Chapter 61: Exposed

Serena’s hands were around my throat.

Again.

"Y-YOU DIDN’T LET ME FINISH!" I wheezed.

She let up briefly.

"You told me... You told me..." She got red and started squeezing again.

So... Here’s what I told her:

Soon, there was going to be a field trip. Because teenage me looooved field trip arcs. And on that field trip, a whole bunch of stuff would happen, stuff that slowly flashed through my mind, but most importantly, there had been a scene where Lily *almost* ran into Serena while she was naked, which meant she would have seen Serena’s secret nine inches.

Serena’s grip tightened again. My vision started going spotty at the edges.

"Wait!" I slapped her forearm twice. "The trip! Let me explain the trip!"

She let go. I dropped against the doorframe and coughed for a while.

"The academy runs a cultural exchange excursion every year," I rasped. "First-years only. Two weeks east, to the Hanamura provinces. It hasn’t been announced yet, but it will be, probably within the month."

"I know what the excursion is, mutt. My family has hosted the eastern delegation twice."

"Great! Then you know they put everyone up in traditional lodgings. Communal baths. Paper walls. Shared changing rooms with a curtain that is, and I cannot stress this enough, a curtain."

Serena’s face didn’t move.

"Continue."

"So on the fourth night, there’s a thing where Lily goes looking for her towel in the wrong wing, and she opens the wrong door, and behind that door there is a certain someone getting out of the water."

Serena’s hands twitched at her sides.

"And that certain someone," I said, "is standing up. Facing the door. With nothing on."

The hallway got very quiet.

"You’re saying," Serena said slowly, "that Everdawn sees me."

"Almost sees you. It’s an almost. She turns around at the last second because someone calls her name down the hall."

"Almost."

"Almost!"

Serena’s hand went over her mouth. Her red eyes had gone somewhere far away, and I watched her run the whole thing in her head, frame by frame, right there in the hallway at six in the morning.

[Uh oh. She’s spiraling.]

"Serena."

"Twelve years," she whispered. "Twelve years of towels. Of changing alone. Of telling my own maids to leave the room. Of-"

"Okay, hey, we don’t have to itemize-"

"AND YOUR ROOMMATE UNDOES IT BY OPENING A DOOR!"

"An almost door!"

Serena grabbed the front of my shirt with both hands and hauled me up onto my toes.

"If I’m going to be exposed," she snarled, "I’M TAKING YOU WITH ME!!!" She started throttling me again.

"Taking me where!? What does that even mean logistically!?"

Behind me, the bedroom door creaked.

"Kohaku?" Lily’s voice, thick with sleep. "What’s going on? It’s six in the-"

Serena’s hands moved so fast I didn’t register the transition. One second she was strangling me. The next second my face was pressed into her chest and both her arms were locked around my shoulders.

"Nothing is going on," Serena said pleasantly.

I couldn’t see anything. I could hear Lily’s bare feet stop on the floorboards.

"... Are you hugging her?"

"We are close."

"You’re close?"

"Extremely."

There was a long pause. I made a noise against Serena’s sternum that was supposed to be "help."

"Fine," Lily said. Her voice had gone flat "That’s fine. I’m going back to bed. Nobody wake me up. Not that anybody did."

The door shut a little harder than it needed to.

Serena released me immediately. I staggered back and got a full lungful of air for the first time in several minutes.

"Okay," I panted. "Okay. New information. The future isn’t fixed."

Serena’s eyes narrowed.

"Explain."

"What I see is what’s coming if nothing changes. But things change. I’ve watched them change." [Constantly. Usually because of me.] "Perrin was supposed to be a hero and now he’s a joke. That whole outcome got rewritten. So the bath thing isn’t a prophecy, it’s a forecast."

Serena considered this for a long moment. Then she nodded once, and something settled in her expression that I did not like at all.

"Very well then. You will help stop this from happening."

[Oh brother.]

---

"Mhm... Five thousand gold, you say?"

I tapped my pencil against the clipboard and looked over the rim of my borrowed glasses. The wolf girl across from me sat with her back straight and her hands on her knees, ears up, tail thumping once against the leg of the chair.

"Five thousand," she confirmed. "Liquid. My grandmother also keeps a lot of goats, but the goats aren’t mine yet."

"Not yet, you say?"

"She’s very old."

