Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1228: A Wild Senior Appeared ?

"There you are."

The words sank into him slowly, the way a splinter works its way in.

They were so soft. They carried so much. They made it sound as though he had been lost and she had been searching, patiently and without complaint, for years, and had only now been rewarded.

Heat climbed behind his ribs.

It did not come out as noise. It never did. Lucavion’s anger had always gone quiet before it went anywhere else, and now it flattened his voice into something level and cold.

"I was here the entire time." He held her gaze. "You were looking in the wrong place."

Isolde showed nothing of it. She looked at him with something gentler than he had expected, and it annoyed him far more than a rebuke would have.

"Then I will try to look more carefully," she said quietly.

She said it kindly. That was the worst part.

He turned away before his face could answer for him.

"Shall we?" Isolde asked, and did not wait to see if he would follow.

He followed.

They left the folded screens behind and slipped back into the noise of Clubs Day, and Lucavion distracted himself the only way he could. He read every sign they passed. The Pastry Appreciation Circle. The Society for Extremely Slow Chess. A table of students promoting something called competitive knitting, with the gravity of soldiers guarding a bridge. He studied each one with the attention of a scholar, and did not hear a word Isolde said beside him.

And behind the signs, he went over why he had said yes.

Staying outside had looked clean, and it was not. Isolde could approach Elowyn regardless, in any corridor, at any table. He would learn nothing of what she intended, and the dangerous excursion would grow harder to watch from outside its walls. Worse, she would learn something valuable: that a little threatened proximity was enough to make him step back.

Joining had a cost. She would gain access to him.

But he would gain access to her. He could watch her activity, and the excursion, and the way each began to take shape. He could learn what she knew about the Rotunda, and how much of the story she had already gathered. And he could make sure that she was not the only one deciding what version of him, and of that dance, finally reached Elara’s ears.

It was a sound decision, even a correct one.

Lucavion refused to admit to himself that some part of him also wanted to know what she had been trying to say, all those years ago.

He pushed that aside and turned to face her.

"One condition."

Isolde raised a brow, politely.

"If anything concerning Elowyn reaches you, a rumor, an invitation, a plan with her name on it, I hear about it. Before it reaches her."

"Why," Isolde said lightly, "should that be my responsibility? I have offered to help her. I did not offer to keep you informed."

The crowd went on around them, oblivious. Lucavion’s smile disappeared, and his eyes went very still.

"Because you said you would help," he said, and he did not raise his voice, "and help needs eyes. You will have the eyes. I would like to know what you see." He let a beat pass. "If something happens to her that you knew about, and I did not, I will take that as a decision. I don’t take well to decisions made on my behalf."

It was pitched low enough that nobody in the crowd turned.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Then Isolde inclined her head, slowly, conceding a piece she had meant to give away anyway.

"Very well. If something concerning Miss Caerlin reaches me, you will hear of it."

"Promptly."

"Promptly," she agreed.

They reached the Culinary Expedition Society’s table together, and the representative, who had been patiently explaining escort requirements to a first-year, looked up with an expression of cautious hope.

Isolde stopped half a step behind him.

She did not reach for the pen. She did not touch his sleeve, or glance at the line where a signature belonged, or say a word about what he ought to write. She simply stood there, quiet and still, and Lucavion was aware of every inch of distance she chose not to close.

That, too, was deliberate. He suspected she knew he would notice.

He took the pen himself.

Name. Block. Previous experience, where he wrote something truthful and unhelpful. Emergency contact, where he hesitated long enough for the representative to shift in their seat, and then left the line blank. Under reason for joining he wrote the food, which had the great advantage of being true.

He signed it, Lucavion, with no surname, in a hand that did not shake.

Then he slid the form across the table.

"Welcome to the society," the representative said, relieved, and reached for a stamp.

The paper had barely left his fingers when someone stepped up to the table beside him, close enough that he felt them before he saw them.

"Finally, found you."

The voice was brisk and unadorned. He turned, and recognized the function before the person.

A Council armband sat squarely on her sleeve. She carried a slate under one arm and a narrow rod in the opposite hand, held like a conductor’s baton, and there was chalk on her fingers, ground into the creases of her knuckles as if she had been marking the day’s boundaries by hand. Dark hair pinned back without ornament. Gray eyes that took the table, the representative, and the crowd around it in one flat sweep, and reduced all of them to an order of operations.

Lucavion had seen her earlier. She had been near Elias, at the edges of the grounds, and wherever she went, lines straightened. Students eased away from doorways. Booths that had wandered past their allotted ground drifted back on their own. He had not learned her name. He had simply noticed, without thinking about it, that the whole afternoon seemed to correct itself around her.

Her gaze rested on him briefly, then on Isolde.

"Isolde Valoria," she said.

No Lady. No Miss. No honorific of any kind. She said the name as she might read it off a roster, with just the weight needed to make it unambiguous and not a gram more.

"I was not aware you were acquainted with Lucavion."

He noticed the full name for him as well, bare and unadorned, and understood that this was simply how she handled everyone. Rank was a line on a form to her, and she had plainly never been impressed by a form in her life. A practical woman. He found he liked her for it, in the way one likes a locked door.

A flicker crossed the corners of Isolde’s eyes, gone almost before it began.

Lucavion knew what had caused it. Isolde expected her identity to arrive first, announced with its titles, and she had just been handed it bare, in the middle of a crowd, like a coat check ticket. He had done the same thing to her at the Oral Examination, and he remembered that same narrowing.

’Two sentences in, and she has managed what took me an entire examination.’

It was a small pleasure. He kept it off his face.

Isolde smoothed the flicker away, and her voice, when it came, was even.

"We sat together during the Academy examinations, and I found him interesting. Clubs Day seemed a convenient occasion to speak with him again." A pause. "It appears I have persuaded him to join a society."

It was a tidy account. It was also a very small one, with every unhelpful detail left off the edges.

Lucavion let it stand. He offered a nod, the smallest one compatible with honesty, and nothing more. He had learned long ago that the safest way to keep a story upright was to lean on it as little as possible.

The woman looked between them. The slate did not move. The rod did not move. Her eyes moved, once, from one face to the other, and whatever she filed there, she filed it without comment.

Isolde turned to her fully then, and returned the courtesy, name for name, with a rank attached.

"Senior Sera."