Chapter 10: Humiliation Ritual 2

"I really don’t like her," Lily muttered as she glared at the red dress.

"Mm, yeah, cunty, I mean, cunt, yeah," I replied while my mind started racing.

[Okay, I need to breathe and think about this structurally. The humiliation was only the trigger mechanism. The apprenticeship is the actual payload, and the professor is RIGHT THERE. Who says we even need the trigger? The trigger only exists to create drama. Point A is that Professor Corvane doesn’t know Lily, and point B is that Professor Corvane teaches Lily. I can connect those points myself. I can use words, like an adult!]

I had already located the professor at the third table. She had black hair with a grey streak she’d possessed since her twenties, a glass of wine in one hand, and posture so perfect it made my own back ache in sympathy.

"Lily, do you see that woman at the third table? She has a grey streak in her hair, and she’s drinking wine like it’s medicine, yeah?"

"Yes, I see her!" Lily nodded eagerly, proud of the accomplishment.

"That’s Professor Corvane from the Mage Course. She’s a legend, and I heard," I lied, "that she sometimes takes private students. You should introduce yourself and ask her for lessons."

"... What? You want me to walk over there and ask her?"

"Fortune favors the bold, sweetheart. The worst thing she can do is say no."

Lily hesitated for a moment. Then she set her jaw, smoothed her skirt, and marched across the garden.

I settled beside a hedge with my drink and watched.

[There she goes. Look at her! She’s a little village girl walking up to a living legend and asking for private lessons. That’s plucky, and professors love that kind of thing. Come on, Corvane. Look at those big blue eyes. Behold the protagonist and feel the pull of narrative gravity. Please adopt her already.]

Their conversation lasted roughly forty seconds.

Lily gave the professor a small bow, then returned to me.

"She said no."

"She said what?"

"She said that she doesn’t take first-year students and that the academy curriculum exists for a reason." Lily shrugged, though her shoulders sat a little lower than before. "She was polite about it! It’s okay. Asking her was still worth a try."

[... FUCK!]

I kept a pleasant expression on my face while I finally did the math I should have done an hour ago.

[Canon Corvane didn’t adopt a random first-year either. That was the point. She adopted a crying, humiliated girl she found sobbing in the powder room because she felt pity. Pity was the whole mechanism. Lily isn’t wearing rags tonight because I bought her a dress. Serena didn’t humiliate Lily because she insulted ME instead. I removed every single input and then sent Lily over to collect the output. Corvane has no reason to feel sorry for her.]

"Kohaku, are you all right? You’ve got a scary look on your face."

"I was thinking. Rare, I know," I said. "Stay here and guard my drink with your life."

I walked over to the professor myself.

I had no plan whatsoever. But, when charm and structure failed, there was always begging.

Begging was honest work.

"Professor Corvane! Hi! I’m a huge fan. Seriously, I’m an enormous fan. Anyway, this is about my friend. You met the blonde girl a moment ago, right? Her name is Lily, and she’s brilliant. I mean, she’s genuinely brilliant. She’s once-in-a-generation brilliant. I know you don’t take first-year students as private apprentices, and I know the curriculum exists for a reason, but the curriculum wasn’t built for someone like her. She has, and I know how this sounds, but she has a destiny, ma’am. She has the big kind of destiny, and she needs a real teacher! She needs someone brilliant, and you’re the most brilliant person here. I mean no offense to the string quartet, of course. I’ll even throw in free labor! I’ll clean your lab, grade your papers, and organize whatever the mage version of a garage is. My hours are flexible, and I am begging you!"

At some point during my speech, Professor Corvane had turned fully toward me.

She placed her wine on the table, rested her chin on one hand, and watched me with a small smile.

"Keep going."

"... What?"

"I want you to keep going," she said.

"I, uh..." Her answer knocked me out of my rhythm. "I forgot where I was. Right, I was offering labor. My rates are free, my hours are flexible, and I have no respect for normal working hours."

"Mm. What was your name again?"

"Kohaku. I’m a first-year in the Knight Course, and I am currently begging."

"Kohaku," she repeated.

She said my name slowly. Her eyes made a brief tour of the entire fox package. They moved from my ears to my tail before returning to my face.

Her smile deepened.

"Well, you have made an interesting case," she said. "Perhaps we can work something out."

[YES! YES YES YES! The flag has been restored! I would like to thank groveling, the oldest and most reliable form of magic.]

"Walk with me."

Professor Corvane rose from her chair, took me by the wrist, and pulled me away from the party.

She led me down a path lit by floating lanterns, then through a side door and into the manor itself. She moved with the brisk confidence of a woman who knew the building.

[A private conversation makes sense. Of course it does. She wants to negotiate the terms away from all the nobles, which is perfectly reasonable. We don’t want rumors about the apprenticeship spreading before everything is settled. This does look suspiciously like the hallway leading to the powder room, and that would be an unconventional place for a meeting, but academics are eccentric. I wrote her that way, so I really have nobody to blame but myself.]

And once we were in, she pushed me against the wall and kissed me.

A full kiss, with full tongue.

One of her hands held my jaw and tilted my head to her preferred angle. The other pressed flat against the wall beside my head, boxing me in.

My mind went completely blank.

Somewhere inside all that static, an old memory surfaced.

It had been a gag. A recurring gag that I wrote for flavor.

During Lily’s private lessons, Professor Corvane would routinely stop in the middle of a lecture to rant about the few beastkin students in the academy. She would go on and on about how cute they were. She loved their ears. She loved their tails. She once complained that it should be illegal for anyone to have such a distracting tail during a mana theory lecture. Another time, she admitted that she’d nearly proposed to a wolfkin courier after seeing him wag.

Lily always played the straight man.

"Professor, you’re being weird again. Can we please go back to the runes?"

The readers thought it was funny. I thought it was funny too, because the whole thing was harmless.

It was harmless because Lily was human.

I was not human.

I had the ears. I had the tail. I had walked up to this woman in a fitted dress and begged her, cutely and at length, while offering free labor and flexible hours.

Professor Corvane finally pulled back by an inch. Her tongue passed over her lips, and apparently, the tasting notes were favorable.

"Yes," she murmured. "I think we can definitely work something out."

I swallowed.

[Please be gentle.]