Lily got out of bed slowly, looking as if she was forcing herself to do something unpleasant.
As soon as her feet touched the floor, she stood up straight and stretched her arms over her head. The stretch was stiff and made her wince, forcing a breath out through her nose. Then she turned her head and looked at the mirror, even though she knew it might not be a good idea.
She froze in place.
Her hair was a mess. It was loose and ruffled, showing that someone had tried to soothe her. There were dark circles under her eyes from crying during the night. And her clothes...
Her face shifted quickly from sleepy to shocked.
Her shirt looked like it had been through a lot. It was wrinkled, twisted to one side, with two buttons undone, showing more cleavage than she wanted, and another button clearly fastened in the wrong hole.
Lily covered her chest with her hand and turned around slowly. She stood tall, looking so offended that it seemed like she might actually consider getting violent.
"How," she demanded, "did this happen?"
Samantha, still propped against the pillows, let her gaze travel over Lily with entirely unhelpful calm.
"I imagine," she said, "that the answer lies somewhere between nightmare, weeping, and the fact that you slept as if you intended to anchor yourself to me by force."
Lily went crimson.
"That does not explain the buttons."
"No," Samantha admitted. "Those may be my fault."
"How exactly are they your fault?"
Samantha tucked one leg beneath herself and sat facing Lily, her posture relaxed, regarding her with the composure of someone who either missed or refused to admit the scale of the disaster before her.
"You were shaking hard," she said. "At some point, you got your hand caught in your own shirt while trying to cling to me and breathe at the same time. One of the buttons twisted. The collar was pulling crooked against your throat. You looked uncomfortable."
Lily stared at her.
"So," Samantha went on, with the same reasonableness, "I undid the top buttons so you would stop half-strangling yourself."
"You unbuttoned my shirt."
"Yes."
"In my sleep."
"Yes."
"With your hands."
Samantha's mouth twitched. "Lily, I regret to inform you that shirts do not usually open themselves out of modest respect."
For one incandescent second, Lily truly did consider hurling a fireball.
A small white spark snapped at her fingertips.
Samantha noticed it at once and lifted both hands in a gesture that was half-surrender and half-placation.
"Before you attempt murder," she said, "I also tried to fasten it again later."
"That is not helping."
"I know," Samantha said. "I am explaining, not helping."
Lily made a strangled noise that was almost a growl.
Samantha, to her credit, looked faintly apologetic. "You had finally fallen asleep. Properly asleep, I mean. You were breathing evenly. You were not crying anymore. I thought you would be embarrassed if you woke with your shirt open, so I attempted to fix it."
"And?"
"And," Samantha said slowly, "you were still holding onto me like your life depended on it."
Lily shut her eyes for one horrible moment.
"One of my arms was stuck," Samantha went on. "It was dark, and you wouldn’t let go. Every time I got a button done, you moved."
Lily's hand squeezed over the gap in her shirt as if modesty, once breached, might still be defended by force. "So the answer," she said in a dangerously level voice, "is that while I was half-mad with grief and clinging to you in my sleep, you unbuttoned my shirt, failed to rebutton it, and now discuss it like an amusing household mishap."
"That is a grotesque summary," Samantha said.
"It is an accurate summary."
"It is a hostile summary."
Lily drew herself up as much as a small, dishevelled, crimson-faced girl clutching her own shirt could draw herself up. "I hate you."
Samantha's brows lifted. "That is a little severe for a misplaced button."
"It is not about a misplaced button!"
Samantha's gaze dipped for one fatal instant toward the evidence in question.
"Stop looking at it!"
She threw both arms over her chest as if that could reassemble her lost dignity. Her blush deepened to a harsh, ruinous red, and the small white spark at her fingertips flared brighter.
"Turn around," she ordered. "At once."
Samantha, infuriatingly, did not look nearly ashamed enough.
After a tense pause, perhaps because the growing spark had become a very small and very sincere threat, Samantha raised both hands and, without haste, turned around on the bed until she was facing the wall, sitting with her back to Lily.
"There," she said. "I am turned around. You may preserve your honour in peace."
