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Brand called the sparring match, giving the win to Anna. The words were unnecessary except as a formality—Max had managed to land a glancing blow on Anna’s shoulder with his superior reach and Anna had knocked him on his ass for it.
Quinn was hardly surprised. This was usually how it went, at least in the broad present, Anna’s companion training allowing her to outstrip Max with his more limited experience. Max was gaining in experience, though, with the way he stepped in to take Quinn’s place during practice bouts, sparing him from the fractals of possibility that overwhelmed him during fights.
While Anna and Brand were discussing Anna’s form, Max came to Quinn and dropped onto the ground beside him, nudging his shoulder.
“I’ll get her next time,” Max said. He had tried to magically hide the way his face was flushed from exertion, but his breathing was still heavy. “Maybe. Hey, what are the odds that I come out of it alive if I put pudding in her socks?”
It was a joke, mostly. Max never follows through on the threat. Not unless Quinn advises him to.
“Pudding,” Quinn repeated, using the word, the idea as a lodestar as he plunged through the static rush of possible futures.
And he saw Max and Anna as each other’s relief. There’s a looming danger, but Max, so reckless, is safer with Anna protecting him, and Anna, so powerful, is able to relax, just a little, knowing Max is there and that he has her back. They’re so fierce when they’re facing danger together, just as they need to be.
Quinn had seen this future before, common though not inevitable, and it was heartening knowing that even pudding could help them get there. It wasn’t easy through the noise, but he tried to trace the path to this moment, the details where future descended into present.
Anna needs to find her way back to her team. She can’t leave Max and Quinn alone to face a ten ton beast—never mind that they’re not really alone when they’re together, those idiots still need her, okay.
The darkness around her would be the simplest of her problems to solve, but she doesn’t want to make a beacon of herself. She creates a soft glow that barely cuts through the gloom around her at all, just enough to keep her from tripping over anything in this unfamiliar landscape.
As for the rest of her problems? She’s at a loss.
Sometimes, when he’s in a situation he doesn’t know how to handle, Max asks himself what Rune would do. Anna has no way of knowing this. She doesn’t see the similarity when she asks herself what Max would do.
Quinn needed to go back, back. He followed the thread of respect looking for some fragment of foundation, and somewhere sooner, he found the two of them in the halls of Magnus Academy.
Anna is locked down, dead-eyed, staring fixedly at the far wall. She doesn’t respond to the other girls, even as they jostle her or wave hands in her face.
Someone had spilled soda all over her gym clothes and isn’t it so funny that she thought she could wash them in the bathroom sink? What had she been planning to do, show up for class dripping wet? And then she threw the clothes in the trash anyway? Pathetic.
Anna isn’t about to admit to them that she hadn’t thrown the clothes out because of the soda, she had thrown them out because she had singed them when she tried drying them with magic. Their takeaway from such a story should be that they should fear her for her ability to burn things, but they’d probably decide to call her an incompetent housemaid or something.
It’s fine. Let them bully her. She can comfort herself in the meantime with images of immolation and later, in a manner untraceable to her, have her revenge.
“Anna!” Max calls, strolling over.
Anna grits her teeth. She had been hoping he wouldn’t notice her, surrounded as she is, since both acknowledging him and ignoring him would make the harassment worse. Anyway, she isn’t about to ignore Max, so she takes herself out of robot mode long enough to nod at him, both a greeting and a dismissal.
Max ignores the dismissal. “Is everything alright here?”
The fey magic in his smile is so subtle that if Anna didn’t know him so well, she wouldn’t have noticed it was there. The girls are awestruck, adjusting their hair and clothes, and it’s so cliched that she wants to bury her face in her hands and groan.
“Lord Saint John,” one of the girls manages.
“Because it looks to me like maybe everything isn’t alright.”
“We—I mean, I—”
“You’re going to leave her alone now, okay?”
It’s almost funny how fast the group dissipates after that, leaving Anna and Max staring at each other. It’s easier to breathe, somehow.
Max smiles, but it’s a normal goober smile, not fancied up by any magic. “See? Being pretty works sometimes.”
“You’re calling yourself pretty now?”
“No. Yes? It was your word!”
“You’re so embarrassing,” Anna says, but what she means is thank you.
Quinn goes further back, just a little, because he needs to see when Anna calls Max pretty.
“This whole worship-me-because-I’m-Sun-Court thing isn’t going to work forever, you know,” Anna says, cutting the snack line to stand with Max. “Not with the people here who know the scores you get on history tests.”
