Chapter 107: Fox In A Penguin Suit

Serena took one look at me and closed her eyes. She let out a deep sigh that came from the depths of her soul.

"Button your shirt."

"I can’t," I said.

"Sakana."

"No, I literally can’t! Marisol spent forty minutes on it. It’s the biggest shirt she could find in the whole city, and the top three buttons still don’t reach the holes. She said if I pulled any harder, one would pop off and hit somebody in the eye."

The suit was black and fitted, and Marisol had cut a slit in the back of the trousers for my tail. The jacket was perfect. The shirt under it was open to the middle of my chest.

It wasn’t my fault! I’d been reborn into a body that just happened to have gratuitous, huge melons. What could I do!?

Serena opened her eyes again. They went straight down to my cleavage, stayed there for a full second, and came back up furious.

"Keep your damn jacket closed," she said.

"... It doesn’t close either."

She clicked her tongue and stalked off toward the banquet hall. I followed three steps behind with Dame Brask, who was already writing something in her notebook about this interaction.

The herald at the door was a bald old man whose voice made the nearest guests flinch.

"Lady Serena Frostfall!" he boomed. Then, he looked down at his card, looked at me, looked back at the card, and cleared his throat. "And her attendant, Miss Kohaku Sakana, of the... Commoner Scholarship."

Every head in the hall turned toward me.

There had to be a hundred and fifty people in there, all of them in silk and gold and wearing more jewelry than I’d seen in my whole life. They stared at my ears, my tail, and my chest, in roughly that order. A woman in a purple gown actually lifted a pair of opera glasses.

[Okay. That’s fine. I’ve been stared at before. Just smile and walk.]

Halfway down the stairs, a man in a red coat stepped in front of me, took off his cloak, and handed it to me without looking at my face.

"Hang that somewhere dry, girl."

I looked at the cloak, and then at him.

"Sure," I said, and threw it over a passing waiter.

Serena snorted.

At the table, I sat between Serena and an elderly duke with a beard down to his belt. There were six forks next to my plate, four spoons, three knives, and a small silver thing that looked like it was made for murdering crabs. I reached for the nearest fork, and Serena kicked me under the table without looking at me. I reached for the next one. She kicked me again.

[What the fuck?]

"Which one?" I whispered.

"The outside one, you idiot."

"Which outside? There’s two outsides!"

The duke leaned over and peered at me through a monocle.

"Forgive me, young lady. Are you Lady Frostfall’s pet?"

I blinked.

"Her attendant," I said.

"Ah. Is that different?"

Across the table, a young noblewoman whispered to her friend behind a lace fan, and the friend giggled and glanced at my chest. An old man farther down muttered "fox" like it was a swear. Dame Brask wrote that down too, for some reason.

I ate a bread roll. Everybody watched me eat it, judgmentally. I ate another one out of spite.

[I’m not her pet! I mean... Unless she wants me to be, hehe. But not literally!]

Serena was the strange part. Since we’d walked in, she had sat rigid in her chair, holding her fork in her fist like a dagger. Now that the whole room was looking at me instead of her, she had loosened her grip and was holding it like an actual fork. She cut her meat properly. When the duke asked me whether foxes could understand music, she had to put her napkin over her mouth.

I finally understood.

[Aha. So I’m the lightning rod. I take all the judgmental comments and she gets to enjoy being a person for once. Eh, I’m okay with it. I mean, not like I give a shit what anyone here thinks.]

I was reaching for a third bread roll when the herald boomed again from the top of the stairs.

"Lady Hexilia Frostfall!"

Serena’s knife stopped halfway through her meat.

A woman was coming down the staircase in a pale blue gown. She was older than Serena, maybe by five or six years, and taller, with her white hair pinned up in a crown. She smiled at the room, and the whole room smiled back.

Then, she looked down the length of the table, found Serena, and smiled wider.

Beside me, the fork in Serena’s hand slowly bent in half.

"Serena?" I whispered. "Who is that?"

"My sister."

I blinked again.

[She has a SISTER???]

Hexilia Frostfall walked the whole length of the banquet table, and nobles stood to bow as she passed. She called the duke "Bertie" and stole a grape off a marquess’s plate. At our end of the table, she stopped behind Serena’s chair and put both hands on Serena’s shoulders.

"There she is! My cute little sister, all grown up and getting married! Look at you, pup. You’re wearing earrings."

Serena hunched down under her sister’s hands.

"Hex. Please, not here."

"Where else am I supposed to do it? I’ve barely seen you in four months." Hexilia leaned down and kissed the top of Serena’s head in front of everyone. Then, she turned to me and held out her hand. "You must be the attendant. Hexilia Frostfall, but call me Hex. I’m a captain in the Queen’s Guard, and lately I’m also the one stuck planning this engagement."

I shook her hand. Her grip was strong, and her palm was hard with sword calluses.

[Hexilia. I know that name. I wrote it somewhere, in a guest list or something. So why can’t I remember anything else about her?]

"Kohaku Sakana," I said. "Nice to meet you."

"Oh, I know who you are. The whole palace is talking about you." Hex grinned at my shirt. "That’s Marisol Vantecca’s work, right? She made a dress for a viscountess last year."

Hex dragged a chair over from the next table and sat down between Serena and me without asking anyone. The duke scooted down to make room. She poured herself a glass of wine, poured one for me, and then took the bent fork out of Serena’s hand.

"You bent another one?"

"It was already bent," Serena said.

Hex set it down and scratched Serena lightly behind the ear, just above her earring, while she kept talking to me.

"When she was little, she bent every spoon in the house. Our mother had to buy wooden ones."

Serena leaned into her sister’s hand, just slightly. A second later she noticed, jerked her head away, and glared at the tablecloth. Hex took her hand back and didn’t say anything about it.

[She knows exactly where to scratch. Like she’s seeing wolf ears instead of human ears. Huh.]

I looked from Hex to Serena and back again. Serena was sitting very straight now, chin up, hands folded in her lap. Dame Brask had spent all week trying to get her to sit like that and gotten nowhere. Whenever Hex spoke, Serena’s eyes went right to her, like she was waiting to find out if she’d done something wrong.

[Oh no. Oh no, she’s NICE. And Serena WORSHIPS her.]

Hex propped her chin on her hand.

"So you’re the one from the letters, right?"

Serena went white.

"Hex!"

"She writes to me every week," Hex said. "Usually it’s her grades and how much she hates everyone at that academy. But lately there’s been this fox. The first letter said you were the most irritating creature she’d ever met in her life." She took a sip of wine. "The next two letters about you were a lot longer."

"I’m going to get some air," Serena said.

She stood up so fast her chair scraped the floor, grabbed me by the wrist, and hauled me out of my seat.

"Have fun, you two!" Hex called after us.

Serena dragged me out of the hall, down a corridor, and into a cloakroom full of fur coats. She slammed the door and shoved me back into the coats. Before I could say anything, she dropped to her knees and yanked my trousers open.

"Serena, wait! What are you doing?"

"If you say one word about those letters," she said, glaring up at me, "I will kill you."

Then, she took my cock into her mouth.

She took it fast and deep, much too fast, and gagged almost immediately. Her throat was hot and wet and it squeezed around me. Her eyes started to water, but she didn’t pull back. She grabbed my hips with both hands and pushed herself further down, choking, until her nose was pressed against my stomach.

My knees buckled. I grabbed a fur coat with one hand and a fistful of her white hair with the other.

[... Okay I’ll think about this whole sister thing later. Holy shit!]