Chapter 105: Culture Festival

"Kohaku. Kohakuuuu, you’re going to be late."

I spoke into my pillow and even I didn’t understand what I said.

Lily pulled the blanket clean off me, folded it in half, and set it at the foot of the bed. By the time I managed to sit up, she was already dressed with her hair brushed, and a cup of tea was steaming on my side of the desk.

"Drink that first," she said. "Your left sock is under the bed again. I haven’t found the right one yet."

"Thanks, hon."

I drank the tea. I found the left sock, put it on, and then sat there with one bare foot and stared at the wall while my brain slowly started up.

Lily came back from the wardrobe and dropped one of her own socks in my lap. It had little embroidered flowers on the ankle.

"Eh, it’s fine. You can wear mine. And hold still."

She fixed my collar, retied the ribbon at my throat, and tucked a loose piece of hair behind my ear. Then, she took my bag off its hook and started going through it.

"Did you finish Professor Lucen’s reading?"

"Uh.... Mostly."

"Kohaku!"

"I read the first page and the last page. Everything in the middle is a guy explaining the first page slower."

She sighed, pulled a folded sheet of notes out of her own bag, and slid it into mine.

"Page twelve is the part he always asks about. I underlined it for you. Also, I packed you lunch, so please don’t give the sausages to Fenna again."

"She looked hungry, though."

"She always looks hungry. She eats four breakfasts." Lily buckled my bag and handed it to me. At the door, she turned her cheek toward me and waited.

I kissed it without thinking, and we went to class.

Sabine was already standing at the front of the lecture hall when we came in, with a tall stack of papers in her arms. She waited until everyone sat down, then she set the stack on the lectern.

"Good morning. In three weeks, the academy will hold its annual Cultural Festival. As is tradition, the first-year class will operate a maid café in the east courtyard."

Half the room cheered. The other half groaned. In the row behind me, Fenna raised her hand.

"Do we get to eat the food?"

"You do not." Sabine picked up the first paper off the stack. "Additionally, the faculty has decided that this class, specifically, will perform the Founder’s Play in the main hall on the final night of the festival. I’m told it’s a great honor."

My ears went flat against my head.

[The Founder’s Play. Oh, no. Oh, NO.]

I remembered the Founder’s Play. I remembered it because I wrote it, at fifteen, over one long weekend, while listening to the same sad song on repeat. In the novel, the play existed so every single love interest could fight over the leading role and Lily could accidentally get cast as the princess. I hadn’t bothered to write a good play for that. I had just thrown in every single thing I thought was cool at the time. And I thought Lily being cast as a princess was peak foreshadowing.

Sabine began to read from the first page.

"The Princess of the Fallen Star. A princess with no memory of her past is raised by humble farmers in a quiet village, until a mysterious masked knight arrives at her door with news of her true bloodline, her secret twin sister, and a curse that will destroy the kingdom when the red moon rises."

I slid about two inches down in my chair.

"The princess must choose between the masked knight, who is secretly the prince she was engaged to as a child, and the dark sorcerer, who is secretly the masked knight’s brother and only turned evil because nobody understood him." Sabine turned the page. "Then, she’s poisoned."

I slid down another two inches.

"There are eleven costume changes," Sabine went on, in a voice that told me she had already read the whole thing. "There is a sword fight on a burning ship in a thunderstorm. The princess regains her memory when she is kissed in the rain, and then the dark sorcerer dies in her arms and says, and I quote, ’Your tears are the only light I have ever known.’"

Somebody in the back row snorted. Odette raised her hand without looking up from her book.

"Who wrote this?"

"The author is unknown," Sabine said. "The script was found in the academy archives about forty years ago, and the faculty has been making first-years suffer through it ever since."

[It was me. I’m the author. It was fifteen-year-old me.]

My chin was level with the desk by then. I kept going. I slid all the way off the chair, folded myself up underneath the desk, and put my hands over my ears.

