Chapter 176 — This Is What You Dream About?

Chapter 176: Chapter 176 — This Is What You Dream About?

~ Isolde ~

Isolde had made it halfway down the corridor before the image returned to her: Raven and Dante standing much too close together in the training room.

She clicked her tongue under her breath and kept walking.

Ridiculous.

Whatever Dante Prymont chose to do with Raven Rivers was none of her concern, and whatever expression Raven had been wearing before Isolde walked in was even less so. She pushed the thought away, only to discover that Raven herself was considerably harder to dismiss.

A smile threatened at the corner of Isolde’s mouth.

She still couldn’t quite believe the woman had figured it out.

Years of altered broadcasts, careful timing and enough misdirection that half of Valerius had somehow decided Bellringer was a man, and all it had taken was Isolde walking into a training room for Raven to stare at her and unravel the whole thing.

She should have been annoyed. Instead, Isolde had enjoyed herself more in that room than she had in months.

Maybe years.

By the time she reached the first busy corridor, however, the smile had already disappeared. Her shoulders settled, her pace became measured again, and whatever part of her had spent the last half hour laughing at Raven’s irritation slipped neatly behind the face everyone else expected to see.

"Isolde."

She turned toward the greeting automatically as two women from Ashbourne approached from the opposite direction, both wearing the sort of warm expressions people tended to reserve for someone they wanted something from.

"I was hoping to see you," one of them said as they slowed beside her. "With Concord this close, having you at the top of the Court is reassuring."

Isolde returned the smile easily. "That’s kind of you."

Neither the answer nor the expression required much thought anymore.

The woman continued talking about the Court while her friend nodded at all the appropriate moments, and Isolde listened with the same polite attention she had been taught to maintain since she was old enough to understand that Marchmont children were rarely allowed the luxury of looking bored.

The compliment itself was genuine enough.

The warmth attached to it wasn’t.

The second woman smiled whenever Isolde looked toward her, yet there was a faint tension underneath it that never quite matched the expression on her face.

The first wanted something. Isolde couldn’t tell what yet, but the careful way she kept steering the conversation toward the Concord made the intention obvious enough.

It was always like this. People lied badly, and the unfortunate part was that most of them had absolutely no idea how badly.

Isolde excused herself several minutes later with a pleasant promise that they would speak again soon, then continued down the corridor already knowing she probably wouldn’t make the effort.

Another student greeted her before she reached the stairs, then another. A Hale boy held a door open with a polite smile that became noticeably more enthusiastic after he recognised who she was.

Isolde thanked him and passed through with the same warmth and politeness she had offered everyone else.

By the time she reached the stairs, she was exhausted by all of them.

And, irritatingly, thinking about Raven again.

Raven Rivers would never survive a proper Marchmont dinner.

The woman swore whenever irritated, insulted people stronger than her with almost admirable consistency and possessed absolutely no instinct for pretending she enjoyed someone’s company when she didn’t.

Uncultured hardly covered it.

Foul-mouthed came closer.

Yet somehow, Isolde preferred that.

At least when Raven called somebody an idiot, she generally meant it. There was no pleasant smile hiding the insult, no compliment covering whatever she actually wanted and no conversation Isolde needed to spend several minutes separating from the intention underneath it.

Raven simply said what she thought and accepted whatever consequences came afterward, usually loudly.

The smile returned before Isolde could stop it.

Perhaps that was what she found so entertaining about her.

Raven did things Isolde had been taught not to do before she was old enough to understand why.

She became angry publicly, questioned people when something sounded like bullshit and moved through Valerius as though powerful surnames were mildly inconvenient details rather than the structures everyone else built their behaviour around.

There was something almost enviable about it.

Raven was free in ways Isolde had never really learned how to be.

Except as Bellringer.

That thought softened her amusement, because there had only ever been one other person who knew both versions of her well enough that Isolde never needed to decide which one she was supposed to be around him.

Cass.

Her steps slowed slightly.

She still hadn’t seen him today.

That was unusual, although not enough yet to become that concerning. Cassian disappeared occasionally, particularly when something involving House Blade demanded his attention, and he had never been especially good at explaining himself beforehand.

He would turn up.

He always did.

