The Elemental Practicum met twice weekly in the sunken court behind the west wing, a shallow stone bowl worn smooth from centuries of students setting things on fire or crushing things under earth in more or less the same spot, and Aurora had spent the better part of her time at Isaria privately finding ways to limit her mana output without seeming suspicious to faculty.
It was, she'd decided, a rather interesting problem to tackle, in the same way a locked door was interesting to a locksmith — easily solvable, tedious in practice, and mildly insulting that it existed at all. She was registered at Signature Tier by the Charter Council based on her exploits as the Arcana Witch. Her student persona was registered as Attuned Tier, basically meaning, she had just enough mana output according to a fabricated document by Julian, to be at that level. Attuned Tier meant a clean flame, competent control, nothing that would raise an instructor's brow. She was a perfectly normal student mage in the eyes of the school.
It didn't mean she wasn't still afraid of accidently blowing a building up for being too nervous.
"Ashcroft."
Professor Rennick said it without looking up from her ledger, which was how Professor Rennick did most things. She was a compact, all too sharp-eyed woman with grey streaked hair cropped close to her scalp and a habit of marking student's performance in a small leather book. It always gave Aurora the feeling she was disappointing the Professor every time a mark was made. "Standard ignition. The far brazier, if you would."
Aurora stepped up to the chalked line. The brazier sat perhaps twenty feet across the court, a squat iron bowl that had probably been relit ten thousand times by ten thousand nervous students.
Attunement Tier meant clean, not fast. A visible half-second of buildup, because a true novice would need it. Slightly uneven catch, because—
"Miss Ashcroft."
Antonio's voice, of course it was, pitched low, meant for her alone, from where he stood at the court's edge waiting for his turn. He hadn't moved, hadn't even looked at her directly, which was somehow worse than if he had. "I hear Isaria's Attunement Tier students rarely manage more than a modest flame this early in the term. Try not to mess up."
It was, on the surface, a compliment. It was also, Aurora understood, a test disguised as small talk, delivered at the exact second her concentration was most useful to disrupt — and the fact that he'd clocked that timing at all ticked her off.
Her hands moved. A small mana circle appeared. The fire caught its target.
It was, by every measure, unremarkable — a decent, well-shaped flame shot out of the mana circle and lit the brazier's iron mouth before settling into a steady burn, precisely the kind of flame an average student would be expected to produce on a Tuesday afternoon in front of her classmates.
What she had not fully accounted for was Antonio's voice landing half a breath before she began, and the small, irritated spike of he doesn't get to do that had followed it. Unfortunately, the way that irritation translated itself was —without her permission—into a flame that was just slightly too clean. No hesitation. No flare at the edges. The flame students were meant to produce was known as a fireball, what she almost produced was a Bullet Flame, a different category within the fire element. Roughly six months was the time it took most to even attempt that.
Professor Rennick's pen stopped.
It was such a small thing — half a second of stillness over the open ledger — that Aurora doubted anyone else in the court had registered at all. But Aurora had spent enough time during her childhood knowing when a room decided to look at her differently, and she felt this one land in her stomach like a dropped stone.
"Efficient," Rennick said, and made a small mark. Her eyes came up just briefly, just long enough to stare into Aurora's eyes before returning to the page. "Next."
Aurora made her way to the back of the line with her expression arranged into something she hoped resembled mild, unbothered pride rather than the internal scramble that was actually occurring.
She did not look at Antonio. She could feel, without looking, that he was staring at her — not with suspicion exactly — but with the particular feeling of a man who just found a loose thread and was deciding whether it was worth the trouble to pull it.
Add it to the list, she thought, and did not elaborate on exactly how long the list was getting.
She was still turning it over an hour later, walking back from the west wing with her thoughts at least several corridors ahead of her feet, when a hand closed around her wrist and hauled her sideways into an alcove with a force that suggested the owner of the hand had given zero thought regarding subtlety.
"Eh!?" She tensed slightly.
