Chapter 82: Tsuzumi

So, yeah, we went on another totally-not-a-field-trip.

The students buzzed as they walked under cherry blossom trees. The teachers were putting up a valiant effort, trying to talk about the place’s history and whatnot, but nothing they said could get the students’ attention off the pretty leaves.

Marisol and I were walking side-by-side, going over the, uh, recent developments.

"She saw?"

"Yeah."

"She saw what?" Marisol asked.

"It... doesn’t matter. But, yeah, the plan is off the table. Or maybe the right way to say it would be that it fell off the table and shattered into a million pieces." I sighed.

Marisol stopped walking. I kept going, so she had to jog two steps to catch up, which she hated.

"Fourteen nights," she said. "I had a chart. I had the bells written out by hand, Sakana, and I bribed the shrine girl who rings them. Do you know what that cost me?"

"You’re broke, so, nothing?"

"I owe her a favor! Highly distressing."

"I am sure you’ll think of something."

Marisol pouted behind me and kept walking in silence for a bit. Up ahead, past a cluster of Saint girls taking petals out of each other’s hair, I could see a white head walking alone at the front of the column. Serena hadn’t looked back once since we left Hanamura.

[Twelve years of hiding. One moth, one clearing, and Lily saw the whole schlong. And what has Serena done about it? Nothing. Nobody’s dead. Nobody’s even bleeding.]

I raised a brow.

[Honestly? She’s taking it better than I thought she would. Maybe she’s more reasonable than I suspected.]

Which meant the secret wasn’t my problem anymore. It was hers, and Lily’s, and whatever the two of them decided to do about it whenever I wasn’t around. My problem hadn’t changed since the moth.

That problem was the sword.

"So what’s next?" Marisol said. "You didn’t drag me out here to say the operation’s over. You don’t do that. You’d have just let me find out."

[She knows me a little too well.]

"I need an opening," I said.

"For what?"

"The place where they keep all the swords."

She waited. I didn’t add anything.

"That’s it? That’s the whole briefing? ’The place where they keep all the swords’?"

"W-Well, what else am I supposed to say about it? It’s a big place. Old. Lots of stone. Odette says forty-one blades on the register. And, I need to be inside it, alone, or close enough to alone, for long enough to find one."

"Which one?"

"I’ll know it when I see it."

Marisol looked at me sideways for a good ten steps.

"You don’t know which one?"

"I’ll know it when I see it!"

"Fine." She tossed her curls back. "Fine. An opening. Sabine’s going to walk everyone through there in a herd, with a lecture, so that’s your first look, and it’s useless. You’ll want the second look, because that’s when everyone’s gonna get sloppy."

"So?"

"So I’ll think of something. That’s what I do." She held up a finger. "But if there’s money in that building, Sakana, I want a cut. I’m not saying there is. I’m saying if."

"There’s no money."

"You don’t know that. You don’t even know which sword!"

I didn’t have an answer for that, so I looked away from her, which was when I caught Lily.

She was a few rows back, walking between Odette and Fenna, and she’d been looking at me. Not at the trees or at the cherry blossoms I shamelessly threw into my fantasy world. At me, with that little line between her eyebrows she gets when she’s working something out. The second I turned, she looked up at the branches like she’d been doing that the whole time.

[Oh, no you don’t~]

I waited until she peeked again. Then, I put two fingers to my lips and blew her a kiss, slowly, winking at the same time.

Lily went red from the collar up, turned her head so fast her hair whipped Odette in the face, and walked straight into the back of the Saint girl in front of her.

Marisol sighed next to me.

"Go ahead, go back to your wife. I’ll make a plan on my own."

"She’s not my wife!"

"You’ll have to inform literally every wildfolk girl in the academy, then, cause they all think so."

I groaned.

---

{Serena}

"Oh my gods, did you see that thing???" Lily cackled, in my head, rolling around on the futon and kicking her feet. "IT WAS SO SMALL!!! What was she even gonna do with it when she was on top of you? Poke you?"

