Chapter 11 The Conversation That Wasn't
We don't actually have the long conversation that night.
Not for any dramatic reason. Just because when Cassian suggests the common room and Rhydan says fine and we all start walking, we round the corner of the east corridor and nearly walk directly into Sera Vance.
She's not alone. Three girls behind her, mid-laugh about something, head tilted back, completely at ease, and then she sees us and the laugh doesn't stop exactly, it just lands differently, settling into something warmer and more deliberate as her eyes find Rhydan with the precision of a compass that only has one north.
"Rhydan." She steps forward, closing the distance between them naturally, like she has every right to that space, and something about the ease of it, the practiced ownership of it, puts a specific kind of tension in my jaw that I have no business feeling. "I've been looking for you. Aldric wants to move the strategy session to tomorrow morning, first free period."
"Fine," Rhydan says.
Her eyes move then, sweeping the rest of us in a single pass. Cassian gets a warm smile. Petra gets a polite one. I get something that lives in the precise space between warm and cool, pleasant enough on the surface that nobody watching could call it hostile, deliberate enough underneath that I feel every degree of the temperature gap.
"Veyra," she says. "Settling in well?"
"Really well," I reply, matching her warmth with the accuracy of someone defusing something they're not ready to touch directly yet. "Northveil's great."
"Good." Her gaze drops to my right hand, briefly, half a second, the same way it did in the corridor after the forest trial, that specific quality of recognition she keeps trying to disguise as nothing. Then back up to my face, smooth and composed. "Don't overdo the studying. First years burn out fast if they push too hard too early."
She moves past us, her girls falling into step behind her, and I watch her go and keep my expression completely still and feel the particular awareness of Rhydan watching me watch her.
"She does that on purpose," Petra says flatly, the moment they're around the corner.
"Which part?" Cassian asks.
"The hand thing," Petra replies, gesturing at me. "She keeps looking at Veyra's hand. Every single time."
"I noticed," I say.
I glance at Rhydan. He's staring at the empty corridor where Sera disappeared, jaw set, something working quietly behind his eyes that he has no intention of sharing in a hallway.
"The strategy session," I say. "What actually is that?"
"Hockey planning," he says. "Captain business."
"Right," I say, in a tone that makes it clear I've noted that answer under incomplete but acceptable for now.
He looks at me sideways. Brief. Measuring.
"Tomorrow," he says. "After morning classes. The conversation we didn't have tonight."
"Fine," I reply.
He nods once, says something low and private to Cassian that I don't catch, and walks away, and I stand in the corridor with Petra and watch him go and press my warm hand flat against my thigh.
"He's still cold with you," Petra observes.
"Noticed that too," I say.
"Even though you literally reached into whatever was happening to him in that forest and steadied it with your bare hand," she continues, in the tone she uses when she finds something genuinely baffling. "He's still walking away from you like you're a mildly interesting stranger."
"Yep," I agree.
"Does that bother you?"
I think about the guilt that crossed his face when he told us about the Binding Circle arrangement. I think about the way he said between us in the Ability Theory classroom without seeming to notice what those words did to the air. I think about the fact that he engineered our trial pairing, which was a choice, which was something, even if he won't name what something it was.
"Ask me something easier," I reply.
Petra links her arm through mine and we head toward the Ember corridor and she doesn't push further because she knows when pushing helps and when it doesn't, and I love her for that more than I usually remember to say.
From somewhere down the west corridor, Sera's laugh carries.
Bright and effortless and pointed in the specific way of things that are meant to carry.
My hand burns warm at my side and I flex my fingers once and keep walking.