"Shh." The Princess of Astoria pressed her back flat against the stone, eyes glowing with the barely contained delight of someone sitting on an enormous secret and unable to hold it in for one more second. "He's going to do it. Today. In the next twenty minutes, if he's on schedule, and Damien is always on schedule."
Aurora's body loosened as she blinked. "Do what?"
"Ask her!" The Princess said this the way one might announce the discovery of gold, with a small, excited bounce that made the alcove feel considerably smaller than it was. "Eira. He's going to ask Eira. We have to see it."
"We have to—" Aurora attempted to locate the part of her brain responsible for reasonable objections, and found it overrun. "How do you even know that?"
"He told me." The Princess said this like it explained how the world was created.
"He told you? Prince Damien. Told you he was asking Eira to the ball."
Not like that." The Princess was already tugging her back out of the alcove, moving with an unstoppable momentum. "He doesn't say things like that, you know how he is." Aurora very much did not. "He left me a note. It said—" She cleared her throat and tried her best to imitate her brother's flat cadence, which Aurora had to admit, was uncomfortably accurate, "—I intent to speak with Lady Vandenberg following her second class, in the west garden path, should you have other engagements planned for that hour."
Aurora stared at her. "That's not a confession. That's a room booking."
"That's exactly what it is! That's the whole problem, Aurora, he informed me of his own romantic overture like he was filing paperwork with the steward's office. I nearly cried." She had not, in fact, cried. Quite the opposite, she looked, if anything, thoroughly delighted by the entire ordeal. "Which is exactly why we have to be there." She pumped her fist into the air. "Someone in this family needs to witness him doing something undignified for once, and I refuse to let it be secondhand."
"This feels like an invasion of his privacy..."
"It is an invasion of his privacy," Alara agreed, already three steps ahead down the corridor, "which is why you're coming with me instead of letting me do it alone. I need someone to laugh with afterward. Come on. The west garden has excellent hedges."
Aurora, who had a very compelling argument prepared regarding, dignity, propriety, and the general principle of not spying on the Crown Prince during what was likely the single most vulnerable moment of his teenage life, discovered that she was already following, and gave up on the argument somewhere by the second turn.
The west garden's hedges were, as promised, excellent for spying — tall, dense and conveniently positioned along the gravel path in a way that suggested some long-dead groundskeeper had possessed remarkable foresight or a well-developed sense of humor, Aurora suspected both. The Princess dropped into a crouch behind the largest of them with the ease of someone who had clearly done this before, tugging Aurora down beside her into a gap barely wide enough for two people who were, Aurora thought carefully, sitting rather closer together than strictly necessary for surveillance purposes.
"There," The Princess whispered, pointing through the gap in the leaves. "He's early. He's never early."
Aurora looked. The Prince stood a little way down the path, hands folded behind his back, his weight settled evenly on both feet; he looked as if her were waiting for a foreign diplomat rather than a teenage girl. Even from here, she could see it — the faint, repeated motion of his thumb against his signet ring, turning it over like a man counting down a clock only he could hear.
"He's terrified," Aurora murmured.
"He's magnificent," The Princess corrected, with the fierce pride of a younger sibling who had waited her entire life for this exact spectacle. "Look at him. He looks like he's about to deliver a declaration of war."
Aurora had looked at the Prince for another moment, in the interest of surveillance. Then, because the light in the garden had gone soft and gold with the early afternoon and because the Princess's whisper had come out warm and low against Aurora's ear, she found her attention sliding sideways instead — to the curve of her grin, unguarded in a way it rarely was in front of anyone, to the way the Princess's eyes had gone bright, fixed on her brother with an intensity that had nothing to do with mocking and everything to do with love dressed up as teasing. She was leaning forward slightly, forearms braced on her knees, entirely unselfconscious about the entire ridiculous position they were both folded into, and Aurora thought, with a clarity that turned to embarrassment, that she would rather be watching this than the actual event they'd come to see.
That is certainly an unhealthy thought, she informed herself and returned her eyes to the path with more force than strictly required.
