Faerie Fire

There’s a girl named Hildegard who lives at the Grove with him. A fairy. Weirdly tall, or so he’s been told. Cuan doesn’t know much about fairies, and as someone who’d already been pushing six feet by their second year, he can’t really attest to the impressiveness of anyone else’s height.
 
But she’s an artificer, like him. Smart. Technical. Annoyingly chaotic workflow. Has a strange obsession with stealing and melting down all the toilet paper holders and cutlery, despite the fact that they can just ask for raw materials. They’ve helped each other with homework and projects, and she made him a pair of wrist guards that he uses for his stupid martial weapons training.
 
Once, she tries to collect his name — another fairy thing, apparently — and he gives it to her with a smile. Cuan Caerwyn is a name, but it’s not his real name, so he’s fine with letting her hold onto it.
 
Once, he tries to count her freckles — not compulsively, just out of curiosity — but she notices, somehow, and looks away. Tells him that he doesn’t have to smile around her. Says it’s a waste of energy.
 
Cuan isn’t sure what to make of that. His smiling has nothing to do with her and he tells her so.
 
But the next time he’s helping her pour molten metal for fasteners, in a clearing far away from the dorms and the caretakers and the other students so that the smoke won’t bother anyone, he feels his mouth relax a little.
 

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They tag along with Ned for some secret midnight meeting in the Great Hall, and almost get caught by a caretaker along the way. Cuan briefly considers shoving Ned down the massive staircase connecting the two lodges as a distraction, but doesn’t — Hilde seems to like Ned, for whatever reason, and Cuan has to admit that despite the whole pathetic wizard cosplay thing, Ned being a somewhat decent artificer puts him further down the list of people Cuan would like to see given to the Designers for parts.
 
In the end, no one gets thrown down the stairs, and the meeting turns out to be an inauguration ceremony for a cult. Or, “academic society,” according to Alyxander, one of said cult’s leaders. Cuan remembers him, vaguely; he was one of the four people who were transferred out of the Grove during their first year. The others are here too, the two rich kids and the vapid gardener girl who left later.
 
Even after a dramatic speech and some thaumaturgic flexing, Cuan is still unclear on what the purpose of the cult is besides getting Alyx a date for the Gala. Granted, he isn’t really paying attention — for some reason there are biscuits at this secret cult meeting, and people are dropping poppy seeds all over the floor.
 
Cuan, still smiling, grips his spell focus with white knuckles and decides he hates it here.
 
But Hilde thinks it’s a good opportunity to meet people and make connections or whatever, and if she joins then he’ll join. It’d be a bad look if he were to somehow fall behind the other artificers, assuming this really does turn out to be some sort of elite society. Best of the best, or whatever they keep trying to get everyone to repeat.
 
Besides, Hilde is the only one left in the Grove who’s willing to help him test his construct after that incident in Broxwerth, so he doesn’t have much choice but to follow her.
 
So Cuan smiles politely and submits himself to what he assumes is the completely arbitrary judgement of the so-called Scholars. He demonstrates his spell amplification matrix and ends up with the rank of Academic, whatever that means. Apparently it was covered in the speech.
 
(Ned informs him later, somewhat dejectedly, that it’s a good thing, before mumbling something about needing to have a word with Kraius because there’s clearly been a misunderstanding, his grades have been excellent, okay, well, maybe not in Metaphysical Fitness, but definitely in everything else, and then Cuan stops listening.)
 

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Four days later, he finds out that he also apparently missed the part where their first order of official cult business is to attend the Green Gala.
 
If Cuan’s smile happens to falter a bit during Artifice, no one notices — perks of always sitting at the back of the class. He’d been considering faking sick to get out of going, a reasonable excuse considering his track record of catching colds from the bathing river. The living situation at the Grove is already exhausting, and the prospect of sharing oxygen with roughly quadruple that amount of people is not his idea of a good time.
 
Besides, how the fuck is he supposed to get a date at this point?
 
He looks up from die stamping the core of yet another matrix, over to where Hilde is working away furiously at her loom. The bags under her eyes are even darker than usual, and her hair looks like it hasn’t been washed in a while.
 
He starts dismantling the matrix to see if he can harvest enough copper to make an ingot.
 

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Cuan never developed a sense of fashion beyond the utilitarian clothes he was given as a child. Even here at the Academy, with access to seemingly every type of fabric in the Four Kingdoms, he wears the same sort of loose linen tunic, durable straight legged pants, and flat soled leather boots that served him in the Clockwork City.
 
(Well, he does like the red more than the grey.)
 
He lets Hilde choose his outfit. Make his outfit, rather, like she’s doing for dozens in their lodge. When she askes him for ideas, he just shrugs and smiles, completely unhelpful, and then stands obediently still while she flits around, frantically taking his measurements and muttering about needing more thread for his stupidly long legs.
 
On the night of the Gala, she dresses him in plain black slacks and dress shoes, some sort of lace up corset-type thing that forces him to stand up straight, making him look even taller and skinnier than usual, and a shirt with a similar fit to his normal one, albeit with slightly longer sleeves and deeper neckline. It’s made from green silk, with a subtle, tessellated pattern that looks like cubes when viewed a certain way.
 
(If he didn’t know any better, he’d think she was making fun of him.)
 
His only accessory is a ring with a spinning center band, crafted from the same copper he’d gifted when he asked her to the Gala — something about not wanting to burden him with a favor. More fairy things. It doesn’t have the same satisfying, rhythmic click as his spell focus, but it’s not bad. Maybe he’ll keep it on even after the Gala.
 
The whole thing is painfully simple compared to most of the outfits she’d been commissioned to do, but Cuan gets the sense it has less to do with the time constraint and more to do with how Hilde is… weirdly conscientious of his preferences. Not for the first time, he finds himself wondering why she seems to care if he’s comfortable, or if things trigger his arithmomania, or whether he actually learns how to fight with a short sword.
 
He almost asks, but doesn’t. Maybe someday, when he understands her motives a bit better.
 
Instead, he tells her it’s fine if she wants to shrink down and cling to his collar, and he’ll walk them both to the Gala. After all, she doesn’t have any shoes on.
 

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There’s a girl named Hildegard who lives at the Grove with him.
 
She has 192 freckles on her cheeks, and he doesn’t hate her.