Chapter 1225: An Objection And A Bargain

"I would not return that yet."

The words reached him before their meaning did.

His body answered first. His spine went still, an old habit of listening for the next instruction, and Lucavion turned his head only after making sure the rest of him would follow.

Isolde stood close enough that he did not need to search for her. Platinum-blonde hair, gone nearly silver where the sun caught it. It was her eyes that held him, pale lavender, so light they looked almost colorless in the open air, and fixed on him with the mild, patient attention of a woman who had the whole afternoon to spare.

And all of it, he noticed, was aimed at him.

The representative’s hand hovered above the form, unsure whether to advance or retreat.

Lucavion drew a breath and took his senses back, one at a time. "Really?"

He kept his voice level. It cost more than it should have.

"Hmm...~"

Isolde hummed, the sound light and easy, and smiled. It was a small smile. It reached her eyes just enough to be noticed and not enough to be trusted.

He pressed on before she could make the pause her own.

"I would like to know why, Lady Isolde."

Lady. He had chosen the title for the distance it put between them. He watched her hear it, and watched her decide to be amused.

"Would like to know why?"

"Yes."

Her smile deepened just enough to make it worse.

She did not answer him. Her attention moved to the paper under his hand and stayed there, as though the form were the more interesting party in the conversation.

Lucavion found the shift almost insulting. He had braced for her to study him, and she had simply looked elsewhere.

"You have decided against joining, then."

She said it to the form, not to him.

"I have decided that the fine print deserves respect." He let his thumb rest on the corner of the form. "Why do you care?"

Isolde said nothing. The smile stayed where it was, doing the work an answer would have done.

Then she lifted her eyes back to his.

"Would you care to follow me, Mister Lucavion?"

"I wonder what that would bring me?"

"Not everything is done to get something out of it."

"Someone I knew would disagree."

Her eyes narrowed a fraction.

Lucavion did not miss it.

It was such a small jab. She could have let it pass without effort. That it had landed at all struck him as strange, and for a moment he wondered which of them had changed: her mask, or his eyes.

"That someone," Isolde said softly, "may not be here."

"...Heh."

The scoff left him before he could decide whether it was amusement or something less comfortable. He glanced at the representative, whose hand was still suspended above the table, and took the form back from the edge where he had squared it. He told himself it was because paper was expensive.

Then he followed her.

The crowd closed behind them, and the murmur of the recruitment grounds thinned to a dull background hum. Isolde walked a half-step ahead and never once glanced back to see whether he came.

She did not need to. Whatever she had called it, the question had been an arrangement, and she had made it before she opened her mouth.

Lucavion could feel it closing around him like a coat cut to someone else’s measurements. Whatever Isolde was scheming, it had already begun.

She led him past the last of the recruitment tables to a quiet stretch at the edge of the grounds, where a row of folded display screens hid them from the crowd and the noise of Clubs Day arrived only as rumor.

Here, Isolde finally stopped. She turned, and looked up into his eyes.

She said nothing.

Lucavion let the silence run for as long as he could stand it, which was not long. He was holding the unsigned form in one hand, and he became aware that his grip on it was tighter than paper deserved.

"So?"

He kept his tone light. "You brought me all the way out here, Lady Isolde, and now we’re alone. I assume there was a reason."

She still did not speak.

"Speak freely," he added, with a small gesture toward the screens and the crowd beyond them. "Though I’d think about it first. A woman in your position might not want to be seen around someone like me, especially in a place like this." His smile sharpened. "Considering you have a fiancé."

The concern was sincere enough. It was also, though Lucavion did not notice, the first exit he had reached for since she had spoken behind him.

Isolde’s eyes fluttered, a single slow lowering and lifting of her lashes, like someone recognizing a line she had already read. She looked as though she had expected this.

"Quite interesting things are happening around you, Mister Lucavion."

She said it pleasantly.

"I am an interesting and handsome person."

"I may not agree with one of the two."

"..."

Lucavion had braced for a blade and been handed a red pen.

Isolde let him sit with it for a moment, then continued, her voice unchanged. "But you are not the only interesting person in our student year."

The name arrived a moment later, placed neatly between them. "Lady Elowyn Caerlin." Elara, in his head. Isolde did not know that.

He kept his face still. It took slightly more effort than he would have preferred.

"The Rotunda Salon," Isolde went on. "I was not there. Regrettably."

The regret in it was decorative.

"But several of our Lorian nobles were, and they have been generous with their accounts. They enjoyed how the play turned out. It was not spite, you understand. Loria has always admired good theater."

She had collected the versions the way other students collected gossip, and she recited them with the same cool patience. In one, Lucavion had cut across a full row of dancers. In another, he had been standing beside the floor the entire time. A few insisted he had said something unforgivable. The cheerful ones claimed he had winked. The Arcanian students, by contrast, had been rather more careful, and preferred not to be overheard discussing a Warenne heir’s evening.

On the essentials, they agreed.

Gervase had moved to claim Elara for the Second Measure. Lucavion had crossed the floor and reached her first. Gervase had tried to press him, by words or by rank, and Lucavion had refused to yield the dance. Elara had accepted him as her partner. Gervase had been left standing at the edge of the floor with the whole room watching.

"A public sequence," Isolde said. "Tidy. Easy to repeat."

Lucavion listened, and set her account against his memory.

It was accurate in the places that mattered to an audience, and vague everywhere else. She had the crossing, the refusal, and the acceptance. She had nothing at all from inside the dance: no word exchanged in the middle of the floor, no glance held a moment longer than it should have been, nothing of what either of them had felt as the music carried them.

The story ended where the public did.

"What none of them could tell me," Isolde said, tilting her head, "is why."

Her eyes stayed on his face and waited.

"Why, you ask."

"Yes."

Lucavion weighed the word. He had known the conversation would end up here. He had simply hoped to arrive later, and better rested.

"Why would that matter to you, Lady Isolde?"

He asked it lightly, the way a man presses on a bruise to learn how deep it goes.

Isolde did not look away or hesitate. When she answered, her voice was warm, and the warmth sat in it as naturally as if it had grown there.

"I am really interested in you, Mister Lucavion. I am sure that I have made it clear already."

"...."

A muscle in his cheek twitched.

He felt it happen and could not stop it, a small, betraying movement at the edge of an expression he had worked hard to keep flat. How could anyone say that so easily? Not with a flutter or a blush or a single hair out of place, but with the calm of a woman reading out a schedule.

’You have done all that to me, and now you are speaking like this?’

Isolde gave him no time to recover. That was, he suspected, the point.

"However," she said. The warmth stayed in her voice, though the intent beneath it turned, like a current under calm water. "Another huge contributing factor would be."

She let the sentence hang, just long enough for him to notice that it was hanging.

Her eyes did not leave his.

"Your relationship with Lady Elowyn."