Chapter 14: The Smart Friend

{Kohaku}

The library annex had an entire wall dedicated to spirit theory. If I was gonna figure out a way to pair up with someone else, and also pair Lily up with someone else, I had to do some research.

I stood in front of it with my head tilted back, taking in titles like A Treatise on Resonant Harmonics, Vol. IV and The Covenant Codex: Annotated. There were hundreds of thousands of pages of academic fantasy-speak on those shelves, written by authors who were all, technically, me.

I blinked.

[Two weeks until the exam. If I start reading now, I’ll finish understanding resonance-pairing sometime around Lily’s coronation.]

I pulled one book out at random, opened it to a diagram with eleven overlapping circles and a footnote in Elvish, and put it back.

[Why the hell did I even include multiple languages in this story? Ugh.]

Luckily, I’d written a search engine for this magic system: a girl whose entire reason for existing was to explain story mechanics in clean, digestible paragraphs whenever the plot needed the reader to understand something!

Her name was Odette Yun-Salera, Lily’s designated Smart Best Friend.

[And if the pattern holds, she’ll be...]

I walked to the far corner of the annex.

Odette was at a single table behind the reference stacks, hair in a lavender bob and glasses pushed up her nose nerdily, three books fanned open in front of her.

[Found her! God, I’m good.]

Now, with any normal human being, a competent question would get me a competent answer, forty seconds long, and then she’d go back to her books. But the character I built couldn’t leave ignorance uncorrected. Show her a small, confused animal and she’d lecture it back to health.

I sat down across from her, put my chin in both hands, made my eyes as big and dumb as I could manage, and said:

"Heya. Quick question. The resonance thingy for the forest exam... that’s basically friendship power, right?"

Odette looked up and stared at me for a long, clinical moment, then closed all three books.

"No," she said. "Sit there. Don’t touch anything."

And in that moment, she decided correcting me was far more important than who I was and why I was speaking to her, as predicted.

"Resonance," she began, stacking the books to one side and pulling a blank sheet toward her, "is a passive alignment of mana signatures. It is not, gods help me, ’friendship power.’ Two mages who spend enough time around each other begin to oscillate on compatible frequencies. The academy measures that alignment and pairs students accordingly, because the Spirit Forest reads dissonance as prey behavior. It’s the least important part of the exam, and everyone panics about it anyway."

I nodded, trying to show my interest.

"Wait, least important?" I flipped my notebook open. "Go slower."

Odette blinked. I’d written as a gag that people lasted four minutes into one of her lectures before inventing an appointment to escape. An audience that opened a notebook was outside her documented experience.

"Your classmates," she said, "believe you can force resonance by holding hands and concentrating very hard on each other. You cannot. I have watched them try it. It was one of the worst afternoons of my life."

"Noted. Keep going."

She kept going. My dumb act was maybe forty percent act.

After all, I wrote this system almost fifteen years and one death ago, at three in the morning, on energy drinks, making it up scene by scene as the plot required it. I didn’t remember the rules.

"The contract itself," Odette said, sketching a quick diagram with a spirit on one side and two stick figures on the other, "is where everyone’s understanding goes wrong. Spirits don’t bond to whoever stands closest, or whoever’s strongest, or whoever fed them!!! When a spirit manifests, it reads every intent in range and bonds to whichever is clearest. A student who knows exactly what she wants and why, with no static behind it?" She tapped the paper twice. "That one gets chosen, every time. The pairing chart only decides who’s standing next to whom when the choosing happens!"

I stopped writing.

[So it doesn’t matter if she’s paired with Perrin, or with me, or with a decorative shrub. When the spirit shows up and reads the room, the clearest heart in range wins. And I know exactly whose heart is always clear. I can work with that.]

I thought for a moment.

[... Wait, so the whole time apart thing was for nothing? Now I feel like an asshole!]

---

{Marisol}

Papa always said to know your enemy.

Step one was interviewing the victim.

Extracting Lily Everdawn from her routine took exactly one invitation, and now the commoner sat across from me in the east garden, holding her teacup with both hands.

It was time to conduct an interrogation. The fox had a plan, and I wanted to know what it was. But, well, I couldn’t just ask her. So, I was going to get to know this plebian and piece things together myself.

"It must be so demanding," I said, refilling her cup, "rooming with someone so... spirited. She must ask you for so many little... favors?"

"Oh, no, it’s the opposite!" Lily’s whole face lit up. "Kohaku does everything for me. She taught me sword forms that the instructors don’t even teach, and she took me hunting so we could afford dresses. And she’s so funny, and she always knows what to do. I’ve never had a friend like her."

I smiled and made a note under the table.

[Aha~ Subject deeply compromised. She recites praise unprompted, at length, with hand gestures. Possibly enchanted. Did that fox slip her a love potion?!]

"And her studies?" I tried. "Surely she leans on you there. Copying your notes, borrowing your-"

"Oh, she doesn’t even open the textbooks." Lily leaned in like she was confessing to a scandal. "She just knows things. Professor Halvern used to call on her to embarrass her, and she’d answer like she wrote the book herself. He stopped calling on her."

[Doesn’t study? Has she already secured the loyalty of all the lecturers??? She’s far more impressive than I thought.]

"More tea?" I said.

"Yes, please! Oh, did I mention she’s teaching me a breathing technique..."

She had, twice.

---

Step two was the registrar.

The clerk cost me four silver and a promise to mention his diligence to my father, and what he handed me was one page. It listed her name, her race, and her scholarship classification, and nothing else: no family entry, no sponsor, no prior schooling, no debts, no assets.

Administratively, the fox was a single sheet of paper that said "broke" in formal calligraphy.

[No one has nothing. A family, a debt, a scandal, something. No records at all means the records were removed, and removing records from a royal academy takes money, reach, and nerve. She scrubbed herself out of existence, and now she walks around playing the penniless flirt. Oh, she’s good.]

---

{Kohaku POV}

The lamps were coming on when Odette finally walked me to the annex door, still lecturing. She had an hour of material left in her, and she resented the existence of dinner.

"Oh, and your notes on manifestation are incomplete," she said as I pushed the door open. "Forest spirits scale to the contractor’s bloodline. Farmers get sprites, and old houses get hounds and hawks. The Frostfall girl will probably pull something with a pedigree longer than the headmistress’s."

"Uh-huh," I said, half out the door, my mind already on dinner.

"Which raises an interesting academic question," Odette said to my back. "That Everdawn student. The one whose appraisal wouldn’t resolve. If the crystal couldn’t read her blood... I do wonder what would answer a call from that."

I kept walking, my smile fixed and my pace even.

[Something calamity-sized. That’s what.]