— Caelum POV —
The thing about being invisible was that you noticed when it stopped.
Caelum had been invisible for four years. Not literally. Literally would have been useful. He meant invisible in the way that mattered — the kind where people looked at you and their eyes moved on without registering anything. A background detail. Furniture that filed paperwork.
He had cultivated this deliberately. Invisibility was a resource. You learned things when people forgot you were in the room. You moved freely. Nobody bothered to account for furniture.
So when someone started watching him, he noticed immediately.
It started the morning after the alcove incident.
He was at his desk in the east administrative office at seven-fifteen, which was forty-five minutes before his official start time, because the backlog didn't care about official start times and neither did he. The work was straightforward. Enrollment verifications, equipment requisitions, two scheduling conflicts that the senior clerks had been pretending didn't exist for three weeks.
He was halfway through the second scheduling conflict when he felt it.
The specific quality of being looked at.
He didn't turn around. He finished the sentence he was writing, set the pen down with a precise movement, and then turned.
The corridor outside the office had a window. Through it, at the correct angle, you could see the small reading alcove across the hall.
Lady Seraphine Valdros was sitting in the alcove with a book.
The book was open. She was not reading it. Her eyes were on the office window with an expression that was — he searched for the right word — attentive. Not the polite performance of attention that nobles wore at functions. Actual attention. The kind with weight.
She noticed him noticing.
She looked back at her book.
He turned back to his desk.
He thought, very carefully, about what he knew about Lady Seraphine Valdros.
Daughter of Duke Valdros. Seventeen. Academically exceptional — top of her cohort in both theoretical magic and strategy, though she did the work with an air of someone completing chores. Kept everyone at precise distance. Aldric had been attempting to breach that distance for a year with notable failure.
She had been present in the alcove yesterday. Had watched the whole scene. Had not intervened, not spoken, not reacted visibly.
And now she was here.
People did not come to the east administrative corridor to read. There was a library. There were three common rooms. There were gardens. There was no reason to sit in the corridor outside a clerk's office unless the corridor was specifically the destination.
He was the destination.
He did not know what to do with this information so he filed it away and went back to the scheduling conflict.
She was there for an hour. When he next glanced at the window she was gone.
He stared at the empty alcove for approximately three seconds longer than was necessary.
Then he went back to work.
It happened again the next day. And the day after that.
Different times. Different books that she wasn't reading. Same quality of attention through the same corridor window.
By the fourth day he had developed a theory. By the fifth he had mostly confirmed it.
She was studying him.
Not in the way of someone with romantic interest — he had enough self-awareness to know what that looked like and this wasn't it. This was the way of someone assessing an unknown variable. Trying to determine its properties before deciding what to do with it.
He recognized it because it was exactly what he did with people.
On the sixth day she didn't come.
He noticed the absence of it. The corridor window just a window. The alcove across the hall just an alcove.
He was annoyed at himself for noticing.
He was more annoyed when, three hours into his shift, a junior clerk dropped a sealed envelope on his desk with the words: Lady Valdros. For you.
He looked at the envelope.
He thought about the five days of watching.
He thought about the fact that Duke Valdros was the most powerful noble house that wasn't the royal family, had backing across three provinces, and was — if you read the administrative records carefully, which Caelum did — quietly accumulating a very specific kind of political leverage.
He thought about how a girl with access to all of that had chosen to spend her mornings watching a clerk.
He opened the envelope.
The note inside was short. No preamble. No formal address. Just:
Roof garden. Sixth bell. Come if you're curious.
— V
He read it twice.
Then he folded it neatly, placed it in his desk drawer, and went back to the scheduling conflict.
He told himself he wasn't going.
This was, he would later acknowledge, a lie he told himself so quickly that he barely heard it.
— Seraphine POV —
The roof garden was empty at sixth bell, which was expected. Most students ate dinner at this hour. The academy kitchen produced food that was genuinely excellent, which Seraphine had found briefly surprising before cataloguing it and moving on.
She stood at the railing and looked at the city below. Aethermoor spread out in the early evening light — all stone bridges and canal water and the particular orange color that old cities went at dusk. It was beautiful in the way of things that didn't ask anything from you.
She had been here for two years and she still found the sky wrong. Too many stars. Too bright. Her old world's sky had been orange-grey at night from the city lights and she had found it ugly at the time and now she missed it with a precision that surprised her occasionally.
She heard footsteps on the stairs at six bells and two minutes.
Two minutes late, which meant he had been deciding until the last moment.
She didn't turn around.
"You came," she said.
"You sent a note," he said. "It would be rude not to."
His voice was the same as in the alcove. Flat. Careful. Each word placed like something that might be used as evidence later.
"Sit down," she said.
A pause. Then the sound of him sitting on the bench behind her.
She turned.
He was looking at her with those grey eyes doing their assessment thing. She noticed he had changed out of his clerk uniform into ordinary student clothes, which meant he had gone back to his room first, which meant he had been more uncertain than two minutes late suggested.
She found this information mildly endearing. She stored it away.
"You've been watching me for five days," he said. Not an accusation. A statement of observed fact.
"Yes."
"Why."
She considered giving him a partial answer. Decided against it. Partial answers were for people she was managing. She didn't want to manage him.
"Because you did something interesting," she said. "And I wanted to see if you'd do it again."
"The report."
"The trap. The report was just the documentation. The interesting part was the three weeks before it — watching how they worked, identifying who would sign witness statements, timing the filing for when the right administrator was on duty." She paused. "You planned that for weeks. For a dispute that most people in your position would have let go."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Most people in my position," he said, "don't have a position worth defending."
"And you do?"
The grey eyes didn't flicker. "I have a desk. I have a record of work. Those are mine. Yes."
She looked at him.
Two years of going through the motions. Two years of following a script written by someone else. And this boy — unremarkable on every surface, weak enough that a basic binding spell had pinned him without effort, orphan, clerk, nobody — was sitting across from her talking about a desk like it was a kingdom.
Something in her chest did the inconvenient thing it had been doing for five days.
She ignored it.
"I have a proposal," she said.
"I assumed."
"Strategic consultation. My house has problems that require a particular kind of thinking. You have that kind of thinking. I'll compensate you fairly and provide certain protections."
He was quiet again. Longer this time.
"Protections from what."
"From whatever comes next," she said. "You filed a complaint against Bors. Aldric is unhappy with you. These things tend to escalate."
"I'm aware of that."
"Then you understand the value of the offer."
He looked at the city below for a moment. She let him look. She had time.
"I'll consider it," he said finally.
"You have three days."
He stood. Gave her the same precise nod as the corridor. Started for the stairs.
"Ashveil."
He stopped.
"The scheduling conflict in the east office records. The one between Professor Aldenmoor's advanced seminar and the third-year swordsman assessment. You've been sitting on it for three weeks."
A pause. "The senior clerks told me to leave it."
"Because fixing it would show they'd been ignoring it. I know." She turned back to the railing. "Fix it anyway. File it under routine maintenance. Nobody will check the attribution."
Silence behind her.
Then footsteps on the stairs going down.
She stood at the railing and looked at the city and waited for the inconvenient thing in her chest to settle.
It didn't, particularly.
She decided to give it time.
* * *
End of Chapter Two