"My honour," Lily said, aghast, "has been mauled."
A soft laugh escaped Samantha before she could stop it.
Lily's eyes narrowed at the back of her head. "This is not funny."
"It is a little funny," Samantha said.
Lily drew in a breath through her nose, sharp as an offended cat. She risked a quick glance at the mirror again, then regretted it. Her hair looked exactly as it was: stroked, smoothed back, gathered in calming hands, and fully disordered.
She looked away again at once.
There was something especially unbearable about it. It reminded her, with vicious precision, of the first day in the room: Samantha's eyes on her, frank and interested, making Lily feel too visible in her own skin. But this was worse. This was not merely being looked at. This was waking with proof, all over her, that someone had held her for hours, soothed her, and known how disordered she became when she came apart.
Heat crawled all the way to the tips of her ears.
"Pervert," she muttered.
Samantha, still facing away, said cheerfully, "That is unkind. I was being medically useful."
"You were meddling with my clothes in the dark."
"You were trying to suffocate yourself with your own collar."
"I was not."
"You absolutely were."
Lily opened her mouth to deny it, then shut it again because, unfortunately, that sounded possible. Her shame did not improve.
Samantha tilted her head slightly. "Would it help you," she asked with suspicious mildness, "if I said I was very respectful about it?"
"No."
"What if I said you are very pretty, and that made restraint difficult?"
Lily froze.
"Do not," she said, in a voice of immediate warning.
There was a pause. Samantha's shoulders shifted with the effort not to laugh.
"And for the record... "
"Do not," Lily repeated, sharper now.
"You are very pretty," Samantha said anyway, because apparently self-preservation had never been one of her stronger habits. "It is genuinely hard not to look. And as for your chest, I li..."
"If you finish that sentence," Lily said, with terrible clarity, "I will kill you on the spot."
Silence.
Then Samantha, in the tone of someone revising her position in the face of mortal danger, said, "What a pity. It was going to be a compliment."
Lily could barely breathe for indignation. "You are impossible."
"Yes," Samantha agreed.
"I am changing," Lily informed her in a tone of cold fury. "If you turn around, shift so much as an inch, or even appear to be thinking about looking, I will erase you."
"Mm," Samantha said to the wall. "A fair and proportionate response."
Still holding her ruined shirt closed with one hand, Lily marched to her trunk and pulled out fresh clothes. She kept glancing, suspicious to the last, but Samantha did not move, only remained turned away on the bed, hands visible, which was somehow irritating in its own right. Lily would have almost preferred another offence; it would have been easier to manage than this obedient stillness.
She stripped out of the wrinkled shirt with all the speed of someone disposing of evidence, dragged on a clean one, and fastened every button with rigid concentration, checking them twice. Then she pulled the skirt on, adjusted it, and, after one final distrustful look at Samantha's back, raised two fingers to her temple and worked a small corrective spell through her hair.
This wasn't combat magic, and no one at Silverwood would have thought it impressive. It was just an old household spell, shaped by careful intent. The magic worked its way through the snarls, smoothed out the flyaways, and gently brought the tangled silver strands into order. For a moment, a soft blue shimmer moved through her hair before fading away.
Only once she was certain she looked like a person rather than the aftermath of a personal collapse did she lower her hand.
"Done," she said.
Samantha did not immediately turn. "Am I permitted to survive?"
Lily narrowed her eyes. "For now."
"That is generous."
Only then did Samantha look back.
The first thing Lily noticed, to her surprise and mild relief, was that Samantha actually did keep her gaze on Lily's face. The second was that this restraint looked like an effort.
Something warm and humiliating flickered low in Lily's chest.
Samantha sat up a little straighter, taking in the now-orderly hair, the corrected collar, the full restoration of respectable buttons, and smiled with a softness that undid Lily.
"There," Samantha said. "Much less murder in your appearance. You look lovely."
Lily's composure nearly failed again on the spot.
"That," she said tightly, "was not an invitation."
"I know."
"I mean it."
