The notice appeared on the third-floor commons board sometime between Aurora's return from the library at dusk and her arrival at breakfast the next morning, which meant either the Academy's clerks worked through the night or someone had too much coffee for their own good.
"Isaria Academy First Term Ball", it read, in the looping formal hand the administration reserved for anything it wanted taken seriously. "Held in honor of the Caelmere Compact Festival, commemorating the four hundred and thirtieth year of Astoria's founding. All students in their second term or above are required to attend. Attendance requires a paired escort for the Opening Processional, per Academy tradition dating to the founding of the Eight Compact Houses."
Aurora read it twice. Then a third time, mouth slightly open, in the faint hope that the words might rearrange themselves into something far less alarming.
Alas, they did not.
A required escort. For a processional. Named after eight lords who agreed to stop killing each other four centuries ago. Someone, at some point, decided that the correct way to honor that was to make teenagers find dance partners. Aurora made a face.
"You're doing the face again," Arden's voice came clear in her thoughts. His blob of a body was perched on the windowsill to the direct right of the board.
"I'm not doing a face."
"You're doing the face where you look like you're trying to solve something and failing miserably." He clicked his beak, which she had learned over the years was the raven equivalent of a smirk. "It's a dance, Aurora. Humans do them. I've watched you dance and you're not bad at it. Mostly. You've simply never had to ask anyone if they'd like to watch you do it."
"That's a very precise description of the obvious problem, thank you."
She was aware, unfortunately, that this was not a matter of national security. She had faced down plenty of things that wanted to kill her. She had written works on magical theory that would be read and argued over for centuries. She had even held a princess's Heartbeat together with the structural integrity of her own soul and not, as far as she could tell, broken apart at the seams doing it.
Finding a date to a dance should not, by any reasonable convention, register on the same scale.
And yet, Aurora had spent her childhood dancing for men thrice her age, and in all that time, no one had ever gotten around to teaching her how to ask someone to dance with her innocently and on purpose, in advance, with witnesses. She bit the inside of her cheek and went to find breakfast, and told herself, not for the first time, that this was a manageable problem she would manage later.
She found the Princess — predictably, since finding the Princess was most of her job description — in the east courtyard an hour later, and it was there that she also found the Crown Prince, and it was there, hovering toward a conversation she had not been invited to and was making a show of not overhearing, that Aurora learned rather more than she intended about the private life of the Crown Prince of Astoria.
She'd taken a bench two hedgerows away, ostensibly to review a passage of Spatial theory she'd already memorized on the first read, which gave her an excellent, foolproof reason to be sitting perfectly still with a book open and her ears even more open. As if they weren't being loud enough already.
"—so you'll need someone," The Princess was saying, with the particular bluntness she reserved for facts she considered all too obvious and everyone else seemed determined to complicate, Aurora being the usual suspect. "For the Processional. You're not walking out alone, Damien, you're the Crown Prince, people will write dramatic plays about it."
"I'm aware of the optics." Damien's voice was level. "I have several appropriate options."
"Appropriate isn't the same as good."
"I wasn't aware good was the requirement."
"It should be!" A pause filled — Aurora suspected, without even looking — with the specific quality of the Princess's attention, the kind she turned on people when she'd already decided something and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
She cleared her throat for dramatic effect. "You should ask Eira."
Even the birds stopping making noises.
"Lady Vandenberg," Damien said, his tone shifting somewhat, "is a friend of yours."
"She's a friend to all. That's not an argument against it; that's an argument for it. You already know her. You wouldn't have to make conversation with some stranger for an entire evening, which I know for a fact is your least favorite activity in the whole wide world, second only to public displays of anything but being miserable looking."
"I attend three council sessions a week that require both."
"And you hate every one of them and you've never once let it show, which is my point exactly!" She stuck a finger in his face with a bluntness that Aurora had learned, over weeks of proximity, was simply how the Princess loved people — directly, without decoration, as though affection were a fact of life rather than a feeling to be managed. "She'd say yes. You know she'd say yes."
"That is not," Damien said, "the difficulty of the situation."
Aurora, three hedges away now as to remove any possible chance of being caught, did not look up from her book as she strained her ears, and did not turn the page she had stopped reading four sentences ago.
Alara's voice came again. "Damien—"
"I'll consider it," he said, in the tone of a man closing a door he had no intention of reopening anytime that afternoon, and Aurora heard footsteps, unhurried, moving away across the courtyard stone.
She waited a full ten seconds after they'd faded before allowing herself the luxury of peeking through the loose hedges. The Princess was still sitting where she'd been, arms crossed, watching the space where her brother had left.
Well, he didn't say no. Aurora would count that as a small win for the Princess.
"He also didn't say yes," said Arden, practically reading her thoughts somehow, as he always does. He had relocated to a nearby fountain and was watching the whole affair with the keen interest of a creature who found human courtship roughly as compelling as watching moss grow but was willing to admit the moss occasionally grew into an interesting pattern. "You people make everything so complicated. Ravens don't have this problem."
"Ravens don't attend balls, stupid."
"Exactly my point."
Aurora had perhaps four minutes to enjoy the small satisfaction of witnessing something before Antonio arrived, and in retrospect she would come to think of those four minutes as the last calm ones of her morning.
He crossed the courtyard the way he did everything — with an unhurried charm that made people want to like him before they'd decided whether they should. His accent softened certain vowels in a way Aurora suspected was rather more deliberate than it appeared and it prickled the moment he smiled.
"Princess." He inclined his head to Alara with exactly the right measure of respect that was dictated for a princess and none of the stiffness most of the nobility managed it with. "I wonder if I might steal a moment."
