Spring inventory at the tower really pissed Constans off.
To be fair lots of things pissed Constans off, but right now he was neck deep in this thing, so it was running ahead of the class as far as irritating went. Anywhere else you could possibly think of spring cleaning would mean throwing the windows wide open, filling the building with fresh air and sunlight, shaking out the dust. At the tower you know what they did? They tossed you into a musty cave to do mind-numbing repetitive labor until your eyes strained from the lack of light. Now that was flat-out mean-spirited.
Last year, the first year they’d pushed him down into one of these holes to sort and stack until he got a cough from the stale air, he’d at least had decent company. Funny how a tiny, little itty-bitty flood could get the Senior Enchanter’s smallclothes all in a bunch about who went with whom into the stockrooms. It hadn’t damaged anything important, and anyway Carrick started it so Constans didn’t see why he couldn’t be paired with Alpin or someone half decent. Seeing as how he hadn’t done anything wrong. Technically.
Instead he got Ice Princess, Queen of the Nerds, who had carefully avoided saying a word to him since Senior Enchanter Alden left them alone here. She pissed him off too. Until recently he had generally been able to go months at a time without remembering the girl existed, annoyed only periodically when she upstaged him on an exam or sucked up to the Templars, but he no longer had that luxury with the way she hovered around Desi like a self-satisfied hen. He might be forced to admit that it was… decent of her to take to looking after Desi, when the kid hadn’t been anybody to her when he arrived but another homesick apprentice straight off the docks, but Constans seethed when she looked down her nose at him. It was as though Bethen thought he couldn’t do a good enough job of raising the boy himself. He was Desi’s big brother, his brother, and he didn’t need some girl all puffed up on mothering instinct to tell him how to treat his own kin.
Still, Desi thought she was brilliant. For his sake Constans would put up with her condescension. He’d do anything for that boy.
For his part, today Constans had been doing what he considered an excellent job of keeping the peace between him and Bethen. For example, he’d held his tongue for the entire last hour while he’d been coming up with the cleverest quips he could have been needling her with. “Is it just me or is it freezing in here?” was one of his favorites, but “With your nose stuck that far up, I was wondering if you could smell the ceiling,“ would do in a pinch. Instead, thinking himself a veritable Spirit of Charity, he left the silence that hung heavily between them undisturbed.
Crouching to paw through a stack of unlabelled canisters and musing to himself darkly (bollocks, wouldn’t you just know it, I’m going to have to open every single one of these to see what’s in and that’ll be twenty minutes gone), Constans didn’t notice immediately that Bethen had crept up on him. When she cleared her throat he almost jumped in surprise, was immediately relieved he hadn’t, and craned his neck to look over his shoulder at the other apprentice. Oho, she wanted help did she! Constans broke out grinning.
“Thank the Maker, you’re talking to me!” He pushed himself to his feet, wiping his hands on the front of his robes. “I thought I might’ve dropped dead from boredom hours ago, and been trapped down here as a ghost. Imagine, nobody ever looking at you or talking to you for eternity. Nothing to do but count bottles. Creepy.” He added a sarcastic little finger waggle to the last word, smirking. She wasn’t even looking at him, her gaze pointedly boring into the wall some several feet away, and for some reason he found that incredibly funny.