Chapter 68: Careful Orchestration

{Kohaku}

The shrine steward called it a "walk of the grounds."

That was a damn lie.

This was a field trip. Two hundred first-years shuffled after her in a long line while she explained the shrine’s architecture in enough detail to make me resent buildings.

While everyone else admired the scenery, I dropped to the back of the line and stopped beside a stone lantern. Then I opened my Manuscript.

The text I had paid for appeared in front of me.

I regretted spending the money before I finished the first paragraph.

[Oh, for fuck’s sake.]

The corridor was dim, and the paper walls glowed in the sunset. Lily turned the corner with her arms full of towels and did not see him until it was too late.

"Ah!"

She crashed into something solid and warm, and the towels went everywhere. A hand caught her wrist before she could fall.

She looked up.

Cassian.

His dark eyes stared into hers. His hair had fallen across his face, and the red streak caught the light. He did not let go of her wrist.

"Watch where you’re going... commoner," he said, but his voice was soft.

Their faces were so close.

So close.

She could feel his breath on her lips. Her heart beat so fast that she thought it might burst out of her chest.

Just a little closer, and...

"Lily? Are you there?"

Odette’s voice came from down the hall.

Cassian released her wrist and turned away, his coat swirling behind him.

"Forget this happened," he said.

Then he was gone.

Lily stood among the fallen towels and touched her lips.

They were still tingling.

I closed the Manuscript.

[Someone shoot me.] I sighed. [I wrote "so close" twice. On purpose. Also, "his coat swirling." In a hallway. Indoors. Was there a strong breeze coming from the linen closet?]

Fine. Whatever.

The prose was a crime, but the information was useful.

Second day. Sunset. Corridor beside the linen room. Lily carrying towels. Cassian coming from the other direction. They crashed into each other, ended up nose to nose, and Odette interrupted before either of them could do anything.

Canon Lily spent the next three Chapters replaying that moment in her head. It was, well, literally, a canon event.

Current Lily had rated him "fine, I guess" during the entrance ceremony.

Still, she had never been two inches from his face. Maybe that would change things?

I had faith in the basic mechanics. If you put two attractive people that close together, the brain usually did something stupid. That’s just biology.

[Therefore, today’s mission is simple. I make them crash into each other. Preferably without causing a second verbal mauling.]

There was one small problem.

None of the ingredients were in place.

Right. Lily didn’t exactly like Cassian. But, eh, maybe they could have a whole enemies-to-lovers thing.

Right now, Cassian was near the front of the line, brooding beside a well. Odette was three people ahead of me, reading while she walked. At this rate, she was more likely to walk into a wall than wander into a corridor at sunset while looking for Lily.

So, I would have to build the scene myself.

First, I needed to get Lily into the linen corridor with an armful of towels.

Second, I needed to send Cassian into the same corridor from the opposite direction.

Third, I needed an interruption before things went too far, so Cassian could storm off and Lily could stand there touching her lips and tingling for three Chapters.

[I can be that interruption,] I thought, smirking.

All in all, three moving parts. Though, I was one of them.

[I can handle this.]

The line stopped in front of a storehouse. The steward rang her bell and began explaining rice.

There was a shocking amount to say about the rice.

Lily dropped back from the group and fell into step beside me.

"You’ve been staring at nothing for five minutes," she said. "Are you feeling all right?"

"I’m planning your future."

"What?"

"Never mind." I put an arm around her shoulders. She immediately blushed. "This is important," I said. "Lily, do you know where the linen room is?"

"No."

"Wonderful. We’re going to fix that."

---

I ended up giving Lily a whole tour around this place.

For a fantastical... somewhat gratuitous interpretation of Japan, there wasn’t a whole lot to see around here. But that had never stopped a tour guide before, and it wasn’t going to stop me.

"This," I said, "is the storehouse. Notice the raised floor. That keeps the rice dry."

"The steward told us this an hour ago."

