Chapter 15 Sera Makes Her Move
Saturday morning at Northveil means no structured classes, which sounds like rest and is absolutely not.
The weekend ability sessions run from nine to eleven, optional on paper and socially compulsory in practice, and Ember House has theirs in the lower training hall with a third-year senior named Bram who has patient eyes and the manner of someone who genuinely enjoys watching people figure themselves out.
I'm there on time with Dara and two other Ember students I've started to know properly. Corvin, quiet and watchful, who may or may not be able to pass through solid objects and hasn't confirmed it either way. Sable, who smells faintly of something electric that she can't explain yet and finds it mildly distressing.
The training hall is warm and high-ceilinged, practice mats on the floor, ability dampening panels lining the walls to keep anything from escalating past a manageable threshold.
"Nothing forced today," Bram says, sitting cross-legged in front of us, hands resting open on his knees. "We're not pushing. We're just noticing. Whatever your ability is doing, let it do it. Don't direct it. Don't stop it. Just notice."
Professor Elara's word again. Noticing.
I settle onto my mat and close my eyes and try.
My right hand is warm, same as always, so I try to go past the warmth, past the surface of it, into whatever lives underneath. There's something there. Faint and searching, like a frequency that hasn't found its signal yet, a low hum of awareness that extends maybe two feet past my skin in every direction and tells me things I don't have vocabulary for.
Dara is anxious about something that has nothing to do with this room. Corvin is calmer than he looks. Sable is about to sneeze.
Sable sneezes.
I open my eyes briefly. Nobody noticed. I close them again.
I let the awareness extend further, past the two-foot radius, past the walls of the training hall, and immediately it's too much, three hundred students in various states of supernatural activity, too many frequencies at once, and I pull it back hard and breathe slowly and sit with just the five of us until my pulse settles.
After the session, Bram asks me to stay back.
"You extended a radius in there," he says, not alarmed, just factual. "About three metres at the peak. I could feel the edge of it."
"I don't know what it was," I say honestly.
"That's fine," he says. "But tell your academic advisor today. Not Monday. Today." He pauses, looking at me carefully. "It's moving fast, Veyra. Faster than standard Ember development. Whoever your advisor is needs to know."
I nod and thank him and go.
In the corridor outside the training hall, I nearly walk into Sera.
Alone this time, which is worse somehow, and she falls into step beside me with the ease of someone who absolutely planned this exact location and timing.
"How was the Ember session?" Warm. Interested. Perfectly calibrated.
"Really good," I reply, matching her register precisely. "Yours?"
"Productive," she says. A beat. "I heard you and Rhydan had a long conversation in the east courtyard yesterday."
I keep my pace and my face steady. "We have a shared trial partnership to debrief."
"You've been spending a lot of time together," she says, and something shifts underneath the warmth now, something with actual edges to it. "For people who met less than two weeks ago."
"Small campus," I say pleasantly.
"Mm." She glances at me sideways and the glance is not casual at all. "He doesn't usually stay interested. After the trial period, I mean. He's very focused, Rhydan. Hockey. Pack responsibilities. Family commitments that go back a long way." She pauses, half a beat too deliberate. "He doesn't have much room for distractions."
The word lands exactly where she means it to.
I stop walking.
She stops too, turning to face me, and for the first time the pleasant composure slips, not much, just enough, just a crack, and what shows through it is something considerably more personal than supernatural politics or family arrangements. It's the specific look of someone who has staked something real on a particular outcome and has just watched a variable walk onto the board that they didn't account for.
She's not just here because of the Binding Circle legacy...
She wants him.
Has wanted him, probably for longer than this semester, probably for longer than this year.
And I have apparently become the thing standing between her and that want, on two separate tracks simultaneously, which explains the precision of every interaction we've had so far.
"Sera," I say, keeping my voice even and unhurried. "Are you warning me off?"
Her chin lifts slightly. "I'm giving you context. You're new here. There are dynamics you don't understand yet. Relationships and histories that predate you by years."
"And you're part of those histories," I say.
"I know him," she says, and the way she says it carries weight that has nothing academic in it, nothing strategic, just something real and slightly raw underneath all the composure. "His family knows my family. There are things between us that you can't walk into in two weeks and understand."
"I'm sure there are," I say.
"Then you understand..." she starts.
"I understand that you're telling me to step back," I say. "And I appreciate you being direct about it, genuinely." I pause. "But I'm going to be direct back, because I think that's more respectful than pretending this conversation is about something else." I meet her eyes. "Whatever is happening between Rhydan and me is not something I chose or planned. And it's not something I'm going to walk away from because it's inconvenient for someone else's arrangements."
Her jaw tightens. The composure holds but it costs her something.
"You don't know what you're involved in," she says quietly.
"I know more than you think I do," I reply.
Her eyes drop to my hand.
Stay there for a full second this time, longer than before, and when they come back up, the pleasant warmth is gone entirely and what's left underneath it is something sharp and assessing and not even slightly friendly.
"Be careful, Veyra," she says.
"Always," I reply.
She holds my gaze for one more moment, then turns and walks away, smooth and composed, and I watch her go and wait until she's fully around the corner before I look down at my hand.
It's burning.
Not the faint steady warmth it's been all week. Burning, hot and urgent and unmistakeable, like something in me heard every word of that conversation and is registering an opinion about it in the most inconvenient way possible.
I press my palm flat against the cold stone wall.
The burning doesn't stop.
From somewhere down the west corridor comes the distant sound of the hockey rink, blades on ice, puck against boards, the clean brutal rhythm of it carrying through the walls.
I close my eyes for exactly three seconds.
Then I push off the wall and go find my academic advisor, because Bram said today and he was right, and because whatever is happening inside my hand right now needs someone with more answers than I currently have.
And because standing in corridors thinking about Rhydan Valecrest's grey eyes is not a plan.
Even if it's becoming increasingly difficult to stop doing it.