Chapter 18: Tolerable, Yes, Tolerable.
POV: Milena Belyanova.
Milena had not meant to think about him more today. That had been the plan, roughly.
Go to the Opening ceremony, go back to her room, spend the day on the research she’d actually come here for. Elian Valcourt, or Rowan Vale for that matter, had not been part of that plan. They simply happened, the way weather happened, inconvenient and impossible to schedule around.
She sat now at her desk in the room she didn’t share with anyone, a small mercy Vale had arranged for her personally, back when Milena had first arrived for summer training and made it clear exactly how little patience she had for company with a stack of borrowed texts in front of her, untouched, while her mind kept circling back to a boy who fell into fights by accident and somehow still ended up ahead.
It offended her, slightly. That was her honest accounting of it.
Zimovian discipline was built on decades of earning every inch of control a mage had over their own power—cold-forged, deliberate, nothing left to chance because chance in her homeland tended to get people killed.
She’d spent her whole life being told that magic without total command of it was a liability wearing the shape of a gift.
And then Elian Valcourt showed up.
With a six-generation dead relic that apparently ran on the exact opposite principle, and it worked better the less he tried to control it, and something about that fact sat in her chest like a splinter she couldn’t quite work free.
She didn’t dislike him, precisely.
That would have been simple for the most part.
Disliking him would have required him to be genuinely unpleasant, and he wasn’t—awkward, yes, painfully so, flustered in a way that should have been irritating and instead was mostly just... endearing, which was an even more irritating thing to admit.
He didn’t perform the way most nobles she’d met performed. Didn’t posture. Didn’t seem to know how to, actually, which made the moments he accidentally succeeded at something all the more genuine, and genuine was a rarer commodity around people like him than she’d expected coming into this school.
That didn’t mean she had to like watching him fumble his way into power that people back home would have trained decades to earn.
Tolerable, she decided, for the dozenth time that week, pulling the top book off her stack with more force than it strictly required.
He is tolerable. Occasionally annoying. That is the full and complete assessment.
She opened the book anyway, not to the section on placement trials or Resonance theory or anything remotely related to the boy currently occupying too much space in her thoughts.
But to the section she’d actually come to Lucenhall for—old, dense, written in a dialect of Zimovian scholarly script that most of the academy’s library staff couldn’t even read, which was precisely why she’d needed access to it in the first place.
’Frostbound Lineages: A Study of Inherited Affliction.’
Her family’s name appeared on page forty, in a footnote so old the ink had gone the color of rust.
Belyanova.
Not for flattering context, though.
Three generations back, an ancestor had made a bargain with something in the deep Zimovian frostlands that nobody in her family discussed above a whisper even now, and the price of it had settled into her bloodline like a stone dropped in still water—never fully surfacing, never fully sinking, just sitting there, waiting.
She was the fourth generation. The clock, according to family record nobody liked to keep too precisely, was running out sooner than anyone wanted to admit out loud.
Lucenhall had the largest arcane archive on the continent. That was the only reason she’d come—not tournaments, not reputation, not any of the things the other first-years seemed to care about.
She needed access to texts Zimovia didn’t have, taught by instructors who’d actually studied curse-bound afflictions instead of just fearing them, and she’d calculated, coldly and correctly, that this was her best chance at finding something her own country’s healers hadn’t in three generations of trying.
She had not calculated on stumbling into a boy who fainted from touching an heirloom and somehow made that look like triumph from the fables.
Milena closed the book with more force than necessary, pressed the heels of her hands briefly against her eyes, and made herself refocus on the actual, pressing, life-or-death problem in front of her instead of the considerably less pressing problem of Elian Valcourt’s stupid, unfairly pretty, fairy-like, unbothered face lighting up every time something went accidentally right for him.
Focus, she told herself.
You have maybe a decade left to fix this. He is not one of your problems to solve.
She believed herself for almost a full minute before her mind wandered right back to the east yard, to the exact moment his staff had flared bright and he’d looked more startled by his own success than anyone watching him had been.
Tolerable, she thought again, weaker this time, and went back to her reading.