---

Instructor Therival asked whether anyone could explain why cure light wounds, a spell that mended living tissue, belonged to the school of necromancy, and Alevar answered without raising his hand.

"Because necromancy governs the manipulation of life force through the Positive and Negative Energy planes. A cleric who casts cure light wounds is channelling positive energy through the Weave to accelerate the body's recovery. A necromancer who casts chill touch is channelling negative energy through the same Weave to suppress it. It’s the same school and same fundamental interaction, because the skill is the same skill. The taxonomy groups them together because the Weave doesn't distinguish between the two directions, only the caster does."

Instructor Therival, who had been teaching Foundations of Arcane Theory at the Academy of Arcane Arts in Leuthilspar for longer than most of his students had been alive, regarded Alevar from the lectern with the weariness of a man who had asked a question designed to produce twenty seconds of productive uncertainty and received instead a lecture from someone who clearly found the question beneath him. He opened his mouth to redirect.

"And both planes are lethal in their pure form, incidentally," Alevar continued, because he technically still had the floor. "The Positive Energy plane will kill an unprotected visitor just as fast as the Negative, by flooding the body with so much life that it tears itself apart. Positive energy isn't benign, it's a force, the same way negative energy is a force, and every living creature exists in the balance between them. Necromancy is the school that governs that balance. Which makes it interesting that we've decided one half of it is sacred and the other half is unspeakable, when the cosmology treats them as equal partners in keeping anything alive at all."

Therival's mouth tightened into the line that Alevar had learned to identify, over the course of two terms, as the instructor's version of a sigh he wouldn't permit himself in public. "That is an interesting observation, and one we will explore in the advanced seminar on planar cosmology, which you are welcome to petition to join when you've completed the foundational courses. For now, can anyone else offer a simpler answer?"

A sun elf in the second row raised her hand. "Because the spell channels positive energy, and the energy planes fall under the necromantic school?"

"Thank you, Liraen. Yes, necromancy governs the interaction between life force and the energy planes. We can move on."

Alevar didn't roll his eyes. He'd trained himself out of the habit after Astrid told him it made him look common, and the training had held even though the impulse never went away. He sat in his chair in the upper tier, back row, left side, where a column blocked part of the lectern but gave him something to lean against during the long stretches when the course covered material he'd worked through decades ago under his mother's tutelage.

The Academy of Arcane Arts was the finest institution of magical learning on Evermeet, and Alevar was too advanced for the introductory courses, too young in the Academy's estimation for the advanced ones, and too proud to sit through material he'd already mastered without making sure everyone in the room knew it. Therival had stopped calling on him after the third week. Alevar answered anyway, because the alternative was watching his classmates fumble through problems he could solve before Therival finished asking them, and he didn't have the patience for it.

Astrid had insisted on the Academy. She'd groomed him for wizardry since he was a child, hired tutors, supervised study, and tested him herself when she thought the tutors were too lenient. After the temple she'd sat him down in her study in the Dawnspire and told him he needed structure, by which she meant he needed to be someone else's problem for a while. He was too clever and rebellious, and two years at the Temple of Corellon Larethian had only made him worse instead of better. The Academy would keep him occupied. It would keep him in Leuthilspar, which was a comfortable distance away from Kimishi. And it would put him in an environment with rules and faculty and quarterly reports, which was Astrid's preferred substitute for the direct oversight she could no longer maintain without one of them saying something unforgivable to the other.

She'd accepted the epiphany. Rathal Evanara had written to her after two years of guided trances and reflective journals, and the letter said her son showed promising signs of spiritual progress. Astrid read it and chose to believe it. The letter gave her what she needed: a reason to stop asking. Admitting that Alevar had spent two years faking communion with Corellon Larethian would have generated gossip that a queen of Kimishi could not afford, so she filed Rathal's letter and cited it when the subject came up and made sure the subject stopped coming up. Whatever doubts she had, she kept to herself.

Sage had his own doubts. He'd given Alevar a look when he came home from the temple that hadn't gone away in the months since, and the word malawain had a way of surfacing in his conversations with Fenris whenever Alevar was within earshot.

