Chapter 33: Marginalia - Part 1

We worked in silence for a stretch, the library's ambient hum filling the space between us. I made my way through the ambient mana section methodically, pulling the relevant framework from lectures and translating it into something presentable. My quill moved in a steady rhythm.

Across the table, Valentina's notes were precise. Organized. She'd structured her section in a way that anticipated the follow-on argument, which I hadn't expected. If you looked past the theatre of her pulling the parchment to her side of the table, past the particular way she held her quill like signing a treaty rather than writing notes, she was actually quite comp—

"Stop staring and look at this, commoner."

She pushed a piece of parchment toward me without looking up from her own work, one finger tapping the page twice.

I let out a breath through my nose. I was putting up with this because I wanted the project finished. That was the reason. The only reason.

Then another thought surfaced, quieter, with a different texture entirely. Why was I putting up with this? I could simply—

I shook my head and set the thought down.

I leaned forward and looked at the page.

An equation. Mid-level variable manipulation, the kind Vox had walked the class through last week. Not complex. The notation was correct up to the third line, and then she'd stopped.

"Do you think mathematics is beneath you?"

Valentina straightened in her seat. The shift was instantaneous, shoulders squaring, chin lifting a precise increment.

"That's correct," she said. "Numbers are the province of commoners and mortals. Accountants. Hired staff." She gestured at the equation with two fingers, a dismissal rather than a point. "A demon of my standing doesn't perform calculations herself. She employs someone to do it."

I looked at her.

"And if that someone cheats you?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"If they falsify the figures." I kept my voice even. "Overcharge you, divert resources, misrepresent a reagent yield. If you can't check their work, how would you even know?"

Something moved across her face. A flash of something unguarded that she covered immediately with a deeper indignation, color rising along the high lines of her cheekbones.

"I would simply employ someone who wouldn't dare to—"

"Right." I pulled the parchment toward me. "So what don't you understand."

A pause. Short, but real.

Her chin stayed up. Her eyes moved to a fixed point slightly left of my ear.

"The third line," she said, clipped. "The methodology is tedious and self-evidently beneath my attention. I've better uses for my concentration than tracking whatever pedestrian shorthand that man writes on the board."

I turned the parchment to face me properly and picked up my quill.

"Walk me through what you did in lines one and two."

*

Line one and two turned out fine once she actually explained them, her methodology sound even if her notation was sloppy. I corrected the shorthand, handed the parchment back, and she took it without comment, which from Valentina counted as gratitude.

I was reaching for my own notes again when a shadow fell across the table.

"There you are." A succubus with long black hair draped herself into the chair beside Valentina, not waiting for an invitation. Rich fabric, rings on three fingers, the particular boredom of someone who'd never carried her own bags. "I've been looking everywhere. Do you know Sable's throwing something Sinday? You have to come, everyone who matters will be there."

Valentina's spine straightened. The cooperative angle of her shoulders vanished, replaced by something colder, performed for an audience of one.

"Jocasta." A different voice than the one she'd used with me a minute ago, pitched higher, edged with practiced ennui. "I'm working. On the project I mentioned."

"Oh, the commoner thing." Jocasta glanced at me the way one glances at furniture. "Gods, why didn't you just have her do it? You said you'll have her doing it."

"I am having her do it." Valentina waved a hand at my side of the table without looking. "Keep going with the ambient section, I'll review it after."

I picked my quill back up. Fine. Let her talk. I had reagent yield to write up regardless of whether she watched me do it.

Jocasta launched into an account of somebody's failed courtship, Valentina supplying commentary between instructions tossed my way like scraps to a dog—no, the other citation, I said the Fulgur text, are you even listening—and I kept my eyes on the parchment and told myself this was efficient. She talked, I worked, the project got done faster without her interference. That was the arrangement now. That was fine.

It was fine for about four minutes.

Something low and unfamiliar coiled tighter with every dismissive flick of her wrist, every no, the other one thrown my direction without a glance to accompany it. My jaw tightened. Better than arguing over methodology, I told myself, turning a page harder than the parchment deserved. My eyes kept catching on the same line of my own notes, unread. Why was I doing both our sections while she narrated someone else's love life? My grip on the quill went white-knuckled. Who exactly did she think she was, tossing orders sideways like I was hired help she'd forgotten to pay? Something in my chest settled, flat and cold, final as a door closing. She needed to learn where the line was.

Jocasta said something about a demon named Eradin being "hopeless, honestly, hopeless," and Valentina laughed, and without turning her head she said, "Fix the transition on page two, it's clumsy."

I set the quill down.

The chair scraped as I stood.

"You," I said to Jocasta. "Out."

She blinked, hand rising to her chest. "Excuse me?"

I didn't repeat myself with any more volume. Just looked at her, steady, until the silence did the work.

"Excuse me," she said again, louder, turning to Valentina like she expected backup.

Valentina opened her mouth, chin lifting into the start of something sharp.

