Chapter 67: Unfortunate Lodging

{Serena}

[I can’t take this. I cannot take one more minute of this.]

I had been awake since the fourth bell.

The lodging had given us one bed, which was not a bed at all but a single enormous futon laid across the entire floor of the room, and the shrine woman had explained that this was traditional and that guests found it comfortable. Everdawn had gone to sleep on the far left without any trouble at all. I had taken the far right, with a deliberate and generous amount of space between myself and everyone else.

Kohaku Sakana had gone to sleep in the middle, which was correct, and then she had migrated.

She was against my side now. One arm was thrown across my ribs, her forehead was pressed into my shoulder, and her tail had wrapped around my leg at some point in the night and stayed there. Her breathing was slow and warm through the fabric of my sleeping robe.

She was also snoring, albeit not loudly. It was a small sound that came at the end of every third or fourth breath, and I had been listening to it for two hours, and I had begun to hate it with an intensity that surprised even me.

[Move. Just move her arm and get up.]

I didn’t move her arm.

The reason I didn’t move her arm was the reason I had been lying rigidly still since the fourth bell, and it was pressing against the inside of my sleeping robe. It had been doing so since approximately the moment she rolled into me. My own body had decided this was the correct response to being warm and having somebody against it. Twelve years of training had produced a face that gives away nothing and a spine that stays straight in any room in the kingdom, and none of it had any authority whatsoever over this.

If I moved, the blanket moved. If the blanket moved, she would feel it, or worse, Everdawn would wake up and see it.

So I lay there and I did arithmetic in my head, which had worked to calm me down in the past, and was not working now.

Kohaku snored again and pushed her face further into my shoulder.

My left hand clenched into a fist.

[The gods want her dead. That’s the only explanation for this. They’ve placed her here, in my arms, snoring, so that I will finally do it.]

She blew me a kiss yesterday. In a courtyard, in front of two hundred people, after telling me I was miserable, and I had gone red like a village girl and turned away. She had watched me do it. This, now, was probably some form of teasing like she always does with her friends.

[She has to be aware. Somehow, some way. Right?]

Outside, somebody rang the fifth bell.

Kohaku stretched, made a noise, and rolled off me toward Everdawn without waking up.

I got out of that bed faster than I have ever moved in my life.

---

{Kohaku}

I woke up feeling incredible.

Best sleep I’d had in two months. My back didn’t hurt, my ears weren’t ringing, and whatever pillow I’d found in the night had been extremely warm and slightly firm, and I wanted to find it again.

Sabine was waiting for me behind the lodging at the sixth bell with her hair down. She looked unusually cute.

"Good morning, Miss Sakana. You look well rested."

"I slept like the dead. Something about the mountain air, maybe."

"How fortunate." She rolled her sleeves back. "You’ll be casting on your own this morning, and your spirit stays in your sleeve the entire time. If I see so much as a whisker I’ll add a twelfth item to the list. Let’s get to it."

We worked for about an hour. Independent casting is horrible, by the way. When the weasel does it, I feel a pull and then there’s light. When I do it, I have to "hold the shape of the spell in my chest", whatever that means, and push it out through my hands. It’s been going wrong in increasingly confusing and creative ways for a while now.

"Again," Sabine said. "You’re clenching. Your whole body has gone tight, and mana won’t move through a person who is bracing. Loosen your shoulders."

"They are loose!"

"They are not." She stepped behind me and put both hands on my shoulders, and then ran them down my arms, slowly, to my wrists. "There. Do you feel the difference?"

"Professor, this feels like a technique with a lot of applications."

"It has several. We’ll cover the others during advanced convalescence." She let go. "Again."

I got it on the fourth try. A ball of light the size of a plum, sitting over my palm, coming from me and not from anybody living in my sleeve.

"Adequate," Sabine said.

"That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. I mean, outside of sex."

---

Afterward, while I was catching my breath, I pointed north and east, at the mountain with the cloud sitting across it.

"So what’s the story with that?"

Sabine didn’t look where I was pointing.

"You will not go up there."

"I was only asking-"

"I know what you were doing." She turned to face me, and she had stopped doing the voice she uses for everything else. "The faculty packet lists that peak as prohibited. It is the only site on this excursion the shrine refused to discuss with us at all, and I have taught here for nineteen years and been told nothing about it in any of them. If you go up that mountain, Kohaku, I won’t be able to help you."

She’d used my first name.

"Understood," I said.

[So, definitely go there. Got it.]

---

I found Odette after lunch, sitting on the covered walkway on the south side of the lodging with three books open around her and a fourth in her lap.

"Are you working? We’re on vacation."

"I’m reading. It isn’t the same thing." She didn’t look up. "The shrine keeps a records room and the woman in grey let me into it this morning, which I think was a mistake on her part, because I have no intention of leaving."

I sat down next to her and let my legs hang off the edge of the walkway.

"So teach me something."

"About what?"

"The sword thing you mentioned before the trip. The burying blades in stone business."

Odette finally looked up.

"Interment," she said. "It’s a regional practice. When a weapon is considered dangerous, and by dangerous they mean the weapon itself and not the person holding it, the province doesn’t destroy it. They believe destroying a blade with something in it releases whatever is in it. So they seal it into stone at a shrine and they maintain the shrine forever."

"... Like a long maintenance contract?"

She raised a brow, and then she started yapping.

"I suppose. There are eleven interment sites in the province. Nine are minor. One is at Tsuzumi, which is the largest and the oldest." She turned a page and tapped it. "The records list forty-one blades at Tsuzumi. Most of them are unremarkable. One entry has no name attached to it, only a date, and the date is roughly six hundred years before the others."

[East. Got it.]

"Okay, hang on," I said. "What about the mountain?"

"What about it?"

"Is there an interment site up there? Is that why nobody goes?"

"No." Odette closed the book on her finger. "That’s what I found interesting. The mountain isn’t on the interment register at all. It isn’t on the shrine’s land register, it isn’t in the tax survey, and the province maps mark the whole northeast face as unsurveyed, which for a region that has counted forty-one swords and written down the date on each of them is quite strange. They’ve documented everything here except that."

[... So I have two places to check, then? East, and the mountain.]

"You’ve gone quiet," Odette said. "That’s usually bad."

"I’m just impressed. You did all this before lunch."

"I did all this before breakfast. I’ve been awake since the fourth bell."

[As expected of Miss Walking Exposition.]

She went back to her book.

"In any case, I’ll be at the baths after the ninth bell. Not the eighth, when everyone goes. I’d prefer to go when the water has settled, and it’s quiet, and nobody is shrieking about the temperature."

I looked at her.

She kept reading with great concentration, and the tips of her ears went pink.

"Is that an invitation, Odette?"

"I-It’s a schedule," she said, blushing. "I’m telling you the schedule. What you do with the schedule is your business, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make it a whole thing."

[It’s absolutely an invitation.]

"Kohaku!"

Fenna came around the corner of the walkway at speed, still in her travel clothes, holding a cloth bundle in both hands. She stopped in front of us, went down on one knee, and held it out.

"Pears," she said. "There’s an orchard on the north side of the valley. I asked the farmer and he said I could take some, so I took eleven."

"... For me?"

"For you!"

I sighed.

[Fine... I’ll take the courtship pears.]