Shattered Innocence: Transmigrated Into a Novel as an Extra

Chapter 1252: Secondhand

The Academy had been getting busier for weeks, slowly enough that no single day showed it. Another notice on the boards, another society’s table in the corridor, another assignment due before the last one came back. Elara felt it in her own timetable, which had no gaps left that she had not put there herself.

Selphine seemed to feel it most. Her timetable had grown a second page, and she turned up in more places than one person should fit into a day, always with a pen in hand and always on her way to whatever came next.

They were halfway down the Block’s main corridor when she let out a long breath through her nose.

"This is so annoying."

She was reading the page rather than walking, and Aurelian steered her around a pillar without looking up from his own.

"Which part?" Elara asked.

"The Wednesday lecture. Two weeks of reading due in two days, and then a quiz on the part nobody was told to start." Selphine turned the page over, as if the back might be kinder. "None of them speak to each other. I would bet on it."

"Mine does the same," Elara said. "It assumes our evenings are free."

"I agree." Aurelian said it with a sigh bigger than Selphine’s. "And I’d add Magister Marisse’s class to the list, except I can’t find a part of it to blame. It’s all— It’s just a lot. Evenly."

"Name one part."

"If I could, I’d have filed it already."

He said it lightly, and Elara let it go.

The lecture room was nearly full when they reached it. The benches ran in shallow tiers, and the students had mostly taken their places, bags down, conversations running at the volume that came before a lecturer. Elara scanned the room out of habit, and her eyes went where they always went in that room, to the third tier.

With the benches on either side of her empty, Priscilla sat alone, silver-white hair falling straight to her waist, the deep crimson eyes no one else in the room could claim fixed on her notes, her stylus laid parallel beside them. She looked perfectly calm, as if the gap were part of the room’s design.

Elara looked a moment longer than she meant to. That calm belonged to the Entrance Banquet, to a hall full of nobles waiting for the princess to be wrong, and to the way she had stood up for Lucavion anyway.

Lucavion again.

’Everything in this room leads back to him sooner or later.’

She did not enjoy noticing it, and from him her thoughts went straight to yesterday. Flow Control had been strange from the first minute. A girl had looked at her, then at Lucavion’s bench, as if comparing the two, and the whole room had seemed to know something Elara did not. Then Thalor had turned up at the front plate in a course that had no place for him, and Selenne had told Lucavion to stay behind. Elara had left without learning why, and in the day since, nobody had said a word of it to her.

Then the door opened.

"Open your books."

The lecturer stated, immediately, not even wasting a second after arriving.

Just like that, her thoughts were interrupted, which she had no complaint about.

Following that, the lecture ran its full length. Halfway through, a bench on the second tier emptied. Notes gathered, Thalor murmured something to the lecturer, took a short nod for an answer, and left without a glance at anyone. Elara noted it and took nothing from it, because the diagram on the slate was already three steps ahead of her.

When the lecturer dismissed them, the room loosened all at once. Benches scraped, bags were hauled up, and Priscilla started down the tiers toward the door before Elara had finished capping her ink. Selphine stayed seated, which meant she wanted the room to thin first.

"You haven’t heard," she said, and it was not quite a question.

"Heard what?"

"Good. Then I’m not repeating something you’ve already listened." Selphine turned her pen over in her fingers, clearly liking the fact that Elara did not know. "Yesterday, in the Martial sector. Someone called you a beggar."

"Eh?" Elara was surprised. Her hand going still on the clasp of her bag, she asked. "Called me a beggar?"

Elara let the clasp go. "I haven’t asked anyone for anything since I got here. Who would say that, and why?"

"That’s what I’d like to know."

"Then it’s a stranger’s word." She said it as she thought it. "A beggar has to be begging for something, and I wasn’t. Someone with a grudge picked the first stone off the ground."

It sounded reasonable in her own head, and she was ready to leave it there. The Academy was full of people who had opinions about the commoner entrants and their sponsors, and about the barony nobody had heard of two years ago. If every one of them were worth an afternoon, she would never finish a lecture again.

’Is this even worth my time?’

Selphine had stopped turning the pen. She was looking at Elara the way she looked at a problem set that had come back marked wrong when she was sure it was right.

"Eh," she said slowly. "Really?"

"Really what?"

"You really don’t know."

"Know what?"

Selphine let out a breath that was half a laugh. "Never mind. I forgot. Elowyn is clueless about this sort of thing, sometimes."

"About what sort of thing?" Elara glanced at Aurelian, who had been quiet through all of it. He had finished packing his bag a while ago and had been leaning against the end of the bench, not pretending he was doing anything else. "One of you is going to explain this, or I’ll start guessing, and I’m told I guess badly."

"She’s trying to say..." Aurelian began, then stopped, picking a gentler way in. He did not find one. "Someone is badmouthing you, Elowyn. And it isn’t a harmless word, not here. It’s short for salon beggar."

The words meant nothing to her at first.

"In the capital’s houses it’s what they call someone who lives off other people’s invitations," he went on. "Who turns up at tables she hasn’t earned and smiles until she’s asked back. It’s not about money. It says you have no standing of your own and you borrow everyone else’s." He did not soften the last part. "It’s a slur, and a nasty one. Nobody says it lightly, and nobody says it by accident."

Elara repeated it to herself, and it sounded worse the second time.

Salon beggar. Underneath the polish of it was a picture: someone at the edge of a bright room with an empty cup, smiling until a door opened for her.

"When did I ever do that?" It came out flatter than she meant. "I haven’t asked anyone for a seat anywhere. The one invitation I have, I didn’t ask for, and I haven’t even answered it."

"Nobody here thinks you did," Aurelian said.

"Then where does it come from? Someone looked at me and decided that’s what they saw?" She yanked the clasp shut. "I’d like to know what I’m supposed to have borrowed."

Selphine had waited through all of that with her pen on the desk. She did not look offended, only impatient to get to the rest.

"That’s not even the main part."

"Not the main part."

"No."

"Then what-"

"Reilan."

Selphine said it over her, flat and fast, and it stopped Elara short.

"He was across the yard before the sentence was done," Selphine said. "Some people say he drew. Others say it was just his hand on the hilt, which is bad enough, in front of that many people. One version has him pinning someone to a wall, and I don’t believe that one, because the someone in question wouldn’t stay pinned. And then he stopped. Everyone agrees on that. What nobody can tell me is why. He just stopped, and the man walked off with all his limbs."

It was an oddly careful account: she knew where everyone had been standing, which hand Cedric had used, and she had left out nothing that made him look provoked.

Elara realized her eyebrows had gone up somewhere in the middle of it and had not come down.

"And Lucavion’s name came up," Selphine said.

Elara’s head turned. "Came up how?"

"Depends who’s telling it. In one version he was standing right there. In another the whole thing was his quarrel and Reilan simply walked into it." Selphine tipped her hand side to side. "Then there’s the one where the remark wasn’t even about you. It was about the company you keep."

"Which is it?"

"If I knew, I’d have said so first."

"It would fit, though," Aurelian said. He rubbed the back of his neck. "Reilan’s never needed a reason where Lucavion’s concerned. He had one before we ever got here. Anyone who’s watched the two of them in a hallway could believe the rest."

"That’s what worries me." Selphine’s voice had dropped, which was how Elara knew she was already building something. "Everyone’s so ready to believe it that nobody’s checked."

Elara opened her mouth to say she would, and Selphine’s eyes slid past her shoulder to the side of the room.

"I wonder," she said, pleasantly, "why someone is secretly listening?"