"I know, right?" Kohaku said, in my head, lying on her back and picking at her nails. "I felt it. It was like a thumb. A cold, sad little thumb."

"Twelve years! She hid a thumb for twelve years!"

"Pathetic. Mine’s bigger than her whole arm, you know."

"Can I see it?"

"Sure!"

"Can I suck it?"

"Obviously!"

"Yay!"

"AAAAARGH!"

I stopped walking. A Knight boy behind me nearly walked into my back and apologized. With my hands clenched into fists, I willed my legs to start moving again.

[Lily has never said "yay" in her life. Lily has never cackled. Lily almost apologizes to chairs when she bumps them. And Kohaku wouldn’t call it small, she was pressed against me the entire time I was strangling her, she knows exactly how big it is... Not that it fucking matters anyway!!!]

I nearly screamed.

I looked back once, over my shoulder. That was the moment Kohaku picked to put two fingers to her mouth and blow a kiss down the column, and I watched Lily go red, whip around, and walk into somebody.

[It makes no sense... But somehow, i feel like it’s going to happen!]

I faced front and kept my eyes on the road for the rest of the walk.

Tsuzumi was a hall cut into a hill, with a door at the end you could have driven a coach through. The students were held outside under the trees while the site’s warden, an old man with a gentle voice, took the Professor, Aldric, and me down a side passage. Aldric was there because he was the Crown Prince. I was there because Aldric had told them I would be.

"Forty-one," the warden said, once we were sitting. "All interred, all sealed, all sleeping. A blade goes into the stone and it stays there. That is what this place is for. The stone drinks what the blade carries, and the blade forgets."

"Forgets what?" Aldric said.

"Whatever it was made to do, Your Highness. Some of them were made to do very bad things."

Sabine had her chin on her hand.

"The Academy was told one of the seals had stopped answering."

"Yes."

"Which?"

The warden didn’t answer right away. He looked at the table, then back at her.

"The oldest. It has no name on the register, because she never gave it one, but after she passed, the town did. They called it Dawnlight, after the hour she used it. It was interred here before there was a Tsuzumi. The town grew around it."

"She?" Aldric said.

"Lady Tsuzumi. The founder. She carried that sword for eleven years, and the last thing she did with it was kill the Calamity Queen. Then she put it in the ground and never touched it again."

Nobody said anything.

[Dawnlight. The sword that killed the Calamity Queen. The one from the stories, the one they tell children about so they’ll stay in bed. Killed with a real sword by a real woman, and it’s been sitting under our feet the whole time.]

"Ah, but, that’s just a story... right?"

"It’s a register entry, Your Highness. Stories are what we tell the students."

Aldric leaned back.

"Then you have it. We’ll look at it while we’re here. I’ll want to see it myself."

The warden nodded. He seemed vaguely unhappy about the idea, but he agreed nonetheless. Sabine started asking about the seal’s construction, which was the sort of thing I should have been listening to. I wasn’t.

I was somewhere else.

In my mind, I was standing in the hall under the hill with Dawnlight in my hand. Lily was there. Kohaku was there, on the floor, in two pieces, and I was laughing the sort of laugh I could never afford to let out anywhere in the real world. Lily was looking at me the way she used to look at me, before I apparently ruined it for no reason, and everything was fine. Everything was going to be fine. I was the one with the sword that killed the Calamity Queen. Who was going to argue with me?

[Yeah, right.]

I pressed my thumb into the edge of the table until it hurt.

[That’s a fantasy. Kohaku is the one who sees the future, not me. I don’t get to cut her in half and have it work out. I don’t get to hold that sword. It’s not for me, it’s for some hero who doesn’t exist yet, and the only reason I’m even sitting at this table is that Aldric thinks I’m going to marry him. Unless...]

I looked at the warden. He was still unhappy. Sabine was still asking questions. Aldric was already bored.

Nobody was watching me.

[... Unless.]