Alevar was thinking about none of this. He was thinking about the ninth level divination spell foresight.

He'd never cast it. Ninth level spells were the province of archmages who'd spent lifetimes accumulating the power to reach them, and Alevar was a hundred and twenty years old with a spellbook that was respectable for his age and nowhere close to that. He had spells up to the fourth level, most of them acquired through Astrid's connections and the considerable resources of his House, but the ninth level was a long way off. The spell's description, though, which he'd found in the Academy's archives, had lodged in his head and wouldn't come out. Foresight granted a sixth sense about the immediate future. A wizard under its effects couldn't be surprised; they’d know if an attack was coming, where it was coming from, and the spell would even suggest what to do about it. The question that interested Alevar was whether those warnings described events that were going to happen no matter what the subject did, or events that would have happened if the subject hadn't been warned.

If foresight revealed a future that was already fixed, the spell was just a window. The future existed whether anyone looked at it or not. But suppose the subject received the warning and acted on it. Suppose the spell told a wizard to step left, and they stepped left, and the arrow missed. Was the stepping part of the predetermined future the spell had read? Or had the spell, by delivering the warning, created a future that hadn't existed before the wizard received the information?

He was writing about this in his compressed shorthand when the shadar-kai next to him leaned toward his journal.

She'd been sitting there since the beginning of the lecture. Most of his classmates registered as furniture to him, and she'd been no exception until now, though he'd heard her name in the dining hall often enough. The Academy had a handful of shadar-kai students across all years of study, and this one drew the most gossip: partly because she was supposed to be brilliant, and partly because she was deeply, visibly unsettling in the way all shadar-kai were to elves who'd grown up in the Seldarine's light. Pale grey skin, flat affect, long white hair, with a shock of color in her rust-red eyes. She had a void-black crystal ball she kept on her desk like it was a piece of stationery, and wore an obsidian raven brooch pinned to her collar–the Raven Queen's symbol–without apology in an academy that taught under Corellon's banner. Alevar, who had spent two years in a temple pretending to commune with the god whose banner that was, had found the brooch interesting the first time he'd seen it. He just hadn't found a reason to say so until she leaned over to look at what he was writing.

"What's the diagram?" she asked, low enough that Therival, who was demonstrating a somatic form at the lectern while students shuffled components and chairs, wouldn't hear. Her accent was different from the Leuthilspar standard, the vowels shorter, the consonants harder, her voice flat and dry.

Alevar angled the journal toward her. "The branching model for foresight. Whether the spell reveals a future that's fixed, or a future that changes because the subject was warned. If it's fixed, the spell is just a window. If it changes, then divination just intervened in the timeline by delivering information that wouldn't have existed otherwise."

She studied the diagram. One of her lace cuffs had slipped over her hand and she pushed it back. "The determinist answer," she said, "is that the future the spell shows already includes the subject's reaction to the warning. The stepping was always going to happen. The spell just let the subject see it coming."

"Do you believe that?"

"No." She didn't elaborate on the no. "I've been scrying since I was sixty. When you scry the same target twice in close succession, the second result is different from the first. The differences are small but they're consistent, and I've controlled for technique. The first observation changes the conditions the second one measures. Looking at a future changes it."

Alevar forgot about Therival. The instructor could have set himself on fire at the lectern and Alevar would have noticed only when the smoke reached his row. "That’s a problem for the determinist model," he said.

"For the entire school's self-definition. Divination is supposed to be passive, but if every act of looking alters what you find, then the diviner is participating in the outcome every time she casts."

At the lectern, Therival asked a student to demonstrate the somatic component for detect magic. Someone in the fourth row stood, performed it competently, and sat back down. Neither Alevar nor the shadar-kai watched.

"So the diviner who casts foresight thinks she’s reading the future," Alevar said, "but the act of reading it introduces information that wasn’t there, and the future reorganizes itself around the new information. She's writing part of it and she doesn't know she's doing it."

