— Caelum POV —
He woke up because his neck hurt.
This was, historically, how he woke up when he fell asleep somewhere that wasn't a bed. Which happened more than it should, because he had the self-preservation instincts of a very dedicated rock and tended to keep working until his body simply gave up and made a unilateral decision.
He straightened. His neck made a sound. He winced.
He was in the Valdros library.
There was a blanket on his shoulders.
He looked at the blanket.
He looked at Seraphine, who was asleep in the chair beside him — not across the table anymore, beside him, which was information — with her own blanket and her head tilted slightly and her hair coming loose from whatever arrangement it had been in last night.
She looked — different when she was asleep. Not soft exactly. She was never exactly soft. But the managing was gone. The careful distance she kept between herself and the world had just — paused, for however many hours, and what was left was just a person. Tired. Quiet. Real.
He looked away.
He looked at the decoded letters on the table. Then at the blanket again.
Someone had put this on him. Either Seraphine, which meant she had woken up at some point and then gone back to sleep, or Nessa, which meant Nessa had found them like this and made a decision about it.
Both options were deeply alarming in different ways.
He decided not to think about it and stood up carefully so he didn't wake her.
He failed. She opened her eyes the moment he moved.
Not gradually, the way most people woke up — no blinking, no confusion. Just eyes open, immediately present, like a person whose survival instincts had overridden the luxury of waking up slowly a long time ago.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
The morning light was coming through the library window at a low angle. It made the whole room look different. Gentler. He didn't like how aware he was of that.
"Morning," she said. Her voice was slightly rough with sleep. That was — fine. Normal. People's voices were rough in the morning. That was just biology.
"Morning," he said.
Pause.
"Your neck," she said.
"It's fine."
"You did the thing with your face when you stood up."
"What thing."
"The wince. You winced."
"I didn't—"
"Caelum."
"It's a little sore," he said, with great dignity. "It's fine."
She stood up. Folded her blanket with the efficiency of someone who did not want to make the blanket a topic. He appreciated this. He also folded his blanket and put it on the chair. They were both very focused on the blankets for a moment.
"Who put these here," he said.
"Nessa, probably."
"She found us."
"She finds everything." Seraphine picked up her documents and began straightening them. "She's been working on some kind of contingency plan, I think. She won't tell me what it covers."
Caelum thought about this.
"A contingency plan," he said. "For what."
"I have a theory but I'm not going to say it."
"Why not."
"Because then I'd have to have a conversation about it and it's—" she glanced at him briefly, "—early."
He looked at her.
She looked at her documents.
He thought: I know what the contingency plan is for. I have had exactly the same thought twelve times since last night and I have been refusing to finish it every single time and I am not finishing it now either because she said it's early and she is absolutely right.
"Fair," he said.
They straightened the library in companionable quiet. Documents sorted, lamp extinguished, chairs back to their original positions — not beside each other. He noted that. She had moved them back without comment. He did not comment on the commenting.
When everything was orderly they stood at the library door with no particular reason to keep standing there.
"I have to get to the office," he said.
"It's sixth bell," she said. "You start at seventh."
Beat.
"You know my start time," he said.
"I know your schedule."
"You keep saying that like it explains it."
"It does explain it. I'm observant." She opened the library door. "There's breakfast in the east sitting room. You should eat before you go."
"I wasn't—"
"The dining hall doesn't open until seventh bell," she said. Same calm. Same tone. "And you won't eat if you go to the office first because you'll start working and forget." She walked out the door. "East sitting room. Ten minutes."
He stood in the library doorway.
He thought: she has timed this so that I have exactly enough time for breakfast before my shift and not enough time to argue about the breakfast.
He thought: that is extremely calculated.
He thought: it is also extremely nice and I don't know what to do when things are nice.
He went to the east sitting room.
— Seraphine POV —
She had timed it exactly right. He showed up with four minutes to spare, sat down, and ate with the focused efficiency of someone who had been forgetting meals for long enough that eating had become a task to complete rather than a thing to enjoy.
She had tea. She watched him eat and told herself she was just making sure he actually did it and was not, under any circumstances, cataloguing the way he looked in morning light before he'd had time to arrange himself into the usual careful neutral.
She was absolutely cataloguing it.
This was a disaster. A completely predictable disaster that she had seen coming from approximately chapter one of her own personal story and had done nothing to prevent because — because what, exactly. Because he was interesting. Because he cracked ciphers and sat on cleaning supply crates and talked about his mother's dog at midnight and it turned out that was all it took, apparently. Two lives of professional emotional distance and a dog named Disaster was all it took.
She needed to get herself together.
"You're staring," he said, not looking up from his plate.
"I'm thinking."
"You're thinking at me specifically."
"Eat your breakfast."
He ate his breakfast. She drank her tea. Outside the window the academy was waking up — distant voices, footsteps, the particular quality of a building coming back to life in the morning.
"Last night," he said.
She waited.
"Thank you," he said. "For — the chair. And staying."
She looked at him. He was looking at his plate, which meant he had said the thing but didn't want to watch her receive it. She was learning this about him — he gave things and then looked away, like offering something and watching what happened to it were two separate decisions and he was only ready for the first one.
"I didn't do anything," she said.
"I know." He looked up then. "That's why it helped."
She had absolutely nothing to say to that.
It was genuinely the nicest thing anyone had said to her in two lives and it had been delivered over breakfast with no ceremony whatsoever and she had no response prepared because she had never needed a response to something like that before.
She drank her tea.
"You're going to be late," she said.
He stood up. Tucked his folder under his arm. Gave her the small nod — not the formal noble-acknowledging nod from the beginning. Different. More like the nod you give someone when words are insufficient and you both know it.
He left.
She sat in the east sitting room with her tea going cold and thought about going after him.
She didn't.
She thought about it for a long time though.
— Nessa POV —
She had told absolutely no one about finding them asleep at the table.
Not because it was shameful — it wasn't, they were just sleeping, in chairs, like civilized people who had worked too late and made an irresponsible decision about it. Nothing had happened. Obviously nothing had happened. She had checked.
Four inches. She had measured approximately. Out of professional curiosity.
She had not told anyone because the moment she told anyone it became a thing, and the moment it became a thing it got back to the Duke, and the moment it got back to the Duke he would do something about it, and she had seen what happened when Duke Valdros did something about things and it was generally efficient and cold and left bruises that lasted.
The boy seemed to have enough of those already.
She was not going to add to them.
This was, she told herself firmly, a purely professional calculation. Not because she had developed any kind of personal feeling about a seventeen year old orphan clerk who thanked people quietly and then looked away. Not because of any of that.
She updated the contingency plan.
She added a note: protect the boy.
Then she stared at that for a second.
Then she crossed out protect and wrote monitor.
More professional.
She left it at that.
* * *
End of Chapter Thirteen