She had seen him gently suggest to the other students that they might want to let him sit in the shady spot in the courtyard, then. He looks at her askance and, because it’s easier than explaining himself, asks, “How do you know the scores I get on my history tests?”
“I know whatever I want to know,” She likes how casual the words sound as she says them. The actual reason she knows this—and she might let Max in on the secret one day—is that she acquired a teacher’s system login after that teacher made fun of Quinn for stuttering.
“What is this about?” Max asks. “Are you just here to shame me over my grades?”
Anna waves a hand dismissively. “I don’t care about your grades. What I’m saying is, when getting your way by being pretty and having a title stops working for you, you can try ruling through fear. I have plenty of blackmail material you can use.”
“What’s the catch?”
“I just want to see what it’s like when you try.”
Max was getting restless, worrying at a blade of grass and staining his fingertips green, but he stayed silent. He knew better than to interrupt. Quinn was nearing his metaphysical destination anyway. He wouldn’t have to wait much longer.
“What are you doing?” Anna asks. She had successfully snuck up on Max and he tenses for a moment before realizing who it is.
Max looks between her and the measuring tape at his ankle. “I’m measuring my leg?”
“I figured that out,” Anna says, an unspoken dumbass in her tone.
“Queenie’s going to see if she can let down the hems of my pants for the party tomorrow.” Max has grown a few inches, but he hates the thought of getting rid of the clothes Rune had gotten for him at the mall and he had been told that older clothes are usually more tailor-able.
“Dress codes,” Anna sighs.
“Do you need your clothes adjusted? Queenie might have time if we handle dinner.” Handling would probably mean ordering takeout, but they wouldn’t let her know that until after she agreed.
“Nope. Looks like we’ve found the one and only good thing about dresses,” she says. “It’s not a big deal if the length of the skirt is different.”
Max pauses. Then he holds up a coat that’s big enough to sag off her shoulders. “You can use one of my suits if you don’t want to wear a dress.” It’s only a joke because he doesn’t think it’s possible to adjust any of the suits enough to fit her properly. He’d share otherwise.
“That’s even worse. You want me to match you?”
“They’re nice suits,” he protests.
“No thanks. You can have fun with your limited crotch mobility on your own.”
Quinn found it then—the pudding incident, the unlikely occurrence.
Anna never puts her foot into the sock. She notices its different heft, smells something sweet. When, running her hand over it, she feels a dampness, she turns the sock inside out.
She stares at the pudding, confused. Her first thought is that Corbie is responsible. Maybe he thought he was being helpful by feeding her socks or something. But no, that would have meant both that Corbie had been left unattended with pudding and that he was willing to share it.
Her family was larger than ever before, but the list of people who might be responsible still isn’t long. Brand wouldn’t. Corrine would never. She can picture Rune putting pudding in someone’s socks, but he wouldn’t do that to her, would he?
That left Max and Quinn. (It never occurs to her to accuse one but not the other.)
She’s confused. She doesn’t think they meant it as a friendly prank; they have to know she doesn’t like that sort of thing, but she doesn’t know why they would be mad at her.
She’s left liking them less, and herself less, too.
With that, he knew the way forward.
“Tell her you’ll be getting Brand’s socks,” Quinn advised finally, dropping his voice low.
Max almost turned instinctively to look at Brand then, his head twitching a little, but just as instinctively, he stopped. It was possible that with any slight indication of what they were discussing, Brand would figure them out.
“By getting you mean…” Max said.
“You’ll be pudding-ing—you’ll pu—”
“I’ll be putting the—”
“The pudding in—”
“I’ll pudd them,” Max said. “I’ll pudd his socks.”
Quinn nodded. “That’s the word.”
“Will I actually? Or am I just saying it?”
“She won’t tell,” Quinn said.
Max cast his eyes to where Anna was on her own doing cooldown stretches. “Yeah. She won’t tell.”
Without any further hesitation, he went to her.
Usually, Anna preferred not to get involved in his trouble. But there was this beacon of a moment, with Brand pissed and Max suspected, where Anna, remembering the way she was confided in, covers for Max. Brand decides Rune is responsible, and Rune is amused enough that Brand doesn’t believe him when he denies doing it. Max is exonerated. That was the path Quinn was reaching for.
Either that or they would enter the timeline in which Brand escalates his revenge and Max’s own socks are at unpredictable intervals and by various means made unwearable.
Quinn was excited to see which.