Chapter 109: Replacement

The next morning, Lily rehearsed a few lines in front of me in her nightgown.

She stood on her bed with the script in one hand and my hairbrush in the other, since the princess carried a scepter in the second act and the props table hadn’t finished one yet. I sat on my own bed across from her, holding the tea she’d made me and wearing the flowered sock she’d lent me, and I tried my best to look like I was paying attention.

“Sir Knight, you came!” Lily pressed the hairbrush to her heart. “Even though the stars themselves forbade it, and even though my father swore an oath upon the moon, you still came for me!”

Her eyes were actually watering. She wasn’t bad at all.

“Mm-hm. That was great, hon. Very… moony.”

I nodded robotically as my attention went back to the calculus in my head.

The real problem was that I’d read the whole script last night, and the masked knight never left the stage. He arrived at the masquerade at the start of Act Three. After that, he had to duel the sorcerer brother, carry the princess off a burning ship, and kiss her under the rain machine until the curtain came down. Meanwhile, the royal box sat at the back of the great hall, up two flights of stairs and behind a guarded door.

If Pryce pulled out his knife while I was standing under that rain machine on stage, the most I could do for Hex was gasp very dramatically in her general direction.

In other words, I was trapped in this play.

“Okay, your turn!” Lily flipped two pages and pointed the hairbrush at me. “It’s the part where you’d cross ten thousand burning seas for me. I underlined it for you in blue, so you can’t miss it.”

I took a sip of tea.

“I’m gonna drop the role.”

Lily froze with the hairbrush still pointed at me. Then, very slowly, she sat down on her bed, and the script slid out of her lap onto the floor.

“D-Drop it?” Her bottom lip started to wobble. “But I already bought us matching ribbons for opening night! They’re silver, to go with my dress and your mask, and I sewed our initials on the ends, and the lady at the shop said they were the cutest thing she’d ever…”

Her voice cracked and gave out entirely.

[Oh. I, uh… could have delivered the news a bit more carefully.]

I put my tea down so fast it sloshed onto the nightstand, crossed the room in two steps, and pulled her into a hug. She was small enough that her face ended up squashed against my chest, which happened every time I hugged her and given that she never complained, I could assume she liked it.

“Hey!!! Listen to me, okay?” I rubbed her back. “You heard me read lines last week. I’m horrible at this! If I get up on that stage in front of four hundred people, they’re going to laugh at both of us, because you’ll be standing right next to me, in your pretty dress, even though you’re saying your lines perfectly. Then everybody goes home remembering the fox who ruined it and the cute actress who was guilty by association.”

Lily sniffled into my chest.

“You’re not that bad…”

I nearly laughed. Even the single kindest human in the world couldn’t pretend I was actually good at it.

I tightened the hug and rested my chin on top of her head.

“This is your big night. You deserve a knight who can actually act, so I’m stepping down. I’m doing this because… Because I care about you so much!”

[Wow. That came out way better than it sounded in my head.]

Lily went perfectly still. Then she pulled back, her eyes enormous and shining, and grabbed both of my hands.

“Kohaku…” She was crying again, but this time she was smiling through it. “You’d give up the lead just so I could shine? That’s the most romantic thing anybody has ever done for me! Nobody has ever quit anything for me before!”

She kissed me on the cheek, then the other cheek, then the tip of my nose. After that, she flopped back onto her bed, hugged the script to her chest, and kicked her feet in the air.

[Phew. Crisis averted.]

Then she sat straight up.

“Wait. If you’re not the knight, who’s going to be my knight? Professor Sabine wants the final cast list by Friday, and the knight has the most lines in the whole play after me!”

I opened my mouth, and then I closed it again, because that was actually a good question.

Aldric was the obvious choice, since he’d played the part in the original. However, he would spend the entire kiss scene posing for the audience, and he was also about to get engaged to Serena. Fenna would sign up in a heartbeat, but she’d probably rewrite the wedding vows in Act Four to include a litter count. As for Perrin, he had already left Lily alone with a forest monster once, so I wasn’t going to let him anywhere near her with a sword, even a wooden one.