The Academy's students listened to Alevar the way they'd listen to thunder: with recognition that something was happening, followed by the desire for it to stop. The shadar-kai looked like she was hearing her own thoughts coming out of someone else's mouth for the first time.

"You're not a diviner," she said.

"No."

"What school?"

Alevar wasn't used to the lack of preamble. "Undeclared."

"Undeclared," she repeated, and didn't press.

The lecture ended. Students packed their materials and filed out toward the doors. Therival erased his diagrams with a cantrip, and the room emptied around them.

"I'm Alevar," he said.

"I know who you are." She stood, collected the void-black sphere into her satchel and shouldered the bag. Standing, the top of her head came up to his chin. "Belertzyd. Bel, unless you plan to use the full version, which nobody does.

"There's a text you should read," she continued, adjusting the satchel strap. "Celvandil's Treatise on the Temporal Boundary. Greater divination section, third floor of the library. Best version of the determinist argument I've encountered. She's wrong, but she's wrong in ways you'll need to understand before you can take her apart."

She left.

Alevar sat in the empty hall with his journal open and his hair going pink at the temples. He pressed his hand flat against it until it stopped.

His hair looked like shit today, the same as every day. The waves had frizzed up and lost definition, becoming the kind of mess that Sage used to comment on at breakfast. You look like you crawled through a hedge, Al. Do you even own a comb? Sage said it laughing, and Fenris would be there smirking over his tea, and the two of them built a running joke out of it. The hair was bad. The rest wasn't better. Nose too big, eyes too small, angular jaw, six foot one–taller than most human men and freakishly so for an elf.

He packed his journal, walked to the library, found Celvandil's Treatise exactly where Bel said it would be, and sat down at a desk by the window. He read the whole thing without getting up. He filled four pages of notes, and the notes were thorough, and they would have impressed Therival, and somewhere around the third page he realized he was already planning what he'd say to her if she sat next to him again.

---

He went to the greater divination section of the library the next afternoon and sat at a desk with Celvandil open in front of him.

Bel showed up forty minutes later, satchel over her shoulder, and pulled out the chair across from him without asking whether it was taken. She set the void-black sphere on the desk between them the way another student might set down a cup of tea.

"Celvandil," she said. "What did you think?"

He told her. They spent two hours on it. The two hours were the most productive intellectual work Alevar had done since enrolling at the Academy. Celvandil's argument for temporal determinism was grounded in the mechanics of augury, a second level spell that returned "weal" or "woe" about a proposed action with a base accuracy of seventy percent plus the caster's level. Celvandil's position was that this reliability required the future to be structurally stable, that fluid systems couldn't produce results that consistent. Alevar's counterargument was that the thirty percent where the spell failed wasn't noise. It was the margin where the future was still in motion, and the spell was reading a version of events that hadn't been finalized yet.

Bel's counterargument was different from his and better in some places, grounded in the practical experience of someone who had actually cast these spells and felt the results change when she looked twice. She could describe what a scrying discrepancy felt like firsthand, the sensation of the crystal ball giving back two answers where there should have been one. He could in turn explain the theory behind why it happened. Together they arrived at conclusions that neither would have reached alone, and arriving at them together was exhilarating in a way that Alevar, who was accustomed to being the smartest person in any room, hadn't experienced before.

He came back the next day. And the day after that.

They fell into a routine without discussing it. They talked about Celvandil and temporal theory and the energy planes and the eight school taxonomy and, increasingly, about things that had nothing to do with any of it. By the end of the first tenday he knew how she took her tea, that she pushed her lace cuffs back by habit, and that her crystal ball was warm to the touch even though it looked like it should be cold. She knew that he wrote spells in verse, that he couldn’t sit still for longer than forty minutes without fidgeting, and that his hair escaped whatever he did to it within the first hour of the day.

On the third day, Bel brought up necromancy.

She'd been thinking about what he’d said in Therival's lecture, the argument about the Positive and Negative Energy planes and the cosmology treating them as equal partners. She circled back to it while they were working through Celvandil.

