. Every time. It’s the easiest tell you’ve got."

"I do not do that."

"You do."

"...."

She did not dignify it with a denial this time. She only held his gaze and refused to give the corridor a second thing to watch.

"If so," she said, the pause having annoyed her more than the accusation had, "not everyone knows it."

"...."

"That’s probably true." No theater in it this time, none of the performance he usually dressed a concession in. "My mistake."

Valeria’s gaze flicked past him toward the door he’d just come through. "Why were you summoned to the president’s office?"

"He wanted my help with something." He said it easily, already moving past it, attention already back on her. "Did you accept?"

"I accepted." She added the rest on its own. "Provisionally."

He didn’t press for anything past that. The question had been simple, and her answer had been enough to close it. She kept talking anyway.

"It lets me act while something is still happening, instead of afterward." She turned the token once between her fingers, not quite looking at him now. "And it’s real work. Not another form of training, not another form to fill out before someone decides I’ve earned the next one."

He listened, still, with none of the usual noise underneath it.

"When do you start?"

It was such an ordinary question that it took her a moment to place what it had actually asked. Not whether the appointment was wise, or safe, or worth the risk to her name. Just when.

"After orientation. A week, maybe less."

"...."

"I wanted it." She said it plainly, which she rarely managed about herself. "That’s the whole of it."

He didn’t make her say more than that.

"It suits you." He said it without any of the mockery he usually wrapped a compliment in. "Even before the Academy, I could have pictured you doing exactly this."

Her eyebrows rose, just enough to ask the question she didn’t voice.

He made her wait just long enough for it to be worth it, then straightened, folded his hands behind his back with theatrical precision, and pitched his voice colder and more clipped than his own, an imitation exaggerated just enough to make its target unmistakable.

"So." A slow, deliberate once-over, chin lifted at the angle hers used to lift. "You’re the one who dealt with Korvan?"

For a moment she only stared at him.

"You---" She stopped, because there wasn’t a good end to that sentence. Warmth climbed her neck before she could stop it.

"I expected someone taller," he went on, relentless, holding the pose and her old cadence. "More imposing."

"That is enough."

"Follow me. Now." He dropped the imitation as quickly as he’d picked it up, his own amusement plain on his face again. "You said that. To me. In front of half an inn."

She opened her mouth, found nothing worth saying, and closed it again, which had never once worked as a strategy against him and didn’t now.

Under the mortification came a quieter feeling, harder to name than embarrassment. It had been years. A handful of sentences, exchanged in a single morning at an inn in a small town, and even with everything that had happened since piled on top of them, he still had her words in the order she’d said them, and the tilt of her chin along with them.

She didn’t know what to do with that.

He wasn’t finished with her yet.

"It really does explain quite a bit." His head tilted, that considering look coming back over his face. "I can already picture it. You, catching some unlucky first-year out of uniform---"

He straightened, chin lifting, voice snapping back into that clipped, officious register. "’This constitutes a violation of Academy conduct. State your name and block for the record.’"

"Lucavion."

"’I did not ask for your opinion. I asked for your name.’"

Her fist connected with his shoulder before she’d fully decided to throw it, not hard, but enough to make her point. "Enough."

He actually stopped.

The teasing dropped away without argument or a last word squeezed in edgewise, and for a moment he only rubbed the spot she’d hit, watching her with what looked almost like approval.

She didn’t let it last.

"You still haven’t told me what the president wanted."

He didn’t dress it up. "He wants my help with certain Council assignments." A shrug, easy, as though it cost him nothing to say. "Nothing more specific than that. Not yet."

"And that alone was enough for you to agree?"

"Not entirely." His expression changed, brief and deliberate. "There’s a provisional Wayfarer writ attached to it."

She tried the phrase and came up with nothing. "I have never heard of that."

"Leave without asking permission for every departure." He said it plainly, none of the theater left in his voice. "I still have to come back inside whatever window we agree on. Elias is sponsoring the request. It hasn’t been issued. Needs a second signature first."

It took her a moment to understand what he was describing, and another to understand why it mattered to him as much as it clearly did.

No one standing at the gate deciding whether his reasons were good enough.

She understood at once why he’d wanted it. Whatever else that office had offered him, this was the part he’d actually accepted for.

"That is not a small thing to be given."

"No," he agreed. "It isn’t."

He said nothing further, and the flatness in that told her not to push for more than he’d already handed her.

The question that actually mattered to her came a moment later, quieter than she’d meant it to sound.

"Do you already have somewhere you intend to go?"

His expression turned again, sharper this time and more pleased with itself.

"Indeed." He tipped his head slightly, appraising her as he had a dozen times tonight already. "As sharp as ever."

"That is not a hard conclusion to reach."

"Not every person would reach it this fast."

"...."

She let the compliment lie there, unclaimed, and decided the silence had gone on long enough.

"So?"

"Well, of course I have places I intend to go." He said it lightly, already turning the question aside before she could press. "Arcania, for one. I have yet to actually see the capital properly with all it has to offer. And these grounds---" a small, dismissive gesture at the corridor around them "---would bore me within a season. I am already feeling a bit suffocated, if I am honest."

It was, she noticed, an answer assembled from things that were probably true, and none of them the answer.

She had spent enough time reading him, across a duel, across a table, across two weeks at Andelheim, to know the difference between Lucavion telling her something and Lucavion telling her only the part he’d decided was hers to have. This was the second kind.

"If you do not want to tell me," she said, "you do not need to beat around the bush."

"Come on now." He put a hand to his chest, wounded and not the least bit convincing. "I am not lying."

"Humph."

"Are you a hamster?"

"...."

"I am finding it genuinely difficult not to grab your cheeks right now." He said it flatly, as if noting a minor inconvenience. "You should not tempt me any further than that."

She stepped back half a pace before she’d decided to, one hand drifting toward her own cheek before she caught herself and dropped it.

They left the corridor behind them, the Council wing giving way to the open evening air of the grounds. Clubs Day was winding down around them: the last recruitment stalls folding their banners for the night, insignia gathered table by table, students crossing the lawns with application forms still clutched in hand. The noise of the day had thinned into smaller knots of conversation, drifting toward the dining halls.

"Your writ does not place you outside the Committee’s authority," she said. "You should know that before you get too comfortable with it."

"Lucky for me, then, that I know someone inside it."

"Familiarity will not protect you."

"That," he said, "is why knowing you might."

That landed differently from his usual deflections. He was not claiming she would look away for him. He was betting she would not let either fondness or dislike stand in for what had actually happened.

She still did not care for how he’d phrased it.

Her attention kept snagging, more than once now, on his gaze drifting toward the gates whenever the conversation lapsed, toward the road beyond the wards and whatever lay past it. In the span of one evening he had acquired a name inside the Committee, a lawful means of leaving whenever he pleased, and some quietly arranged shelter from being judged too quickly. It read less like ambition than like a man assembling gear before a journey.

"Are you finished accumulating obligations for one day?"

"Obligations are only troublesome when they fail to open anything."

"What do you intend to open?"

His smile came back, faint.

"Today? Dinner. Assuming the kitchens have not surrendered."

He had turned the question again, as easily as always, and this time she let him.

They walked on together.

The token sat small and cool in her pocket, already worn smooth from how many times she’d turned it that night. Whatever waited for him, a signature not yet given, a road not yet walked, had not even been made real yet.

She would stay when the alarm sounded. He would already be past the gate before anyone finished asking why.

For tonight, though, they were headed toward the same door, and whatever the kitchens had left.