Chapter 72: Tension

{Kohaku}

I looked back and forth between them. Lily had her arms crossed and was pouting at nothing. Serena had her hands behind her back and her eyes closed, body aimed in the opposite direction.

[... Seriously, what the hell is going on here?]

I set the weasel on my shoulder and clapped my hands together.

"Okay! Great news, everyone. The spirit is recovered, the trail behind us is clear, and we still have half a marker to go. Who’s excited? I’m excited."

Nobody was excited.

"Right. Moving on, then."

I started walking. After a moment, two sets of footsteps followed me, one on each side of the trail, spaced as far apart as the trees allowed.

I have been to funerals with better energy. I have BEEN the funeral, technically, and I’m sure whatever crowd attended mine was more jovial.

The eighth boar broke cover on our left. Lily was on it before I finished pointing, and it went down in one stroke, and she stepped back with her chin up and shot a look across the trail.

"Eight," she said.

Serena’s eyes opened.

The ninth boar didn’t even get to charge. It stuck its snout out of a bush forty feet away, and a spike of ice took it through the head and pinned it to a tree.

"Nine," Serena said.

[Oh no.]

What followed was probably the fastest pest control in the history of organized education.

They stopped waiting for the boars to come to us. Lily started cutting through the brush to find them at home. Serena began freezing anything that rustled, which included two boars, a bird’s nest, and one extremely unlucky rabbit. Neither of them said a single word that wasn’t a number. By the time we reached the third marker, the count was fourteen to thirteen, Lily’s shirt had come untucked, Serena’s braid crown was falling apart, and I had eaten three courtship pears and contributed nothing except witness testimony.

The marker stone sat in a little clearing with a bell on it. Lily rang it. Then Serena stepped up and rang it again, harder.

"It only needs to be rung once," Lily said.

"Yours was quiet. If the steward doesn’t hear it, the group doesn’t get credit, and I’m not repeating this hunt because you tapped the bell like it owed you an apology."

"It was AUDIBLE! Birds flew away!"

"Girls," I said. "The forest is dead. You killed the forest. Let’s go home."

The walk back took an hour, and I spent it doing diplomacy.

I told jokes. I asked Lily about sword forms, and she said "they’re fine" to a sword form question, which is like a priest shrugging about God. I asked Serena about ice theory, which got me a two-sentence answer delivered to a point six inches left of my head. I proposed we stop at the river and skip stones, and both of them said "no" at the same time, and then they glared at each other for saying it at the same time.

[This is unbearable. What happened out there? I was gone for ten minutes. TEN. What can two people even do in ten minutes?]

I smirked.

[... Don’t answer that.]

---

The shrine gate came into view around mid-afternoon. The steward stood at a little table with a ledger, checking groups back in, and there was exactly one group ahead of us in the finished column:

Aldric, Cassian, and Perrin were lounging by the wall behind her like a poster for a boy band.

"Group eleven," the steward said, running her finger down the page. "Second to return, and before the midday bell at that. The shrine thanks you. Please report any injuries now, because I am not reopening the ledger after supper."

[Second? We had the two strongest people in the school and we lost to the boy band.]

Aldric peeled himself off the wall as we passed. His hair was annoyingly perfect for someone who’d just been slaughtering pests.

"Frostfall. Back already? We cleared our marker before eleven, though I suppose the western trail runs longer. I told the steward to expect you next, actually. I said, watch, the next bell will be my fiancée’s, and here you are. If the pests gave you any trouble out there, you need only have sent word, and I would have..."

Serena walked past him.

She didn’t slow down, she didn’t nod, she just aimed herself at the east hall and went. Aldric stood there with the rest of his sentence still in his mouth.

"Lily!" I turned around. "Hey, we should celebrate. Fourteen boars! I’ll steal us something from the kitchen, we can-"

"I’m tired." She was already walking toward the west hall, in the exact opposite direction, hugging her own elbows. "It’s not you, I promise. I just want to lie down for a while and not think about anything. I’ll come find you at dinner, okay? Save me whatever you steal."

