Chương 69: [B2] Chapter 26: Cecilia’s Favor

The quiz had been announced on the first day of Continental History III, which Zero suspected was to give the less diligent students a chance to pass.

"As a reminder, every question on this quiz was covered by the break material," Professor Halloran said, distributing sheets down the rows with the serenity of a man who had done this every year for two decades.

"If you studied over the six weeks of break, you should have nothing to fear. You have one hour. Begin." Zero read the first question: Name the three signatory houses of the Concord of Nine that later withdrew, and state the stated and actual reasons for each withdrawal. He felt something that he could only describe as pleasure. He knew this.

He knew it because he had written eleven pages on the Concord during the carriage ride, and because knowing it had cost him nothing but nights he would otherwise have spent looking out a dark window. He was six questions in before he noticed the sound to his left. It was not a large sound. It was the sound of a quill being set down and picked up again, three times, without anything being written in between. Zero flicked his gaze to the side without moving his head. Cecilia Osprey's sheet was almost entirely blank.

Though her posture was immaculate; spine straight, shoulders level, the composure of a woman who had been raised to hold her form under pressure; her hand was shaking. Not visibly, or at least not to anyone who wasn't already looking. But the quill's tip trembled a hair above the parchment, and she had answered question one with a single word and then crossed it out, and her jaw was set like she was considering the best answer to a problem that was not on the sheet in front of her.

Zero assessed the situation for approximately four seconds. He knew the answers. She clearly did not. The distance between their desks was less than an arm's length. There was, so far as he could determine, no reason for these three facts to remain unresolved. He shifted his sheet three inches to the left, angled it slightly, and went back to work, making sure to leave the completed answers within Cecelia's line of sight.

He felt the exact moment she noticed. Beside him, everything went very still. The quill stopped shaking, her breath catching, and Cecilia's entire body arrived at a decision it had not planned on making. Then, after a pause he chose not to measure, the sound of writing came from her desk. Cecilia worked fast once she started.

Zero kept his own pace, kept his eyes forward, and shifted the sheet another inch when her copying slowed at the fourth question, which was to create a genealogical chart for a royal family, which was deceptively difficult, largely due to the sheer amount of inbreeding. That question alone took her ten minutes to copy. By the time Cecilia finished the diagram, it looked more like a spider's web than a family tree. In those ten minutes, Halloran had walked the aisle twice.

Neither time did he look at Cecilia, because the Cecilia Osprey he knew had never in her academic life required looking at. The hour ended, and sheets went forward. Zero gathered his books and was halfway to the corridor before a hand closed on his sleeve.

Cecilia pulled him into the alcove beside the stairwell, which had a window, no sightlines, and had clearly been selected in advance.

"Why did you do that?"

"You were struggling."

"That is not–" She stopped, took a deep breath, and started over.

"Thank you. I want to be extremely clear that I am saying that first, and that I mean it."

"You're welcome."

"And now I need you to hear the second part." Cecilia's eyes went to the corridor, then back." Never do that again. Kestrel, that is a violation of the academic code. If anyone had caught you, both of us would have been expelled with no ability to appeal, and the notice goes to the houses. Both of ours." Zero absorbed this.

"There's a rule?" he asked, genuinely confused.

"Against helping people?"

"There–" She stared at him and sighed." Yes. There is a rule against it. There has always been a rule against it. It is read aloud at every matriculation, it is printed inside the cover of every examination booklet, it is the rule–" Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"I didn't know." She opened her mouth to say something withering. Zero watched her look at his face, and watched the withering thing not arrive, because whatever she found there was apparently more confusing than infuriating.

"... You–" she sighed again.

"You genuinely did not know, did you?"

"No? You were struggling with something I could easily fix, so I fixed it." He considered how to phrase the rest and settled for accuracy.

"In hindsight, I understand why the rule exists. It just didn't occur to me that helping you would be the kind of thing anyone had legislated against." Cecilia was quiet for a moment. Something moved behind her expression that Zero could not read cleanly. It was not exactly gratitude, but something more like a person setting down a conclusion they had been carrying for two years and finding it heavier than they'd realized.

"Everyone says you've changed," she said.

"I assumed it was a performance. A better performance."

"Would that be worse?"

"That would be considerably worse, yes." She straightened her cuffs, reassembling herself.

