Grief, as it turned out, came with almost as much paperwork as saving a duchy did.
Aurora had come to find this darkly funny in the past two weeks since Julian first laid the story out for her — that a man capable of concealing his own mana signature so that even she had trouble detecting it, had needed three separate letters, a formal petition to the Isaria Academy's admissions board, and one deeply uncomfortable in-person meeting with its Headmistress, all to explain why a girl no one had ever heard of was arriving four weeks after term began, freshly bereaved and freshly claimed by a man she'd supposedly never met until her father died.
Your father and the Duke were close, once. University, or the war, depending on who's asking — keep it vague and people won't press. That had been the whole of Julian's guidance, rather helpful, extremely in fact. Said no one ever. An old friendship nobody had occasion to mention until her father passed, and Cassian Partridge, in his grief and his loyalty, took the daughter in as his own ward. It was, as covers went, almost embarrassingly gentle. No one asked hard questions of a grieving orphan. No one wanted to.
None of it was true. Not one word of it. Her father — her real father — had not died recently, had not been the Duke's old friend, had not died in any way that made for polite conversation over tea. But she had insisted on one thing surprisingly when Julian first proposed the arrangement and gotten it: she would keep her actual name. Aurora Ashcroft. She wasn't going to lose a piece of her father's legacy.
The rest of it she was less sure she could live with. She had known, almost indefinitely, that the assignment meant talking to people. She had not guessed, until she had arrived, just how many people that would be.
Isaria Academy sat on a low hill east of Caelmere proper, old enough that its towers began angling unevenly, but prestigious enough that half the noble houses in Astoria measured their standing partly by whether their children were admitted. The other half measured it based on how far their children could go in the Academy. It also, less publicly, took a small and carefully vetted number of foreign-born nobilities each year — a diplomatic courtesy dressed up as education. Aurora had assumed, before arriving, that this meant a handful of Velanthorian merchant-heirs and the occasional Crestmark garrison-lord's son.
She had not expected Rosaria.
She also had not expected Heritage and Historical Practice, six weeks into term and only her second week actually attending it, to be the class that decided on this particular Thursday was the day every student in the room would be made to speak.
Magister Rendall was a small, round, cheerful man who taught the subject with the enthusiasm of someone who had never once considered that other people might not share it. He had arranged the term's seating into clusters of four back at the start of the year, announcing, "so that students might begin the work of knowing one another as more than names on a roster" — which meant Aurora, having arrived a full month after everyone else, had simply been slotted into whatever seat happened to be empty. It had put her at a table with Alara, Eira, and — because apparently nothing in her life was allowed to be easy — Antonio.
Eira Vandenberg, to her left, had appointed herself in charge of "drawing Aurora out of her shell, gently, the way you coax a cat" within their second meeting, and pursued the project with a single-minded enthusiasm of someone who had never once been told no about anything in her life. She kept a small leather notebook tucked permanently into her sleeve, referred to without any apparent shame as her "Correspondence of Record" — a running account of every piece of academy gossip worth knowing, filed away by house and cross-referenced by scandal. Antonio, Aurora happened to know, already had his own page. Having arrived a week prior to Aurora, his seating was a direct result of the same empty seat arithmetic that had landed her here — a coincidence Eira found delicious.
"A small exercise, your first real grade of the year," Magister Rendall said, beaming out at the room. "Each of you will present a story. A legend, a tradition, something passed down perhaps. It needn't be long. It needn't even be entirely believed. What matters is that it's yours."
Aurora's stomach dropped to the floor. An attack on two of her fronts: Her fabricated history and her deep-seated discomfort of public speaking. She was screwed and she knew it.
It needn't even be entirely believed. Absolute rubbish. Everything in life hinged on how much people believed in it. She had spent the last two weeks constructing an entire false grief and had not, in all that preparation, thought to construct a single false childhood story to go with it. She pressed her thumb hard against the inside of her school uniform's opposite sleeve and hoped, with no real conviction, that the exercise would somehow forget she existed.
"I'll go first!" Eira announced, delighted, before anyone else could even hope to volunteer or object, which was — as Aurora was coming to understand — simply how she approached most situations. She sat up, hand's already beginning to move, sketching every little detail of the story before she'd said a word of it.
