Chapter 126: That Smile... That Damn Smile

Serena took me to the little tea room on the third floor of the library, which was always empty in the mornings. She ordered a pot of black tea from the attendant, sent him away, and sat down across from me at a small round table by the window.

Then she didn’t say anything at all, for a while.

She stared at her teacup. She stirred it, even though she hadn’t put anything in it. She glanced out the window, and then back at her cup.

I couldn’t take the silence for more than a minute. So, I did what I always did when I was nervous, and I leaned forward with my chin in my hand and grinned at her.

"So..." I wiggled my eyebrows. "You and my wifey, huh?"

Serena’s head snapped up. The tips of her ears went red.

"Don’t," she said.

"I’m just saying! The stars on the couch! The cape! I didn’t know you had it in you, Lady Frostfall~"

"I will pour this tea on your head," she said through gritted teeth.

"Okay, okay, I’ll stop!"

That was usually the point where she grabbed me by the collar, or kicked me under the table, or at least called me a mutt. Instead, she just looked back down at her teacup and went quiet again.

Her nose twitched. She frowned slightly, as if she’d caught a smell she didn’t like. Then she shook her head a little and let it go.

[Don’t think about it! She’s distracted, and she has something else on her mind!]

In other words, whatever she’d dragged me up here to say, it was bigger than any of my jokes.

"I was angry at you," Serena said finally. "After the play."

"Because of the front row?"

"Yes." She turned her teacup slowly on its saucer. "You swore to me you’d be there. I looked down after the curtain came up, and the seat was empty, and I wanted to tear the whole hall apart." She paused. "I wanted you to see it. I wanted you watching me. Don’t ask me why, because I’m not going to talk about why."

"I wasn’t going to ask!"

"Good." She took a long breath. "Then, yesterday morning, I went to see Hex."

My stomach dropped.

"She told me what really happened in the royal box," Serena said quietly. "All of it. Pryce, the knife. She told me she would have died up there, and that you were the reason she didn’t."

She looked up at me, and her face was completely serious. There wasn’t a trace of anger anywhere in it.

"You saved my sister," she said.

"Oh! Ha! Well, I mean..." I waved my good hand around. "It wasn’t that big a deal! I just happened to be there! I had a tray! The cake knife was right there on the floor! Anybody would have done it! Honestly, Hex did most of the work, and I mostly just bled a lot and then fell over..."

Serena stood up.

I thought she was leaving. Instead, she stepped around the table, stopped right in front of my chair, put her hands at her sides, and bowed.

This was a full, formal, deep bow, the kind a noble gives to the Queen, bent all the way from the waist with her white hair falling forward over her shoulders.

My brain completely shut down.

Serena Frostfall did not bow. She didn’t bow to teachers, or to nobles, or to the crown prince she was supposed to marry. She had refused to bow to Dame Brask for two straight weeks.

Now she was bowing to me, in a library tea room, over a pot of cold tea.

"S-Serena!? What are you doing? Stop that!!!" I leapt up out of my chair so fast I knocked it over. "Get up! Somebody’s going to see! You’re going to ruin your reputation! I’m going to die of embarrassment right here on this floor!"

"Thank you, Kohaku," she said, still bent over.

"You’re welcome! Please stand up!"

Slowly, she straightened up.

Then she laughed.

It was soft and surprised, and it slipped out of her before she could stop it. Her shoulders dropped, and all the tension she’d been carrying since the day I met her seemed to drain right out of her. Then she smiled at me, with her whole face, wide and open and relieved.

My heart skipped a beat.

In the original novel, Serena never smiled like that. She sneered at Lily, she glared at the prince, and after the festival, she stopped smiling altogether. Teen-me had never even thought to write it, because Serena was only ever supposed to be the villain.

[Holy shit... A smile the readers of the original story never got to see.]

---

The closing ceremony for the Cultural Festival had been pushed back two days because of the palace investigation, so it was finally held that afternoon, in the great hall.

For the first time in weeks, everything was fine.