"The necromancy problem," she said. "You argued that the Weave doesn't distinguish between positive and negative energy, that the taxonomy groups them in the same school because the mechanism is the same. The only difference is in which direction the caster pushes."

"That’s what the taxonomy says."

"The taxonomy says something worse than that, if you follow it. It says the instrument is the same instrument whether a cleric uses it to mend a bone or a necromancer uses it to animate a corpse. Different hands, same tool. Every healer in every temple on Evermeet is practising the same school of magic they'd execute someone for studying in this building."

Alevar kept his expression still. He'd been circling that conclusion on his own for months, turning it over in lectures and in his journal. Hearing Bel say it out loud, with no hesitation, made the conclusion harder to keep at a distance.

"The Seldarine would say there's a difference," he offered, testing the boundaries of the conversation. "The creation of undead violates the soul's natural passage. That's a moral line, not a mechanical one."

"The Raven Queen would agree with them," Bel said. Her voice had gone quieter, though the nearest students were three aisles away. "Undead are her particular enemy. Orcus wants to command them, Vecna turned himself into one. Anyone who holds a soul past its natural end is working against everything she stands for. My people consider it the worst sin there is."

She touched the raven brooch at her collar with one finger.

"And I find the school fascinating."

The library was warm around them. Voices murmured in other aisles. Pages turned.

"And the strangest part," Bel continued, "is that the Raven Queen and the Seldarine agree on almost nothing, but they both condemn necromancy. For completely different reasons. And nobody in either tradition asks why it's acceptable to channel positive energy to heal someone but a crime against creation to study the rest of the school."

She looked at him. "You know all of this already. You knew it when you answered Therival's question. You didn't learn that argument in this building."

He hadn't. The argument had assembled itself over the past year, piece by piece, from the Academy's own texts and his own thinking and the specific, grinding fury of having spent two years in a temple asking a god to speak to him and receiving nothing. The taxonomy of necromancy wasn't what made him angry. What made him angry was the principle underneath it: that someone, somewhere, had drawn an arbitrary line through a unified system and declared one half sacred and the other half monstrous, and every institution he'd ever been part of had enforced that line without questioning it.

The same way someone, somewhere, had decided which of Corellon's children were worthy of an answer and which ones weren't.

"The gossip about you is that Corellon took a long time to find you," Bel said. "Long enough that people talked about it."

Alevar said nothing. His hands were flat on the desk.

"And the school you keep wanting to talk about is the one he'd least want you to learn." She tilted her head. "That doesn't seem like a coincidence."

His throat was tight.

Nobody had ever been that blunt about it. Sage dropped the word malawain around Fenris when Alevar was within earshot. Astrid accepted Rathal's letter and never brought it up again. Bel just said it to his face.

"Your goddess despises undead," he said, when he could talk. "And you're sitting here telling me you find the school fascinating."

"Yes."

"Why?"

A small smile broke through, just barely. "Because forbidden things are usually forbidden for interesting reasons. And I'd rather understand the reasons than obey without understanding."

They looked at each other for a long time. Bel didn't soften her gaze or look away, and neither did he. They'd both just said something dangerous, and neither of them was pretending they hadn't.

"We should keep talking," he said.

"We are talking."

"About this. All of it. The things we can't say in lecture halls."

"Same desk tomorrow."

He came back the next day. And the day after that.

---

On the seventh day she told him his boots were ugly.

They were the Academy's standard issue. Brown leather, flat-soled, identical to every other pair in the building.

"You're six foot one," she said. "You could be taller."

"I already don't fit in the chairs."

"You already make everyone look up at you. You might as well make them crane their necks." She had her chin on her laced fingers, watching him across the desk. "You're dressing like someone who wants to disappear. Standard robes, standard shoes, your hair tied back the way I assume someone taught you to wear it when you were a child. You're hiding."

She was right. His hair was a wreck today, the tie already failing, waves escaping down his neck and around his ears. He could just hear Sage's voice in his head teasing him about how he was an amalgamation of all of their parents' worst features.

"I'm not hiding," he said. "I'm being practical."