"I know," Samantha repeated, and this time her tone had lost most of its teasing. "I am trying to behave."
Lily turned away first under the pretence of collecting her satchel, though she did not need it for breakfast, and both of them knew it. She was aware of Samantha rising behind her, of the rustle of sheets, the quiet sound of bare feet against the floorboards, of the room settling into morning around them.
For a brief moment, neither spoke.
The silence was not awkward in the old way. It was not sharp, not hostile, not edged with the brittle danger that had marked so many of their earlier exchanges. It was simply full of what had happened in the night, of what had been said after, of the fact that Lily had woken in someone else's arms and had not wanted to leave them.
That realisation arrived late and struck hard enough that she had to busy herself needlessly with straightening the cuff of her sleeve.
Behind her, Samantha said more quietly, "For what it is worth, I am sorry about the shirt."
Lily paused.
It would have been easier if Samantha had been smug. It would have been easier if she had stayed incorrigible. An apology, even a small one, unsettled the whole arrangement.
She glanced back. Samantha was watching her with a look that was still amused, yes, but gentler now, and touched with something like sincerity.
Lily exhaled through her nose.
"You are forgiven," she said at last, very stiffly. "For the shirt."
"Only the shirt?"
"Do not overreach."
Samantha's mouth curved. "Would it help your sense of justice if I admitted you nearly broke my ribs in your sleep?"
Lily stared.
"I did not."
"You did. Repeatedly. You are deceptively ferocious for someone your size."
"I am not small."
"You are little."
Lily drew herself up at once. "I have changed my mind. You are not forgiven."
Samantha laughed then, low and warm, and rose from the bed.
Lily fixed her attention on the wall with such ferocious discipline that one might have thought it personally responsible for her humiliation.
Behind her, Samantha crossed the room to her trunk, still laughing under her breath in a way that suggested she considered the entire morning a private triumph. There came the soft scrape of the lid opening, the rustle of folded fabric, and then the more dangerous sounds after that: the shift of cloth against skin, the faint thump of a shoe nudged aside, the whisper of movement that gave Lily's imagination far more material than it had any right to possess.
She stood very still.
This, she told herself sternly, was absurd.
She had lived through empires. She had watched cities rise, rot, and vanish. She had killed things wearing human shapes and other things that had never deserved the courtesy of one. She was not going to come undone because her roommate was putting on a shirt six paces away.
Another rustle.
Lily's ears burned.
"Are you sure," Samantha asked after a moment, all velvet amusement, "that you do not want even a quick glance?"
Lily's spine went rigid. "Yes."
"Not even with your peripheral vision?"
"No."
Behind her came the dry sound of fabric being tugged into place. "A tragic lack of curiosity. I offered you a perfectly fair opportunity."
"I do not require opportunities."
"Mm."
Lily narrowed her eyes at the wall. Samantha had put an entire paragraph of disbelief into a single syllable.
A few heartbeats passed. Lily thought, with relief, that perhaps the worst of it was over. Then she heard the neat, unmistakable sequence of buttons being fastened one by one, and her mind, which had been barely under control already, betrayed her with appalling vividness.
She shut her eyes.
Hopeless. Entirely hopeless.
"You are doing that on purpose," she said.
"Getting dressed?"
"Making noise."
Samantha made a thoughtful sound. "It would be difficult to change in absolute silence."
"You could try harder."
"I could," Samantha agreed. "But you are very entertaining when scandalised."
Lily inhaled slowly through her nose, trying for dignity and achieving only greater awareness of every tiny sound in the room. A belt buckle clicked. Cloth settled. There was a pause, then the faint creak of the bed as Samantha sat to pull on stockings.
Lily wished, with great clarity, to dissolve into clean white fire and leave no evidence behind.
"You know," Samantha said lightly, "most people would simply look and save themselves the torment."
"I am not most people."
"No," Samantha said, and something gentler entered her voice. "You really are not."
She heard Samantha rise and move once across the room, then stop.
"All right," Samantha said. "I am decent."
Lily waited a beat longer, just in case Samantha was lying purely for the sport of it.
Then she turned.