I wrote GOATS (PENDING) on the form.

Lily was sitting on her own bed with a textbook open in her lap, not reading it, staring at the two of us.

"And what would you say is your greatest strength?"

"I can carry a full-grown boar three miles without stopping."

"Sure, sure. And your greatest weakness?"

Vanessa Blacktorch thought about it seriously.

"I get jealous. Very jealous. My cousin says it’s a problem."

I nodded and wrote it down.

[Honest. That’s rare in an applicant.]

"And, where do you see yourself in five years?"

"Married to you, with four pups, running the eastern kennels."

"Four?"

"Fenna said five, but Fenna’s an idiot. My goals are far more realistic!"

"Noted." I flipped the page. "Last question. Why do you want to marry me?"

"You beat my cousin in front of the entire delegation!" Vanessa’s ears flattened, and her voice came out fierce. "If I marry you, I’m at the top!"

I let the silence sit for a moment.

"Thank you, Vanessa. We’ll be in touch."

"When?"

"We’re seeing several other candidates. Standard process."

She stood up, bowed at the waist, and left. The door closed behind her.

Lily set the textbook down.

"What was that?"

"An interview."

"... Kohaku."

"What? I’m being thorough!" I pulled the glasses off and folded them. "Do you know how many of these letters I have? If I ignore all of them, that’s an insult to thirty-one separate clans, and half of them are already calling you my wife. But if I actually sit down and evaluate each one on the merits, then it’s a process, and processes take time. Possibly years."

Lily’s mouth opened. Then it closed.

"You’re stalling them!"

"I’m looking to the future."

"That’s not what looking to the future means!"

"It’s exactly what it means. I’m considering my long-term options in a structured manner." I smoothed the pencil skirt down over my knees. Sabine had lent it to me. I’d decided not to think about why Sabine owned a pencil skirt in my size. "Everybody wins. Nobody’s offended. And I get free goat information."

Lily stared at me for a while. Then she pulled her knees up and hugged them.

"Fine."

"Great!"

"Can I ask you something else?"

"Sure."

"Why was Serena Frostfall at our door at six in the morning?"

I stood up out of the chair immediately.

"Have you eaten? I don’t think you’ve eaten. You skipped breakfast yesterday too, and Odette says the dining hall does a fish thing on Thursdays that’s supposed to be really good, and you know I care about your nutrition-"

"Kohaku."

"So we should go! Right now, actually. Before the fish runs out. I’ll bring you back a fish," I said.

Then I grabbed my shoes and sprinted out the door.

---

So, I had a tiny situation on my hands once again.

The future was telling me Serena’s big secret was at risk of being unveiled. But, that was just one thing.

As I walked away from my roommate’s questions, I remembered more of this arc. Honestly, not my worst work. The leads would be walking through the woods at night and sleeping in confined spaces, and having deep philosophical conversations under the moonlight. Teenage me was kind of cooking.

But what really mattered was that this was where Lily got her signature weapon!

So, I officially had my next goal.

[Lily has the power to make a wooden sword look OP, but she doesn’t need to use a wooden sword. Instead, she’s gonna get...]

I smiled.

[DAWNLIGHT! That’s right! That was her sword!]

Oh, it was brilliant.

Dawnlight was buried in a shrine two days east of the Hanamura provinces, in a mountain the locals never bothered to climb. In the original, Lily pulled it out of a stone (subtle, I know) at the end of volume six. It glowed, everyone cried, and one reviewer called it "the only good Chapter."

All I had to do was get her there!

I burned five MP on the logistics and the Manuscript coughed up the arc’s structure. The excursion split the first-years into travel groups of three. Groups were assigned by the faculty. Lily’s group in the original text was Everdawn, Holloway, and Stellaris-Vane, and the entire two weeks were her walking between two boys who wouldn’t stop trading petty verbal jabs over her.

[Cool. So, if she ends up in that same group, I won’t have to do anything. I can just sit back and watch her fall for the male leads. This might be simple for once.]

---

The assignment sheet went up outside the lecture hall on Friday morning, and about sixty first-years hit it at once, all buzzing about who they were paired with.

I got in there and found my name near the bottom.

GROUP 11 — EVERDAWN, L. / FROSTFALL, S. / SAKANA, K.

I read it three times.

[... Um.] I blinked. [Where are the boys?]