Page 131 of Legacy Ascended

"They're going to fight you on it," he says.

"I know."

"Not quickly and not cleanly. My House will be on both sides of it and I'll be on yours, out loud, at cost." He straightens up off the balustrade. "I wanted to say that before you asked, so you never have to wonder whether I needed talking into it."

"Luke—"

"Also you're freezing and you're wearing my jacket, and if we stay out here much longer Sophia will come and find us and I'm not prepared for that." He offers his arm. "Come back inside. You've got people waiting for you."

Inside, Sophia takes one look at me and confiscates me entirely.

"You have danced with enough men," she announces, hauling me onto the floor. "It is my turn."

We dance badly. Renzo joins in and is immediately the best dancer in the hall, which everybody hates. Declan, asked directly, turns out to move like a man who has been to a great many Irish weddings, and the entire scholarship section reorganizes around him. And at some point I look over and Freya — who said at least three separate times today that she was not going to dance — is dancing, with great precision, exactly on the beat, wearing the face of a woman completing an assignment.

"Don't," she says, without looking at me.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

Ander doesn't ask either, but for a different reason than Soren.

He appears at my elbow between songs, says nothing at all, takes my hand, and the musicians start something faster than anything they've played all evening — older, with a turn in it every few bars — and it becomes immediately obvious that Ander Ardent has known this dance since before he could read.

"What is this?"

"Ardent set the program. This one's ours." He puts me through the first turn and my skirt goes out and I laugh in surprise. "Four hundred year old dance. I've hated it since age six."

"You don't look like you hate it."

"I don't hate it tonight."

He's good. He's better than Luke and by the third turn he's stopped caring, and by the end of it Ander is laughing out loud in a public hall in front of his own House's delegation with his hand in mine.

I've known him for two years. I have never once seen that.

"They're staring at you," I tell him.

"Let them," he says, and spins me again.

Later on, when the crowd has thinned and I've got my shoes in one hand because my feet gave up twenty minutes ago, I'm at the water table with my back to the room when Jon appears beside me.

He doesn't stand close. He picks up a glass he doesn't want.

"Orange," he says.

"Everybody keeps saying that."

"I was going to say it suits you."

"That's better."

His eyes move over me once, all the way, and come back up.

"Considerably."

"Professor."