"Lady Elowen," he said. The tone of someone addressing something he had decided was manageable. "What a... remarkable occasion. To see you here, given the..." a pause with a smile in it. "The circumstances."
She looked at him.
What a bother. She couldn't help but internally roll her eyes.
"It is lovely to be recovered," she said pleasantly.
"Yes, quite." The smile. The eyes doing something different from the smile.
She hated people like him.
"I had heard, naturally. The whole region has heard. Quite the.." another pause, weighted differently this time — "quite the incident."
She waited.
She had found, in five days, that waiting was the most useful tool she possessed in conversations like this. Most people, given enough silence, would fill it with the thing they were actually trying to say.
"Some are saying," he continued, lowering his voice to the register of someone sharing information rather than gossip, which was the same register, "that the — the nature of the return raises certain questions. Theological questions, one might say."
She looked at him with the expression of someone genuinely uncertain what the person speaking to them was getting at.
"Oh?" she humored him.
"The church would have views, naturally, on—"
"On recovery from severe illness?" She let her eyes widen very slightly. The specific widening of someone who was following the conversation carefully and had just encountered something confusing.
"I'm not sure I follow. Do you have theological concerns about recovery from illness generally, or specifically mine?"
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"I—"
"Because I've found the physicians were quite thorough," she continued, in the same pleasant tone. "And I'm not aware of any doctrine suggesting one should remain unwell for the sake of propriety. Though I confess I haven't read all the theological texts. Perhaps you have?"
The silence that followed was a different kind.
Someone to his left — a woman who had been listening with the focused attention of someone who thought she was invisible — produced a sound that was technically a cough and hid it behind her feathered fan.
The man adjusted his expression into something that was trying to be graceful.
Pig.
"Quite," he said. "Yes. Delightful to see you recovered."
He removed himself from the conversation with the speed of someone who had decided to go elsewhere.
She watched him go and thought..
One.
The room had seen that.
Not all of it.. but enough. The people who were paying attention, which was most of them because most people at these events were paying attention, had registered the exchange and were now reclassifying her accordingly.
She felt it in the room's temperature. The way a space adjusted when something unexpected had happened in it.
Good, she thought. Let them recalibrate.
She found a footman with a tray and took a glass of something pale and cold and moved through the room with the unhurried quality of someone who had nowhere to be and therefore owned the space she was in. Her crimson gaze searching for prey.
She found the first person worth finding in the east corner.
He was standing slightly apart from a group of three others, not fully in their conversation, with the quality of someone who was attending an event and conducting a separate assessment simultaneously. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen. Shorter than average — she noted this because most people at these events used height as posture and he didn't need to. He had sandy-brown hair and round spectacles that should have made him look younger but didn't, and he was holding a small notebook.
At a party.
He was writing in it.
Interesting..
She approached from a slightly oblique angle — not directly, not in a way that required him to acknowledge her before he'd decided to. Just close enough that when he looked up the conversation would be his choice.
He looked up.
His eyes behind the spectacles went immediately to hers — the crimson, registered— and then to her face more generally with the specific quality of someone who was doing arithmetic on her.
He has keen observational skills. He was someone who shouldn't be taken for granted.
"You're the Draveth girl," he said. Not rudely. Just with the directness of someone who had decided preamble was inefficient.
Her style.
"Yes," she said.
"You sat up at your own funeral."
"I did."
He looked back at his notebook. Wrote something. Looked up again.
"I've been running probability assessments on ascendant manifestation events," he said. "What you did — the fog, the temperature drop, the visible corporeal recovery — those are indicators. Specific ones." He paused. "Do you know what I mean by ascendant manifestation?"
She considered how much Elowen's memory covered and how much she should reveal.
"I'm familiar with the concept," she said carefully. "My memories from before my illness are — incomplete."
He nodded. Not with sympathy — with the acknowledgment of someone who had received a data point.
"Pip," he said. His name, offered with the efficiency of someone who had decided she was worth knowing. "Pip Halvane. My family is from the Heartlands. I'm here because Lord Arvane is my father's second cousin and there was apparently no graceful way to refuse the invitation."
"Zolani," she said, a warm smile playing on her lips, and then — because five days had not entirely erased the instinct — she caught herself. "Elowen. Forgive me. I've been — the memories, still finding their shape."
He looked at her.
The round spectacles. The notebook. The specific quality of someone who had filed the slip and was deciding what to do with it.
"Zolani," he repeated. Neutrally.
"It's nothing," she said. "An old nickname. From before."
He looked at his notebook.
"I'd like to speak with you more at length," he said. "If you're willing. I have questions about the manifestation that I haven't been able to answer from the existing texts."
"I may not be able to answer them either," she said.
"That's also data," he said, his brown eyes almost twinkling in excitement.
She looked at this boy with his notebook and his probability assessments and his complete disinterest in performing social ease at a social event.
"Are you perhaps entering the academy, this year?" she asked. It was better to make something closer to allies in the academy sooner. It would prove more useful.
He wrote something in the notebook, something she couldn't see.
"Yes I am. Are you perhaps seeking for an alliance of some sort?"
His brows rose.
"Yes, I also want to understand your research. If you are willing?"
He paused for a while. His brown gaze studying her. Normally she would have looked away in her old world because she was afraid he would see how ugly she was. But this face she had didn't belong to her and in her personal opinion, she found Elowen extremely beautiful.
He reached to shake hands which she accepted, only to receive something that felt like a card. "When you enter the academy find the Supernatural Studies Society and request for me. Give them this. They will know I requested your presence. We will talk then."
"I will. See you then Lord Halvane."
She moved on.
The second person she found, or rather — the second person found her.