The following morning, I was seated at my vanity, fully clothed once more in my academy uniform and styling my hair when Yvonne knocked at my door. "Come in," I said, sliding a pin up into a somewhat unruly bun. It was one of those days where I needed my hair out of the way or I'd be possessed with the urge to chop it off (and then I'd be distraught afterwards).

She opened the door just slightly, her eyes somewhat wide. "Someone is here to see you."

"Who?" I asked, puzzled. The only people in the whole city who thought I was worth seeing would find me at school in a matter of minutes. No one had any reason to intercept me here. Unless... My stomach dropped.

But Yvonne waved my concerns away with the simplicity of her answer. "The boy from school," she said. "With the red uniform. He asked to walk with you."

It did little to settle my nerves, though now they had taken on a fluttered sort of confusion rather than the all-consuming panic. "What do you mean?"

She smiled knowingly. "Come downstairs and see."

Yvonne was far too shrewd for my liking, embarrassingly attuned to things I didn't even recognize about myself. It flustered me to imagine what assumptions she was making, mostly because there might be a modicum of truth in what she thought. Which was a terrifying and humbling realization.

Still, despite my efforts to be calm and normal, I stood too quickly and bumped into the vanity, then I stumbled about the room for my schoolbag—forgetting that I'd left it hanging on the back of the very chair I had been sitting in. I shoved my boots on and barely laced them before careening down the stairs, bag haphazardly swinging behind me. At the second to last step, I began an even stride to the door, like a sensible girl. I was busy smoothing flyaways when Elias stepped aside from the doorway to reveal Bren standing just outside the threshold.

He smiled at me in that way of his—like sunbeams finally breaking through a cluster of dark clouds. "It's good to see you again, Celestine."

I practically shoved Elias aside, ignoring the look he was trying to give me, and met Bren at the threshold, somewhat breathless. "What are you doing here?" I asked, then regretted it. My face warmed. "Not that I don't want to see you."

"I thought we could walk together."

I heard the sharp intake of Elias's breath beside me, the kind he made when he was about to say something atrocious, so I quickly stepped outside, loudly bid him goodbye, and shut the door. Bren raised a brow at me, but from the press of his lips I knew he was holding back laughter. I grinned at him, feeling somewhat silly but no less free. I gestured down the path. "Shall we?"

"After you, m'lady." He bowed to me like we were nobles at a fancy dinner party. In his school uniform, boasting a somewhat-fresh grass stain on one knee, the image was laughable, though not too far off. Bren had this air about him like he always belonged. I could only oblige him with the polite dip of my own head, and then we walked together.

"I thought you lived on campus," I said once we had left the house and potential prying ears. "I hope you didn't go out of your way for me."

He laughed, and it was almost sheepish. His ears turned somewhat pink at the tips. "I do live on campus."

I blinked. A small amount of shame came over me, just barely enough to consider. There was no reason for him to come all this way just for me. "Bren..."

"I'm counting the trip as my morning exercise. It's no trouble at all."

I gave him a once over, but he didn't even look winded. The walk to school was long enough to be annoying, but not long enough to cover the rigorous expectations Professor Diern had for his students. "I doubt a brisk walk will count for a student of the illustrious red track." I gestured to his colored vest, then to mine. "But it might work for me. Even walking taxes us charm students, you know."

"Could break a nail," he observed with a nod and a gleam in his eyes. It faded as he looked at me. His pace slowed slightly, bringing him more easily to my side. "I didn't know Vesper had injured your leg too."

"What?"

"You're limping."

I glanced down at my feet as I walked, searching for the flaw in my steps. I hadn't even felt the limp—the wound the cultist had given me was little more than a bad memory now. And an ugly scar. If I watched long enough, however, I began to see it: the slightest hesitation in my injured foot. I didn't know how he had even noticed such a thing. "That?" I met his eye again, ready with an excuse I had prepared the night before, and—froze, because I could not wave away the concern as I had wanted to.

He looked back at me with such striking, real concern that I could not even find the lie I had shaped. It felt wrong to lie to him, like I might taint him. So the two of us came to a stop there, a physical and verbal standstill. His head tilted slightly. "Does it hurt?"

I shook my head and began walking ahead of him, determined not to limp this time. The effort was more taxing on my mind than my body, so I gave up after a while. "I'll tell you about it later. Just a bit of trouble I ran into." The journal I'd stolen, now stashed away in my schoolbag, hung heavy from my shoulders. I'd tell him when we could open it together. For now, I wanted to think of other things. Anything else.

Bren obliged by occupying the rest of our walk with pleasant conversation. He told me the highlights of the sampling classes I had missed. For example, how Sil had failed so spectacularly at potion making one day that the concoction had blown up in her face. "I think it took off her eyebrows," he said. "She'd had them drawn on the next time I saw her."

"Charm students," I said, laughing. "Wholly incompetent."

"Not all of them." Bren nudged my side.

