CHAPTER 10 The Price of Attention

Crown Prince Aldric Solenne introduced himself on Wednesday.

Clara had been aware of him the way she was aware of weather — present, significant, requiring appropriate preparation, not something you could prevent by wishing. He moved through the Academy with the relaxed authority of someone who had been raised to occupy space and had never had cause to question whether that was appropriate. Students made room for him without being asked. Conversations adjusted around him. He was, in the social architecture of the institution, a load-bearing wall.

In the novel, he had been written as charming and fundamentally decent — not the kind of male lead who required redemption, which was either a virtue or a narrative limitation depending on your tolerance for uncomplicated love interests. Clara had found him acceptable. She had not found him interesting.

In person, he was somewhat more interesting than acceptable, which was not what she needed.

He found her in the library. She had positioned herself at a reading table with a good sight line to both exits, which was a habit she was aware of and not particularly apologetic about, and she was working through a secondary text on elemental conductivity when she became aware of the particular shift in the room's quality of attention that meant someone significant had entered.

She looked up.

He was already looking at her.

Not with the quality of attention Morwen used — that fixed, absolute, horizon-level regard. His was more mobile, more social, moving across her face with the practiced ease of someone who was used to making people feel that they had his complete and genuine interest. Whether the interest was complete or genuine was, she suspected, a more complicated question.

"You're Clara Quinn," he said, settling into the chair across from her with the confidence of someone who had not considered the possibility that the chair might be reserved.

"I am," she said, and did not close her book.

"I'm—"

"Crown Prince Aldric Solenne," she said. "Yes."

Something shifted in his expression. Not offended — recalibrating. She had, she understood, declined to perform the usual reaction. No widened eyes, no straightened posture, no the crown prince social adjustment. She'd simply acknowledged the information and waited.

He smiled. It was a good smile — genuine, or well-practiced enough that the distinction was academic. "I've been wanting to speak with you," he said. "About Lady Ashvale."

Clara set her pen down. "Why."

"Because she's never done this before." He said it without preamble, which she respected. "In three years, Lady Ashvale has acknowledged a first-year student exactly once, and that once was you, and she has since made your schedule her observable business in a way that is — " he paused " — notable. I've been watching her for two years. This is not her pattern."

"I'm not sure what you expect me to tell you about her pattern."

"I don't expect you to tell me anything about her pattern. I expect you to tell me what she's said to you." He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, with the manner of someone accustomed to conversations going where he directed them. "She's spoken to you. More than once, I think. What does she want?"

Clara looked at him. He was, she noticed, genuinely concerned — not performing concern, not running a political calculation disguised as conversation. In the novel, his relationship with Morwen had been one of wary antagonism laced with an attraction he'd never acted on. In this iteration, with Morwen's attention pointed entirely elsewhere, that dynamic had apparently shifted into something more straightforwardly unsettling.

"Why does it matter to you?" she asked.

"Because Morwen Ashvale is dangerous," he said. "That isn't a judgment — it's a fact that she would agree with. She has never hidden what she is capable of. And when someone like that redirects their focus suddenly and completely, it matters to anyone in the vicinity." He paused. "It matters especially to me, because the story that everyone in this building has been telling about her for three years is that she is obsessed with me. And suddenly she isn't. And I find that I don't know what that means for either of us."

Clara considered this. It was more honest than she'd expected, and more perceptive. She revised her assessment of Aldric Solenne upward, slightly.

"She's not a threat to you," Clara said. "In this — in the current situation, whatever her attention is doing, it is not aimed at you and it is not going to become aimed at you."

"How do you know that?"

"Because she's told me." A pause. "Not in those words. But she is occupied with something, and that something is not you."

He looked at her steadily. "That something is you."

"That something involves me, yes."

"What does she want from you?"

Clara picked up her pen. "That's between her and me," she said, not unkindly. "But I will tell you this, because I think you deserve to know it: Morwen Ashvale is not going to do the things this story expects her to do. The version of her that your concern is based on — the obsessive, threatening, politically destabilizing version — that's not what's happening in this iteration." She met his eyes. "Whatever you were braced for, you can set it down. That particular crisis isn't coming."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "And what is coming?"

"I don't know yet." This was true. "Something different. Whether better or worse is still being determined."

He sat back in his chair. Studied her with the mobile, assessing attention. "You know more than you're saying."

"Everyone knows more than they're saying. That's what conversations are."

The corner of his mouth moved. "You're not going to tell me anything useful."

"I've told you Morwen isn't planning to make your year difficult. I thought that was the thing you most wanted to know."

He was quiet again. Then, unexpectedly: "She looks at you like—" He stopped. Started differently. "I spent two years trying to understand what she was. What she wanted, what she felt, whether there was a person under the — the performance of what she showed the world. I never found anything. She was completely opaque." A pause. "She is not opaque when she looks at you."

Clara did not respond to this. She felt the weight of it and let it settle and said nothing.

"She looks at you," Aldric said, "like you are the only thing she can see."

"I'm aware," Clara said quietly.

"That doesn't concern you?"

She thought about it honestly. About what it would mean to be the singular focus of someone who had spent more than a hundred lifetimes looking for you. The weight of that. The particular claustrophobia of being found by someone who had never stopped searching.

"It concerns me," she said. "But not in the way you mean. I'm not afraid of her."

"You should be," he said. Not threatening — careful. "Not because she intends to harm you. But because of the force of what she—" He stopped again. "Because she is not a person who does things by halves."

"I know," Clara said.

"And you're not frightened."

"I'm a great many things," Clara said. "Frightened is one of them, some of the time, about some aspects of this. But not of her." She looked at him directly. "Are you?"

He blinked. "Frightened of her?"

"Frightened of what it means that she's stopped looking at you."

He was very still for a moment. Then: "I don't know," he said. "I spent two years dreading her focus. I find now that her absence is equally difficult to navigate, for entirely different reasons."

Clara looked at him and understood, for the first time, what the novel had underwritten in him. The Aldric Solenne in the book had been a love interest, a foil, a political function in a noble uniform. This one was a person who had been trying for two years to understand a woman who was incomprehensible to him, and who was now confronting the discovery that she had simply moved on.

She felt something she recognized as sympathy, which was not useful but was real.

"She was never looking at you the way you thought she was," Clara said, as gently as she could manage. "Whatever her obsession was in the story everyone was telling, it wasn't about you. It was always about something else. You happened to be standing in front of it." A pause. "I'm sorry if that's a difficult thing to hear."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"It is," he said. "But I suspect it's also true."

He left without further ceremony, which she appreciated. Clara watched him go and then sat for a moment with the peculiar weight of having just given accurate personal information to a character who was not supposed to know her name.

Rule one, she thought. Do not interact with Crown Prince Aldric Solenne.

She picked up her pen and crossed it out.