Samantha was, in fact, fully dressed, which should have been reassuring and was instead only a different sort of trouble. She sat on the edge of her bed with one boot half fastened and a hairbrush in hand, her mahogany hair still loose from sleep and falling in a faintly unruly spill over one shoulder. There was something so ordinary about the sight that it struck Lily harder than any deliberate provocation had. It was domestic in a way she still had no proper defences against.
Samantha caught her looking and smiled with infuriating calm.
"See?" she said. "I can behave."
"That remains unproven."
"Cruel." Samantha lifted the brush a little. "Though I admire that you turned around only after a full internal inquiry."
Lily ignored that. Her eyes snagged, despite herself, on the uneven fall of Samantha's hair. One side sat slightly flatter where she had slept on it; the ends had begun to curl in conflicting directions.
Without thinking, Lily crossed the space between them.
Samantha's brows rose, but she stayed still.
Lily lifted a hand, gathered the stray texture of air and static and the faint domestic current that always lived in inhabited rooms, and passed her fingers through the length of Samantha's hair without quite touching it. Magic moved lightly with her intent. The tangles eased. The flattened section lifted. A moment later, the whole dark fall settled into order, smooth and shining down Samantha's back as though carefully tended by hand rather than coaxed into obedience in a breath.
"There," Lily said, withdrawing at once. "Done."
Samantha looked into the mirror above the small washstand, then back at Lily.
"It is very pretty," she said. "And completely cheating."
"It is efficient."
"I would still prefer the brush."
Lily frowned. "Why?"
Samantha turned the brush between her fingers. "Because it feels nicer."
For one stupid second, Lily could think of nothing at all to say to that.
Then, because retreat into practicality remained her most reliable refuge, she said, "Breakfast. We do not have time."
She pivoted toward the door.
Behind her, Samantha bent to finish fastening her other shoe. "I could brush yours as well," she said lightly.
Lily stopped with her hand half lifted toward the latch and turned back slowly.
"I do not trust," she said, with great severity, "that you would do it merely to do it."
Samantha glanced up at her. "No?"
"No. You would absolutely have some ulterior motive."
That drew a soft laugh from Samantha, though not an unkind one. "You say that as if you would not enjoy it."
"I did not say that."
"Mm. So only the motive concerns you."
"The motive very much concerns me."
Samantha tied the laces neatly, then rested her forearms on her knees and looked at Lily with frank amusement. "All right. Yes. I would have an ulterior motive."
Lily folded her arms, feeling absurdly vindicated. "There."
"The ulterior motive," Samantha continued, "would be that I like doing nice things for you."
Lily's expression stalled.
Samantha's own softened, though the corner of her mouth still threatened mischief.
"And," she added, because apparently she could never leave a thing mercifully alone, "I would also enjoy watching you try to survive it."
Lily felt heat rise straight into her face. "You are unbearable."
"So I have been told."
"Repeatedly."
"And yet," Samantha said, standing now and setting one hand on the bedpost, "you are still here."
That was unfairly difficult to answer.
Lily looked away first, toward the window where pale morning light washed the stones of the opposite tower. "We share a room," she muttered.
"Yes," Samantha said. "That must be the only reason."
Lily pressed her lips together.
There was a brief quiet. Not strained, exactly. Just full.
When Samantha spoke again, her tone had changed in that subtle way Lily was beginning to recognise - the point where teasing stayed, but care sat under it like a steadying hand.
"I would not do anything you did not want," Samantha said. "If I offered to brush your hair, it would be because I wanted to spoil you a little. Not because I meant to make a game of you."
Lily turned back.
"If," she said, with great care, "you manage to behave for the entire day..."
Samantha's brows lifted at once. "An impossible task, I'm sure."
"Do not interrupt. If you manage to behave," Lily repeated, "and by behave I mean refrain from being completely unbearable, then I may consider allowing you to brush my hair tonight."
She watched the meaning land.