I flushed a little. If he noticed, he carried on as if what he'd said was perfectly rational. Vesper had not been seen around the school since the incident, but there was no word on what had happened to him after the attack. Bren told me Seraya had sent her crow to peck his eyes out. The crow had returned unsuccessful. It was probably for the best—if his attitude toward crows was anything like his attitude toward people, he would have caught it, killed it, and roasted it for dinner. Not for himself, though. He would have invited Seraya over and had her eat it.

If he had done such a thing, there would be no place he could hide from me. Wise to his tricks, I would not lose to him a second time. He could say hello to Death for me when I reunited them.

The thought was strikingly violent, and I quickly shoved it down.

As the glittering spires of the school came into view and began to tower over us, Bren stopped me suddenly with a hand on my arm. There was a crowd of other students pouring into the doors, but he'd kept us out of their earshot. I looked at him, brow raised, but he answered my unspoken question before I could voice it.

"Have you heard about the Lux Ball?"

I laughed. "Do I look like the kind of person who gets invited to balls?" There was surprising sourness in the retort. Balls and other fancy gatherings were a distant, hazy memory from my brief stay at the palace. I was too small to dance, to eat the fancy food, to chatter with the guests, or do anything that I assumed one did at a ball, so all I could remember was crying in a little alcove outside the reception hall as I waited for Mother to take me to bed. In another life, I might have been a girl who received invitations to balls—if I was my father's daughter instead of my mother's.

But Bren didn't laugh. His amber-gold gaze had a steeliness to it as he searched my face. Not a cold, unfeeling steeliness, but a resolve that had been constructed long before this conversation. Perhaps its final touches had been scraped together during this walk. That made my breath catch.

"It comes every year right before the end of the semester. The academy hosts it. All the students are invited to attend," he said. Then his resolve must have fractured somewhere because he laughed in that nervous way of his and smoothed his hair out of his face. His other hand, I noticed, was still against my arm, and I found that I didn't mind. Until he took that away too, awkwardly sliding the hand into his pocket. "I must be quite lucky if I get to be the first to tell you about it."

Something dawned on me then, as slowly as the sun rose. It left me in similar awe. "You did say you would have to get to me faster next time," I said. "If you wanted to be my partner."

"You've caught onto me." His ears had reddened, and I was offered a glimpse of a different Bren. Not the flawless boy who knew what to say in every circumstance and made the hearts of every girl around him ache with longing for his perfection. It wasn't even the quiet, wounded one who came to me in the infirmary, who spoke of dying with all the disdain I expected from someone so likeminded. No, this Bren was just as charmingly awkward as anyone else made a fool by their own heart. It was endearing—the way he could no longer meet my eye, the way he could not find a still place to rest his hands, the way he must have planned what he would say and now had lost those pretty words.

We were equals in that brief moment of awkward understanding, the realization before either of us could bring ourselves to speak. I had gone stiff, but it wasn't the stiffness of disinterest or bracing myself to turn him down. If anything, I was prisoner to the tension, begging him to ask so I could answer.

"Celestine," he said—and I think I'd always liked the way he said it—"would you like to go with me?"

A cornered, nervous part of me jumped, itching to say no. No was safe. No was quiet. No protected both of us from what I didn't know. But I tamped down the thorn because the thorn had said enough. Flustered and flattered and uncertain though I was, I also found the idea tantalizing. The idea that maybe, just maybe, I was as special to Bren as he was to me.

"Of course." I smiled for good measure, though it was somewhat shaky. I could only hope it wasn't too much. Too excited. "I think I'd like that. If you'd like that, that is."

The tension visibly left his shoulders as he laughed. It was free this time. Not at me nor about me, but the pure release of all the nerves that must have been bundled up inside him. It took all I had not to laugh with him, but eventually I gave in too. It really did ease every worry.

When we both found ourselves again, he said, "I would. I really would like that." Just in case I might have feared otherwise. He grinned then, and it was the sort of excited but perhaps double-edged smile I expected of him when we would enter the halls of the school. The charming one of the perfect Bren. "Do you happen to know how to dance?"

It seemed expected of a charm student that I say yes both because a charm student should know how to dance and that I should always make up a façade for my flaws. My feet shifted. "No, I don't. I've never had to learn."

The school's bell tolled, cutting short our moment. Bren glanced back. The crowd of students had thinned significantly. Now, it was only those who were usually late. Not the diehard late students, but the semi-lazy ones who sauntered on their way to class and loitered in the halls. I sometimes came in with this group, but I doubted Bren ever had.

"I can help you learn." The words came in a rush as he swiveled back to me. "You don't have to know anything complicated—just enough to get through the start of the evening. Everyone will be watching. I'll catch up with you later." With one last apologetic, awkward wave, he hurried off, leaving me to digest the rest of what he had said.

I'd be chewing on it all day though.

What is a fantasy academy story without a fancy party? You've gotta have at least one.