Chapter 92: Declined

After a bit of training, we had lunch. All 100 students, being served otherworldly seafood as they flanked wooden tables.

Lily and Serena were sitting four tables down, and they had been talking for eleven minutes without stopping.

I watched the whole thing. Serena was doing something with her hands, speaking very animatedly, explaining something I couldn’t hear, and Lily was leaning in over her plate with her chin on her fist. Then Serena said something and Lily laughed so hard she had to put a hand over her mouth, and the two Saint Course girls at the end of their table looked over like they’d heard glass break.

"You’re pouting."

"Huh?" I asked, head whipping.

Odette had what looked like a crab leg in one hand and her book open in front of her with the other, and she had not, as far as I could tell, looked up once.

"I’m not pouting. I’m eating."

"You’ve had that same piece of bread in your hand since we sat down. You’re holding it. It’s been three minutes."

"O-Oh yeah? Well, that’s called savoring."

Marisol leaned around from my other side and looked at my face with real interest.

"No, she’s right, you’re absolutely pouting." She reached over and took my untouched bread out of my hand and started eating it. "It’s a very cute, tiny pout, but it’s there. I’d have missed it if she hadn’t pointed it out, and now I can’t stop seeing it, so thank you for that, Odette."

"I aim to be useful."

"I am not pouting!" I said, which came out about four notches louder than the conversation required, and Reindl jumped, and I had to spend the next thirty seconds telling her she hadn’t done anything wrong.

[I wasn’t pouting. My face was resting. Faces do that.]

Anyway, I needed something to think about that wasn’t four tables down, so I went to the thing I always go to, which is the schedule. The all-important schedule.

Tomorrow was open-water endurance, which meant two full days where nothing canonical happens and everybody’s in the sea getting tired. That’s dead time. And dead time is the only time I get to work on the actual long-term project, which is stuffing everything Sabine puts in my head into Lily’s head before the year runs out.

I’d been sitting on Tide for a week. I could hold it seven seconds now, which was bad, but Lily would have it in four days and be holding it for a minute inside a fortnight, because that’s what Lily is.

[Right. Yes. Productive. Let’s go be productive.]

I got up and went down the four tables with my most casual walk.

"Hey, you."

Lily looked up and immediately brightened, which I’d like the record to show she still does.

"Kohaku! Did you try the orange ones? They’re better than they look."

"I’ll take your word for it. Listen, tomorrow’s mostly swimming drills and there’s a gap in the afternoon, so I was thinking we could get out on the sand and I’d walk you through the new thing Sabine’s been teaching me. It’s called Tide, it’s a way of running the Coat through you in a band instead of all at once, and it’s honestly kind of incredible, and you’re going to be better at it than me by the second attempt, which I’ve made peace with. Trust me, you’re gonna love it."

"Oh!"

"So, the usual? After the afternoon session?"

Lily’s face morphed into an apologetic cringe.

"I can’t tomorrow. Serena’s going to show me a few things."

I paused.

"... Sorry?"

"She watched me in the courtyard before we left and she says she wants to show me a bunch of stuff they teach in her course that I don’t know." She said this cheerfully. "So we’re doing that in the afternoon. She’s already picked a spot."

"She’s... already picked a spot."

"Up past the dunes, where it’s flat."

"Where... it’s flat."

Serena, across the table, had not said one word during any of this. She was eating. She did not look up.

"Right," I said. "No, that’s great. That’s a great use of the afternoon."

"We could do yours the day after?"

"The day after. Sure. Absolutely."

I walked back to my table and sat down and picked up a piece of bread that Marisol had already eaten most of.

[Well, that’s fine. That’s completely fine! Good, even. She’s getting instruction from an actual ranked duelist instead of a C-rank who lands one swing in three. That’s better for her. That’s better for the plan, and the plan is the whole reason I’m here. And it’s not like I own her. She’s allowed to have other people. I-I’m the one who spent three weeks trying to hand her to a prince, for god’s sake!]

I ate the bread.

"You’re pouting again."

"EAT YOUR CRAB, ODETTE."

