Chapter 41: Mountains

[... So how did it come to this, exactly?]

That was the question I was working on at seven in the morning, over a bowl of porridge, in the middle of the cafeteria, surrounded on all sides by beastkin women.

"Look at my hips," said the bear girl.

"I’d rather not."

"No, look at them properly. I’m giving you information here, Sakana." She turned sideways so I could get the full picture. "You’re a fox. Foxes are small. Fox kits come out fine, but they come out weak, and you know it! Now, a bear carries a fox kit to term with zero complications, and the kit comes out with my frame and your speed. How about THAT, huh?"

"No."

"What!?"

There were nine of them, all around me. Word had gotten around the Wildfolk row that some fox on the commoner scholarship went from Rank F to Rank C in under two months and then put Fenna Greywild on her back in front of four thousand people. Wildfolk take that sort of thing extremely seriously. Apparently the correct response to it is to find her at breakfast and propose.

The rabbit girl from the Mage Course had brought a chart.

"Litter sizes," she said, tapping it. "Now, you could space these out over a decade or so-"

"Please put the chart away."

"-but if you did them all at once, the math is honestly incredible."

A dragonkin third-year with horns leaned over the table from the other side and said her clan holds nine mountains and that I’d never have to work again...

... Which, I’ll be honest, was actually tempting.

[If I didn’t have to help Lily save the world, I’d absolutely take her up on that.]

Then Lily stood up.

She didn’t say anything at first. She just stood with her hands flat on the table and smiled at all of them. Then, her mana came up hard enough that the porridge in my bowl started rippling.

Every set of ears in a five-meter radius went flat.

"Good morning," Lily said pleasantly. "She’s eating. She hasn’t finished her porridge. Could you all come back later, please?"

The bear girl said something about how it had been nice to meet me. The rabbit rolled up her chart. The dragonkin took her nine mountains and left. In about twenty seconds the table was clear, and Lily sat back down and picked her spoon up.

[Okay, rare hot Lily moment.]

Then Fenna dropped into the seat across from me with a tray. Her nose had a splint on it and she looked delighted.

"Morning," she said. "Don’t get up, you’re eating." She started eating my bread. "So listen, I’ve been thinking about it all night. I lost. Fair and square, you got me clean, and the courtship claim’s void, that’s the rule and I’m not going to be weird about it."

I was shocked.

"Wow. Thank you. Genuinely, thank you, that’s very-"

"I’m still not giving up on you though."

[FUCK!]

"You’re the one for me!" she said, with her mouth full. "I knew it the second you helped me up. You’re kind, and you’re powerful, and I think that’s hot as hell! I’m gonna be honest, Sakana, I don’t think I can go back to my life after meeting you."

[Stop throwing crappy love song lyrics at me before nine in the morning!]

"Also I told my mother," Fenna added.

"You told your WHAT?"

This was gonna be a pain going forward, wasn’t it?

---

Training happened at the west yard at dawn, before the grounds filled up.

"Again," Lily said. "Your elbow drops on the fourth one. Every time, the fourth one, and that’s the one that gets you killed."

I did it again. My elbow dropped on the fourth one.

She stepped in behind me, put one hand under my arm and one on my hip, and pushed me back into the right shape. I decided to be flustered about that later.

I’d been chewing on something since we started these sessions.

I never wrote Lily’s training. I mean, I wrote that she was good with a sword and I wrote that she got better, but how that happened did so offscreen for four hundred pages because I couldn’t be bothered. So, aside from what I taught her... where did she learn all this?

She has forms. She has names for them. She’d been running me through a sequence for two days that she called the fourth opening, and when I asked where the first three were she said you don’t need those yet. Somebody taught her to say that.

[Right, she’s secretly a princess. God, past me. You didn’t even try to hide it, did you.]

"Kohaku."

"Yeah."

"You’ve stopped."

I had stopped, because I’d caught something over her shoulder, on the path that runs along the far side of the yard.

Perrin Alderltoft, walking with his arm out at the elbow like a man escorting somebody at a wedding.

On that arm, in Saint Course robes with pink hair coming out of the hood, was Reindl Ashcombe.

[Ah, the designated "damsel in distress".]

She was talking. He was nodding at about half the correct speed. Then she stumbled on something, and he caught her by the elbow. She bowed to him twice for it, and even from across the yard I could see her apologizing with her whole body.

[Wait a second...]

Perrin torched his run at Lily in the Spirit Forest when he left her standing in front of the Warden, and I said good riddance at the time. Perrin stays in the novel, though.

He gets a whole arc later, an actual one, where he does the single genuinely brave thing in his life and drags Reindl out of a cult basement. She spends the rest of the story thinking he’s the bravest man alive. They end it together. It’s her only romance and the only good thing that ever happens to that girl.

And she gets it because she believes in him first.

I looked at her holding his arm and doing her little grateful bows, and I ran the math on my Saturday.

[So I have to beat him. I have to beat him in front of the entire academy, and I don’t know that I can, he’s Knight Course and he’s twice my size, and even if I somehow pull it off... I have to do it without making her stop believing in him.]