"You're being boring, and you're not boring. Boring is a disguise and it doesn't fit you." She pushed her lace cuffs back. "In the Shadowfell, we mark ourselves on purpose. Piercings, tattoos, scarification. The plane strips everything, so we put things back. We choose what stays visible." She gestured at him, from the frizzy hair down to the flat brown boots. "You've chosen to be invisible, and it's not working, because you're tall with a face like yours and nothing you put on is going to make people stop looking."

He didn't know what a face like yours meant. He knew what his face looked like. He'd been cataloguing its problems since adolescence and the list never got shorter.

"What would you suggest?"

"Black boots. Heeled. Silver hardware. Something that makes noise when you walk into a room."

He bought them a tenday later from a cobbler in the lower city. Black leather, silver buckles up the sides, a heel that added two inches and clicked against the Academy's stone corridors.

The first morning he wore them, he walked into Therival's lecture at six foot three and every head in the hall turned or tried not to.

Bel looked at the boots. "Better," she said. "Now we do the rest of you."

He let her.

On the days he sat with Bel in the library, his grey-teal hair took on a faint iridescent pink sheen.

Bel noticed. She didn't mention it.

---

The Academy held a Midsummer revel every year, a formal dance in the great hall that the faculty spent a tenday preparing and that most of the student body treated as the big social event of the term. Alevar had no intention of going. Bel had informed him, three days ago in the library, that his intentions were irrelevant.

She arrived at his room an hour before it started with a satchel that clinked when she set it down.

"Sit," she said, pointing at the chair by the window.

"I haven't agreed to go."

"Sit."

He sat. She opened the satchel on his desk, pushing aside inkwells and lecture notes, and started pulling things out: glass pots with dark lids, brushes in graduated sizes, pins, a fine-toothed comb, and a folded bundle of black fabric that she set to the side without explanation.

"What is all this?"

"Close your eyes."

"Bel."

"Close your eyes or I'll close them for you and you won't enjoy how."

He closed his eyes.

Her fingers went into his hair first. She stood behind the chair and worked through the waves from the crown, separating the loose curls instead of flattening them. She'd been touching his hair more often lately, in the library, pushing a strand out of his face mid-sentence or tucking a wave behind his ear without looking at him. He never stopped her.

She pulled one side back. She'd been trying to get him to cut it for weeks, a proper undercut, and he'd refused every time because elven hair grew slowly and cutting it was something you didn't do unless you had lost your mind. This was her compromise. Her fingers gathered the hair above his ear and drew it tight against his skull, twisting and pinning it flat in sections from his temple to the back of his head, the comb scraping close against his scalp as she worked. The top and opposite side she left alone. All the volume and curl stayed, the waves falling heavy to one side, sweeping across his forehead and past his jaw. The side with the faux undercut was sleek and close, the top and opposite side full and dramatic, and it changed his face. The angles of his jaw and cheekbones showed in a way that tying his hair back had never managed.

"Keep your eyes closed," she said, and he heard her uncork one of the glass pots.

A brush touched his eyelid. He flinched.

"Hold still."

"You could have warned me."

"I did. I said keep your eyes closed." She held his chin with her other hand, her thumb against his jawline, and the brush moved across the crease of his eyelid in a single stroke. Nobody had ever touched his face like this, and the intimacy of it was disorienting. He didn't know what to do with his own hands so he put them on his knees and kept them there.

"Cold purple," she said, mostly to herself. "Deep, with a blue undertone." She switched to a smaller brush and blended something at the outer corner of his eye with her fingertip. "Shadar-kai skin is desaturated. Everything we wear looks flat against it. Your skin still has saturation even when you're in winter, so the same purple looks richer on you."

She tilted his face toward the window light and started on the other eye. He let her move him.

He was starting to understand why she liked this. There was something to it, having color applied to your face with this kind of deliberate attention, like being fitted for something. Like putting on armor. Sage would have laughed at that comparison, and the laughter would have been the kind that was designed to make Alevar feel stupid for finding meaning in something Sage considered trivial, so he didn't think about Sage. He thought about the brush on his eyelid and the cool pressure of Bel's thumb on his jaw.