"No," I said, before she got a word out. "You listen too. This is a group project, mine as much as yours, and if you're going to spend it posturing for some leech hoping for scraps off your table, you can do your half alone. I don't care if we fail. That's your choice to make, not mine."

"Girls." Meridia's voice drifted from somewhere behind the stacks, flat and unhurried. "Quiet, or I throw all three of you out."

*

Valentina's gaze went from Jocasta to me, then back again. Something calculated behind her eyes, weighing options I couldn't see the shape of.

"Go," she said finally. Clipped. Final.

Jocasta's mouth fell open. "You're—you're taking her side? Over me?"

"I'm telling you to leave before Meridia makes good on her threat." Valentina's tail flicked once, sharp, against the chair leg. "This isn't about sides."

"She's a commoner."

"And so are you." Valentina didn't raise her voice. Didn't need to. "You just have better parents than most. Don't confuse the two."

The silence that followed had weight to it. Jocasta's mouth twisted, jaw tight, chin lifting a fraction too fast. She stood, chair legs shrieking against stone, and swept off toward the stacks without another word.

I watched her go, then looked back at Valentina, who was very deliberately not looking at me, attention fixed on the parchment like it had suddenly become fascinating.

"That was unexpected," I said.

"Don't." She still wasn't looking at me. "Don't make it into something."

"I'm not making it into anything. I'm observing that you told your friend to leave instead of me."

"She's not—" Valentina stopped, jaw tightening, and started again with more control. "You would have made a scene about it, and I don't have the patience tonight to deal with your particular flavour of righteous commoner nonsense on top of everything else. That's all this was. Practicality."

"Right," I said, and let it sit there without pushing.

She glanced at me then, quick, checking whether I believed her. I kept my face neutral. Whatever this was, it wasn't worth spending capital on unpacking it in the middle of the library with Meridia's patience already thin.

"So," I said, drawing the conversation back to solid ground. "Are you willing to actually work, or was that performance for Jocasta the extent of your effort tonight?"

Her chin came up, some of the earlier ice sliding back into place. "I was already working before she interrupted."

"You were narrating gossip while I did your citations."

"I was multitasking." But she pulled the parchment closer, dipped her quill, and this time when she wrote, her shoulders stayed angled toward the page instead of toward an audience. "The ambient section. You said the framework needed restructuring."

"The transition between passive absorption and active siphoning. Right now it reads like two separate papers stapled together."

"It reads like a proper distinction between—" She caught herself, exhaled through her nose, and when she spoke again the edge had dulled. "Fine. Show me."

I turned my notes toward her, pointed to the paragraph break, and for a while neither of us said anything that wasn't about mana density or citation formatting. She still bristled at every correction, still muttered under her breath when I circled an error, but she stopped waving me off like I was furniture, and she stopped looking past me toward the stacks where Jocasta had disappeared.

The quill scratched. The candle beside us guttered and steadied. Somewhere above, a book shifted restlessly on its shelf, and Meridia's voice didn't return, which I took as evidence enough that we'd earned the quiet.

*

The dorm door shut behind me with a click I felt more than heard, and I crossed the room without bothering to shed the uniform jacket, just let myself fall backward onto the bed. The mattress swallowed me. My tail flopped off the edge, boneless.

"How'd it go?" Aria's voice came from her side of the room, muffled by whatever she was doing to her hair.

"How'd what go."

"Valentina, genius. Your little library date."

I stared at the ceiling. Crystal light filtered soft through the stone, the kind of glow that made everything look gentler than it was. "Surprisingly well. She was competent. Actually competent."

Aria's hairbrush stopped mid-stroke. She appeared in my peripheral vision, upside down, having crossed the room to lean over the foot of the bed. "No way."

"Apparently as long as there's nobody around for her to posture at, she's not unbearable."

"Okay but." Aria's eyes narrowed, scanning my face the way she did when she thought she'd missed something. "Are you okay? Did she do something?"

I laughed, short and real. "No. She's still annoying as hell. I just discovered it's possible to get work done with her if the alternative is losing an entire evening to her tantrums."

Aria studied me another beat, unconvinced but willing to let it go for now, then flopped onto her own bed with a bounce that sent her tail curling up over the headboard. "Well. Speaking of relaxing—I talked to Bella. We're doing the pleasure dome later. You in?"

I turned the idea over. Aria had mentioned that place a dozen times since I'd met her, always with the same reverent tone she used for good desserts. I'd filed it under things to politely decline. But I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with muscle, the kind of tired that came from holding a conversation with someone who wanted to fight you the entire time, and there was something appealing about not thinking for a few hours.

"Why not," I said.

Aria sat halfway up. "Wait. You said yes?"

"I did. Is that a problem?"

"No, it's just—" She squinted at me, tail going still. "You usually put up more of a fight about fun stuff. Are you sure Valentina didn't do something to you? Hex you? Slip you something?"

I grabbed the pillow out from under my own head and threw it at her without sitting up. It caught her square in the face.

Her laugh rang out loud enough to rattle the light fixtures, muffled behind the pillow she hadn't bothered to remove.