"It's a small one. House Vandenberg's, from my great-great-grandmother's time. There was this terrible storm the winter she was young — the kind that closes roads for a whole week— and a traveling merchant got caught out in it near our lands with nowhere to go. My family found and took him in. Fed him. Gave him a bed by the fire. Turned out later he wasn't a merchant at all, he was the second son of a Heartland house, no one can ever remember which, traveling in secret to avoid a marriage he didn't want. The story goes that he sent gifts for decades afterward, showed up at every Vandenberg wedding and funeral for the rest of his life, called my great-great-grandmother 'the child who fed a stranger without asking why he needed feeding.'"
Eira spread her hands, pleased with her story telling. "That's where our house words come from. A door held, a name remembered. We still keep a place set at the table on the worst storm nights of the year." She smiled warmly. "Just in case."
The table clapped just as Magister Rendall walked over from another table, hearing the tales from as many students as he could. His gaze slid toward Antonio and Alara sat up a fraction straighter before he'd even have a chance to open his mouth.
"Let Tony go," she said, warmth laced in both syllables of the nickname, easy and unguarded in the way she generally reserved for people she'd known considerably longer than a month. Aurora, having watched this happen five times now, despised the Princess falling for the charm of some foreign noble, she just couldn't put her finger on why. Perhaps the pact altered her emotional state more than she thought.
"My turn, I suppose, since no one's stopping me." Antonio leaned back, easy as ever. His charming smile angled towards Alara, which made Aurora shiver in slight disgust.
"We have a story in Rosaria about a fox who lived at the edge of a wolves' territory. Everyone told the fox to run, to find somewhere safer, somewhere the wolves couldn't catch her. She never did. She just got very, very good at being smaller than she looked, and knowing exactly which shadows were long enough to hide in, and most of all, which fights weren't worth losing teeth over." He shrugged, his expression light, though something in his eyes hadn't quite caught up to the rest of his face.
"My father used to tell it to me as a lesson about patience. Though, I've always privately thought it was really about knowing when to lose on purpose."
Nobody at the table said anything for a moment. Eira's expression was one of curious thinking. Probably attempting to decipher every theme from the story that she could. Alara clapped lightly, not in a polite, often reserved manner, but in a way that showed her genuine delight at listening to the charming Lord before her.
Aurora sat very still. The clapping was muffled as her thoughts ran in circles, much like a dog would when chasing its tail. An uncomfortable recognition crept into her chest. Every line of that story fit her rather better than it had any right to, and Antonio could not possibly have meant it to.
"Alara?" Magister Rendall prompted, his gaze shifting from a rowdy table nearby to the Princess.
Alara put a finger to her chin in thought. "Mine's an old one," she said, settling back in her chair with the comfort of someone who was about to enjoy listening to herself. "Older than my family being royal, even, if you believe the version that isn't trying to flatter us. You'll have heard some piece of it if you've spent any time near the Palace Archives — half the tapestries in the east wing are about it, badly, in my professionally humble opinion as someone who has stared at them during a great many boring functions."
She tucked one leg beneath the other, and for a moment she wasn't a princess telling a class assignment story — she was just a girl who liked this particular tale, and it showed.
"They call her the Shard-Maiden. Four hundred and some years back, before there was a Cayne on any throne, a weaver named Ashwell found a baby girl in the flax field the year the frost came late, when the moon was thin as a fingernail paring. He was preparing for the night when before the weather turned, and he saw a light lying in the furrows where no light should be — not fire or a lantern, but a soft and steady glow, the way a coal glows after the fire's gone out. When he went to it, he saw the little infant girl wrapped in nothing but a small blanket, her heart radiating the soft glow, and she did not cry, and she did not sleep, but only watched him with eyes far too old for a face so new." Alara's mouth curled, the way people smile at stories they've loved since childhood.
"He took her home. What else was there to do with a light in a field?"
"They named her Senna, for the last light of evening, because that was what she looked like, lying in the dark furrow. And she grew as children grew — slower some years, faster in other, the way flax grows uneven in a poor season — but strangely enough, the light in her heart stayed. It was not as bright but still held a dim glow beneath her clothing.
The village loved her the way villages love a thing they cannot explain: Carefully, and with one eye always watching.
She had a friend," Alara went on, quieter now, "a village boy, most accounts place his name to be Corin. He was plain as bread, a boy who'd stopped playing music after his father died because it felt disloyal to keep making something beautiful in a world that had taken something from him. Senna wouldn't let him stay stopped.
She followed him to the market square and to the millpond and to the back step of his own house, humming under her breath until he could not stand the silence of his own hands any longer and picked the thing up just to make her stop. She was relentless in the way of someone who has decided a thing shall not be long, and will not be argued out of it, and does not especially care whether you thank her for the trouble.
