Chapter 88: Awkward Times

A week passed after that.

As always happens after random storms, things settled into a rhythm. We took actual classes, sparred, went over etiquette. The usual fantasy conventions a fifteen-year-old would carelessly throw into her medieval magic academy.

Not much changed.

Well... Aside from...

"Ugh, this oatmeal is horrendous," Serena whined.

"It’s good for you!"

"In that case, its nutritional value seems to be directly proportional to its horrid taste," Serena replied.

Right, Serena was sitting next to us. Next to Lily, specifically, and the two of them had been chatting all week as if those several years apart had never happened.

Lily insisted that oatmeal was an acquired taste, and Serena told her that a taste you have to acquire is a taste nobody wanted to begin with, and then Lily laughed at that like it was the funniest thing she’d heard all year.

I rolled my eyes and went back to my own bowl.

[A week ago, this woman tried to murder me. Now she’s giving us her hot food takes.]

A plate slid into view from my right. Potatoes, small ones, roasted and still steaming, stacked into a little pile that somebody had clearly spent time on. I looked at the plate. Then I looked at Fenna, who was looking very hard at the ceiling.

"Okay," I said. "Before I touch these, I need you to tell me if they mean something."

"Pfft. Come on... They’re potatoes."

"Fenna."

"They’re from the kitchens. I got there early." Her ears had gone flat. "T-They’re just potatoes. You barely ate yesterday and I noticed, that’s all, and you don’t have to eat them if you don’t want to."

Odette turned a page without looking up from her book.

"Food that the giver has personally selected and portioned, offered at a communal table in view of the household, is a Sixth Stage overture," she said. "Fifth is carrying possessions. There’s a monograph on it in the east annex and the diagrams are extremely thorough."

"Odette!"

"You have committed no crime. I’m merely providing context."

"Nobody asked you for context!"

"Kohaku did. Out loud. Approximately nine seconds ago."

I stared down at the potatoes.

Across the table, Reindl spoke up.

"That’s really sweet, though," she said. "N-Nobody’s ever brought me breakfast. Not that anyone should! I can walk to the kitchens. I have... legs."

"Congratulations on the legs," Marisol said with a smirk. "Truly, a magnificent pair."

I blinked. Then, I looked around the table.

Fenna on my right with her ears still down, still clearly hoping I’d eat the damn potatoes. Reindl across from me, blushing and pointedly looking away from Marisol. Marisol beside her, enjoying herself enormously, and Odette at the end with her book. Lily on my left. Serena next to Lily, eating the oatmeal she’d just spent four minutes insulting.

[Hold on. When the fuck did this happen?]

Lily and I had mostly sat alone for the first two weeks of the school year. But at some point, the world’s worst adventurer guild started accumulating around me.

Anyway. There was a plate of potatoes in front of me and a wolf girl pretending to read the ceiling, and I am not a strong enough person to leave that alone.

I picked one up.

"Weeeell," I said, "if a lady goes to all that trouble."

I got it about a third of the way into my mouth and held it there, tongue out, eyes on Fenna the entire time. Then I closed my lips around it slowly, made a noise that belonged in a completely different kind of establishment, and dragged it out clean.

"Mm~ It’s so warm. And firm."

Fenna’s chair scraped a full foot backward.

"That’s not," she started, and stopped, and her tail was going hard enough to knock the salt over. "You’re doing that on purpose!!!"

"I’m eating breakfast, honey. You brought it! It would be rude not to appreciate it properly."

"... I’M GOING TO WALK YOU TO CLASS!" She declared.

"I guess you can. You already carry my bag."

"Then I’m going to carry it further."

I laughed, and I was in the middle of enjoying myself thoroughly when I felt it. Somebody was staring at me. I turned my head, and Serena was looking right at me over the top of her spoon, and if looks could kill, my head would have exploded right there.

Then she noticed I’d noticed, and turned back to her bowl like nothing had happened.

[Uh. What was that about?]

I didn’t get a chance to ask, because a bell sounded off, and breakfast ended the way breakfast always ends here, which is with two hundred teenagers standing up at once.

---

Outside, in the courtyard, Aldric was waiting.

"Frostfall," he said, in his voice. "The delegation is expecting us at ten. The carriage has been ready since nine."

