It was not in Isas's nature to be fascinated with other people. On the whole he preferred plants, who would not leave him, or tell him he was inadequate, or force him to demonstrate his skills for family members he didn't even like. That was why he enjoyed Lightsbridge so much. The mages here tested and expanded upon his skill, and he was expected to know things. He was not fawned over, or his powers exclaimed upon; he could disappear into the masses of students that attended the sprawling college. Any attention drawn to him would be completely under his own control.
But she was an irregularity. Where he had been taught it was inappropriate to sit in the soil, to dirty his hands with common plants, she found a special pleasure in getting clothes filthy enough to need to change them. She'd been raised on a farm, he gathered. She acted like it. She sat in the sun wearing breeches bound at the calf and a wide sleeved tunic, barefoot but uncaring. She spoke with the vines outside her window, and carefully grew strawberries on the ledge. The strawberries were the first deliberate magic she ever did. She introduced a dye from one of the loom houses, stolen no doubt, and managed to produce several colors of strawberry. Isas was forced to admit that they were delicious and beautiful, though not aloud, of course.
That was something he was embarrassed about. He hadn't spoken to her about the incident with the roses. She'd shown him the extent of his own pride in thinking that only he was truly a mage, among the nearly two dozen novices in their group. He supposed his silence had been because he had been jealous of the ease and love with which she handled the plants. He caught himself wishing that he had been born a farmer, had grown up knowing plants and growing things as objects of affection and wonder.
She wasn't top of the class for the first year or so; she got distracted by something new in the gardens, and often failed to turn in some piece of work. Isas kept that distinction. But it irked him to no end how comfortable she was in the workshop, how easily she learned things that took him weeks to develop and understand.
Niva. The Anderran girl, a mud-roller. A short girl with a sharp tongue and the darkest red hair he'd ever seen. She was pretty enough, her pale skin being her only obvious vanity, but when she turned those furious eyes on you, you forgot about the beauty and remembered the sight of vicious thorns and stickers she could create when provoked.
The green magic inside her, that was what he was fascinated with, he told himself. Anything else was unthinkable.