The silence that settled between them was not uncomfortable, exactly, but it had weight to it — the kind that formed whenever something valuable was suddenly placed on a table between two people who were trying very carefully not to look at it.
Arthur's expression had shifted the moment the words left Nero's mouth. The warmth that lived around his eyes when he talked about history or noble house scandals had gone somewhere distant, replaced by a measuring look that felt less like curiosity and more like calculation. He picked a stem of dead grass from the ground near his boot and turned it between his fingers without really looking at it.
"You want to learn sorcery," he said, and there was nothing accusatory in his tone — just the flat repetition of a fact being examined from multiple angles.
"I said I was curious about it."
