Chapter 42: Darling

I had five MP left. Exactly enough for one short scene, which is the cheapest thing Manuscript sells.

I spent it on the worst four pages I have ever written.

"You dropped this," Perrin said, holding out the handkerchief.

Reindl’s hands flew to her mouth.

"Oh! Oh, thank you, thank you so much, I’m so sorry, I’m always dropping things, my mother says I’d lose my own head if it weren’t attached, I’m so sorry to have troubled you-"

"Hey. Hey." He smiled his easy smile. "No trouble. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?"

It goes on like that for four pages. At one point he calls her "little saint" and she nearly faints. I read the whole thing sitting on my dorm bed with my hand over my mouth.

The part I needed was on the page right before this.

There’s a line about why she was crying when he found her, and it’s this: she’d just watched Serena Frostfall beat him half to death in the quarterfinal.

I remembered the whole beat the second I saw it.

OG-Serena drew Perrin in the round of eight, and she spent four minutes taking him apart on purpose, talking the entire time, telling him he was a decoration, telling the crowd that this is what the Knight Course produces now. When he finally went down she stood over him and told the referee to hurry up, because she had a real opponent waiting. Four thousand people watched a nice, loud... slightly dim-witted boy get humiliated by an aristocrat with a mean mouth, and four thousand people hated her for it.

And a pink-haired girl in the stands decided that Sir Perrin Alderltoft was the bravest man alive.

[So, there we have it. The humiliation is the road forward. It needs to happen. The audience has to hate the winner. That’s the whole engine.]

Except this timeline has no Serena in his bracket. This timeline has Serena somewhere on the other side of the board, being mean toward others.

Which left the slot open.

I put my head in my hands and worked through it one more time, looking for literally any other option, and there wasn’t one. To save Reindl Ashcombe’s only love story, somebody had to get in a ring with Perrin on Saturday, wreck him, and be so unbearable about it that four thousand people boo.

[Yeah, the answer’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m going to have to cunt it up!]

---

{Reindl}

Perrin bought me ice cream.

I told him he didn’t have to and he said a knight who lets a lady buy her own ice cream isn’t much of a knight. I laughed a little too hard and apologized. He didn’t mind.

It was the pear kind. I’d never had the pear kind before!

"So you’re on the Church stipend?" he asked.

"Mm. Full stipend. They send two of us a year from the whole diocese." I held the cone with both hands so I wouldn’t drop it. "My parish is Little Arden, which, well, you won’t have heard of it. Nobody’s heard of it. It’s about nine days east, and it’s mostly sheep. My mother runs the alms house. I’ve been setting bones since I was eleven, so when the examiners came through and the gift tested clean, that was sort of that. Everyone had a little party. The whole village came." I looked at the ice cream. "They put my name on a board in the chapel."

Perrin’s face remained exactly the same the entire time.

"That’s... great."

"It’s terrible! It’s a board! If I wash out they have to take it off and then there’s a gap where I was!"

Perrin laughed and told me I worried too much, and honestly, he’s probably right.

Yeah... Everyone says that. He’s been very kind about it all week, and people are not usually kind to Saint Course girls unless they want something healed for free.

"Speaking of," he said, standing up and stretching, "hold that thought, I need to visit the, uh, little knights’ room. Two minutes."

He went off toward the arena gate.

I sat there with my pear ice cream and thought about how nice it was to be sitting somewhere with someone.

Then somebody sat down on the wall beside me, very close.

"So you’re what he’s been spending his afternoons on."

I turned. It was a beastkin girl, a fox, orange hair, green eyes, in a commoner uniform with one sleeve stitched up.

"I’m sorry?"

"You heard me." She leaned back on her hands and looked me over from my hood down to my shoes, taking her time about it. "Huh. Well, I can see the appeal. The robes, the little worried face, the whole package. He’s been parading you round the stalls all week, hasn’t he? Showing everyone his latest conquest?"

"I, um. That’s not, we’re just—"

BAM!

She planted a hand right next to my head, on the back of the seat.

"I’m fighting him on Saturday." She said. "I’m going to take him apart in front of the entire academy, and I want you in the stands where I can see you. Don’t sit at the back. I want you watching every second of it and I want to know what your face does when he goes down. And when he’s lying there," she said, and then she reached over, took my wrist, tilted my hand toward her, and had a lick of my ice cream. "Mm. Pear. Good choice, that’s the best one." She let go of my wrist slowly. "When he’s lying there, I want you to have a good long think about who you’ve been spending your Saturdays on."

She stood up and brushed off her skirt.

"Front row, if you can get it. Wear the white robes, darling."

Then she was gone into the crowd.

I sat very still while my ice cream melted onto my thumb.

[... Who I’ve been spending my Saturdays on?] I asked myself. [Does she mean... Does she mean SHE’S the better option? Was she flirting with me?]