He felt it the moment he walked in — not hostility, not anything so simple as that, but a kind of charged awareness, conversations pausing fractionally as he passed, eyes that found him and then deliberately looked away, the specific texture of a room that knew something significant about you and was working out, in real time, how to behave around that knowledge.
He kept walking. He found his table.
Liam was already there, and the specific thing Liam did — which William hadn't anticipated but which, once it happened, struck him as exactly right — was to simply continue the conversation he'd been having with Marcus about the Inter-House Competition's team event scoring as though nothing in the dining hall's atmosphere had changed at all.
"Sit," Liam said, without looking up from his point about scoring weighting. "Marcus thinks the survival scenario category should count double. He's wrong, but I want you to hear his reasoning so you can also tell him he's wrong."
William sat.
