Chapter 16: Routine*

After a while, those morning lessons with Professor Sabine got into a little rhythm.

Usually, it was twenty minutes of actual instructions... sometimes delivered vertically, then we’d keep the class going the standard way.

Today, at half past six, the continent’s foremost authority on combat casting was bent over her own mahogany desk with her skirt around her waist, and I was balls-deep in her pussy, driving into her hard enough that the desk hopped, while she delivered a lecture through her teeth.

"Circulation, ah, mana circulation isn’t, harder, isn’t a reservoir, it’s a current, you have to, oh gods, right there, you have to keep it MOVING through the limbs or it pools and-"

She reached back blind, found my tail, and gripped it like a handle. My whole spine lit up. I grabbed her hips with both hands and stopped being gentle about it, slamming into her.

"-and it POOLS and stagnates, which is why, yes, why your rank reads low, your reserves aren’t small, they’re, don’t you dare slow down, they’re DAMMED-"

[The worst part,] I thought, hilt-deep in a professor and taking mental notes, [the genuinely deranged part, is that I AM learning. I’m going to pass this exam because of information received mid-rail.]

Sabine came with her forehead on her own attendance ledger. I finished about four seconds later, and for a while the office was just the two of us panting and one traumatized inkwell rolling on the floor.

Then she flipped over, laid back across the desk in a sprawl, and casually kept lecturing at the ceiling, because the woman had two settings and I’d now seen both of them run simultaneously.

"Questions," she said, still catching her breath. "You always have one. Go."

"Affinity." I leaned on the desk beside her, tail flicking the sweat off. "How does it unlock?"

"Mm. Two ways." She held up fingers. "One: a resonant emotional bond. The heart opens the channel, the mana follows. It’s all very poetic and it’s why affinity blooms in academies, all these young idiots falling in love." Second finger. "Two: a spirit chooses you first. Contract before affinity, cart before the horse. The spirit forces the channel open from the outside."

"Does that happen a lot?"

She laughed at the ceiling.

"Basically never. Spirits are picky. Pickier than nobles, pickier than cats. A spirit choosing an unopened channel is like... like a spirit standing in front of a locked door and deciding the door is its favorite person." She waved a hand. "You’d have better odds of the door opening because you fell in love. Why?"

[Because a spirit weasel followed me home and I wanna understand why.]

"No reason," I said. "Academic interest."

---

The academy bathhouse after dinner was my one sacred ritual.

[I. Am. SO glad I wrote this into the story.]

Big stone tubs, a steady stream of water, and at this hour, blessedly empty. I soaked up to my collarbone with a cold cloth on my head and let the week just dissolve off my body.

Then, the door opened.

Steam rolled in and parted, making way for Serena Frostfall.

My brain performed a full shutdown. Her white hair was down and damp, and she was only wearing a towel.

[Eyes up. Eyes UP. Kohaku, so help me. She’s a villainess, she dies in the finale, she called you a mutt in front of four hundred people, she is NOT for you, she is... oh no. Oh no, she’s coming HERE.]

She was coming here.

Empty bathhouse, twelve tubs, and the ice queen of the story was walking the length of the room and stepping down into MINE. Albeit at the opposite corner, of course.

The towel was discarded and my heart damn near stopped.

"Mutt," she said, by way of hello.

[Okay... Calm down. Speak like a normal person, Kohaku.]

"Miss Frostfall." My voice came out impressively level. I tried to look as relaxed as possible. "Come here often?"

"No." She settled back, arms along the stone rim. "Nobles don’t come to the commoner bathhouse."

[Right... In other words, I’m being cornered.]

"So," she said, examining her own nails. She was trying to exude maximum boredom, but she was trying a little too hard. "The Everdawn girl. Your little project. I hear you’ve been training her."

"Word travels."

"Sword forms. Every afternoon," she kept going. Her red eyes came up off the nails and onto me. "Who taught YOU sword forms, scholarship?"

"I read a lot."

"Mm." A long pause, steam lifting between us. "Her appraisal."

"What about it?"

"I was there. The crystal didn’t say what her rank was." Another pause, and the boredom act got visibly harder for her to maintain. "Did it ever resolve? Privately? A retest?"

[She’s fishing so blatantly. The great Serena Frostfall came all the way here to fish about Lily?]

"Why do you wanna know? You worried about the competition?"

I expected a sneer. I’d have welcomed the sneer, honestly, the sneer was hot.

Instead she went quiet, and when she spoke again the voice had changed.

"That girl is weak. If you’re her friend, you’ll keep her out of that forest."

[... Lady, you don’t know how wrong you are.]

I sat up. Water ran off my shoulders.

"And-" I didn’t even get the second word out.

"I don’t explain myself to strays." She stood, water sliding off her, and reached for the towel, and a single bead broke from her hairline and traveled the full length of her collarbone, over the ridge, into the hollow of it, and my mouth opened and issued a statement I had at no point approved.

"God, you’re hot."

Serena Frostfall stopped moving.

[Oh, shit.]

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

She stared at me for three full seconds, and I watched something happen on that face that I had never once written into it: she lost the thread. The ice queen, whose every entrance came pre-blocked and whose every line came pre-sharpened, stood in a towel with no idea what her next move was.

Then she wrapped the towel, said "keep her out of the forest, mutt," with about forty percent of her usual venom, and left at a pace just short of dignified.

The door shut.

I slid down until the water hit my nose.

---

{Marisol POV}

Three tubs down, submerged to the nose, I did not move for the duration.

Crocodiles survive on patience. And, I, sitting at the far end of the bathtub, fully submerged, holding my breath throughout the entire conversation, had been patient.

What I had just witnessed, plainly: the Frostfall heiress, who visits no one, sought out the scholarship fox in private. They spoke at length in lowered voices. The heiress asked the questions; the fox controlled the answers. And at the end, the fox said something brief that visibly rattled the most composed woman in the academy, who then RETREATED.

I didn’t really hear what they said. Couldn’t hear too well, being underwater and all.

It didn’t matter! I ducked behind the tub rim and wrote in my waterproof field book:

Subject held private audience with S. Frostfall.

Subject left her flustered.

One does not fluster a Frostfall without leverage or an offer.

Confirms scale of operation.

I underlined it twice and the page tore a little, wet.

[First a random commoner, to secure the plebian vote. Then a knight of the Alderltoft line. Now a Frostfall. She’s assembling a coalition across every faction in the academy, and she’s doing it from a charity dorm in a secondhand uniform.]

I smiled.

[Magnificent.]