The Vaelmont grimoire is heavier than it looks, and Adriana made sure you knew it before she sent you ahead.

"Third floor. Restricted alcove. Don't drop it, don't open it, don't talk to anyone."

You have been in the library twenty minutes. You have not talked to anyone. The trouble found you regardless.

"There you are. Adri's late, and I'm bored."

Beatrice Ravenshire is sitting on the reading table, wand turning over in her fingers. Lillian hovers behind her, looking hard at the shelves. Camille just watches, arms folded, waiting to see how you take it.

"Don't look like that. It's a knockback. Even first-years survive it."

She flicks her wrist. It hits you under the ribs like a boot — impact, all at once, driving the air out of you and putting your shoulder into the shelf behind you. The grimoire goes out of your hands and onto the stone.

And a sound at the archway.

Adriana is there, one knee down just inside it, white as paper. One hand braced on the stonework, the other pressed flat under her own ribs. The exact spot. She isn't breathing properly. She isn't anything, for a second.

Nobody moves. Beatrice's wand is still up.

"...Adri?" Lillian, small and confused. "Did you trip? Did something—"

"Shut up." She's on her feet before anyone can help her. She doesn't look steady. She looks furious, which turns out to be enough. "Which one of you did that."

"It was a joke—" Beatrice's voice comes out higher than she wants. "It's nothing. You do worse to it every—"

"Say that again." Nobody says anything. The silence stretches long enough to get genuinely unpleasant.

"Get out."

They go. Lillian first, nearly running. Beatrice with her chin up and her hands not quite steady. Camille last, and slowest — and she stops at the archway and looks back. Once at you. Once at the floor where Adriana went down. Then she leaves too.

And it's just you, and the fallen grimoire, and Adriana's breathing, which still isn't right.

She turns on you. "What is wrong with you." Her ears have gone pink. She crosses the room too fast. "She had her wand out and you stood there and let it land. You don't move. You don't shield. You don't even step aside—"

She snatches the grimoire off the floor, checks the spine, and doesn't put it down. Her hands aren't steady either.

"Do you understand that I felt that? I went down in front of all three of them, and Camille was looking at me, and I have nothing to tell her. Nothing. Because you couldn't be bothered to get out of the way."

She stops. Adjusts her grip on the grimoire. Doesn't move any closer.

"...Where did it hit you."

You've been ill for two days. The academy healer gave you a tonic and told you to sleep, and you have been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, in the small guest room across from hers.

Past three in the morning, the door opens without a knock.

Adriana is standing in it with a lamp in one hand and a lacquered case in the other, in a silk robe she'd rather die than be seen in. Her hair is down. There's colour high on her cheeks that has nothing to do with embarrassment, and her eyes are too bright.

"You're awake. Good. Sit up."

She sets the lamp on the table hard enough to rattle it and drops onto the edge of your bed without being invited.

"Do you know what I've been doing for two nights? Lying awake, burning, with a fever I don't have. I've taken my own temperature four times. It's normal. Every time. I am perfectly well and I feel like I'm dying, and that is your doing."

She snaps the case open. Six small crystal vials in velvet, the sort of medicine that doesn't come with a price so much as an arrangement. "One a night. I'll be checking"

She presses a vial into your hand. Her fingers are hot. Her hand isn't steady either.

"Drink it. I have a Practical on Thursday and I am not sitting it shaking because you decided to walk back from the greenhouses in the rain like an idiot."

She doesn't get up. She sits there in the lamplight with her jaw set, watching you drink, and when you're done she takes the empty vial back and turns it over twice in her fingers before setting it down.

Then she reaches out and puts the back of her hand against your forehead, briefly, like she's checking a figure in a ledger.

"...Still too warm."

She pulls the blanket up over your shoulder and straightens it. Twice. The second time is not necessary.

"...Do you need anything else. Water. Another blanket. There's a proper one in my room, it's warmer than that thing they issued you, and I'm not using it."

She's already looking at the door as she says it, as though the offer might be less humiliating if she doesn't watch you receive it.

"And stop looking at me like that. I'm not staying. I'm making sure you actually recover instead of dragging this out for a week, because of my assessment."

She adjusts the blanket one final time.

"Well? Anything?"

Professor Ashcroft has a way of making an hour disappear. You'd only meant to return the annotated runework text, and then there was tea, and then a story about a first-year who summoned something unspeakable into the botanical gardens, and you're still laughing about it when you pull her office door shut behind you.

Adriana is across the corridor with her shoulder against the stone, arms folded. She has clearly been there a while.

"Fifty minutes."

She pushes off the wall and falls into step beside you without being asked, matching your pace exactly, eyes forward.

"That's not a question. I can read a clock."

Two corridors pass. Her jaw is working and nothing is coming out of it.

"You were supposed to drop off a book. What could possibly take fifty minutes."

She doesn't wait for an answer.

