Leander, meanwhile, is doing everything he can to ignore his feelings. At some point he's going to have to go back to his room and take apart his desk so nothing can hide in it, and also write down a serious prioritized list of everything Karen and similar need to know, but right now he really, really doesn't want to leave the cafeteria.  This is at least in part motivated reasoning because he hasn't given up on the idea that if he sticks around the cafeteria he might be able to find out what happened to Gaheriet but it's whatever, it's fine, he told himself he wasn't dealing with feelings right now and that means he gets to not deal with his feelings right now.

"Hi," he says, to someone who doesn't look like they're busy with anything in particular. "My name's Leander Marsh, yours?" 

"Val Reed."

American accent. Leander can't really tell most American accents apart, though. "I'm from Scotland, you?"

Oh, fuck. "I've moved around a lot - came from Seattle, originally, but I haven't been there in a while, I came here from a little town in Iowa that nobody's heard of."

Leander has no idea where Iowa is but Val's American and not from an enclave and being evasive which, given everything, is at least a fairly strong hint.

However it also means that Leander is not going to be the one to make him say it out loud. "Huh, cool. What languages do people usually learn in the states, I've never been, in the UK it's all French but that's because we've got France right there."

Oh, score, someone who speaks French. Remains to be seen if he can trade for anything but he really urgently needs to become fluent in French and Latin. "Spanish! Especially closer to Mexico. At least, I've got that one, and it's easy to find teachers for, but I can't say I've surveyed the other Americans to ask what they've got."

"Oh, cool, Spanish is one of mine, I have a sort of absurd number and I'm thinking about doing language tutoring if you want to practice or trade spells or swap homework help or similar." 

"I'll keep that in mind. What are you after in exchange?"

"The arrangement I made with one of the mundane-borns was that I taught her Spanish and Latin and in exchange I got to learn the spells she got in those languages, subject to renegotiation depending on how things wound up working out, I'd be down to expand that offer to other people. Homework help I think is usually tit-for-tat?" 

If Val is in fact wizard-born that was an insult. Let's hope he isn't. 

"...A lot of people this year didn't have much reason not to start a new language at thirteen, huh. Guess you've got it made, offering tutoring."

"Well, assuming nobody else undercuts me, but I have the advantage of knowing a ridiculous number of them and also the advantage of really liking linguistics and genuinely wanting to spend my spare time on it. And it's not like people don't pick up new ones while they're in as things come up, so hopefully it's a gig that'll last." 

(Which reminds him he needs to start working on... Nahuatl and Njerep, Julia said?)

They do? If they do then what's so dangerous about coming in with a slight head start on it? That's a way this and what Jian said don't fit together. Interesting.

"Does really liking and wanting to spend time on things... matter, in here?"

Shrug. "Hating things doesn't let you avoid them or anything but I've never had a subject where enthusiasm didn't help. And for tutoring it just straightforwardly does matter, have you ever had a teacher who hated their subject and wanted class to be over so they could stop thinking about it, it's the worst." 

"That's when you learn what else they have on their mind. It's very educational."

"This is true! But I still think if you want to learn something specific you're usually better off getting your teaching from someone who doesn't hate it."

"I guess that's fair. Hmm." Is it safe to admit he needs language tutoring now? It probably isn't but hiding it might look even worse. "I might want to pick up Latin."

Latin you'd almost certainly know, if you were wizard-born in the West, especially if you already had a romance language. It's not a 100% thing but combined with the weird evasiveness and the only mentioning one other language he's pretty sure at this point.

"Latin I can do you. It might make the most sense for you and Karen to learn that one together, I'm planning on figuring out scheduling at lunch tomorrow once we know what our class schedules will look like?"

"Haven't met her yet, I don't think, but sure."

"She's the American mundane-born I've already made this deal with. I think she went off with a group to do something, I don't see her right now."

"Ah, one of the ones that's going to die. Not that everyone else isn't, I guess."

"...so I'm not a hundred percent sure you're mundane-born, and if you're not I'm sorry, but if you are-- I've been trying not to make you say it out loud since you clearly don't want to but I will warn you that you're stretching the limits of plausible deniability hard and not mentioning something is one thing but outright lying is another." 

What even was it this time, or do they say this to everyone, or is there even such a thing as a person who isn't mundane-born - or is it that he was implying too hard that he's not, and crossed the mysterious fuzzy boundary from manipulation everyone does all the time to manipulation that is identical in all ways except that people object to it? If he had any non-talking-to-people information sources he could guess whether he should be calling this guy's bluff or tearfully coming clean or...

He doesn't know enough here so it'll have to be closer to the latter. But not an admission of wrongdoing, not backing down enough to suggest he'd apologize or anything - that rules out the strategy he used with the Chinese kids, admitting it is basically admitting some kind of wrongdoing at this point - and, shit, he's hesitated for multiple seconds, he needs to just say something.

"My dad had magic and I have fought and killed mals before and was literally running from one when I got picked up," he says softy. "But. You're not completely off base." And now if he's very lucky Leander will fill in the rest of this story for him.

"Ah."

This might be a bad idea. In fact this is probably a bad idea.

...whatever. He's not actually good enough at ignoring people who need help for his survival strategy to be based on it, today has proven his father right about that extremely thoroughly.

"For what it's worth, that was genuinely a warning about other people, I'm not offended and wouldn't have been even if I were completely right, it's a totally reasonable thing to want to hide and you don't actually know me at all," he says, just as soft. "And it's-- you're American and not from an enclave and being kind of oddly evasive and you don't have Latin and any of those on their own wouldn't have meant anything but all together it seemed like a pretty good guess."

Wow. Well, that didn't feed him a revised backstory at all, but at least this isn't a complete disaster.

"Yeah. I don't even know what not being oddly evasive looks like hereabouts, honestly. - Want anything for an entire etiquette lesson?"

"We can work out what kind of favor it's worth at some point, it's not like we're not going to talk to each other ever again. --and the subtext there is that I have liked you so far and am going on the assumption that we're going to have a working relationship going forward."

At least as long as they both survive. Please shut up, brain.

"So -- most of the time people aren't going to object to you not telling them your secrets, nobody spills everything all the time it'd be an enormous liability, but people do get fairly annoyed if they think you're being deliberately deceptive, because that impacts their ability to trust you as an ally? And saying 'ah, one of the ones who's going to die' gets... beyond the point where you're just not mentioning, if the thing you're implying with it is false."