Chapter 101: Out Loud

{Lily}

"Breathe in for me, please. Hold it... and out."

I breathed out. The healer moved some cold metal disc from one side of my back to the other and listened again, frowning, while I sat on the edge of the cot in the infirmary tent and tried very hard not to squirm.

"Well," she said at last, "your lungs sound clear. No fever, and no water left in there that I can hear. You’re a very lucky girl, Miss Everdawn."

"So, I can go?"

"You can go. No swimming for three days, and no more boats at night." She gave me a stern look over her glasses. "Ever."

"Y-Yes, ma’am. Thank you!"

I pulled my shoes on and stepped outside, and the sunlight was so bright that I had to put a hand over my eyes. It was a normal, lazy morning on the beach. Students were lying around on towels, a few of the Knight Course boys were throwing a ball back and forth, and the sea was calm again.

I looked at it for a long time.

[I really went out there at night, all by myself.]

My face got hot just thinking about it.

I remembered being angry, getting into the boat, and rowing out, and then something hitting the boat from underneath. After that, everything was just black and cold until I woke up on the sand with Kohaku crying into my hair.

"KOHAKU! Wait!"

I turned around.

Kohaku was sprinting down the beach at full speed with her tail sticking out behind her. Right behind her were four Wildfolk girls, all wolves, all of them holding something. One had a basket of fish. One had a flower crown. One was waving a sheet of paper over her head and yelling about pups.

"I told you, I’m not accepting proposals before lunch!" Kohaku yelled over her shoulder.

"It’s a formal challenge!"

"I don’t accept those before lunch either!"

They ran right past me in a cloud of sand and kept going.

I stood there, blinking.

"She killed that sea monster with an oar," someone said beside me. "Apparently that counts for something with them."

Serena was leaning against the post of the infirmary tent with her arms folded. She had her hunting clothes on, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in two days.

"Serena!" I went over to her. "What happened last night? Kohaku won’t tell me anything. Every time I ask her, she just starts crying again."

Serena was quiet for a moment.

"You didn’t come back to the room," she said. "I went looking for you in the village. Then I heard something screaming down by the water, so I came back and found Sakana on the beach, fighting that thing with a stick." She glanced toward the far end of the beach, where the dead monster was still lying on its side while two teachers argued over it. "You were lying in the sand next to her. You weren’t moving."

I swallowed.

"I helped at the end," Serena went on. "Barely. She was the one who pulled you out of the water, though, and she kept that thing away from you by herself until I got there." Her jaw tightened, and she had to force the next part out. "She saved your life, Lily."

"R-Really?"

"Yes. Then she pressed on your chest for a while and breathed into your mouth until you woke up."

My whole face went red at once.

"She... Into my...?"

"It’s a medical thing, apparently." Serena pushed herself off the post. "She seemed to know exactly what she was doing, which, honestly, is the most surprising part of this whole story."

I put both hands over my mouth.

[Kohaku’s mouth was on mine, and I wasn’t even awake for it!?]

"Anyway." Serena turned toward the facility. "I’m going to sleep for about fourteen hours. If anybody asks, I was never here."

"Serena?"

She stopped.

"Thank you," I said. "For helping her."

Serena looked at me for a second. Then she nodded once, and she walked inside without another word.

I turned back toward the beach.

Kohaku had doubled back somehow, and she was running along the waterline now, with the wolves still behind her. One of them had grabbed her tail. She yanked it free, spun around to keep running backward, and that was when she saw me.

Our eyes met.

Kohaku grinned, the same stupid, cheeky grin she always had, and gave me a big wave over her head, right in the middle of being chased by four women with a marriage proposal.

"Morning, Lily~!"

My heart skipped a beat.

---

Kohaku found me an hour later.

I was sitting on the steps of the infirmary tent with my knees pulled up to my chest, trying to figure out what I was going to say to her. So far, I had gotten as far as "thank you," and everything after that kept falling apart in my head.

Then, somebody dripped on my foot.

I looked up. Kohaku was standing over me, soaked from head to toe, with sand stuck to one side of her face and a long, fresh scratch running down her shin. She had one hand behind her back, and she was hiding something there very badly, because I could see the stem sticking out.

"H-Hey, Lily."

"Hi," I said. "Did they catch you?"

"Twice. I got away both times, though." She sat down on the step next to me, took a deep breath, and held out her hand. "Here. This is for you."

It was a flower. It was small and white, with five round petals and a bright blue center, and one of the petals was a little bent.

"It’s a saltbell," Kohaku said. "They only grow on the cliffs at the very end of the headland, where the, uh, the sea spray hits the rocks. So, I may or may not have climbed the headland this morning. Please don’t tell Halvard."

"Kohaku! That’s the one place we’re not allowed to go!"

"Which is exactly why nobody else has picked them all yet!" She pressed it into my hands. "Okay, so, in the old Stellaris flower language, a white saltbell means ’I was wrong.’ The blue in the middle means ’please don’t stay mad at me,’ and the five petals stand for the five virtues of the first Queen of Stellaris, who carried a whole bouquet of them at her wedding after she won her husband in a duel. And if you give one before noon, it’s an apology. But if you give it after noon, it means..."

She stopped talking, and her face went pink.

"Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s still morning."

I turned the flower over in my fingers.

"How do you know all of that?"

"Oh! Um, I came up with... I mean, I came across it! In a book! I read about it when I was fifteen, and it just kind of stuck with me. A very obscure book. You’ve never heard of it." She waved her hands around. "Nobody’s heard of it. It was terrible."

[She really climbed a cliff for this.]

I didn’t say anything. I just held the flower, and Kohaku took that as a sign to keep going. She stood up, brushed the sand off her skirt, and cleared her throat.

"Also, I had a speech. The pages are somewhere in the ocean now, but it’s fine, because I memorized it." She put one hand over her heart. "Lily Everdawn. It has come to my attention that I have wronged you. And thus, despite the fact that the cause of your rage eludes me, your ambiguous fury has nonetheless pierced me to the very core of my being..."

She kept going, but I stopped listening to the words.

I was looking at her instead. I looked at the scratch on her leg from the cliff, the bruise on her ribs peeking out from under her blouse, and the bandage on her thigh where that monster had cut her open. I thought about how she’d come running into black water, full of monsters, after me, when she could barely swim herself. Last night, she’d pushed on my chest and breathed for me until I came back. This morning, she climbed a cliff so she could say sorry for something she still didn’t understand.

She had absolutely no idea, and she was standing there in the sun, dripping wet, reciting a speech about my ambiguous fury.

My hands were shaking. I set the flower down on the step very carefully, and I stood up.

"Whether by word, by deed, or by bed sheet," Kohaku went on, with her eyes closed now for dramatic effect, "I humbly beg your..."

I grabbed the front of her blouse and pulled her down, and I kissed her.

Her lips were cold and they tasted like salt water. For a second, she was completely stiff, and I could feel her tail shoot straight up behind her.

It was the second time Kohaku’s mouth had been on mine, and this time, I was awake for it.

I pulled back. Kohaku was staring at me with her mouth still slightly open and her eyes huge.

"I like you," I said.

Kohaku’s eyes went unfocused, and her ears went flat against her head. She opened her mouth and closed it again. Then, she tipped straight backward like a falling tree and landed flat on the sand with a soft thump.

"K-Kohaku!?"