Chapter 127: Congratulations, Lady Frostfall

The ceremony ended with one last round of applause, and the Queen left the stage with Hex at her side. The whole hall stood up at once, and half of it started pushing toward our row.

I barely noticed. I was too busy staring at the blue window floating in front of my face.

MANUSCRIPT — NEW CANON ESTABLISHED

"The Sister Who Lived"

Hex Frostfall survives the Founder’s Play. The villainess thread has been overwritten.

+200 MP Bonus Reward:

Racial Skill Awakened: FOXFIRE — Lv.1

Summon up to three orbs of fox-flame that circle your body. Orbs can be thrown, or detonated on command. Fox-flame burns with your Light affinity.

New Skill: LIGHTSTEP — Lv.1

Turn your body into light and cross up to fifteen feet in an instant. Long cooldown.

I read it three times. Up until now, my biggest payouts had always come from dragging the old plot back onto its rails. This time, I’d thrown the original plot in the trash, and the Manuscript had paid me double my best record, plus three whole levels.

In other words, the system wasn’t only rewarding me for fixing the old story anymore. It was rewarding me for writing a new one.

[I can throw fireballs!? I can teleport!? I’m finally a real protagonist!]

I closed the window and looked up. Then my excitement died on the spot.

Serena wasn’t standing next to me anymore. The crowd had swallowed her whole. I could just barely see her white hair in the middle of a ring of noble girls, all of them talking at once.

I pushed my way in. I had to elbow two second-years and duck under someone’s fan to get close enough to hear.

"Congratulations, Lady Frostfall! You’ll make such a beautiful princess!"

"Thank you, Lady Orsetta. That’s very kind of you to say."

"The Winter Ball! Oh, I’m so jealous! Have you picked out a dress yet?"

"Not yet. I’d be glad to hear your advice, if you have any to give."

"Lady Frostfall, my mother asked me to pass on her very best wishes..."

"Please thank her for me. I’ll write to her myself this week."

I stopped dead.

Serena was smiling at them. She thanked each girl by name, she tilted her head politely when they spoke, and she even laughed at the right moments. It was the perfect behavior Dame Brask had spent two weeks trying to drill into her, and Serena was doing all of it flawlessly.

That scared me more than the Forest Warden ever had. The Serena I knew would have told these girls to get out of her way, or at least glared at them until they ran.

Then I looked down at her right hand, which was resting against her skirt. It was shaking.

Her fingers kept curling toward a fist, and every time, she forced them flat again. In other words, Serena wanted to kill someone very badly, and the only thing holding her back was the number of witnesses.

[I need to get her out of here right now!!!]

"Excuse me, ladies!" I squeezed in beside her and grabbed her wrist. "Sorry! Palace attendant business! It’s very urgent!"

I dragged her through a side door into the empty corridor. The noise from the hall faded behind us.

Serena pulled her wrist free and folded her arms.

I tried to smile.

"So... does this mean I get to be your maid of honor?"

Serena stared at me with a completely blank face, and my smile slid right off.

"This was decided years ago," she said. "It was settled long before the academy, and long before I ever met you. Hex has been working on it for months, and now the Queen has announced it in front of the entire school. It’s done."

"Serena, wait! If you don’t want this, we can figure something..."

"Don’t make a scene, Kohaku." Her voice was quiet and perfectly even. "Not here, and not for me."

She turned and walked away down the corridor. I stood there with my mouth hanging open, trying to come up with anything at all to say.

Halfway to the stairs, she stopped, though she didn’t look back at me.

"Report to the palace tomorrow morning," she said. "You’re still my attendant, and your first duty will be helping with the wedding preparations."

Then she left.

In other words, starting tomorrow, my job was to help Serena marry Aldric.

---

When I got back to our room that night, Lily was sitting on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, with her hairbrush lying in her lap.

Every single night, Lily hummed while she brushed her hair. Tonight, the room was completely quiet.

[Uh oh.]

I shut the door behind me and put on my best smile.

"I’m home, darling~"

That was her cue to jump up, take my bag, and ask how my day at work was, even though neither of us had a job.

Tonight, Lily only looked up at me.

"Welcome home."

I sat down on the bed beside her. Since I didn’t know what else to do, I pulled her into my lap.

She let me. She curled up against my chest with her head tucked under my chin, and her bare legs draped over my thigh. Her nightgown was so thin that I could feel exactly how warm she was through it. On any other night, that alone would have had me making heart eyes for an hour.

"Lily? What’s wrong?"

"I don’t know," she mumbled into my collarbone. "I’ve been sitting here trying to figure it out, and I can’t. I should be happy for her, shouldn’t I? Everyone in the hall was so happy. Hex was happy, the Queen was happy..."

"You don’t have to be happy."

"But I don’t even know what I’m upset about!" She grabbed a fistful of my shirt. "I only just got her back, Kohaku! We barely spoke for years, and then after the play, she finally... she finally looked at me the way she used to. Now she’s marrying the prince. She’ll live in the palace, she’ll belong to the crown, and I’ll have to bow every time I see her."

I didn’t have anything clever to say, so I stroked her hair until her breathing slowed down.

Then she tilted her head back and looked up at me with wet blue eyes.

"Can you fix it?"

"Yeah," I said immediately.

[What the fuck did you just say, you dumb fox!?] A different side of my own mind said. [No you can’t!]

Lily’s whole face lit up. She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me, hard enough to knock me backward onto the mattress. She landed on top of me with her hands pressed flat on my chest, and her nightgown rode all the way up around her hips.

"I knew it! I knew you could!" She kissed me again. "You always fix everything!"

"Ha ha... of course I do..."

[Wait. I only said yes because I hate saying no to her. But, actually, how the fuck could I possibly stop Serena from getting married!?]

Lily didn’t notice the panic on my face. She snuggled down on top of me, pulled the blanket over us both, and was asleep within five minutes.

I waited until her breathing was slow and even. Then I opened the Manuscript.

If I was going to stop a royal wedding, I needed to know what was waiting at the Winter Ball. In the original novel, there had never been an engagement, because Serena was already the villainess by then. The canon ball would be very different from the real one, but it was the only map I had.

MANUSCRIPT — View Scene: "The Winter Ball"

Cost: 15 MP

Current MP: 255

The text unrolled in front of my eyes.

The chandelier blazed above them like a thousand frozen stars, and Lily’s heart pounded as Prince Aldric took her hand.

"May I have this dance, my lady?" he asked, his voice like velvet thunder.

They swept across the floor. Every eye in the ballroom was on them. The music swelled as they spun beneath the chandelier, closer and closer, until their faces were only a breath apart.

"Lily," Aldric whispered. "There’s something I must tell you. I..."

But then the clock struck midnight, and the moment was lost.

I pressed my face into Lily’s hair to keep from groaning out loud.

[Velvet thunder!? What does that even mean!? Fifteen-year-old me, what were you doing!?]

Still, I read it carefully. In canon, the Winter Ball was the night Aldric and Lily almost confessed to each other. The whole ballroom stopped to watch them dance under that chandelier, and the only thing that saved Aldric from finishing his sentence was the clock.

Near the bottom of the scene, after a long section about dresses, there was one line sitting all by itself.

Far away, a shadow fell over the chapel.

I remembered writing that line. I’d typed it at two in the morning because it sounded cool and mysterious, and I had never written a single word about what it meant.

I skimmed right past it. Then I closed the Manuscript, wrapped my arms around Lily, and went to sleep.