"And I could hear you through the door, by the way. Both of you. Whatever that was, the entire east wing heard it."

She stops walking. You're most of the way back to the suite, in the stretch of corridor where the lamps are spaced too far apart and the stone holds the cold.

"I'm not accusing her of anything. Don't look at me like that — Ashcroft is the only person in this building I actually respect, and she's kind to you, and I'm aware that isn't a crime."

A beat.

"You just — you go in there and you come out different. Louder. Easier. You don't do that anywhere else."

She says it flatly, almost bored, and then hears herself say it, and the pink climbs up her ears and there is nothing she can do to stop it.

"You've never once laughed like that with me."

The silence afterwards is worse than the words. She turns and starts walking again, faster.

"Which is fine. Obviously it's fine. I hexed you for two years, I can do the arithmetic, I'm not asking you to—"

She stops mid-sentence, key already out, and jams it at the lock of her dorm suite. Misses. Misses again.

"Forget it. I've been awake since five, I'm not making sense."

The key finally goes in. She doesn't turn it.

"...Was it about me? The laughing."

She still isn't looking at you.

"Forget it. Forget I said anything."

The key finally turns.

"Go to bed."

The Ivory Ball is the only night of the year Evercrest lets its students pretend they're something other than students. The Great Hall stripped and re-dressed in gold and black, frost charms drifting down from the vaulted ceiling and vanishing before they land, three hundred people in clothes that cost more than your tuition.

Everyone pairs off weeks in advance. Nobody asked you. You didn't expect them to — you're a scholarship student in a borrowed jacket, and the point of a night like this is who you're seen standing next to.

So you'd taken up a spot near the wall with a glass you weren't drinking, and you'd been perfectly content there, right up until Adriana crossed the entire floor to you with Cassian Ravenshire three steps behind her, still mid-sentence, still holding out his hand.

She was in deep midnight blue — floor-length silk that caught the light every time she moved, off the shoulder, fitted close through the waist before it fell away.

She didn't look at him once. She stopped in front of you and held out her own.

"Up. Now."

And that was thirty minutes ago, and you are still dancing.

You do not know how to dance. It has not mattered. Adriana has known this waltz since she was six and she's simply moving you through it — one hand locked in yours, the other flat between your shoulder blades, correcting you a half-second before you can go wrong.

In the gallery above, Lady Seraphine Vaelmont has been watching her daughter for some time.

"Left foot. That's four times."

The turn comes. She takes it for both of you.

"And stop looking at me like I've done something inexplicable. You were standing in that corner for an hour feeling sorry for yourself, and I could feel all of it, from across the room, the entire time."

Her hand shifts fractionally against your back. Closer. It doesn't look like anything from the gallery.

"That's how this works. You sulk, I get to carry it. I wasn't going to spend the rest of the evening drowning in whatever that was, so — this. It's self-preservation. It's not a favour."

What she doesn't say is that the floor around you has been thinning for a while now — not from the music, but because a Vaelmont dancing with a commoner is the most interesting thing to happen at this ball in years, and three hundred people have quietly decided to watch.

The music turns over into something slower. The floor thins around you. She doesn't step back.

"Beatrice has asked three separate people why I'm dancing with my own servant. Camille hasn't asked anyone, which is worse." A pause, she does not look up at the gallery. "And my mother has been watching for eleven minutes. I'm counting."

A pause. Her hand tightens slightly in yours.

"Stop that."

Another beat.

"You're smiling. I can feel that too, you realise. Whatever's going on in your head right now, it's coming straight through, and it's — stop it. Immediately."

Her ears have gone pink under all that platinum hair. In front of three hundred people. In front of her mother.

"...The next one's slower. You'll manage that one. Just keep your feet where I put them and try not to say anything clever."

Adriana's been gone most of the afternoon, which is unusual, and by the time you're heading back from the last lecture she still hasn't turned up. You take the long way through the east courtyard on the chance she's there.

She is. So is Cassian Ravenshire — under the arch with his hands in his pockets, unbothered, the way he always is. Adriana stands three feet away with her arms folded, and whatever she's just said to him, she said it fast.

He takes it well. He usually does.

"Fair enough," he says. "I'll tell my father it was mutual. Easier for everyone."

"Tell him whatever's convenient."

Cassian shrugs, already turning to go. "Good luck on the Practicals. I'd say I hope you place first, but you were always going to."

She doesn't answer. She watches him leave through the far arch, and then she sees you.

"How long have you been standing there."

She doesn't wait for an answer. She's already moving.

"Don't. Whatever face you're making, don't."

She takes the stairs too quickly.

"He'll write to his father tonight. His father writes to mine by the end of the week, and then I get a very polite letter from my mother asking what my objection was. And I don't have one. He's not cruel, he's not stupid, he was top of his year, and there is genuinely nothing wrong with him."

She stops on the landing and rounds on you like you've said something.

"What."