For one brief, startling instant, Samantha looked genuinely caught off guard. Not because Lily had finally offered something she could turn into sport, but because she understood exactly what had just been handed to her: trust, small and conditional and wrapped in irritation, but trust all the same. Then Samantha smiled again, and this time there was less triumph in it than warmth.
"A magnificent honour," she said. "I will endeavour to deserve it."
"You will endeavour not to ruin it."
"That too."
"Breakfast first," Lily said, because if she allowed this exchange another breath, it would become impossible to survive with dignity intact.
She turned and opened the door before Samantha could answer.
"Of course," Samantha said behind her, too mild to be safe. "One does not meet conditions for hair privileges on an empty stomach."
Lily nearly walked into the corridor wall.
She recovered before actually embarrassing herself, stepped out into the North Spire passage, and fixed her expression into what she hoped suggested cool indifference rather than acute internal collapse. The morning light coming through the narrow lancet windows striped the stone floor in pale gold. Students moved in pairs and clusters toward the stairs, carrying satchels, books, and the lingering haze of half-finished conversations.
Samantha fell into step beside her after pulling the door shut, neither crowding nor drifting too far. Exactly the right distance.
Lily was beginning to suspect Samantha had an unnatural talent for choosing the precise amount of nearness required to unmake her.
For the first turn of the stairs, Samantha said nothing. Lily, who had been braced for immediate retaliation, found the silence suspicious enough that she glanced sideways.
Samantha caught the look and smiled with bland innocence.
"What?"
"You are being quiet," Lily said.
"I am being nice."
"That expression on your face is not reassuring."
"It should be. I am exercising tremendous discipline."
Lily made a faint, disbelieving sound and kept descending.
The lower they went, the fuller the stairwell became. A few students shifted out of their way automatically when they saw them coming - not merely because of Samantha's easy confidence, but because Lily's reputation had apparently survived the night intact and possibly improved itself through rumour. She caught fragments as they passed:
"...those two, from practical..."
"...butterflies, I heard..."
"...in the middle of class..."
Lily's shoulders tightened.
Samantha's voice came, quiet enough for only her to hear. "If you like, I can develop a sudden passion for public duelling before breakfast."
Lily glanced at her. "You are not helping."
"I know. But I am offering options."
Despite herself, the corner of Lily's mouth threatened movement. She pressed it flat at once.
They crossed the inner court together, morning cold still clinging to the flagstones where the sun had not fully reached. Spring had begun to take hold in the academy gardens; the ivy on the old walls showed small fresh growth, and somewhere near the cloister arch a tree had begun to flower in pale, wind-shaken clusters. Students streamed around them in blue and silver, their voices blending into a broad, refectory-bound hum.
At the doors, Samantha paused and gestured her in first with exaggerated courtesy.
Lily narrowed her eyes. "You look as if you are enjoying this too much."
"I am enjoying how suspicious it makes you."
Lily gave up and stepped inside.
The refectory was already awake and noisy, full of clattering dishes, steam, and bright bands of sunlight across long wooden tables. Heads turned. They always did now. Some quickly looked away. Others did not bother.
Lily felt the attention at once - sharp, avid, irritating.
Beside her, Samantha seemed not to notice or not to care.
"I will get food," Samantha said. "Find somewhere before the scavengers take the good seats."
"I am perfectly capable of getting my own breakfast."
"I know."
That answer was so mild that Lily had no argument ready for it.
Samantha tilted her head. "Would you prefer I leave you to fend for yourself in the brutal wilderness of porridge and bread?"
Lily hesitated for a fraction too long.
Samantha's mouth curved. "Sit down, Lily."
It was not an order. Not quite. More a practical kindness spoken as if it were already settled.
Lily disliked how quickly that made her want to obey.
"I am not helpless," she said.
"No," Samantha agreed at once. "You are very frightening. Sit anyway."
Lily stared at her, then at the crowded room, then at the queue already beginning to knot near the serving tables.
Finally, with a muttered, "Fine," she turned and went to claim a place near one of the side windows.
It was not hidden, exactly, but it was less exposed than the central tables. She set down her satchel and sat with rigid dignity, hands folded for a moment in her lap while she pretended not to scan the room for Samantha's progress.
