Chapter 54: Situation

The office of tournament logistics was, for the first time in its history, completely silent.

Then somebody knocked over a cup of tea.

"Fuck!"

After that everyone started talking at once.

"The prince lost," Shelly said. She had both hands in her hair and she was not taking them out. "Marco. The prince lost."

"I heard you the first time."

"To the fox girl!!!"

"I was there, Shelly. I was standing eleven feet from the line. I watched it happen with my own eyes and I haven’t been able to think about anything else since."

"The commoner scholarship girl. The one who was Rank F in her first week."

Marco turned around from the wall he’d been banging his head against.

"I. Was. There."

The junior staff were already pulling records, which was optimistic of them, because there weren’t any. The big board on the far wall had ALDRIC STELLARIS-VANE written across the top in gold script, and nobody had bothered with a marker for the loser’s column.

Marco walked over to it, looked at the name, looked at the empty space under it, and uncapped a red marker.

"I... I can’t do it!"

"Just write her name."

"The marker won’t move. Shelly, I have been doing this job for nineteen years and I have written some things on this board that I’m not proud of, but this is the first time it’s felt like vandalism!!!"

Shelly took the marker off him and wrote SAKANA, KOHAKU underneath the prince’s name in jagged red letters.

Nobody in the room said anything for a while.

"Okay," she said, capping it. "Okay. We can spin this. We put her in the feature slot tomorrow, against someone the crowd already knows, someone who’ll make her look good whether she wins or loses."

"You want to give the girl who just humiliated the crown prince top billing?"

"I want people so busy watching the fox that they stop talking about what she did to him. That’s mercy, Marco. For all of us."

Marco looked at the bracket, at FROSTFALL, SERENA in neat blue ink, sitting on the opposite half of the tree where the committee had carefully placed her three weeks ago for a final nobody was going to get now.

"Frostfall’s not even on that side of the board. To put those two in the same ring tomorrow I would have to move four matches, bump Holloway’s semifinal onto the side ring, and rewrite the seeding. Anyone with eyes would see it."

"Then do that!!!"

"That’s tampering! It goes against my ethics!!!"

"Marco, we rigged this entire bracket for a Frostfall-Stellaris-Vane final in the second week and you brought in pastries." Shelly was already writing. "Your ethics are already compromised. The prince got weasel’d out of his own tournament. I need a headline that isn’t ROYAL FAMILY TAKES EMBARRASSING LOSS. What I’ve got is the fox versus the ice queen, and it is going to sell every seat on that hill."

She wrote SAKANA, KOHAKU in the next slot, then FROSTFALL, SERENA beside it, and stood back.

"There. Let them sort it out."

One of the interns put a hand up. She’d been holding a ledger against her chest for the entire conversation.

"What?"

"The stalls, sir. The odds on Sakana yesterday were nine hundred to one and there was a run on her about twenty minutes before the match, and I don’t know who started it. There were forty-one separate bets, most of them out of the Noble Course."

The room went quiet again.

"How much?" Shelly said.

"We’re still counting."

"How much, roughly?"

"Roughly, we owe a first-year girl in the Noble Course more money than the festival made last year."

"What the hell?"

Marco sat down on the edge of a desk and put the marker down very carefully.

Nobody could even say what was happening.

---

{Kohaku}

Lily was on her third cup of something alcoholic and she was kicking her feet under the table.

"You beat him! You actually beat him! The prince, Kohaku!"

"I pushed him out of a ring. That’s not the same as beating him."

"It’s literally the same, the tournament rules say it’s the same, therefore, it’s the same."

[Can’t argue with that logic.]

The common room was quieter than it had any right to be, given that half the building had been at the arena hours ago. People kept giving me a very wide berth.

The weasel was asleep on the table by my elbow. There was maybe one good effort left in the little guy before he hibernated for a week. It wasn’t done working though. We had...

[What, two more fights left? Holy shit, we have like two fights left!]

When I first saw Lily lose and decided I wanted to win it all, I couldn’t have even imagined getting here.

"You know what this means?" Lily said, elbows on the table, chin in her hands. "You’re famous. Like... She-beat-the-prince famous! You know?"

"Ah, I see I’ve been promoted from weird-stacked-foxgirl famous."

"It’s a much better adjective and it comes with perks." She wiggled her eyebrows at me. "You could get some new connections out of this."

"Lily, my cute roommate is the only connection I need."

"I’m your only roommate though."

I snorted.

"I know."

She blinked.

And then she blushed and looked away.

[Ahh~ God, I needed this.]

At one point, somebody had propped the common room door open with a chair, and every so often a Wildfolk beastkin girl would walk past it very slowly while looking directly at me. This had been happening since about noon. Fenna had turned up twice already, once to tell me the match was "the best thing she’d ever seen with her own eyes" and once to bring me a plate of meat she’d taken from somewhere, which I assumed to her was like giving me flowers.

The door banged. Marisol came in without looking at anyone, dropped into the chair beside me, took my cup, drank from it, and put it back down.

"Nine hundred to one," she said.

"What?"

"Nine hundred to one. I got forty-one people to take it, none of them believed me, and every single one of them is going to have to look me in the face tomorrow." She looked extremely pleased with herself. "You, lover, have just made me the richest first-year in the Noble Course."

"Wait, what? You put money on me? Based on what???"

"Faith," Marisol repeated, and she took my cup again.

Across the table, Lily had gone very still and was watching this happen with her hands flat on the wood. Then, Marisol kissed me on the cheek and left, and Lily eased up instantly.

"Seriously though," Lily said, once Marisol had gone. "How does it feel?"

I thought about that for a second.

[How does it feel? It feels like I sprinted for four days, got hit for four days, got told I was going to die by every single person I asked for help, and then won because the rules don’t require me to be better in order to win. Obviously, I got lucky. I know that. But, if we’re gonna keep the Calamity Queen from taking a flamethrower to the entire world, we could use a little luck.]

"It feels pretty good," I said.

---

The next morning I woke up with a weasel on my face and a piece of paper under my door.

I peeled him off my forehead and put him on the pillow, where he curled into a ball and went straight back to sleep. Then I picked up the paper. It was the match schedule, freshly printed and still warm.

Match 7 - Feature Bout SAKANA, KOHAKU vs. FROSTFALL, SERENA

[Well. That’s one way to wake up.]

I read it twice more to be sure.

[That’s nowhere near the bracket. She was on the other half of the board, so somebody in the logistics office sat down last night and moved things around, which means I’m being sold. And it’s Serena, who told me about a window she had to know he could close, and then couldn’t look at me from the stands. I still can’t work out whether I’m allied with her.]

The weasel chirped in his sleep.

[Yeah, buddy. I don’t know either.]

I folded the paper into my pocket and sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, doing the arithmetic I’d been avoiding since the second the crowd started screaming yesterday.

[Two more wins. That’s all that’s left between me and the Benediction, and the Benediction is the only reason any of this matters, because it goes in Lily’s chest and then the world doesn’t end. And the next one is against the strongest student in this school... So, realistically, I’m kind of fucked at this point.]

I sighed. Then, I got up, got dressed, and went to find breakfast.

The weasel stayed where he was. I let him. He’d earned a break.