The rain machine had been taken down. The cardboard ship was gone. The royal box at the back of the hall had new carpet and a brand-new set of chairs, and if anyone in the audience noticed, nobody said a thing. The whole academy was packed in, every seat full and students standing along the walls, and the air smelled like leftover festival food.

Marisol was sitting two rows ahead of me with the café cash box open in her lap, counting coins under her breath.

"...forty-one silver, forty-two, forty-three..." She clutched a fistful of coins to her chest. "A record! It’s a record, darling! The highest profit any first-year café has ever made in the history of the academy!"

"That’s great, Marisol!"

"Your gold coin from the professor is in here, by the way. I’ve decided it’s mine."

Beside her, Fenna was eating lemon cakes out of a paper bag. I was almost positive that the bag belonged to the third-year sitting on her other side, who kept glancing at it sadly. Fenna caught me looking, grinned with her chipped fang, and offered me one.

I took it.

I was standing at the end of our row, with Lily on my left and Serena on my right. Lily was holding my hand and swinging it a little, humming to herself. Serena had her arms folded and was looking straight ahead at the stage, but every so often, she glanced sideways at me. Every time I caught her doing it, she looked away again.

I took a bite of my lemon cake and let out a long breath.

I thought about everything that had happened. Hex was alive, and so was the Queen. Pryce was gone. Serena hadn’t locked herself in her room for three days, and she wasn’t going to turn into the villainess. Lily and Serena were closer than they’d been since they were six years old. The play had been a hit, the café had made a fortune, and my arm was nearly healed.

In other words, for once, the plot had actually worked out.

[Look at that. I’m a genius. I’m the greatest author who ever lived.]

At the front of the hall, the Headmaster stepped aside, and the whole room rose to its feet.

The Queen walked out onto the stage.

She was wearing her dark red shawl again, with a simple silver circlet on her gray hair. Hex walked two steps behind her in full uniform, with her bandaged arm tucked behind her back. When she reached the edge of the stage, Hex’s eyes swept across the crowd, found me, and she winked.

The Queen waited for everyone to sit, then smiled out at the hall.

"Thank you all," she said. Her voice was soft, but it carried all the way to the back wall. "I want to thank the academy for a wonderful festival. I especially want to thank the first-year class for the Founder’s Play. I’ve seen it every year for forty years, and I believe this was the finest performance I have ever watched."

The whole hall burst into applause. Somewhere backstage, I was pretty sure I heard Hugo start crying.

"I would also like to thank," the Queen continued, "whoever made those lemon cakes."

Her eyes passed over our row for just a second. Then she moved on, and I nearly choked on mine.

"Finally," the Queen said, "I have one more announcement, and I can think of no better place to make it than here, among the young people of this kingdom."

She turned and held out one hand toward the side of the stage.

Prince Aldric Stellaris-Vane stepped out of the wings. The light caught his golden hair, and he paused for one moment in a perfect pose, the way he always did.

"It gives me great joy," the Queen said, "to formally announce the engagement of my son, Prince Aldric, to Lady Serena Frostfall. The engagement will be sealed before the whole court at the Winter Ball."

The hall exploded.

Everyone was on their feet again, cheering and clapping. A group of noble girls in the front row started squealing. Somebody threw flowers. On stage, Aldric raised one hand to the crowd, and Hex clapped loudly behind the Queen, beaming with pride, because she had been planning this engagement for months.

Next to me, Serena had gone completely still.

Her arms were still folded, her face had gone as white as her hair, and as far as I could tell, she had stopped breathing. She was staring straight at the stage, at Aldric’s dead eyes and perfect smile, without blinking once.

On my other side, Lily’s hand had gone stiff in mine.

In the original novel, this engagement had never happened. After the festival, Serena had turned against everyone, and the betrothal had fallen apart along with everything else. I’d been so busy saving Hex and keeping Serena from becoming the villainess that I’d never once thought about what came next for the girl who didn’t turn evil.

She was still engaged to the crown prince.

The applause kept roaring around us, louder and louder, while Serena stood frozen between me and the aisle.

[... What?]