Samantha moved through the crush of students with the same easy confidence she seemed to bring to everything. She exchanged a word with one server, another with a second-year Lily vaguely recognised from Magic Theory, and endured two separate attempted interruptions with a polite look sharp enough to end both. A few people glanced from Samantha to Lily and back again with undisguised interest.
Lily looked away first, irritated by the sudden pulse of something unpleasantly close to possessiveness.
Utterly ridiculous.
Samantha returned a minute later, carrying two trays.
Lily blinked.
There was tea. Bread. Fruit. Porridge with cinnamon. And, because apparently Samantha had noticed everything, the honey Lily had reached for yesterday before deciding it was unnecessary.
"You are staring," Samantha said as she set one tray down in front of her.
"I am assessing."
"And?"
"It is excessive."
Samantha sat opposite her. "It is breakfast."
"You brought enough for a convalescent noblewoman."
"You say that as if you did not forget to finish half your meals all last week."
Lily went still.
Samantha, realising perhaps that she had spoken from observation rather than tease, softened her tone. "I noticed," she said simply.
The heat that rose in Lily's face had nothing to do with embarrassment alone now.
No one had noticed such things for a very long time. Or if they had, it had not mattered enough for them to alter their own habits around it.
Lily looked down at the tray. "You pay too much attention."
"Probably," Samantha said.
Lily picked up her spoon, mostly to have something to do with her hands. "That is not a denial."
"No."
That answer, too, was without defence.
Across the hall, someone laughed too loudly. Cutlery rang against ceramic. A group of students hurried past with armfuls of books and robes only half-fastened. Morning carried on around them in all its ordinary, crowded academy life.
Within that ordinariness, Samantha broke off a piece of bread and spread butter over it with complete unconcern, as if sitting across from Lily after the night before - after fear, confession, tears, and shared warmth - were simply another fact to be folded into the day.
Lily found the steadiness of that almost unbearably tender.
So naturally, she resorted to pettiness.
"You had better be careful," she said, taking a bite of fruit she did not especially want merely to avoid looking earnest. "If you continue behaving this decently, I may begin to suspect strategy."
Samantha looked delighted. "Ah. Then my efforts are succeeding."
"That was not praise."
"It was from you."
Lily glared at her over the rim of her teacup.
Samantha held up both hands in surrender. "I apologise. That was nearly unbearable of me."
"Nearly?"
"I am trying not to exceed the day's allotted limit."
Lily should not have laughed.
She did. Very softly, and only into the cup, but Samantha heard it anyway. Her expression changed at once, into something gentler.
The sight of it made Lily look down too fast.
For a little while, they ate in relative peace.
Not silence, exactly. Samantha commented once on Corven's likely plans to maim the first-years' confidence in duelling class; Lily replied that the confidence which could be maimed by one instructor perhaps deserved the injury. Samantha snorted tea through her nose and called that vicious. Lily informed her that it was merely accurate. They discussed schedules. Samantha offered one dry observation about Professor Ainsworth's handwriting being an argument against literacy. Lily, treacherously, smiled again.
Each time it happened, she felt Samantha notice and choose not to make too much of it.
That, more than the teasing, more than the flirtation, more than the warmth of last night still lodged in memory and body alike, touched something old and defensive in Lily with alarming precision. Samantha was trying, truly trying, to keep within the lines Lily set for her. Even now. Especially now.
When breakfast had thinned to the last of the tea and the room was beginning to empty toward the first bell, Samantha leaned back slightly and regarded her with what had become a dangerously familiar glint.
"I should warn you," she said.
Lily set down her cup. "About what?"
"You have made the entire day intolerably high stakes."
Lily's pulse gave one abrupt, foolish jump. "How tragic for you."
"It is. I now have a profound personal interest in remaining on the acceptable side of your judgment until evening."
"That seems unlikely."
"And yet I am nothing if dedicated."
"To mischief."
"To rewards," Samantha corrected.
Lily fixed her with a flat stare that would have worked better if she were not already blushing again.
