Chapter 35: Aria’s Account [2]

Raven answered with an unusually long account—new terrain mapped, a ridge line worth noting, some detail about defensible ground near a bend in the river. It was delivered fluidly, almost too fluidly, the kind of report that sounded rehearsed rather than remembered. Aria nodded along, filing it, but something underneath the words didn’t sit right. Raven had only split off from the rest of the group near the very end of their patrol, and she’d looked rushed doing it, distracted in a way nobody else seemed to clock. That wasn’t enough time for half of what she’d just described. Aria’s mind, the part of her that had always liked a puzzle more than she was willing to admit out loud, started turning the pieces over on its own.

She pressed, gently probing for more specifics. "Exactly where does the ridge sit? How far out? What did you use to mark the terrain?"

Raven’s expression shuttered fast, the brief flush draining away, replaced by her usual flat mask. "I need to go," she said, her voice clipped. She was already turning before Aria could get another question in.

Aria narrowed her eyes at her retreating back. Raven walked away with her usual economy of motion, her hips swaying with a tight, controlled power that pulled the fabric of her short skirt taut over a firm, round ass.

And that’s when she saw it.

Low, just beneath the hem of the skirt, faint against pale skin—the ghost of a handprint, already fading but unmistakable in shape, fingers splayed wide across one plump curve of her backside.

Aria froze.

Heat flooded straight up into her face, a blush so sudden and total it made her ears burn.

Is that—is that what this was?

Raven, off in the woods on her own, going to have some kind of "fun"?

An unbidden, embarrassingly vivid image flashed through her mind: a firm palm connecting with skin, the sharp sting of it, the lingering warmth, the shape of a hand left behind on her own ass.

She had to physically stop herself from rubbing her own butt right there in the open, her hand twitching toward her hip before she caught herself and folded her arms instead. No. There was absolutely no way.

Not Raven, stone-faced, unreadable, sharp-tongued Raven, sneaking off into the trees for something like that. She’d never even seen Raven talk to anyone long enough to build up to it, no flirtation Aria had ever caught wind of, no name that came up when the other girls gossiped. Which meant there was no lead to chase, nothing solid enough to hand a name to. She filed the whole thing away anyway, tucked into the same corner of her mind where the panty incident and the duskfang and every other half-answered question about Cane already lived, and got back to work.

Her actual job today was runes, and at least that was something she was genuinely good at.

She’d never been the type to draw the sprawling, layered constructs the top scholars managed, dense webs of interlocking sigils that took an hour of careful, unbroken linework to finish and produced something powerful enough to stop a charging beast dead in its tracks. Any scholar in this bracket could sit down and reproduce one flawlessly given enough time, because the actual drawing barely demanded anything from the caster beyond patience and a steady hand—the complexity did the heavy lifting, not the person holding the chalk. What she had instead was control—real, fine control over her own mana, tight enough that she could compress the same eventual effect into something far simpler on the page and far harder to actually pull off. A triangle. A circle traced tight around it, nothing more elaborate than that. She knelt in the dirt, set the chalk to stone, and channelled mana into the shape in one smooth, continuous pull, watching the lines flare once with brilliant blue light, flare again, then settle into a steady, low glow.

A basic barrier rune, finished in under a minute, holding exactly as well as one of the scholars’ hour-long versions would, with only one real cost—if her control slipped even slightly mid-channel, a flicker, a stutter, anything less than perfectly even, the whole thing failed outright, no partial credit, no room for error, and she had to scrape the lines away and start over from nothing. She spent the next fifteen minutes producing eight of them in a row without a single failure, her knees aching from crouching over stone the whole time, and gathered the finished batch onto a cloth before carrying it over to where the princess was standing.

Seraphina took the runes from her with a smile that didn’t quite reach past the corners of her mouth, polite and thin in the specific way reserved for someone she’d rather not be smiling at. Aria was under no illusions about why. Seraphina liked Vincent. Of course she did—everyone with eyes and a pulse seemed to, one way or another, and Aria’s spent enough time standing next to him to have built up an immunity to it that clearly read as either admirable or suspicious depending on who was judging.

She tried, briefly, to actually picture Seraphina’s life rather than just resent the result of it—a girl raised entirely inside palace walls, tutored from birth in etiquette and history and presumably a small library’s worth of romances about princes and knights riding in to save the day. Of course a story like that landed on someone like Vincent. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

He was handsome enough, by any objective measure, broad-shouldered and golden and clean-jawed in the way storybooks described their heroes. He was also, undeniably, the strongest person on this entire campus, bar absolutely none, and he held that strength back constantly, visibly, choosing restraint every single time he easily could not.

Aria didn’t see him that way herself—never had, not once, he read to her as something closer to an older brother than anything romantic—but she could trace exactly why someone raised on those stories would read him differently.

Seraphina turned from her without another word, her skirt swaying lightly with the motion, the fabric whispering over hips that were slender but still held a delicate, aristocratic curve.

She skipped the short distance over to where Vincent stood, giggling something too quiet for Aria to catch before leaning in close. She bent slightly to murmur it directly against his ear, one hand resting light on his forearm, the gesture pulling her uniform blouse taut across a pair of surprisingly full breasts. Aria watched for a second, shrugged it off, and turned to walk away toward the supply crates.

Then she caught it. Just a flicker, gone almost as soon as it registered—Raven, walking back into the treeline, alone, moving with clear purpose rather than a wander. It was brief, barely more than a glimpse of that same short dark hair disappearing past the first line of trunks, but Aria was certain of what she saw.

She narrowed her eyes, turned on her heel, and walked straight back toward Vincent and the princess without a shred of hesitation about interrupting whatever quiet moment they were having.

She asked Vincent plainly where Raven was headed, whether either of them had sent her out to collect something, scout something, anything that would explain a second unsupervised trip into the woods this soon after the last one.

Seraphina tilted her head, the picture of polite confusion, and asked, genuinely baffled, what Aria could possibly mean. Then she lifted one hand and pointed, past Aria’s shoulder, back toward the riverbank.

"Raven is right there," she informed her, her voice sweet and entirely certain.

Aria turned.

And there she was—Raven, exactly where the princess said, standing easy at the river’s edge. She was deep in some unremarkable conversation with another student from their group, nothing furtive about her posture at all, nothing that matched what Aria could have sworn she just watched vanish into the treeline seconds ago.

Aria’s eyes narrowed further, her jaw setting.

She was right. There was something going on here, and Raven was a key part of it.