— Caelum POV —
He did the math on a Thursday night, alone in his dormitory room with the door locked and every document he had accumulated over three months spread across his desk and the floor and one corner of his bed.
He did it properly. No shortcuts. No comfortable assumptions. The full picture, all of it, laid out like a map of somewhere he had been walking without knowing the terrain.
It took four hours.
When he finished he sat back and looked at the ceiling and thought: oh.
Oh, that's bad.
The situation, in total, was this:
Lord Vasek — coalition ally, cold operator, currently investigating him — had enough political reach to end his scholarship, his academy position, and his access to the Valdros house records in approximately one conversation with the right administrator. Clean, quiet, total. He would be back to nothing before he knew it was happening.
Aldric Solenne — hurt, increasingly unstable about it, connected to the family that had probably killed his parents — was still circling. The scholarship threat had been a bluff that Aldric hadn't called, but that wasn't the same as it going away. Aldric was the kind of person who didn't let things go. He just got quieter about them.
The Duke — not hostile, exactly, but running a calculation that had Caelum on the liability side and was getting more confident about it.
And Seraphine, who had fought for his arrangement and come to warn him and moved her chair and put a blanket on him and was, with the efficiency of a person who had no idea she was doing it, systematically taking apart every wall he had built in four years.
That last one wasn't a threat. It was just — also in the picture. It belonged in the picture.
He looked at the documents.
He thought about the smart version of himself — the one that had spent four years being careful and invisible and making sure that every decision was tactical and defensible. That version of himself would look at this picture and say: you are overextended. You are emotionally compromised. You have acquired enemies faster than assets and the one person who is genuinely on your side is also the single biggest vulnerability you have. Pull back. Cut the arrangement. Disappear into the clerk work and wait for a better moment.
He thought about that version of himself for a while.
He thought about four years of being careful and invisible and what it had produced.
He thought: nothing. It produced nothing. I was nowhere when I started and I was nowhere after four years and the only reason I am anywhere now is because she walked into a corridor and found something worth finding.
He looked at the ceiling.
He thought: I don't want to pull back.
This was, professionally speaking, a terrible thought to be having.
He had it anyway.
He started a new sheet of paper.
Not for the case. For himself. He made two columns — what he had, what he needed. Clean and tactical, the way he approached everything, but applied to this specific disaster instead of someone else's.
What he had: the Helvast documents. Vasek didn't know the extent of them. Aldric didn't know they existed. The Duke thought they were leverage against Solenne but didn't know Caelum had already mapped three additional threads from them. Information asymmetry — the only kind of advantage a person with no magic and no rank could actually accumulate.
What he had: Seraphine. He wrote that down and then looked at it and then left it because she wasn't a resource, she was — she was something else, and putting her in the asset column felt wrong in a way he was going to have to think about eventually.
What he needed: time. And a move that made Vasek cautious without making him hostile.
He thought about that for a while.
Then he picked up his pen and started writing.
— Seraphine POV —
He came to the library the next morning with a document he handed her before he even sat down.
She looked at it.
It was a letter. Addressed to Lord Vasek. Written in the formal register of someone making a professional introduction — precise, respectful, not flattering. It laid out, in three paragraphs, a summary of the Helvast case analysis. Not everything. The shape of it. Enough to demonstrate that the work was serious and that the person doing it was someone worth having rather than someone worth removing.
The last paragraph offered, very politely, to share the full analysis with Lord Vasek at a time of his choosing.
She read it twice.
"You want to walk into his office," she said slowly.
"I want to make him come to me," Caelum said, sitting down. "There's a difference. If I'm hiding from Vasek, I'm a liability. If I approach him first with something valuable, I'm an asset he hasn't finished evaluating." He poured himself tea from the tray on the table, completely at home in her library at this point, which she was not going to think about. "He already suspects I have something. This confirms it. But it also says: I'm cooperative. I'm not a threat. I'm useful."
"And if he decides you're more useful to someone else?"
"Then we find out before he acts rather than after." He looked at her steadily. "Vasek doesn't make moves without information. If I give him information first, I control what he knows. Partial disclosure is better than him finding it himself."
She looked at the letter.
It was good. It was genuinely good — the tone exactly right, the disclosure calibrated, the offer extending just enough to be interesting without being desperate.
She thought about her father's desk face. The lever comment.
She thought about the fact that Caelum had sat down in a dormitory room alone and worked out the entire threat picture and produced a response by morning without telling her he was worried.
She thought about how that made her feel.
Annoyed, actually. Genuinely annoyed.
"You should have told me you were thinking about this," she said.
He looked up.
"I worked it out last night."
"I know. You could have come to me."
"It was late—"
"I don't care if it was late." She put the letter down. "We are working on the same problem. That means when you map the threat picture, I should be in the room. Not reading the results the next morning."
He was quiet. The expression he got when he was deciding whether to push back.
He didn't push back.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay meaning you agree or okay meaning you're done arguing?"
"Both," he said. Pause. "I'm used to doing things alone. I'm — working on that."
She looked at him.
He was looking at the letter. Not avoiding her exactly, just — the look of someone who had said something real and was giving it space to land before checking what happened to it.
I'm used to doing things alone. I'm working on that.
Four years alone in a dormitory working through everything by himself. Carrying the whole picture because there was no one to share it with. And now he was sitting in her library at seven in the morning saying I'm working on that like it was a simple practical adjustment rather than the thing it actually was.
She was going to combust. Quietly. In a dignified manner. But still.
"Send the letter," she said. "Through my house. Under the Valdros seal — it makes it more interesting to him and more legitimate for you."
"That works."
"And next time you do a threat assessment at midnight, you come get me."
"Your father's conditions—"
"My father's conditions apply to the consulting meetings. Not to—" she paused, chose a word, "—the rest of it."
He looked at her.
"The rest of it," he said carefully.
"You know what I mean."
"I do." He picked up his tea. "I just wanted to hear you say it."
She stared at him.
He was looking at his tea with the focused innocence of someone who absolutely knew what they had just done and was refusing to be caught knowing it.
He had made a joke. A small, dry, devastating joke at her expense and then hidden behind his teacup.
She had created this problem. She had walked into that corridor and found him interesting and now she was sitting across from a person who made quiet jokes over tea and she had absolutely no one to blame but herself.
"Drink your tea," she said.
"I am," he said, still not looking up.
She looked at her documents.
She was smiling. She made it stop.
It came back.
Fine. Fine. She left it.
— Vasek POV —
The letter arrived on a Monday.
Vasek read it once. Then again.
Then he put it on his desk and looked at it for a while.
The boy had come to him. Voluntarily. With a partial disclosure of what he had and a polite offer to share more.
Three possibilities. First: the boy was naive and thought transparency was a defense. Possible, but the letter was too well-calibrated for naive. Second: the boy was being managed by Lady Seraphine, who had decided proactive engagement was safer than avoidance. Also possible, but the tone was wrong — too personal, too specific to the boy's own work rather than the house's interests. Third: the boy had done his own threat assessment, identified Vasek as the most immediate risk, and made an independent decision to get ahead of it.
He stared at the letter.
An orphan clerk scholarship student had independently identified him as a threat, assessed the risk correctly, and responded with a calibrated partial disclosure designed to reframe himself from liability to asset.
Without telling the Duke's daughter first, Vasek suspected, because the letter had a quality of individual initiative that didn't feel delegated.
He thought about small things that weren't small yet.
He wrote a response.
He accepted the meeting.
* * *
End of Chapter Fifteen