But I’d told him the truth. I did want that, too: I wanted him to get on a plane and come to me, and I wanted to live happily ever after with him in a clean and shining world we’d purge of maleficaria and misery, and apparently I wasn’t a sensible realist after all, since I was leaping after that outrageous fantasy with both hands, straight into the chasm I could see perfectly well open before me.
“I do have plans, though,” I added, to distract myself from my own stupidity. “You might be perfectly satisfied to roam the wilds hunting and then come home to the little woman at night, Lake; it won’t do for me,” and I told him half defiantly about my enclave-building project, except it only made matters worse. He kept that horrible shining look on me the entire time; not even smiling, just holding my hand in his and listening to me go on and on getting progressively more fanciful, littering the whole world with tiny enclaves, sheltering every wizard child born, until finally I burst out, “Well? Haven’t you anything to say about it? Go on and tell me I’m mad; I don’t want humoring.”
“Are you kidding me?” he said, his voice cracking. “El, this school was the best thing I could imagine. But now when I hunt, I’ll be helping you do this,” as if I’d laid a gift in his hands.
I let out a strangled sob and said, “Lake, I hate you so much,” and put my head down against his shoulder with my eyes shut. I’d been ready to go down to the graduation hall and fight for my life; I’d been ready to fight for the lives of everyone I knew, for the chance of a future. I didn’t need this much more to lose.
We couldn’t afford to miss dinner, which thankfully gave me an excuse to put a stop to the sentimentality and horrific confessions. I gave Orion a slap on the shoulder and told him to get his clothes mended and back on. It had stopped pissing down snake-things, and the ones that had fallen were mostly dead—amphisbaena aren’t very sturdy, and the gym ceiling is a long way—although we did have to pick our way gingerly past the ones that were still writhing a bit.
Orion clearly wasn’t satisfied to put his emotions away where they belonged: he tried to hold my hand on the way up the stairs, and I had to scowl him off and put my hands firmly in my pockets. At least we caught up with Aadhya and Liu on the stairs, and they let me fall in between them to provide an additional bulwark, although they charged me in eyebrow-wagging and insinuating looks—Liu was clearly pleased to get some of her own back. It wasn’t any great act of telepathy on their part: there were sparkly-dust handprints all over my clothes and even my skin. Orion all but bounced along behind us, despite having offered to carry the lute for Liu, and even hummed on the stairs, as if he’d been wafted ethereally far above minor mortal concerns such as our impending doom. Liu covered her mouth with both hands to stifle giggles and Aad smirked at me. I couldn’t complain at them for enjoying the distraction—I’d have liked one myself—but I put on my dignity and refused to acknowledge it.
He did manage to get hold of my hand under the table at dinnertime, rubbing his thumb over my knuckles, and I’d already finished eating, so I didn’t immediately yank it away and shove his chair over or anything. Although I should have, because after dinner, he trailed me down the stairs, and when we reached our res hall, he tried hopefully, “Want to…come to my room?”
“The night before?” I said repressively. “Go and get some sleep, Lake. You’ve had yours; if you want more, you’ll just have to graduate.”
And he sighed but went, and I went to Aadhya’s room with her and Liu instead. The lute was there waiting, but we didn’t have any work to do on it, we just sat crammed in there together, piled on the bed. They both teased me for a bit more, but I didn’t actually mind, and then obviously we moved on to the serious business of my giving them a detailed report, and I confess that by the time I finished going over it, I was privately thinking to myself maybe I might after all stop by Orion’s room before bed for just a little bit, and Aadhya sighed and said, “I’m almost sorry I turned down that junior.”
Liu and I both demanded more information—turned out this junior artificer named Milosz had been helping her make some precision-enchanted strips of gold to go on the lute tuning pegs, and he’d suggested one of those last-night hurrahs to her, which idea she, being the sensible girl I knew and loved, had firmly quashed.
“What about you?” she said to Liu, nudging. “I saw Zixuan going downstairs just before us. He should be in his room around now…”