Samantha's eyes flicked, very briefly, to her hair, then back to her face. She said nothing.
She did not have to.
Lily rose before that silence could sharpen into something impossible. "We should go," she said.
Samantha stood as well, gathering both trays before Lily could protest. "As you wish."
They carried themselves back out into the corridor stream with the rest of the students, and Lily was acutely conscious all over again of Samantha's presence beside her, of the remembered pressure of her arms from the night before, of the absurd bargain she herself had made less than half an hour ago.
At the stair landing, Samantha glanced at her, unreadably amused.
"I am being exceptionally good," she observed.
Lily gave her a cool look. "Announcing your own virtues rather undermines them. I will decide whether you are behaving well, and at present, you are barely within tolerable limits."
Samantha pressed a hand to her heart. "Only tolerable? Cruel."
"Barely," Lily repeated, and continued up the stairs.
She heard Samantha's soft laugh beside her and hated the small, pleased warmth it caused.
The rest of the morning passed with surprising peace.
There were no formal lessons scheduled that day, only assigned revision, independent practice, and the sort of administrative drift the academy seemed capable of producing in any season. Students split off in twos and threes toward libraries, workrooms, training courts, and shaded stretches of cloister where one could pretend to study while actually gossiping.
Lily and Samantha did not exactly decide to spend the day together.
They simply failed to separate.
It happened in increments so small that Lily could not point to the moment it became deliberate. They walked from the refectory to North Spire with the loose excuse of collecting books. From there, they drifted to one of the quieter upper reading rooms, where the windows looked over the sea-facing terraces and the spring light lay pale and clean over the desks. Samantha revised practical notation with a concentration that was almost severe when she applied it. Lily copied fragments of runic history into a fresh notebook in her neat, old-fashioned hand and tried not to notice how often Samantha glanced up, as if merely checking that she was still there.
Around midday, they moved to an unused practice chamber.
Samantha worked through air-shaping exercises with smooth, disciplined precision, holding spirals and tension-lines in place until they hummed faintly in the warded room. Lily limited herself, as always, to what looked plausible: small control drills, efficient ember-patterns, minute corrections of balance and heat. Marris's irritation was still fresh enough in her mind that she took particular care not to produce anything remotely artistic.
Samantha noticed, of course.
"You are doing that thing again," she said at one point, dismissing a ring of air that had been spinning around her wrist.
Lily looked up from the thread of white-gold flame balanced over her palm. "What thing?"
"The one where you perform modesty so aggressively it becomes suspicious."
"I am exercising discretion."
"You say that as if it were not deeply unnatural in you."
Lily narrowed her eyes. "You are becoming careless."
Samantha smiled, but there was no edge in it. "No. I am becoming familiar."
That should not have landed as softly as it did.
Lily looked away and pinched the flame down into nothing.
Later, they took a late meal in a smaller hall with less spectacle attached to it, and after that, the day loosened further. Samantha disappeared for part of the afternoon to train outside, as she often did. Lily told herself she appreciated the solitude, then discovered, with faint annoyance, that she had become attuned enough to Samantha's presence that the room felt subtly wrong without her.
Ridiculous, she thought for perhaps the fiftieth time.
She spent the quiet hours sorting her notes, mending a frayed cuff with domestic magic, and staring too long out the North Spire window at the academy roofs and the distant line of water beyond them. Once or twice, she caught herself listening for footsteps in the corridor.
By the time Samantha returned, hair damp at the temples and cheeks bright from exertion, the late sunlight had already begun to thin toward evening.
"You look disappointed," Samantha said, setting down her practice gloves.
"I do not."
"You do. It is very encouraging."
Lily shut her notebook with unnecessary precision. "Go wash."
"Yes, dear."
Lily stared at her back as she crossed toward the washstand. "Do not start using that word."
Samantha glanced over one shoulder, entirely unrepentant. "You say it as if you don't like it."
By nightfall, the room had settled into a hush broken only by small domestic sounds: water poured into a basin, the rustle of linen, the muffled creak of floorboards, the low crackle of the lamp.
Lily changed first.