---

Dinner was outdoors, which meant everybody ate standing up near the fires and I ate sitting on a crate by the seawall with my back to all of it.

I had a plate of something in my lap. It had a shell, it had legs, and it had that sweet white meat inside that comes apart in strings, so I’d decided it was a crab. Nobody had confirmed this. The kitchen staff kept calling it by a name I couldn’t pronounce and pointing at the water like that explained anything.

The sun was most of the way down and the third band of the sea had gone black.

[What am I even doing? Why am I over here?]

That was the part bothering me.

I could account for every mood I’d had since arriving in this world, because they’d all been reasonable. Panic, mostly. Some horniness. A lot of arithmetic. But this one had shown up at lunch, sat down in my chest, refused to explain itself, and I’d been carrying it around for five hours like a rock in my pocket.

Lily was getting sword lessons from a woman who could actually use a sword. That was good. I wanted that.

[So why does my chest feel like this? UGH, it’s so frustrating!]

"You’ve been over here forty minutes."

Fenna dropped onto the crate next to me without asking. She had two plates and a clay jug hooked on one finger.

"I’m brooding."

"Hm? Brooding people don’t hunch that much." She put one of the plates in my lap on top of my other plate. "Here. You had three of those and then you stopped, so I got you more."

I looked at the second plate. Then at her.

"You’ve been counting how much I eat?"

"Somebody has to. You skip way too many meals." She poured something out of the jug into a cup and handed it over. "This is from the village. It’s not wine. Don’t ask me what it is, the man who sold it to me wouldn’t say either, but it’s good."

I took a sip and it went down like fruit and came up like a chimney fire.

"Oh, that’s VILE."

"It is."

"That’s genuinely one of the worst things I’ve ever put in my mouth."

"Do you want more?"

"... Yeah, sure."

I don’t know how long we sat there. The sun finished going down, somebody started singing over by the fires, and the jug kept getting lighter.

At some point I ran out of jokes to tease her with and asked her an actual question.

"Where’d you grow up?"

"Northern range. Past where the maps stop bothering." She swirled her cup. "Four brothers. Grandmother ran the valley."

The fires popped somewhere behind us and I kicked my heels against the crate.

"So how does a girl from past the maps end up at Stellaris?"

"Eh, recruiter came through the harvest fair. He was there for someone else. I was sparring, and I put a man through a fence about eight feet from where he was standing."

"And the recruiter signed you on the spot?"

"He asked if I could read first. I said badly. He said that was fine, they’d fix it." She looked out at the water. "And, uh, that was that."

I nodded slowly.

And here’s the thing that got me.

I wrote this woman as a plot device. She loses one duel to Lily in Chapter thirty and then cheers for her until the book ends.

I never gave her a grandmother.

[Right. These people have lives I didn’t write for them.]

Somewhere around the bottom of the jug, my mouth stopped consulting me.

"You know, you’ve got a really good jaw."

Fenna paused with her cup halfway up.

"What?"

"Your jaw!" I reached over and put two fingers under it and turned her head toward me, which at the time seemed like a completely normal way to make a point. "Look at that. That’s a good jaw. And the fang. Do you know what that fang does to a person?" I leaned in closer, smirking. Why not have a bit fun? "I’ve been thinking about your arms, actually. The bag thing. You carry my bag with one arm like it weighs nothing, and you do it every day. That’s very cool of you~"

"Cool?"

"Extremely."

Fenna made a sound I’d never heard from her. She stood up very fast, and the crate rocked, and my plate went into the sand.

"I have to go check something."

"Check what?"

"A thing. Over there." She had both hands in front of her hips and she was already three steps away, and the tent in her shorts was not remotely subtle in firelight. "Goodnight, Kohaku."

Then she was gone, at a speed I’d call a sprint if I were being honest about it.

I sat there for a second.

Then I started laughing, and I laughed hard enough that I had to hold onto the seawall, and when I finally stopped, I was still grinning at nothing.

[Man, she’s silly.]

I picked my plate up out of the sand, poured the last of the jug into my cup, and went back to looking at the water.