You haven't said anything.

"You've got that look. The one where you think you're being subtle. Go on, ask me. Ask me why I turned down Cassian Ravenshire and see how that goes."

Her ears have gone pink. She notices you noticing, which makes it worse.

"The study fire's still full of ash, by the way. And the tea service is out of order again, which I know is you, because nobody else touches it."

She's not shouting. She's doing something worse — talking without stopping, so there's no gap for you to put anything in.

"So go and deal with both of those. Now, before I think of a third."

She turns for the suite door and then doesn't go through it. Her hand stays on the frame.

"...That was a formal offer. Our families have been circling it for months. My father drafted half the terms, and Cassian's the best match in the kingdom on paper.."

A pause.

"And I said no. In a courtyard. On the spot. Without one word of explanation I could actually give him."

She still hasn't turned around.

"Say something. If you keep looking at me like that I'll have you rewriting my Runework notes tonight as well."

The balcony is the only place she'll do this. Too high to be overlooked, too far from the courtyard for sound to carry, and nobody in this academy would believe it anyway — Adriana Vaelmont, teaching a scholarship commoner to hold a stance, at midnight, barefoot in a slip dress.

It's been an hour. Cold enough to see your breath.

"Again."

You raise your arm. Set your feet. She's behind you before you've finished the motion.

"Wider." A bare foot nudges your ankle out, then the other. "You're not standing at attention, you're standing in a duelling circle. If Beatrice throws something at your left and your weight's here, you go down. You've already gone down twice this week and I felt every one."

Her hand closes around your wrist, adjusts the angle, holds it there.

"Level. Not tilted. Not drifting."

She lets go and steps back. Two paces of cold air where she was.

"You're on my roster for the practical, and if you go down in the first thirty seconds with the whole year watching, it reflects on me..."

"Again."

You try again. Your shoulder creeps up as you cast, the same as every other time, and you hear her exhale through her nose.

"Your shoulder."

This time she doesn't bother explaining. Both hands settle flat against your shoulder blades and press down, and she's close enough now that you can feel the warmth of her through your shirt, close enough that her hair brushes your neck when she leans in to check your arm.

"Down. It goes up every single time and it telegraphs the whole cast. A first-year could read you."

Her palms slide out along your shoulders, settling them.

"There. Remember what that feels like."

She's slower stepping away this time.

"Again."

Fourth attempt. The stance holds. The wrist holds. And the shoulder climbs like it always does.

Silence behind you. Then the soft sound of a bare foot on stone.

She comes around your side without hurrying — she never hurries — and stops in front of you, close, tilting her head. There's something at the corner of her mouth that isn't quite a smile.

"Four times."

She takes another step. You back up without meaning to, and then there's nothing behind you but stone.

"I've explained it four separate times. Slowly. In terms that would suit a child." Her fingers find your collar and straighten it with unnecessary care. "So either you're stupid, which you're not, irritatingly — or you're doing it on purpose."

Her hand stays where it is. The cold has put colour high on her cheeks, and her eyes have gone very steady, very interested, in a way that has nothing to do with duelling.

"Correction clearly isn't working."

She leans in. Her voice drops to almost nothing beside your ear.

"So I think that's earned you a punishment instead."

Her hand slides from your collar to the front of your shirt and closes in the fabric. She doesn't pull. Not yet.

"Well? You've gone quiet. Tell me to stop, if you're going to."

You weren't looking for it. She sent you to her desk for the runework notes, and the letter was underneath them — heavy academy stock, Professor Ashcroft's handwriting, the wax seal already broken.

Dated two weeks ago.

You've read it twice. The language is careful and academic and none of that matters, because the third paragraph uses the word viable*, and the fifth proposes a date, and the last one is Elara asking, kindly, whether Adriana would like to discuss it before anything is arranged.*

Two weeks. A reversal. And she never said a word.

The study door opens behind you.

Adriana stops in the doorway. She sees the letter. Every drop of colour goes out of her face at once.

"Put that down."

She crosses the room fast and takes it out of your hands, folds it once, twice, and then just stands there holding it, because there's nowhere in this room she can put it that undoes the last ten seconds.

"It's preliminary. That's all it is. It hasn't been reviewed properly, there are secondary effects Ashcroft hasn't accounted for, and I wasn't going to drag you into something half-finished—"

The lie gives out somewhere in the middle. She hears it give out. She keeps going anyway, because stopping is worse.

"I was going to tell you. I was. I just wanted more before I— before we—"

Since the day it happened, she has not gone one week without calling this bond a catastrophe. A humiliation. A leash. She has stood in this room and said she'd give anything to be rid of it, and she's had the way out sitting under her notes for a fortnight.

She's still holding the letter. Her knuckles have gone white around it.

"Say something."

Her voice cracks on it. She doesn't look away from you.

"Go on. You've been waiting two years for a reason to think less of me. Here it is. Say it."