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I could have a million of them, but I tell myself I need to take it slow and should nurse this one. I have another sip and look for the friend group.

Avelene finds me first, which is lucky, because I had been about to walk the wrong way around the hall. She waves her cane at me from near one of the smaller tables and I follow it. She’s in a gown of deep plum velvet with gold embroidery crawling up the bodice like vines, and a stiff ruff at the throat that shouldn’t work yet somehow does. Her hair has been curled and pinned with pearl pins, which match the necklace around my neck. We may have coordinated, a little.

“Saturna,” she says, looking me up and down, her voice a warning.

“Is it alright?” I ask, pushing my hips to the side in show and holding out the edges of the skirt.

“It’s not alright. It’s a weapon. Did you really make that?”

“You flatter me.”

“Well it flatters you. I can’t believe you made that on a dormitory floor with the sewing machine from your cottage. In two weeks.”

“It was nothing,” I say with a wave of my hand.

I mean, I might use just a teensy bit of magic in my seams and in the sewing machine itself, but obviously I’ll never tell a soul that. Morena knew of course, was always begging me to make her dresses, and I obliged because I’d do anything for my sister.

“I hate you,” Avelene says with a smile. In this moment she reminds me of Morena too.

I curtsey. “Thank you.”

Ambrose comes up on her other side with a glass in each hand, his smile already full. He’s in a midnight-blue coat with the collar buttoned high, dark gold at the cuffs that complement his twin’s, and he looks very handsome, I must admit. More man than boy. He hands me his second glass without comment, because mine is already half gone, which is embarrassing for me. So much for nursing it.

“You look wonderful,” he says. “Both of you.”

“Both of us,” Avelene echoes, and taps his glass with hers.

Nelle arrives last, wearing exactly what I’d expected her to wear, tight black silk with a high stiff frilled collar beaded with onyx, long sleeves fitted to her wrists, slim cut with no petticoat and nothing extraneous anywhere, showcasing her lithe body. Her dark hair is pulled back off her face in the single tight braid she always wears, and she has fastened an ebony comb at the base of it.

“Greythorn,” she says. “You clean up.”

“So do you.”

“Yes, well I’m not the one being stared at.”

I frown. “What?”

She lifts her chin very slightly toward the dais, where the faculty table is already partially filled, and I follow the lift and my body understands before my head does.

Baz is at the far end of the faculty table in a burgundy tuxedo that fits him the way the dress fits me, with the kind of close cut that suggests someone paid attention to the shoulder measurements. The purple tones complement the gold in his eyes, making them catch the room’s light and throw it back brighter. His hair is combed back and his jaw is shaved clean and he’s holding a full glass of champagne.

And he’s looking right at me.

Not glancing or pretending to look past me, but unabashedly staring. His chin tilted the way it is when he’s working out a problem, except whatever he’s working out is me in this dress, and the look is naked enough that I have to drop my eyes down to my own glass for a second to get my breath back.

Goodness.

“Mm,” Avelene says beside me.

I don’t answer her.

“Mmmm,” she says again.

“Avelene,” I warn.

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“And yet you’ve said it twice.”