By the time breakfast is ready to be served, the princess has presumably sneaked back out to rejoin her caravan, and Scyelen turns up freshly scrubbed in her uniform (Siesta seems to have added a ribbon to Scyelen's hair) looking far more relaxed and mellow than Raafi has ever seen her.

She has a kind of distant, abstracted expression on her face, like she's questioning some of her fundamental assumptions about the world.

Raafi gives her a knowing grin and a hug around the shoulders. "Congratulations."

"Congratuwha? What are you congratulating me about?"

"I mean, maybe I'm wrong about what you got up to last night." Squeeze. "But I don't think so."

Scyelen isn't even sure herself what exactly she got up to last night and she was there, but it definitely wasn't the sort of thing one gets congratulated for!

"You're doing that thing again where you assume I know what you mean when I really don't."

He leans in close. "You slept with the princess, didn't you."

"Umm, obviously? She was. Here this morning. So she could hardly have slept anywhere else."

She's blushing, now, and not looking at him.

"Mmhmm." He chuckles, and gives her one last squeeze, and starts on his breakfast.

Scyelen blinks at him, sighs, and decides she doesn't want to know.

The itch of not knowing thoroughly ruins her good mood, though, especially since the only guess her brain is willing to generate is obviously wrong. She plops down to eat and nibbles mechanically at her food.

"-sweetheart." He hugs her again. "We can talk after breakfast, okay? This isn't really the place."

Scyelen ignores him, trying re-capture some of her good mood. Henrietta still wants to be, still is, her friend, and is at least twenty percent as perverse as Scyelen herself. Maybe thirty percent. To share pleasure with Scyelen that... earnestly... without hesitation...

Unfortunately for Raafi's conversation plans, immediately after breakfast, the headmaster calls everyone out onto the lawn to receive the royal convoy. The procession enters the grounds. It isn't especially large and grand, and only takes about a minute to get all the way through the outer wall, but the princess does give the assembled student body a very short and equally generic speech.

And then the headmaster dismisses the assembly so they can all get to classes.

The first chance Raafi has to get Scyelen alone isn't until after lunch.

Inconvenient. What kind of mood is Scyelen in, by then?

Wistful, but still way more relaxed and not-twitchy than usual.

Good.

"C'mere, sweetheart."

Hug? Inquisitive noise?

Definitely hug. "I wanted to talk to you about this morning."

Scyelen repeats her inquisitive noise.

"When I said you slept with the princess I didn't just mean that she spent the night in your room."

Shy finger-poke. "What, um, did you mean, then?"

Squeeze. "You had sex with her, I'm pretty sure? You've been mellow all day, that's usually a pretty good sign. It's just not something I'd usually talk about like this, it's not my business."

Scyelen starts to protest that it obviously wasn't sex, because they're both girls, but even before she opens her mouth she knows she's being pedantic, and that Raafi is probably just trying to be nice. She stops and just blushes really hard instead.

"You didn't want my... private things... to be your business," Scyelen mumbles, mortified. "And saying it like that doesn't actually help," she can't help herself from pointing out.

"I'm not sure what you mean - saying it how?"

"Calling it sex so it sounds less embarrassing."

"Ah. Where I grew up we don't think of it as different when it's two women or two men, sweetheart, or at least not like that. I'm calling it sex because I think it is."