"You may steal several," The Princess said, with a directness that made her, Aurora thought, terrible at political espionage and wonderful at everything else. "What is it, Tony?"
"The Festival Ball," he said lightly, as though the words were fresh rather than rehearsed, which Aurora did not believe for a moment. "I find myself without a partner for the Processional, and it occurred to me that a Princess of Astoria walking beside the son of Rosaria's Prime Minister would make for a rather striking appearance. Good optics, as I understand your court likes to say." His smile widened, entirely too practiced. "Would you do me the honor?"
Aurora, still nominally reading, felt the question land somewhere in her chest that she didn't like whatsoever.
If she says yes... then the Princess will have a partner. Which means Aurora will have no reason to be standing beside her during the one evening where standing beside her matters most. Which means Aurora will be standing at the edge of the ballroom, alone, while the entire student body of Isaria Academy watches Princess Alara Cayne walk in on the arm of a foreign diplomat's son.
This is not, she thought to herself, the primary concern here. The primary concern is that untrustworthy smooth-tongued foreigner.
It was, she would later admit, extremely difficult to focus on the primary concern when the secondary had opened up beneath her like a sinkhole. She was going to be dateless at a ball that apparently required dates as a required precondition of attendance, in front of the entire Academy, and the single most likely outcome of that fact was that she would spend the evening standing very still against a wall, being looked at with the pity reserved for a sort of person everyone assumed simply hadn't been asked, and she would die there, she decided, old and forgotten, a cautionary tale whispered by future first-years. That girl, the one no one asked. They say she's still there, by the punch table, and if you listen closely, you can hear her muttering about the punch's lack of healthy properties.
"That's very kind of you," Alara said, and something in her tone pulled Aurora out of her decrepit thoughts. "Let me sit on it."
"Of course." Antonio's smile did not waver, though something in his eyes knew something Aurora didn't. "Take all the time you need, Princess."
Aurora did not register her answer; she was still lost somewhere in the punch table of her own imagined future.
She was going to die. Not tragically. Not interestingly. Just — alone, at a dance, next to a punch table.
"You tied yourself to a princess's Heartbeat with your own soul three weeks ago," Arden stated, unhelpfully, "and this is the crisis that's put that expression on your face."
"Different category of problem..."
"Is it." He flew off before she had an answer.
Not that she had one in the first place. No answer would have survived a close inspection, so she didn't attempt it, and instead spent the rest of the day in the low, simmering dread of a girl who wanted to die while a string quartet played behind her.
Their room that night was quiet, the same as it always was when the corridor lamps sizzled into embers — Alara curled sideways across her bed with a book she'd stopped pretending to read some time ago, and Aurora at the small writing desk by the window, ostensibly reviewing notes, actually rehearsing, with great effort and mounting despair, several different ways to raise the subject of the ball that didn't sound as pathetic as she currently felt.
"I told him no," The Princess said, filling the quiet, without preamble.
Aurora looked up. "Antonio."
The Princess made a sound of agreement as she kept her eyes glued to her book, though they weren't moving across the page. "He's charming. I like charming people, generally. But he wanted something from that Processional that wasn't me, and I've been a Princess long enough to understand the difference." She turned a page she hadn't read. "Besides, I'd already decided who I wanted to ask."
Aurora's stomach turned in a complicated manner. "Prince Damien changed his mind about Eira?"
"Not yet. He will." Alara said this with a certainty that could convince anyone, and Aurora, who had watched the Prince not-say-no in a courtyard that morning, found she didn't entirely disagree. "And barring the fact that I know you we're obviously eavesdropping on me earlier. I wasn't talking about Damien."
Before Aurora could react to that statement, the Princess set her book down at last, and looked at Aurora directly, in the way she did that made Aurora feel, every time, pleasant — the look of someone who saw exactly what she was looking at and had never once considered pretending otherwise.
"Go with me." The Princess said finally. "To the ball. As my — I don't know what the Academy calls it. Escort. Partner. Whatever satisfies them." A small shrug, as though she were suggesting they split a plate at dinner rather than derailing Aurora's entire thought process. "You're standing next to me for the Processional either way, Aurora, and I'd rather it be official than have you loitering at the edge of the room looking lonely when you could instead be enjoying yourself. Which," she added, with a curl of the lips, "you are terrible at hiding, by the way. The loitering face. You should work on that."
Aurora opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again and found that the several rehearsed lines she'd spent the evening preparing had all evacuated the premises, leaving behind only a stunned face.
"Y-You don't have to do that because I don't have a date," she managed to spit out finally. "I wasn't going to — I would have been fine on my own. I have a very compelling plan involving the punch table."
I'm not doing it because you don't have a date." The Princess said simply, her eyes watching the book as she traced its spine with her slender finger. "I'm doing it because I want to go with you. The date part is just convenient." She picked the book back up, apparently considering the matter settled. "Wear the blue one. You always reach for the grey one, and it makes you look like you're attending a funeral." A pause. "I like you in brighter colors."
Aurora sat very still for a long moment, feeling something in her chest untangle that she hadn't fully registered was tangled, and told herself, firmly, that the sudden warmth she felt was gratitude, and nothing more complicated than that.
Well," said Arden, appearing from the windowsill quietly, as he always did at the most inconvenient of times, with the smug satisfaction of a creature who had predicted this outcome far before she had ever thought about it. "No punch table, then."
"Shut up." She puffed her cheeks slightly, embarrassed.
"I'm only saying. All that dramatic tragedy, wasted."
Aurora didn't answer him as she turned back to her notes, her thoughts elsewhere still. She was busy trying to remember where, exactly, in her wardrobe the blue dress had ended up.