She set down the eye brush and picked up something else. "Open your mouth slightly. Don't talk."

A different texture, waxy and smooth, drew across his upper lip, and then his lower.

"Indigo," she said, drawing the colour across his lower lip and then his upper. "Hold still." She studied the result for a few seconds, tilting his chin left and then right. "Good. Open your eyes."

He opened them. She was standing directly in front of him, close enough that he could see the flecks of darker red in her irises and the silver threading in her temple braids.

"Mirror," she said, and stepped aside.

Alevar looked at himself.

He almost didn't recognise the person looking back. The blue-violet shadow made his grey-blue eyes look larger, and the matching lipstick drew out the shape of his mouth in a way he'd never noticed before. The hair was the biggest change. With the left side pinned flat and the waves swept to the right, the nose and the jaw and the deep-set eyes that he'd been cataloguing as flaws since adolescence looked, with the makeup and the hair pulling them together, not too bad.

He stared for longer than he meant to.

“Now the clothes,” Bel said, and unfolded the black bundle.

It was more than he'd expected. A high-collared top in black silk with structured shoulders, a corset, and a clasp at the sternum set with an indigo stone. Underneath it all, a mesh undershirt patterned in fine hexagons that extended down the arms into fitted gloves, each ending in a loop around the middle finger.

He held it up. The lace, the high collar, the black silk–it matched what Bel was wearing, or close to it. And it had been altered. He could see where the seams had been let out to accommodate someone his height.

"How long have you been planning this?"

"The tailor in the lower city needed three tendays for the mesh. The lace I got from a contact in the Gloom Market. The fitting–I used your coat measurements. You leave your coat on your chair in the library. Coats have measurements written on the inside label."

"You stole my measurements from my coat label."

"I borrowed your measurements from your coat label. The coat was returned unharmed."

She turned around without being asked while he changed, which was either tact or the understanding that he would have stood there holding the clothes until she did. The silk was cool against his skin. The mesh showed through at the open collar and fit close along his arms, the hexagonal pattern pulling taut over his forearms, and the finger loops felt strange, the middle finger anchored while the others moved free. The corset he couldn't manage on his own.

"I need help with this," he said, and hated that he had to say it.

Bel turned back around and laced him in with quick, practiced hands at his back, pulling it snug until his waist narrowed and his posture changed whether he wanted it to or not.

He looked at himself in the mirror and then at Bel.

She wasn't doing the shadar-kai smile thing. Her lips were parted and her red eyes were wide, and for a fraction of a second before she caught herself and looked away she looked like she hadn't expected it to work this well.

"The boots," she said, recovering. "Put the boots on. We’re late."

---

The great hall was full and loud with music.

The revel was structured the way the Academy structured everything: by school. Each of the eight schools of magic was given a movement, a span of time in which its faculty and advanced students could reshape the hall however they saw fit, and the movements cycled through the evening like the parts of an orchestral piece. The abjurers always went first, laying wards and protections that kept the rest of the evening from killing anyone.

When Alevar and Bel arrived, the alteration faculty had the hall. The stone floor had been turned to glass–real glass, with a luminous depth beneath it that went down further than the building's foundations should have allowed. The ceiling had been made permeable to air and light while staying structurally intact, and the real Midsummer sky hung above the dancers unobstructed, deep violet fading to amber at the edges, the long solstice twilight stretching from wall to wall. A warm wind came through that had no business being indoors. The bards' instruments had been altered so that each note trailed a faint ribbon of visible color, and the ribbons tangled and dissolved above the dancers' heads.

Alevar had never come to one of these. He was starting to understand why people did.

The students had dressed for the occasion. Most of the sun elves in gold and cream, moon elves in silver, and wood elves in greens they hadn't purchased in Leuthilspar. The eladrin, maybe thirty of the three hundred, had chosen their seasons that morning: autumn bronzes, a handful of summer golds, two spring pinks already drifting toward each other across the glass floor.