"And this is the well. It’s the deepest one in the valley. The rope is forty feet long."

"You just made that up."

"And this," I said, steering her into the east wing by the shoulders, "is the linen corridor. Look at it. Really take it in. Feel the linen in your soul!"

Lily took it in. It was a hallway. It had paper walls, a wooden floor, and a door at the end with a shelf of folded towels behind it.

"It... sure is a hallway," she said.

"It’s the linen corridor!!! The staff store all the bath towels in that room at the end. If a person ever needed towels, this is where that person would come. At sunset, for example, when the light comes through the paper and the whole thing glows. Very memorable. You could find your way back here easily."

"Why would I need to find my way back here?"

"Life is unpredictable."

She stared at me for a while. Then her shoulders dropped, and she got the face she gets when Sabine assigns reading over a rest day.

"Kohaku, you know you’re my friend, right?"

"Mhm."

"... But I am so bored. We’ve been walking for an hour and you told me about roof tiles twice."

"Fiiine, I guess we can stop." I held up a finger. "But I will quiz you."

"You won’t."

"Oh yeah? Storehouse floor. Why is it raised?"

"Rice," she said, already walking away.

"Length of the well rope!"

"Forty feet, and YOU MADE IT UP!" She turned the corner, and her footsteps sped up on the other side of the wall, and then she was gone.

[Perfect. The victim knows the terrain. Phase one complete.]

Phase two was Cassian, and Cassian required a different approach, because Cassian did not go places when you asked him to. He went places when he believed he’d decided to go there himself, ideally against someone’s wishes.

I found him behind the main hall, leaning on a support post with his arms crossed, doing nothing. That was normal. In the original text he spent roughly a third of his page count leaning on things until Lily entered the scene. So, I imagined, with no Lily involved... he probably did just spend half the day brooding.

"Holloway."

"What do you want?"

"Nothing. Forget it. You wouldn’t be interested anyway." I turned to leave, slowly.

"Interested in what?"

I grinned. Then, wiping my grin off, I turned back around.

"It’s just something I overheard. The shrine staff were saying the east wing is off-limits after the eighth bell tonight. They’re moving something through the linen corridor and they don’t want students seeing it." I shrugged. "Probably nothing. Storage stuff. Anyway, the point is, don’t go to the east wing at sunset, especially not the hallway with the towels at the end. That’s all."

Cassian looked at me for a long moment.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you seem like a rule-follower, and I’d hate for you to get in trouble."

He raised a brow so high I worried it hurt. Nobody in his entire life had ever accused him of being a rule-follower, and I could watch the sentence travel through him and come out the other side as a decision.

"I go where I want," he said.

"Sure you do."

"If I want to walk through the east wing at sunset, I’ll walk through the east wing at sunset."

"That seems unwise, but you’re your own man."

He pushed off the post and stalked away with his coat doing its best to swirl.

[Phase two complete. I am so good at this.]

---

Sunset came, and the plan was set into motion.

The tea was spilled, professionally, on both spare blankets. Lily sighed at me, called me a disaster in her usual good-natured way, and left for the linen room. Two minutes later I spotted Cassian crossing the courtyard toward the east wing. The light was coming through the paper walls exactly the way fifteen-year-old me had described it, minus the thousand tiny lanterns or whatever.

I gave them their head start. Thirty seconds for Lily to gather the towels, twenty for Cassian to reach the far end of the corridor, and then me, the interruption, arriving from the south entrance right on cue.

I came around the corner of the east wing at a jog, running the countdown in my head, and someone came around the same corner from the other side with her nose in a book.

We crashed.

The book went one way, her glasses went the other, my hands caught her shoulders, her hand grabbed my collar, and momentum did the rest. Her face came up. My face came down.

Our lips brushed.

We both froze exactly where we were.

Lavender bob. Tired eyes, enormous up close. Ink smell.

"Ah," Odette said, against my mouth.

I blinked.

"Whoa."