He never did thank her. Not in words. But he played again, and the village noticed, and no one had to ask why for they knew the answer already.
They grew up together the way two vines grow up the same post — never quite touching, always finding the other's shape in the wood between them. They complimented each other and often found comfort in their shared adventures when there was nothing else to find comfort in.
It is said she spoke, sometimes, of someone who was owed to her. Not the boy — she was careful to make that plain, in her own sideways fashion. Someone further off. Someone not yet arrived. She would go quiet in the evenings and look toward no particular horizon and say that she was waiting on a promise, though she could never say whose promise it was, or when it might be kept, only that it was the most important promise she'd ever have.
The tellers disagree about what she meant. Most say it was nothing — a fancy, a private grief dressed up as hope, the kind of thing the strange and lonely tell themselves to make the waiting bearable. A few, the odder tellers, the ones who tell this by low fires and won't quite meet your eye, say she knew something the rest of the tale doesn't."
Aurora found she'd gone very still, listening. Beside her, she felt — though she could not have said how she felt it, only that some quiet part of her simply did —The Princess's Heartbeat give the faintest flicker, there and gone. It lasted a second. The Princess never seemed to notice it herself.
"She died at nineteen," Alara said. "Peacefully, they say. Not tragically, not the way stories usually insist on — she simply went quiet, like a room after the last guest leaves. The village always remembered that — how calm she went.
Corin was with her at the end. Sat with her until the light in her finally settled, the story says, into something truly calm for the first time in her whole strange life." She shrugged, "The sweetest part's the bit everyone forgets. She used to tell him, whenever he worried over her — and he worried constantly, poor boy — not to. Said she wasn't really going anywhere, not really. Said there was someone waiting for her, somewhere far off she couldn't name, and when her time finally came, she'd only be going to meet them.
Corin struggled to agree with the thought of losing her. No telling agrees whether he wept, or spoke, or only reached for the light as it left her, the way a man reaches for something falling that he knows he cannot catch and tries to catch anyway.
Only this much every version keeps the same: Somehow, someway, he caught the light.
What became of it, the old tale does not say." Alara spread her hands, the storyteller's flourish. "Corin's line eventually merged into mine, a few branches and a great deal of politics later. Which is, I like to think, why we still tell it. Family business."
"That's the most romantic thing I've ever heard," Eira said, hands pressed dramatically to her chest and meant it entirely.
"It's a very good story," Antonio said, and for once, he sounded devoid of charm. Not just a compliment to the Princess, Aurora could feel that he actually meant what he said.
Magister Rendall's attention landed, inevitably, on Aurora, kicking her out of any thought besides one: How badly was she going to publicly embarrass herself.
The panic arrived all at once, the specific particular horror of having two weeks to prepare a grief and zero foresight to prepare a childhood. She could feel he pulse in her throat. Every version of a lie she reached for collapsed the moment she tried to build anything under it — a house story meant a house, and she had none that was truly hers to give; a homeland story meant a homeland, and Astoria wasn't even the right one. She bit her cheek, hard enough to ground herself in something, and stared rather intensely at the grain of the table.
"I don't—" she started and stopped all at once. Four faces waited, none of them unkind, which somehow made it worse.
And then, unbidden, something surfaced — not a lie, not a piece of the cover Julian had built for her, but something real. It wasn't quite a story like the others, but it was hers, slipping out before she'd decided to let it.
"My father used to say the world doesn't perform miracles," she said, quietly, eyes still on the table. "That it performs patterns. And a pattern, followed closely enough, will always tell you what happens next." She swallowed. "I don't have a story to go with it. Just that. He said it a great. I didn't... I didn't understand it until much later."
It wasn't Tobias's name. It wasn't his grave, or his execution, or the thing the world had actually done to him that truly stuck with Aurora. It was his voice, his teachings, and saying them out loud in a room full of people felt, absurdly, like an unspoken promise she made to herself: To keep passing on her father's work.
The table said nothing. Eira reached over, without asking, and gave Aurora's hand a single squeeze under the table — gone as quickly as it came. Alara stared at her for a moment longer than anyone else, something quiet passed between them, nothing to do with her cover story and everything to do with the bond they shared now, the bond they were not permitted to name out loud in this room.
Magister Rendall moved on to the next table, already beaming about someone else's grandmother.
Aurora let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding and did not look up against for the rest of the hour — but some small, unfamiliar part of her, sitting between an oversharing girl and a princess who kept her secrets as guarded as her own, thought that this, at least, had not gone as badly as she'd feared.