Chapter 24: Cordelia Ashworth.
POV: Elian Valcourt.
Elian didn’t remember falling the rest of the way asleep.
He just surfaced from it hours later, the actual kind of waking this time, sun already well up past the horizon and Bellamy’s voice already somewhere on the other side of the room complaining loudly about a shirt that had apparently betrayed him overnight.
He lay there a moment longer than what would have been proper, staff propped against the bed within arm’s reach, turning the same thought over the way he’d turned the crest’s motto over back home.
Five petals. One family. Six generations.
"Faithless. Absolutely faithless!" Bellamy was saying in the background, having an overly theatrical accent while holding the shirt up to the window light like it might confess something under scrutiny.
"I hung this exact shirt exactly where I always hang it, and it has decided, overnight, to develop a wrinkle in a place no wrinkle has any business being!"
"That’s what happens to shirts that get hung up," Elian said, finally sitting up properly.
"Don’t defend it!"
Elian let that go unanswered, mostly because arguing with Bellamy before breakfast had already proven, in the space of one day, to be a losing proposition on principle.
He washed and got dressed instead, trying to tie his hair back out of habit rather than panic this time—a small distinction he was still getting used to noticing—and checked the schedule Colm had handed him the day before, now slightly creased from having lived in his coat pocket overnight.
Theory of Mana Manipulation and Continental History in the morning, and in the afternoon, Practical Casting. Then special training with a teacher, which he now knew was Rowan Vale, for Resonance artifact holders in the evening.
All were native to the Selenoire curriculum track, apparently, though nothing on the page explained what half of that meant in practice.
He said his good bye to Bellamy, who was Courtcraft student, not a regular mage study student, and had different classes.
Lucenhall primarily had five different types of courses from what he knew, first was the Mage Studies, which Elian was enrolled to, then there were Theory Studies, Artificing, Restorer Studies, and Courtcraft.
Mage Studies was the most difficult course out of all of them because it taught everything the other courses did and had no apparent specialization, expecting the students to learn everything there had to be about being a mage.
Courtcraft, the one Bellamy was enrolled to, was primarily about practicing and studying diplomacy. Which Elian found perfectly fitting for someone like his extremely social, borderline chatterbox roommate.
He remembered Milena being a Theory Studies student, which meant that they’d only have a few classes each week which overlapped.
But that didn’t matter now, he figured, since they’d have special classes with Vale in the evening every day.
It was still hard to completely wrap his head around what the other courses taught, so he instead opted to just go to his class without spending too much brainpower on unimportant things.
The lecture hall for Theory of Mana Manipulation turned out to be considerably less grand than the great hall. It had tiered seating in a tighter arc, chalk dust already hanging faint in the air, the particular hush of a room full of students who hadn’t fully committed to being awake yet.
Elian found a seat near the back out of some old instinct, staff settled across his knees, and had just started to relax into the relative anonymity of it when someone dropped into the seat beside him with enough enthusiasm to make the bench creak.
"You’re the Valcourt boy!"
He turned. The girl beside him was already digging through a bag stuffed considerably past capacity with books, parchment, and what looked like at least one small, unlabeled jar, talking before she’d even fully sat down.
She looked up to see him staring with utter bafflement on his face.
"Oh! ...sorry" She paused, hesitating.
"That was a terrible opener, my apologies, everyone’s been doing that to you since you arrived, I heard. Rude of them if i had to be honest, you’re a person and not a... headline."
She finally located the notebook she’d apparently been looking for, flipping it open to a page already dense with handwriting.
"I’m Cordelia Ashworth. I’d shake your hand but I only have two and they’re both currently occupied."
"Elian," he offered, mostly on reflex, since she clearly already knew.
"I know. Everyone knows." She said it the way Darrow had said it yesterday, flat fact, no weight attached, before her attention snagged visibly on the staff across his lap, eyes going wide in a way that had nothing to do with reputation and everything to do with what looked like genuine, undiluted academic delight.
"Is that actually the Everbloom?" She whispered like she was talking about a world ending secret. "The real one? Six generations, the vault records, all of it?"
"That’s the one."
"Can I..."
She stopped herself, hand already halfway extended, visibly wrestling her own manners back under control.
"Sorry. No. That was extremely forward, ignore that, I get like this about Resonance artifacts since they’re so rare, it’s a whole documented character flaw, being an Artificer and all that."
"You can look. Just..." He hesitated, old instinct flaring, then made himself finish the sentence anyway.
"Don’t grab it. It doesn’t love that."
"It has preferences?" Cordelia beaming. She looked, if anything, more delighted by this than by the staff itself.
"That’s- do you know how rare that’s documented as being? Most Resonance-theory texts treat bonded artifacts as passive conduits for the holder, which has always struck me as criminally reductive, given the actual bonding literature suggests... .... ..."
She kept going.
Elian let her, mostly because it required nothing of him beyond nodding occasionally, and because there was something genuinely restful about being looked at like an interesting research subject instead of a rumor with legs.
She wasn’t performing curiosity for an audience the way most people at the ceremony back home had performed congratulations to him, or the people that had talked to him on the way to cafeteria yesterday. She just was curious, loudly, like Bellamy, without any apparent awareness that this made her unusual.
Elian found it a little comforting, having already came to terms with the fact that even he, maybe had the chance to find friends in the place.
"—which is why I petitioned for a spot in advanced Resonance theory as a first-year, which nobody does, by the way, it’s technically a third-year class, but my father’s the Duke of Ashworth so the registrar mostly just sighs and lets me do what I want at this point—"
"Wait, that’s... a lot of information very fast," Elian said, starting to feel overwhelmed.
Cordelia blinked, then had the grace to look faintly abashed.
"Sorry! I do that... My governess used to say I talk like I’m being timed."
She closed her notebook halfway, visibly recalibrating.
"I’m not trying to interrogate you, for what it’s worth. I just haven’t had anyone to actually talk artifact theory with since I got here last week, and everyone else in this class is either half-asleep or here because their parents made them take it."
"I don’t know enough about artifact theory to actually talk it with you."
"That’s fine, I know enough for both of us currently."
She said it entirely without arrogance, just plain fact, the same kind of tone that Vale used with him usually.
"You just have to be willing to be talked at occasionally. In exchange I’m told I’m very good at helping people study for Continental History, which I assume you also have, given the schedule?"
Elian found himself, somewhat to his own surprise, smiling.
"That sounds like a fair trade."
"Excellent! Friendship achieved."
Cordelia said it the way she seemed to say everything—brisk, certain, entirely unbothered by whether the sentiment was supposed to be more heavily negotiated than that.
Up front, the instructor finally called the room to order, and she turned forward with the sudden, total focus of someone who’d apparently decided the conversation had reached its natural stopping point and moved on without any transitional awkwardness at all.
Elian sat there a moment longer, faintly bemused, staff settled warm against his knee, and thought that whatever else Lucenhall turned out to be, it was already less lonely than he’d braced for.