That part was easy. It was always easy. Her own nightclothes were familiar - soft, long-worn trousers and a buttoned shirt plain enough to make a nun seem flamboyant.
When she turned back from the mirror, Samantha had emerged from behind the wardrobe screen.
And then, very abruptly, nothing was easy.
The nightgown was not indecent. That, maddeningly, was what made it worse.
It was almost plain: pale cotton, loose through the skirt, simple enough that on anyone else Lily might not have looked twice. But Samantha wore it carelessly. One shoulder had slipped bare. The neckline had settled lower on her collarbones. When she moved, the fabric pulled and loosened in small, unthinking ways that made Lily far too aware of the body underneath it.
Lily's eyes made one disastrous circuit and then, with all the dignity of a routed army, fixed themselves on the lamp.
This did not help.
The lamp was positioned at exactly the wrong angle, so Samantha remained at the edge of her vision whenever she shifted: the easy line of her waist when she leaned one hip against the bedpost. Lily became acutely aware, in the most useless possible way, that she knew how warm Samantha felt under blankets.
Lily swallowed.
Behind her, Samantha went still in that way she had when she noticed too much and intended to enjoy it.
"Well," Samantha said at last, very mildly, "this is gratifying."
Lily kept her attention on the lamp as if it had become a matter of principle. "What is?"
"The effect of my nightclothes on you."
"They are nightclothes."
"Yes," Samantha agreed. "And yet you are looking at that lamp as though it has personally offended you."
"It is safer than looking elsewhere."
There was a beat of silence.
Then Samantha laughed, soft and delighted, and pushed away from the bedpost.
"Oh," she said, coming a little closer, "that is useful to know."
Lily closed her eyes for one horrible second. "Do not start."
"I am not starting anything," Samantha said with patent innocence.
She stopped in front of Lily, then bent slightly at the waist, bringing herself nearer to Lily's eye level as if she were merely being considerate. The movement drew the gown a little more askew over her shoulder.
At this distance, the whole thing was worse. Fresh soap. Damp hair. Bare throat. The soft shift of cotton over Samantha's body when she breathed. Lily became humiliatingly aware of the answering heat in her own body, of how little distance there suddenly seemed to be in the room.
"There," Samantha said softly. "Now you do not have to strain your neck to look at me properly."
Lily folded her arms harder. "You are doing this deliberately."
"Am I?" Samantha asked, sounding genuinely curious in a way that was itself an offence.
Her mouth curved when Lily's eyes flicked, traitorously, to the slipped shoulder again.
"I am only standing here," she said.
Lily should have looked away. She did not.
Samantha's eyes flicked briefly to Lily's hair, which had come loose from its daytime tie and now fell in a pale, unruly sweep over one shoulder.
"Earlier," Samantha said, quieter now, "unless I imagined it, you implied that if I behaved myself for the day, you might permit me to brush your hair tonight."
Lily's face heated at once. She had said that. At the time, it had seemed safe because it had been said across daylight and corridors and several layers of self-protective irritation. Now it felt like volunteering for a different and perhaps more dangerous form of intimacy.
"You remember too much," she muttered.
"I remember promises that favour me with perfect clarity."
"It was not a promise."
"A conditional offer, then. One, I have spent the day earning with saintly effort."
Lily hesitated.
On the one hand, allowing Samantha anywhere near her in her present state of heightened awareness was foolish. On the other hand, the thought of sitting with her back turned while Samantha handled her hair, while Lily could surrender to touch without enduring eye contact, had an immediate, perilous appeal.
Also, Samantha had, in fact, behaved. More or less. By Samantha's standards, at least.
Lily lifted her chin with strained severity. "You were tolerable for most of the afternoon."
Samantha put a hand to her chest. "High praise."
"Do not become emotional over it."
"I will try to be brave."
That earned her a look. It also, despite Lily's best efforts, earned a smile.
"So?" Samantha asked, gentler now.
Lily exhaled. "If you must."
Samantha brightened at once, though she had the grace not to pounce on the victory. "Sit, then."11Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSfYIkYkUCv
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