Isolde pushed that thought away as well and continued down the stairs.

~~~

Three days later, Isolde made the mistake of falling asleep.

She had only intended to nap, which somehow made the whole thing more irritating in hindsight. There had been nothing dramatic about the evening, no strange feeling before she closed her eyes and certainly no reason to expect that the next several minutes would occupy far too much of her mind afterward.

One moment she was lying across her bed, and the next music surrounded her.

Isolde opened her eyes beneath a sky crossed with hundreds of hanging lanterns, their warm light stretching between unfamiliar buildings and spilling across a crowded street below. Music carried from somewhere farther ahead, constantly swallowed by laughter, conversation and the movement of people brushing past one another.

Someone collided lightly with her shoulder.

"Sorry!"

The stranger disappeared into the crowd before Isolde could answer.

She looked down and immediately noticed the absence of academy colours.

No uniform. No Marchmont crest.

Instead, she wore a loose dress she would never have chosen for any formal event, and her hair fell freely down her back rather than being pinned into something appropriate.

More strangely, there was a drink in her hand.

Isolde stared at it for a moment before taking a cautious sip. It was sweet, far too sweet, and she liked it anyway.

A woman she didn’t recognise caught her free hand and pulled her toward the music, laughing as she went. Isolde should have objected, but instead she found herself following.

Nobody bowed.

Nobody whispered her surname when she passed.

Nobody seemed remotely interested in whether she was First Seat, a Marchmont heir or somebody they ought to impress.

The woman dancing beside her shouted something Isolde couldn’t hear over the music before throwing her head back with laughter, and Isolde laughed too even though she wasn’t entirely sure why.

It didn’t seem to matter.

~~~

"This is what you dream about?"

Isolde stopped speaking and looked across the infirmary at Raven, who was staring at her with open disbelief.

"What?"

Raven leaned slightly forward. "You. At some festival, drinking something you found in a stranger’s hand."

"I did not find it in a stranger’s hand."

"You don’t know where it came from."

"That is completely irrelevant."

The corner of Raven’s mouth twitched. "You were dancing."

"There was music."

Raven continued looking thoroughly unconvinced until Isolde sighed and shifted against the bed.

"Could you let me get to the relevant part?"

"I’m judging you."

"Shut up."

That finally pulled the smile Raven had been fighting onto her face.

Isolde ignored it and waved one hand. "Anyway."

~~~

Someone eventually asked her name.

That part Isolde remembered with irritating clarity.

A boy beside one of the drink stalls leaned closer so he could be heard over the music. "What did you say your name was?"

Isolde opened her mouth.

Marchmont almost followed automatically.

Instead, she smiled.

"Isolde."

The boy glanced at her. "Just Isolde?"

She considered the question for a moment before nodding. "Yes."

Just Isolde.

The answer felt unexpectedly good.

The boy accepted it without another thought and returned to whatever argument his friends were having, apparently finding nothing remarkable about the fact that she had given him only one name.

Isolde stood there for a little longer, enjoying the feeling.

Then something changed.

The music didn’t stop, the lights didn’t dim and nobody around her seemed to notice anything unusual, yet her attention pulled sharply toward the other side of the street.

A man stood beyond the moving crowd, completely still.

People passed in front of him constantly, hiding him from view for a second before revealing him again, but he never moved.

He was watching her.

Isolde couldn’t make out his face properly. At that distance, beneath uneven lantern light and with people constantly moving between them, that should have been easy to explain.

Except something inside her refused to accept it.

Her awareness sharpened so abruptly that the festival seemed to pull away from her. Her breathing became too noticeable, her heartbeat too loud, and somewhere beneath all of it her wolf rose.

Not curious.

Threatened.

Isolde went still.

The reaction made no sense. The man hadn’t approached her, spoken to her or even moved, yet every instinct she possessed was telling her the same thing.

Something was wrong.

Then the man smiled.

Isolde woke with a gasp.

Her room was dark, and for several seconds she remained upright in bed, breathing hard while her eyes moved over everything familiar enough to prove where she was.

The desk beside the window, her wardrobe, the closed door.

Nothing else.

She rubbed both hands over her face. "Goddess."

A nightmare.

That was all.

An unusually vivid one.

She lay back down and closed her eyes.

Several minutes later, they opened again.

The man’s smile waited behind her eyelids.

Isolde did not sleep again that night.