After a few seconds, Lily’s face appeared upside down in the gap between the desk and the chair.

"Kohaku? Are you okay?"

"I dropped my pencil."

"You don’t have a pencil down there," she said. "I packed all of your pencils in the front pocket of your bag this morning."

---

Sabine passed a basket down each row, and everyone dropped a folded slip of paper into it. It took about five minutes. Counting the votes took her less than one.

"For the role of the princess," Sabine said, unfolding the slips and sorting them into piles on the lectern, "Lily Everdawn, with thirty-one votes."

The class clapped. Lily went pink and covered her mouth with both hands.

"For the role of the masked knight, Kohaku Sakana, with twenty-nine votes." Sabine picked up a few more slips. "There were also three votes for Miss Sakana as the princess, one vote for the burning ship, and one vote that simply says, ’the fox and the blonde, obviously, they’re married.’"

"That one was mine," Fenna said proudly from the row behind me. "I also voted for you the normal way."

"You’re only supposed to vote once, Miss Greywild."

"I know. I just wanted to be sure."

The whole class laughed. I didn’t. I had just realized which role I’d been given.

The masked knight was the secret prince. He was the one who showed up at the princess’s door in the rain, the one she chose at the end of the play, and the one who kissed her memory back into her body in the third act. When I wrote this play, I’d meant for the masked knight to be Lily’s true love, and now thirty-one people had looked at the two of us and agreed.

Lily grabbed my arm with both hands and shook it.

"Kohaku! We’re the leads! I’ve never been in a play before, not even once. Back home, the village only did a harvest pageant, and they made me be the turnip every single year."

"That’s great," I said. I smiled and nodded. "That’s really great, Lily."

[I have to say those lines to her. Out loud. In front of the whole academy. OH MY GOD I’M GONNA DIE!]

I knew every single line in the script because I had written all of them. The knight’s big speech in the second act went, "Princess, even if the stars forget your name, my heart will keep it safe until the end of time." At fifteen, I thought that was the most romantic sentence anyone had ever written.

Performing it as a joke would have been fine. I could ham it up, make the audience laugh, and walk off stage with my dignity mostly in one piece. But Lily was sitting right beside me, glowing, with the script already hugged against her chest. She was going to say her lines like she meant them, and she’d look at me the whole time, waiting for me to mean mine back.

In front of four hundred people, while wearing a mask.

"We should practice every night," Lily said. "I can quiz you on your lines before bed."

"Sure," I said. "Every night sounds perfect, hon."

A little piece of my soul left my body and floated out the window.

---

Three days later, I was standing on a stool in the Noble Course sewing room while Marisol stuck pins into the side of my maid uniform.

"Hold still," she said, with two more pins between her lips. "And breathe in."

"I am breathing in."

"Breathe in more."

The uniform was black with a white apron, a white headband with frills on it, and a skirt that stopped a long way above my knees. It was the largest size the academy owned, according to Marisol, and it still wasn’t large enough. The buttons across my chest were holding on for dear life. Every time I moved my arms, I heard the thread creak.

My tail was the other problem. The skirt didn’t have a hole for it, so it was stuck underneath, lifting the whole back of the skirt up like a curtain.

"The customers are going to see everything," I said. "This is more lewd than when I flashed Serena."

"The customers are going to pay double," Marisol said. She stepped back to look at me, tilted her head, and made a small, satisfied noise. "I’m taking a percentage of the café tips, by the way. I’ve already told the treasurer."

"Since when?"

"Since I saw you in that uniform."

I turned to argue, and the top button of my blouse popped off. It flew across the room and pinged off the window.

At that exact moment, the door opened, and Lily walked in wearing her own maid uniform. She was carrying a tray with two cups of tea, because she’d thought I might be thirsty.

She looked at me. She looked at my chest, where two more buttons were already starting to strain. Then, she looked at the back of my skirt, which my tail had just lifted another inch.

The tray hit the floor.

"I’ll get a mop," Marisol said, and went to write something down in her ledger.