Chapter 62: Stress

"Well... You seem like you got some bad news." Sabine raised an eyebrow and gave me her perpetually amused look. "I’d think you would be hopping with joy after how far you got in the Duel Festival."

"I mean... I didn’t win," I muttered.

"Still. You made it farther than you had any business to. So, what’s on your mind? Is it the wolves?" She smirked. If she had a tail of her own, I know it would be wagging right now.

"It’s not the wolves. It is a little bit. It’s, like, twelve percent the wolves." I slumped further into the chair in her office, which was a bad chair to slump in because it was designed to make students sit up straight. "It’s mostly everything else."

Sabine leaned back against her desk and crossed her ankles.

"Elaborate."

"I can’t."

"Can’t or won’t?"

"Both. It’s a both type of situation." I dragged a hand down my face. "Okay, look. Imagine you’ve got a list. And every item on the list is a thing that has to happen or something terrible occurs. And you’re the only person who can see the list, and you can’t show it to anybody, and every time you knock one item off the list, two more items appear at the bottom."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It IS exhausting!"

"And whose list is it?"

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it.

"... Mine."

"Mhm." Sabine smiled in a genuine teacherly sort of way. Like she knew she was about to impart some great wisdom onto me. "Kohaku, I have been teaching at this academy for nineteen years. Do you know what I’ve observed in that time? Every single first-year believes they are carrying something no one else can carry. The prodigies believe it. The scholarship students believe it. Even the Stellaris-Vane boy believes it, and that child has never carried anything heavier than his own reflection."

"This is different."

"It’s always different." She tilted her head. "Here’s what I’ve learned. Stress sits on your shoulders at exactly the weight you agree to give it. Not an ounce more. You’ve decided this is crushing, so it’s crushing you."

[No, I don’t think that advice applies when I’m trying to prevent the literal end of the world.]

"That’s very inspirational," I said.

She frowned.

"You’re being sarcastic."

"A little bit."

"Then let me put it in terms you’ll accept." Sabine pushed off the desk and walked around behind my chair, and her hands settled on my shoulders. "You cannot do anything about your list at this exact moment. You are sitting in my office. There is no list in this room. There is only training, and the inevitability of you giving me oral."

"What?"

She just kept going.

"If you spend the next hour worrying about it anyway, you will have lost the hour and accomplished nothing, and the list will be precisely where you left it."

I didn’t say anything to that, because it was annoyingly correct.

"Also," she added, "you are hunching. This is why you lost points on the poses. Straighten up!"

I straightened.

"Better." Her thumbs pressed into the muscle either side of my neck. "Your circulation is knotted from the base of your skull down. When did you last actually rest?"

"... Define rest."

"Kohaku."

"... Three days ago. Maybe four."

"Mm." Sabine’s hands left my shoulders. "Come on. Let’s work on your spellcasting."

"Right now?"

"Right now. That spirit has been doing all the work for you, which is efficient and also lazy, and it means the moment your weasel tires, you have nothing." She was already rolling up her sleeves. "You’ve been through a lot recently, so we’re going to build you something that doesn’t depend on anyone else. That includes me."

I stood up out of the chair.

[Okay, fine.]

---

"So let’s say, hypothetically, that you had two people who have to be in the same place for two weeks."

Odette turned a page.

"Go on."

"Right. And one of them has a thing she can’t let the other one find out about. And the other one has no idea the thing exists, but she’s very observant and she asks a lot of questions."

"Is one of them you?"

"No!" Odette turned another page. I kept going. "And there’s a third person in the group," I said, "whose job is keeping the whole thing from detonating. That person is very tired and did not ask for any of this."

She finally looked up at me over her glasses.

"Is that person you?"

"... Hypothetically."

"Mm." She went back to her book. "You’re in Group Eleven with Everdawn and Frostfall. Everyone’s talking about it. Two people have money on which day Frostfall breaks her arm."

"Whose arm?"

"That’s another part they’re betting on."

I groaned into the table.

"Odette, tell me something useful. You’ve been reading about the excursion all week. What’s actually out there?"

She set the book down and folded her hands. I knew from that alone that I was getting a lecture.

"Well, the Hanamura provinces were annexed by Stellaris two hundred years ago and kept nearly all of their internal governance. That’s why this is a cultural exchange and not technically a field trip. The lodgings are shrine-owned. We’ll be sleeping on the floor."

"On the floor?"

"On mats. It’s traditional. Anyway, the baths are communal, run off natural hot springs. The Noble Course has been complaining about that since Tuesday." She adjusted her glasses. "The provinces also hold the largest concentration of pre-Kingdom shrine sites on the continent. Fourteen registered ones, and at least three unregistered ones the Church has spent sixty years trying to catalogue without any local cooperation."

[Communal baths. That’s the exact problem Serena strangled me about.]

"What kind of shrines?"

"Weapon shrines, mostly. It’s a regional tradition. When a blade was too dangerous or too significant to pass down, they interred it in stone up in the mountains and built a shrine over it instead of destroying it." Odette pulled a map out from between the pages of her book and smoothed it flat on the table. "There’s a mountain northeast of the main lodging that the locals won’t guide anyone up. The Academy route goes around it every year. The faculty packet has a note on it that says ’not to be approached.’"

My ears went up before I could stop them.

[Two days east, a mountain nobody climbs, a blade in stone. Hello, Dawnlight.]

"That’s fascinating," I said.

I sat back and let the information simmer.

[Okay. Two weeks. Get Lily up that mountain and put Dawnlight in her hands. Keep Serena’s huge secret buried through a communal bathhouse. Keep the two of them from killing each other in a room with paper walls. And don’t die.]

I stood up and started gathering my books.

"You’re leaving?"

"I’ve got packing to do."

"The excursion is in eleven days."

"I’m a planner now."

Odette watched me shove three volumes of books into a bag built for two.

"Congratulations," she said, and went back to her book.

---

{Serena}

I stood at the washroom mirror with both hands on the basin and looked at myself.

My hair was down. My eyes were red, and there was a flush across my chest that had no business being there. The water in the basin had gone cold twenty minutes ago and I hadn’t used it.

[Why?]

I bared my teeth at my own reflection. The reflection did it back, and the canines were longer than they should have been, which meant it was happening again.

It hadn’t stopped since the semifinal.

The mutt had walked into that ring in a crop top. Bare stomach, bare shoulders, tail up, and she had turned around in front of four thousand people and made a show of stretching, and every single instinct I had spent twelve years burying had come up through the floor of me at once.

I won the match in under two seconds. I had to. Two more seconds and I would have done something in front of the entire academy that could not be walked back.

And now my body would not let it go. It came at the worst times. In lectures. At meals. When she leaned in the doorway of her dorm in her underwear at dawn and had the gall to look sleepy about it.

I gripped the basin harder and made myself breathe until my teeth felt normal again.

Then I dressed, and I went out into the sitting room, where the Crown Prince of Stellaris was helping himself to my tea.

"You look unwell," Aldric said.

"I’m fine."

He set the cup down.

"I came about the excursion. My father’s office wanted assurances that the exchange goes smoothly. I told them it would."

"Then you’ve delivered your message."

"I also saw the group sheet." He watched me over the rim of the cup. "Everdawn. Two weeks in a shrine lodging, sharing rooms with the girl you’ve been avoiding since orientation. Is her presence going to give you trouble?"

I looked at the wall behind his head for a moment.

[She’s not the one I’m worried about.]

"No," I said. "Everdawn will be manageable."

"You sound certain."

"I am certain. Finish the tea and get out of my room."