"For what it is worth. I do not need charity, and I would rather no one ever learn that I required it. But I know what I would have scored on that sheet, and I know what that score would have done to me." She looked at him directly.

"Therefore, I owe you a favor, and I pay what I owe, and I do not pay it in halves. When you need something, ask, and don't be shy about the size of it."

"That isn't necessary."

"It is entirely necessary. This is how I stay someone worth dealing with." A pause.

"Also, next time, tilt the page toward the window. You had it angled into the aisle." She was gone before Zero could work out whether that had been advice or a warning.

The Founder's Convocation was mandatory, which was the only reason Zero attended. It was held in the long hall with the high windows, populated by three hundred students in formal dress being addressed at length by people who had endowed things. Zero had positioned himself against the eastern wall, roughly forty minutes into a speech about legacy, when he became aware of being observed with intent. He located the source without turning his head.

Across the hall, near the dais, surrounded by a shifting perimeter of nobles trying to be seen near him: a young man in Arcturian royal blue, dark-haired, well-postured, radiating the exact quality of pleasant attentiveness that a crown prince was presumably trained into from birth. The glamour was seamless. Zero could see nothing wrong with it at all.

And yet underneath it, unmistakable to him and to no one else in the room, was Yukito, looking back at him with an expression of profound and carefully suppressed relief. Neither of them moved. As the speech went on, the light from the windows dimmed by degrees as the sun went down behind the west tower, and the hall's sigil-lamps came up slow and warm, throwing long, soft shadows off three hundred people, and Zero understood what was about to happen approximately a second before it did.

The crown prince of Arcturia was still standing near the dais, still nodding politely at a margravine's anecdote. And Yukito was now standing at Zero's left elbow.

"Shadow Switch?" Zero asked. Yukito nodded, a faint smile showing he was proud of his trick.

"Ready to go?" he said. Zero glanced once at the figure by the dais. It had turned to say something to the margravine, and the margravine was laughing. It was his turn to nod.

"Me too," said Yukito. Shadow came up around both of them like a closing hand, and the long hall vanished.

They surfaced in a service courtyard behind the east kitchens, and the first thing Yukito did was sit down on a crate and put his face in his hands.

"Three weeks of being Aster," he sighed.

"I hate this."

"You're good at it."

"I'm good at reading a room, which is the same skill with more consequences attached." He looked up.

"Zero. I'm not being dramatic when I say I nearly cried when I saw you across that hall."

"You held the clone steady while you did it."

"I know. I'm proud of that too." Yukito laughed, ragged, and rubbed his eyes.

"How long can it hold?"

"Twenty minutes, maybe. Until someone tries to hand it a drink." They traded, then, fast and thoroughly, in the way of people who had been storing things up for weeks. Zero gave him the shape of Aldric Kestrel: the reputation, the summoning house, the trial at term's end, the objective still stubbornly undisclosed and the case he'd built for what it must be.

Yukito gave him his own siege: Natania, Ethan, and his legitimacy being eroded by a sister methodically buying his commoners with charity money while he was legally required to sit in a lecture hall miles away.

"There's the two of us," Yukito said finally.

"And no lead on either of the others. Miho could be anywhere. Viria could be anywhere. I've read every peerage roll in the Royal Library and there's no magic or mechanism in this world for finding one specific person you can't name."

"Then we stop searching and start being findable," Zero said.

"Whatever we do, we do it where a stranger would hear about it."

"That's the same conclusion I reached." Yukito exhaled.

"It's a bad plan, but I don't exactly have a better one." The clone had perhaps six minutes left. They were already moving back toward the hall when Yukito stopped, halfway across the courtyard, with the expression of a man remembering something filed and dismissed.

"There's an intake this weekend," he said.

"Transfer students, which almost never happens mid-term. The Arboreal Queendom's second princess is enrolling, and apparently her fiancé's coming with her, which the court thinks is touching." He shook his head.

"I only noticed because Natania will undoubtedly use it against me. A visiting elven princess is exactly the kind of guest she'd host a charity dinner around."

"An elf," Zero said.

"Like… our elf?"

"An elf princess. Enormously well-connected, enormously guarded, and hopefully not our problem." Yukito was already stepping back into the light of the hall's rear entrance.

"Come on. I need to switch places with the clone again before someone notices."