"Then it can be ready until I get there."

She turned to say goodbye to Lily, and Lily turned at the same time, and I watched the entire thing happen in slow motion.

Lily opened her arms for a hug.

Serena put out her hand for a handshake.

Serena’s hand landed directly on Lily’s left tit.

Lily looked down, got red, and looked back up.

Nobody moved. Serena retracted her arm like she’d stuck it in a fire, and then they both apologized at the exact same time, and then they both stopped, and then Serena said "the carriage" to nobody and walked off in a direction that was not where the carriage was parked.

Lily stood there holding her own elbow, watching her go.

[Oh my god. You two are INSUFFERABLE.]

---

The training yard behind the west tower was empty at this hour, which was the entire reason Sabine and I used it.

"Again," she said.

I brought the sword up, pushed mana down the inside of my arms, and held it there. The Coating burned the way it always burned. Then I ran the third Form at the practice post, felt the layer strip off my forearm halfway through the swing, and got it back on before the follow-through.

"Better," Sabine said. "Your reapplication is now merely bad instead of insulting. Again."

I did it eleven more times.

I hated every second of this, because it hurt, and because my body is a fox girl who used to be a novelist with a bad back and a coffee habit. But I kept showing up, and there was a reason for that beyond not dying.

[Everything Sabine puts in my head goes into Lily’s head afterward!]

That was the arrangement I’d tricked the universe into accepting, after all. In the book, Sabine took Lily as an apprentice and turned her into a monster over three arcs. In reality, Sabine took me, so every drill I got beaten through in the morning I walked Lily through in the evening on the roof of the dorm, badly, at about a third the speed. It worked. Lily is better at this than me at everything, which means my job is basically to be a very expensive funnel.

"Enough." Sabine lowered her own blade and rolled one shoulder. "Sit. Drink something before you fall over and I have to explain all these very technical things to a corpse."

I sat on the wall. She sat next to me, closer than the wall required.

"So," she said. "Frostfall, huh?"

"What about her?"

"She was at your table this morning. She was at your table yesterday. She was standing outside this yard eleven minutes ago, watching you swing a sword like a farmhand, and she left when you looked like you were about to turn in her direction." Sabine took a drink from my flask without asking. "That’s newsworthy. The only person that girl’s associated with, this entire time, was Aldric. Up until now."

I sighed and looked at the dirt.

"We went through something on the excursion. She’s not as bad as everyone thinks she is, and she and Lily knew each other before the academy, and that’s really as far as I want to go with it."

"Mm. And you?"

"What about me?"

"You are a C-rank fox on a commoner scholarship who has, in two months, acquired a royal duelist, half the Wildfolk delegation is firmly behind you, and you’ve got a Vantecca helping." She handed the flask back. "Be careful, Kohaku. Trouble follows the royal types. It always has. They collect enemies the way other people collect debts, and the enemies are patient, and when it finally arrives at their door it does not stop at the door."

"That’s ominous."

"It’s historical." She stood up and brushed off her skirt. "And when it does arrive, nobody powerful ever answers for it. They find a beastkin standing nearby and the matter resolves itself. A fox especially. Foxes have a reputation for taking things."

"I’ve never stolen anything in my life."

Sabine looked at me for a moment, and I remembered a certain sword in a certain boulder, and I shut my mouth.

"Same time Thursday," she said. "Bring the flask full."

I limped back through the main courtyard with my shirt stuck to my back and found about sixty students packed around the announcement board, which is never a good sign, because the last time that happened I lost two weeks of my life to a mountain and a moth.

I pushed in far enough to read it over somebody’s shoulder. ℯℯ𝑙.

FIRST-YEAR COASTAL ASSESSMENT

Departing the ninth.

Six days at the Sundrift Coast facility.

All first-year students are required to attend.

Swimwear is a listed item.

Curriculum will include open-water endurance, spirit handling in unfamiliar terrain, and one (1) supervised evening social.

I read it twice.

Unlike the Hanamura trip, which I had written in four hours while ill, I remembered this one perfectly. I remembered writing it. I remembered what it was for, I remembered the Chapter titles, and I remembered exactly which scene fifteen-year-old me had built the entire thing around.

[Oh. It’s the beach episode.]