He was back late tonight, having spent the last hour wrangling with a Master of the social history faculty who had taken issue over his Student Company. Their meeting had not gone well. She had ordered him to dissolve the force, and he had outright refused, and now the matter would apparently go before the head of faculty, or possibly the administrator. Eujen rather suspected that the promised reprimand would arrive some time after the war finished, and at that late point he would be glad to receive it. He stomped up the stairs to his room – he had his own outside door, more for the convenience of the bookbinder than Eujen’s – and shouldered his way in, feeling disgruntled and angry. A moment’s fiddling with the gaslamps turned up a rosy glow – and Averic. Eujen started back with a choked-off cry of alarm, finding his friend standing in the darkness of his own room, unbidden and unlooked for. His first thought, and he was ashamed by it, was Wasp assassin.