Lily needed someone up there she trusted. It had to be someone who could stand in front of four hundred people without flinching, someone who could hold a sword like she meant it, someone who…

“Serena,” I said, absentmindedly.

Lily’s face went white. Then it went red, all the way up to the tips of her ears.

“S-Serena!?” She swayed where she sat.

Then, Lily’s eyes rolled up, and she tipped sideways off the edge of the bed. I caught her about a foot above the floor.

“Lily? Hon?”

[… Another thing I, admittedly, could have dropped on her a tad more gracefully.]

—

That afternoon, I went to daily prayer.

“…and then the dance instructor told me to smile with my shoulders!” Serena hissed. She was sitting on the little bench in the confessional booth with her skirt bunched up around her waist, and I was kneeling between her legs with her cock in my mouth. “What does that even mean? Shoulders don’t smile! I asked him to show me, he did a little shrug, and I nearly snapped his neck!”

“Mm-hmm,” I said, as well as I could.

Every time she got angry about something, her thighs clamped down on either side of my head. Right now, she was angry about a lot of things.

“After that, I had a dress fitting. It was my third dress fitting this week! The seamstress stuck me with a pin four times. Four times! She apologized after every single one, and I swear she meant it less each time!”

Her hand slid into my hair and tightened. I took her cock deeper, and she let out a long, shaky breath through her nose. She was hot and heavy on my tongue, and her hips had started twitching up to meet me.

“Tomorrow,” she said, much more quietly, “the Queen’s secretary wants to walk me through the seating chart for the engagement dinner. It’s going to take three hours, and he’s going to tell me how lucky I am again. I just know it.”

By then, I was only half listening, because my attention had drifted back to the cast list. Serena was fed up with the palace, she had her fingers in my hair, and she was maybe thirty seconds from coming.

In other words, she was never going to be easier to talk into something than she was right now.

I pulled off with a wet pop.

“So, hey! Funny thing~” I smiled up at her. “How would you like to play the masked knight in our class play?”

Serena stared down at me. Her cock twitched against my cheek, clearly upset about the break.

“…What?”

“The lead! The masked knight! The role’s open now, and I think you’d be perfect for it!”

“That’s your role.” Her red eyes narrowed. “Why would you give it up?”

[Because I need to be up two flights of stairs stopping a man from stabbing your sister. I can’t exactly say that, though.]

“I’m just not a very good actress, hehe.” I gave her my biggest, most innocent smile. “Seriously, you should hear me read lines. It’s a disaster!”

“You never stop talking. I’d have thought performing was the only thing you were good at.”

Then, she hesitated. Her eyebrows pulled together, and the hand in my hair went loose, which meant she was actually thinking about it. That was bad news. Serena only ever stopped to think when she was building a reason to say no.

“I don’t have time for a play,” she said. “Brask has my schedule filled until the…”

“W-Wait!!! Think about it for a second!” I grabbed her knees. “If you’re the lead, you have to come to rehearsals with my class every single night for the next three weeks. That means you’d miss your dance lessons, your dress fittings, and your three-hour seating chart. The Queen loves the Founder’s Play, so nobody in the palace is going to tell you to skip it. Brask can’t touch you!”

Serena went completely still.

“Every night?”

“Every night!”

“Done!” She grabbed my head with both hands. “I accept! Tell Sabine tonight, and tell Brask I’ve devoted myself to the arts! I don’t care how you say it!”

Outside the booth, a pocket watch clicked shut.

“Lady Frostfall?” Brask called. “Is everything all right in there?”

“Everything is wonderful, Dame Brask!” Serena shouted back. “I’ve found my calling!”

Then she pulled my mouth back down onto her cock, and I didn’t get to say anything else for a while.

[I’ll tell her about the kiss in the rain later… Probably.]