Then she was gone too.

I stood alone in the courtyard, between two halls, with a weasel on my shoulder and a pear core in my hand.

In the book, those two didn’t even share a scene until Chapter nine. Now they couldn’t share a continent.

[Okay. I need to figure out what the fuck is going on there.]

---

I have a system for this.

When you want something out of somebody, you don’t ask. Asking is for people with leverage. I had no leverage, no rank, and a roommate who could halve a boar without setting her feet, so I did what I’ve always done, which is soften the target until the truth falls out on its own.

Step one was food.

I stole two rice cakes and a jar of something sweet from the shrine kitchen while the cook was arguing with a delivery boy about eels, and I brought them to our room, and I fed Lily by hand until she got embarrassed and took the second one herself. She said thank you four times.

Step two was chores.

I did her laundry. I have never done my own laundry in two lives, and I burned my thumb on the water, and I hung her uniform up backwards on the line, but she came out onto the walkway, saw it and smiled, which told me the investment was paying off.

Step three was flattery, which I’d do anyway, to be honest.

"Fourteen boars," I said, sitting on the rail. "Nobody in that forest was safe. They’re gonna tell stories about you~"

"I-It wasn’t fourteen! Like, two of them were already dead..."

"Then it was fourteen and a half, because moral victories count double in my house."

She laughed. Oh, that’s when I knew I had her.

Finally, we arrived at the moment of truth:

The massage!

I got her face-down on the futon in a shirt and shorts, and I sat across the backs of her thighs. I started off at her shoulders. She’d been swinging a sword since dawn. The muscle under my thumbs was in knots the size of coins, and every time I found one she made a sound she clearly did not intend to make, and then she’d bury her face in the pillow and go quiet for a bit.

"You’re... very good at this," she said, muffled.

"I contain many talents. It’s just that most of them are useless in a fight."

"W-Well, for what it’s worth, this one is very not useless, hehe."

"Appreciate it, sweetheart."

I worked down between her shoulder blades. Her back was warm. Her shirt had ridden up over the small of her back. I, being weak, looked, and then I remembered that I had a job to do and dragged my eyes north.

[Okay. She’s soft, she’s happy, she’s horizontal. Deploy.]

I pressed my thumbs in and kept my voice light.

"So, uh. You and Serena, huh?"

Lily went stiff under my hands. Not tense, exactly. Stiff, like a board.

Then she pushed herself up on her elbows and turned around, and her face was red in a way that had nothing to do with the massage.

"I don’t want to talk about her!"

My brows shot up through the roof.

I have seen Lily Everdawn cry, apologize to furniture, and thank a monster for dying quickly. I had never once heard her raise her voice, and she did it right in my face, in our room, with her hair stuck to her cheek and her eyes wet at the corners.

I put my hands up.

"Okay. Okay, okay. Consider the subject buried. I never said the name, I don’t know the name. Who even is Serena, am I right?"

She looked at my hands. Then she looked at her own, and her shoulders came down about two inches, and she sat back on her heels.

"Sorry." She said it to the futon. "That was awful of me. You’ve been so nice all afternoon and I shouted at you like a child."

"You’ve earned one shout. You’re four hundred behind everyone else I know."

She almost smiled, and then she gave up on it and pushed her hair out of her face.

"She just gets to me," she said. "That’s all. Serena says six words to me in a hallway and I’m arguing with her about a bell like some kind of lunatic. I hate it. I hate that she can do it, and I hate that I let her, and I don’t want to be the person she turns me into. Can we please talk about literally anything else?"

"Sure," I said. "Do you want to hear about well-ropes again?"

"No."

"Rice cake?"

"Yes."

I gave her the rice cake, and she ate it, and she went to sleep about nine minutes later, face-down, with her hand still holding half of it.

I sat there in the dark for a while.

[... Alright then. Maybe I should ask Serena.]