Chapter 66: Long Night

Immediately, she scowled at me.

"No you’re not." She took two steps closer, pointing a finger at my chest. "Do not even begin to imply that!"

"I’m not implying it, I’m saying it. We are. I mean, how else did you end up with an extra package down there?"

She put a hand over my mouth.

"Want the whole damn inn to hear you!?" She whisper-yelled.

"My bad. But, you know what I mean. It might stain your ego, princess, but luck is the only thing that kept you from having matching ears with me."

Serena took her hand off my mouth and wiped it on her sleeve.

"Luck has nothing to do with it, it was fate!" She said. "And my mother was careful. She married into a house that never asks questions, and she spent twelve years teaching me how to hold my face. That’s twelve years of work."

"Sure, but the ears-"

"The ears are an accident of blood, and I’m aware of that!!! It isn’t what I’m talking about." She lowered her voice further. "I’m talking about the fact that you and I are not the same thing. Whatever I inherited, I keep it under control. You don’t control anything at all. You see something you want and you go after it in the middle of a public drive."

"That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think?"

"Is it? You flirt with Everdawn at breakfast. You flirt with the Yun-Salera girl in the library, and the entire second floor has noticed, in case you were wondering. You have thirty-one marriage offers sitting unanswered." She shook her head. "You don’t decide what you want, that THING between your LEGS decides for you, and then you follow it around!"

[Wow. Okay, she’s really thought about this.]

But, to be honest, I disagreed.

[You know what’s funny, princess? Restraint is the only thing I actually do. I could have walked out the front gate on day one. I had a plan and there was a hammock in it. Instead I’ve spent like two months holding a story upright for a girl who doesn’t know she’s in one, and I can’t tell a single person why. You want to lecture me about impulse control? There is an entire countryside of women out there who I could be breeding right now, and I turned all of it down. I’m here, trying to keep the world from ending instead of just having fun until it happens. How’s that for restraint?]

I couldn’t say a word of that out loud.

"What are you, a nun?"

Serena’s hand closed at her side.

"Excuse me?"

"I’m asking you honestly." I stepped in closer, which meant I was looking up at her from about a head down, and I grinned anyway. "You’ve built your entire personality around not wanting anything. You don’t eat sweets where people can see you. You haven’t gone to the bathhouse since we spoke in it. You rode eight hours in a private coach by yourself while two hundred people were singing on the road. And you’re telling me that’s the better way to live?"

"It’s called having some dignity, and you might try it sometime."

"I’ve seen what your version of dignity costs you, though. I’m good."

"You’ve seen nothing."

"I’ve seen enough." I spread my hands out. "What has any of it gotten you? You’re the strongest student in our year. You won the tournament without breaking a sweat. And you still spend every night alone in a locked room pretending the lower half of your body doesn’t exist. You call that restraint. I call it exhausting. Exhausting AND sad!"

She didn’t answer me for a few seconds.

"Look," I said, softer. "Nobody’s telling you to go do it in a public drive like I did. But you could stand to want something out loud, once, in your entire life. It isn’t going to kill you. I’d bet money it’d make you easier to be around."

"I don’t require advice from you."

"You’re the one who came out here to talk to me. Clearly, you thought you’d get something out of it, didn’t you?"

She didn’t answer.

Instead, Serena turned around and walked back toward the inn without saying anything else. She kept her shoulders up around her ears the whole way there, and she slammed the door behind her.

I stayed out in the yard for a minute after she was gone.

[Well, she didn’t strangle me. That’s something.]

At that moment, an idea came to my mind.

I like flirting. I like sex. It’s just part of who I am. But, admittedly, I was kinda starved for options at this academy. I mean, sure, I had beastkin women lining up to put babies in me but that was different. And Marisol would suck me dry at a moment’s notice, but she thinks she’s servicing some criminal mastermind, not just having sex for the love of the game.

Lily was off-limits, and I could hold that line. She was the heroine, she had an ending waiting for her, and I wasn’t going to be the reason it fell apart. If I could get her to fall into the hands of some dude with a chiseled jaw, I had to do it. That much I’d decided a long time ago. But I looked at the door Serena had just slammed and something occurred to me.

[Nobody ever said anything about her, though.]

---

Soon, it was time for the students to get back on the road.

As we exited the inn, I looked at Serena, who was already looking my way. I blew her a kiss. She went red and looked away.

The road went up for the last three hours.

By the time the coaches came over the final rise it was late afternoon, and the whole valley opened up underneath us at once.

Oh, man, it was something else. Terraced fields cut into the slopes in green steps. Wooden houses with heavy curved roofs sat along a river that ran the length of the valley floor, and there were red gates standing at intervals along the water.

[I never any wrote this. I wrote "an eastern province with shrines" and left it at that. Somebody else did all of this.]

"Oh, it’s beautiful," Lily said, with her hands on the window frame.

Odette leaned over her to look.

"The architecture is entirely different from the capital. Look at the roof pitch. That’s for snow load."

The coaches let us out in a gravel yard in front of the lodging, which was one long building with sliding doors down the whole front of it and a covered walkway running around the outside. An old woman in grey was waiting for us with a younger man holding a ledger, and she waited for all two hundred students to stop talking... which, admittedly, took a while.

"You are guests of the shrine," she said. "There are four rules, and I will say them once."

Somebody in the back said "she’s like my grandmother" and got elbowed.

"The baths are downstairs and they are communal. Men have them until the eighth bell, women after. Do not bring soap into the water. Second, the doors are paper. If you speak at night, the entire hall hears you, and the entire hall will remember it in the morning."

[Noted... Extremely noted.]

"Third, the river is fast and colder than it looks, and we have pulled two people out of it this year. Fourth." She raised her hand and pointed past the roofline, north and east, at the mountain standing over the valley. "You do not go up there. Not on a walk, not on a dare, not for a wager. If you ask a guide he will refuse you, and if you go anyway, we will not come and find you."

Everyone looked at the mountain.

It was tall and green partway up, then bare above that, and there was a strip of cloud sitting across it that wasn’t sitting across anything else in the valley.

I nodded to myself.

[So, that’s probably where Lily’s sword is.]

"Kohaku?" Lily was looking at me. "Your ears went flat."

"Did they? Weird. Long trip." I put a hand up on my head and smiled at her. "So, food. Do you think they’ll feed us tonight or is that a tomorrow situation?"

The man with the ledger started calling out room assignments while the old woman went back inside.

I hadn’t thought about the rooms.

I should have thought about the rooms, because the excursion had assigned us into groups of three at the academy, and there was no reason on earth for the lodging to organize sleeping arrangements any other way.

"Group eleven," the man read. "East hall, third door. Everdawn, Frostfall, Sakana."

Lily made a noise.

I turned around slowly.

Serena was standing about ten feet away with her case in her hand and her eyes already on me. She looked at me, then at the paper doors along the front of the building, then back at me.

Fourteen nights. One room. Walls made of paper.

[Okay. So we’re doing this the hard way.]