"There's Eira," The Princess breathed, and Aurora barely had time to look before a groundskeeper rounded the far hedge with a wheelbarrow, forcing them to duck lower, shoulder to shoulder and breath held, until the man passed without so much as glancing their way. The Princess's hand had landed on Aurora's arm at some point and did not immediately leave it. Neither of them mentioned this.
Eira came down the path a moment later exactly as promised, satchel over one shoulder, ink-smudged fingers already reaching to tuck a strand of chestnut hair back behind the ear and stopped when she saw Damien waiting.
"Prince Damien." Warm and easy, entirely unbothered by the fact that he was standing in the middle of a garden path with the expression of a man ready to face the guillotine. "You're not usually out this way."
"I had a matter I wished to discuss." He said it formally, and Aurora watched his hand find the edge of his own sleeve and square the cuff with unnecessary care. "The Festival Ball requires a paired escort for the Opening Processional."
"So I've heard." Eira tapped her shoe against the gravel. "Half the first years have talked about nothing else for a week."
"Yes." A pause. "I wondered whether you had made arrangements."
Eira went still for the first time in seventeen years.
It was such a small stillness that Aurora nearly missed it — no gasp or visible surprise, just a sudden cessation of the small, constant motion that usually surrounded her, hands stopping mid-reach for her satchel strap, expression wiped smooth in a way that looked, on anyone else, almost like calm. On Eira, who was rarely still for anything, it read as something akin to a held breath.
"I hadn't," she said, after a moment that stretched longer than comfortably necessary. "Made arrangements."
"I would be glad to remedy that." The Prince's voice did not change, and Aurora — watching from behind the hedge with the Princess's fingers still loosely curled around her wrist — thought it was possibly the single most stupid sentence to say when asking a girl out. Even she knew that.
The stillness had held for one beat longer. Then Eira's face broke into something warm and startled and entirely genuine, and the constant motion that seemed to follow her came rushing back like a tidal wave — hands finding the satchel strap again, hair escaping from behind the ear as if on cue, and a laugh that came out slightly too loud for the quiet garden.
"Yes," she said. "Obviously yes, Damien. I've been meaning to ask you to help me with the seating chart for the guild reception anyway, this actually saves me the conversation."
She was already talking logistics, Aurora realized, already three sentences into an entirely practical discussion on napkin colors and seating arrangements, apparently unaware — or comfortably aware and simply uninterested in dwelling on it — that she had just been asked to a ball by the Crown Prince of Astoria in the single most understated proposal Aurora had ever witnessed in her life.
Prince Damien, for his part, allowed himself exactly one breath of relief before his shoulders resettled into their usual formality, and said something in reply too quiet to carry, and the two of them continued down the path together, already deep in a conversation about tablecloths.
Behind the hedge, the Princess let out a breath she'd apparently been holding in since the word "yes" and turned to Aurora with an expression of such pure, radiant triumph that Aurora nearly forgot, for a moment, that they had just committed at least several violations of two people's privacy.
"I told you," she whispered, gripping both of Aurora shoulders and shaking with the fervor of a girl who had just watched history being made. "I told you she'd say yes."
"Y-You did," Aurora agreed as she grew nauseous from the shaking. "Repeatedly. In a courtyard, at volume, a hedge away from where he was standing."
"Details." The Princess was already climbing to her feet, brushing the garden dirt from her skirt, glowing with a happiness that made the whole ridiculous afternoon feel entirely worth it. She held a hand down to Aurora, and Aurora took it, and let herself be pulled upright into the air that smelled like turned earth and late-blooming jasmine.
"Come on," Princess Alara said, already walking, already talked, already three subjects ahead as she always was. "We need to tell absolutely no one, obviously, but I need to say the whole thing out loud again at least once before dinner or I'll combust. Also, I've decided we're getting pastries. This calls for pastries."
Aurora fell into step beside her, watched the late sun catch gold in the Princess's silver hair, and found that she did not, in fact, have any objections to pastries, or to the walk, or to any part of the next hour that involved staying exactly where she currently was.