Alevar walked in at six foot three in heeled boots, in shadar-kai black lace and hexagonal mesh, indigo makeup around his eyes and on his lips, and his grey-teal hair swept to one side with the left temple pinned flat. People stared. He'd expected that. What he hadn't expected was that he didn't care.

Bel was beside him in her own black lace, her own high collar, her raven brooch at her throat. They matched. She'd spent tendays building an outfit that echoed hers so they'd walk in looking like they belonged together, and nobody had ever wanted that with him before–not his name, not his House, not access to Astrid's court, but him, dressed to match, walking in side by side.

The alteration movement ended while they stood at the edge of the floor. The glass stayed–each school's changes layered over the last rather than replacing them–and the conjurers took the hall. The luminous depth beneath the glass floor filled with conjured water, real and moving, and things swam in it, bioluminescent creatures summoned from somewhere deep and distant that trailed light beneath the dancers' feet. The warm wind became a salt wind. Overhead, the conjurers had called up a ring of cloud around the real sky, lit from within by distant lightning that pulsed with the music.

"They do this every year?" Bel asked, looking down through the floor at something large and glowing passing beneath her.

"Every year. Last year the conjurers apparently opened a window to the Elemental Plane of Air and made everyone dance on clouds. Two students had to be treated for vertigo."

He was talking too much. He always talked too much when he was nervous.

The bards played along with the conjured thunder. Couples moved onto the glass floor above the conjured sea with long circular sweeps, close turns with hands at the wrists, and separations where each dancer performed alone before returning. Alevar watched them and wanted to be out there with Bel and didn't know how to say so, even though she was right next to him and all he had to do was ask.

"Do you want to dance?" he asked.

She looked up at him. The height difference was nearly a foot. She had to tilt her head back, and the angle put the Midsummer sky behind his head.

"I don't know the forms."

"I'll show you."

"In front of three hundred people."

"You dressed me in shadar-kai clothes and put makeup on me and walked me through the front door. You don't get to be self-conscious now."

She took his hand. Her fingers were cool. He led her onto the floor.

The first figure was a slow wide circle, partners facing each other, hands at the wrists. He talked her through it under the music, voice low, and teaching gave him somewhere to put his attention that wasn't her hands in his. She learned fast. Two passes through the pattern and by the third she was adding her own variations, movements the forms didn't include but that worked because she committed to them.

The music moved into its middle passages. The tempo rose. The figures tightened and the partners came closer. Close turns brought their faces near, and he could smell the mineral cold of the Shadowfell on her skin, something he'd stopped registering weeks ago and was registering now because her cheek was nearly touching his. His hands were at her waist and hers were at his shoulders and the corset was keeping his back straight and his heart was going very fast and he thought, very clearly, that this was the best night of his life.

Bel reached up during a close turn and pulled his face down to hers and kissed him.

He didn't kiss her back. He didn't do anything. Her hand was on his jaw and her mouth was on his and she tasted like violets and the kiss lasted two seconds or three or the rest of his life, and then she let go and stepped back into the next figure like it had been part of the choreography.

His feet kept dancing. Astrid's lessons were deep enough in his body that his legs kept moving when the rest of him stopped, and the rest of him had stopped, because that was his first kiss and it had happened in front of three hundred people and he couldn't feel his hands.

His hair went pink.

All of it. The grey-teal flooded with color in a wave from scalp to ends, iridescent and shimmering and unmistakably spring. His skin warmed. A flush spread across his cheekbones and the winter he'd been holding since he enrolled at the Academy broke in the time it took Bel to complete one turn with her back to him.

Every eladrin in the hall could read what had just happened.

Bel turned back for the next figure. She looked at his hair. She looked at the flush on his cheeks. She looked at the smudge of indigo at the corner of his mouth where hers had been.

She reached up and fixed the lipstick with her thumb. Then she put his hands back in position, because he'd forgotten where they went.

"You're pink," she said.

"I know."

"Very pink."

"I know."

"It suits you."

They kept dancing. His hair stayed pink and his skin stayed warm. He didn't try to stop it. He couldn't have, and for the first time since he could remember, he didn't want to.

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