CHAPTER 33 Aldric's Irritation

Lysa arrived on Monday of the third week of October.

Clara had known she was coming — the novel had established the timing, and the novel's timing in this regard had apparently held even across the working's disruption of everything else. She was a third-year student who had deferred her enrollment twice for reasons the novel had explained and which Clara remembered as something involving a family illness, a harvest season, and a series of administrative complications that had seemed, on first reading, like the author's way of establishing Lysa's resourcefulness before she arrived.

She arrived by cart from the southern provinces, which was how Clara knew she was there before seeing her — Seren had people monitoring the Academy's incoming arrivals as a matter of habit, one of the information networks she'd maintained after formally disbanding the watch system. Seren had a particular approach to useful information: she collected it and then decided later whether it was useful.

"The novel's heroine," Seren said, at breakfast, setting down her tea. "I looked her up. Third-year scholarship, advanced magical track, delayed enrollment. There's a note in the academic records that she tested off the standard scale when she was fifteen."

"She did," Clara said.

"Off the top of it or the bottom?"

"The top." Clara paused. "Significantly off the top."

Seren absorbed this. "And in the story as it was supposed to run—"

"She arrives, discovers the full extent of her ability, attracts the crown prince's attention, and navigates a year of escalating conflict with villainess while the kingdom's political situation deteriorates." Clara paused. "The villainess, in that version, is fixated on the crown prince. Lysa is the rival."

"None of which is happening," Seren said.

"None of which is happening," Clara agreed. "The crown prince is managing an institutional cover story and learning the actual history of what occurred here. The villainess is in the east courtyard at the fifth hour discussing the full range of anchor ability theory. The political situation is not actively deteriorating, as far as I know."

"The mechanism's dissolution has created some regional anomalies," Seren said. "In areas where the Hollow's influence extended beyond the Academy grounds. I've been tracking the reports. Mostly minor — ward failures, old enchantments destabilizing, a few locations where the Hollow had been maintaining something and isn't any longer." She looked at her notebook. "Nothing catastrophic. Things the relevant authorities can address over the next few months without the Academy's involvement."

"Good." Clara looked at her tea. "Lysa is going to be fine."

"You know what happens to her."

"In the original story. In this one, she arrives as a third-year student with a genuinely extraordinary ability, in an Academy where the ostensible villainess is occupied with something entirely different and the crown prince is not, currently, in the market for a politically motivated romance." She paused. "She can just be a student."

"What a radical concept," Seren said.

"I know." Clara smiled. "I thought so too, once."

✦  ✦  ✦

She encountered Lysa in the library that afternoon.

Lysa was exactly as the novel had described: tall, with the direct quality of someone who had grown up somewhere that required directness, hair that had been tied back with the efficiency of someone who regarded it as a practical matter rather than an aesthetic one. She was at the reference section, looking at it with the expression Clara had come to recognize as someone who had encountered something significantly below their actual level and was deciding how to handle that tactfully.

Clara sat at the adjacent table and opened her own text and said nothing.

After a moment, Lysa looked at her. "You've been here since the start of term," she said. It was not a question.

"Yes," Clara said.

"The library reorganized while I was away," Lysa said. "Or something did. The reference section used to be arranged by subject matter. Now it's arranged by — I'm not sure what. The principle seems to be correct but the system isn't written down anywhere I can find."

"It reorganized last week," Clara said. "The wards that maintain the cataloguing system had been running on a disrupted signal for a long time. When the disruption cleared, they returned to the original arrangement." She paused. "The original arrangement is by the age of the magical tradition each text belongs to, oldest first. The subject-matter cross-indexing is in the catalogue on the librarian's desk."

Lysa looked at the catalogue she apparently hadn't noticed. Then she looked at Clara. "How do you know that?"

"I spend a lot of time in this library."

"More specifically," Lysa said.

Clara considered her. The directness was, she thought, going to be either very useful or very complicated, and was probably going to be both at different points.

"I was in the restricted section when the ward recalibration happened," Clara said. "The Archivist explained the original cataloguing logic while we were waiting for the shelves to stop reorganizing themselves."

Lysa looked at her for a moment. "You have access to the restricted section."

"Not officially," Clara said. "The Archivist lets me in."

"First-year students don't get restricted access."

"No," Clara agreed.

A pause. "You're the one Lady Ashvale claimed at the entrance ceremony," Lysa said. Not accusatory — factual, the way she seemed to be most things.

"Yes."

"I heard about that. From the southern provinces." She sat down at the adjacent table with the ease of someone who had decided a conversation was worth having and was proceeding accordingly. "In my village, we got the version where she stopped the entire ceremony to publicly declare ownership of a background character. The story had several embellishments by the time it reached us."

"What embellishments?"

"In the version I heard, there were lightning effects." Lysa looked at her steadily. "Were there lightning effects?"

"No," Clara said. "She adjusted my collar and said do not wander off this time."

Lysa blinked. "This time."

"Yes."

"That's a strange thing for a stranger to say."

"Yes," Clara agreed. "It is."

Lysa looked at the shelves reorganizing themselves very slightly as the ward calibration continued its final adjustments. She had the expression of someone who had arrived at a place and found it significantly more interesting than advertised, which Clara suspected was going to be her characteristic expression for some time.

"I'm Lysa," she said.

"Clara Quinn."

"You know things about this place," Lysa said. It was not a question.

"Some things," Clara said.

"Would you be willing to share them?"

Clara thought about the novel — about Lysa's arc in the original story, the escalating conflict and the political crisis and the climax that had resolved things in ways Clara had found unsatisfying. About what that arc looked like in this version, with no Hollow running and no villainess fixated and no predetermined conclusion.

"Yes," she said. "I think that would be useful." She paused. "Not all at once. And some things I'll need to verify before sharing, because my information may be outdated."

"How outdated?"

"The situation has changed significantly in the past two weeks," Clara said. "Some of what I knew about how this place operated is no longer current."

Lysa absorbed this with the direct quality she brought to everything. "All right," she said. "Start with what's current."

Clara thought about where to begin. About a loop that was finished and a world that was running forward for the first time.

"The library reorganization is current," she said. "I can walk you through the original catalogue logic if you want. It's actually more intuitive than the subject-matter system, once you understand the underlying principle."

Lysa looked at the shelves. "Yes," she said. "Show me."

So Clara showed her. And Seren arrived twenty minutes later — because Seren arrived wherever Clara was, eventually, it was simply a property of Seren — and Seren and Lysa assessed each other with the mutual recognition of two people who collected information for a living and had just identified a potential resource.

And the afternoon moved through the library's windows in the particular autumn way it had, and the Academy continued its adjustment to a world that was running forward, and three people who had been written as a heroine, a supporting character, and a background character sat in the library of the Imperial Academy of Asterveil and talked about cataloguing systems.

It was, Clara thought, a very good way for a new arc to begin.