Chapter 73: From The Horse’s Mouth

Turns out the shrine got a lot livelier after dark.

I walked the outer path with my hands tucked into my sleeves. Somebody in the west hall was murdering a stringed instrument. Four Knight Course boys sat on the steps passing a bottle around, and one of them had already lain down on the stone to have a private moment with his own decisions. Under the eaves by the storehouse, a pack of noble girls shrieked with laughter around a lantern. Reindl was stuck in the middle of them with her shoulders up by her ears, smiling in terror.

And the faculty packet called this an educational excursion.

[Not a field trip, my ass! Two hundred teenagers, fourteen nights, and a river. Somebody’s getting pregnant.]

Anyway, I had a job to do.

Serena wasn’t in the east hall. She wasn’t at the baths, and she wasn’t in any building that currently contained a human being, which narrowed my options down considerably. So I stopped in the middle of the path and did the one thing I’m genuinely world-class at.

[Okay. I’m cold, I’m rich, I hate my fiancé, and I’ve got a cock I never asked for. Where do I go to sulk?]

The answer was up and alone. She’d want to be above everybody, in the cold, with a clear view of the whole compound so she could watch people enjoy themselves and brood about it. I gave her that personality when I was fifteen, so I’d know.

The bell tower on the north end had an outside stair that the steward had specifically told us to stay off of, so I climbed it. The steps creaked loud enough that I gave up on sneaking about a third of the way. At the top I found Serena Frostfall sitting on the rail with one leg hanging over the drop.

She heard me coming and kept her back to me.

"The stair is prohibited."

"So’s the mountain. I’m collecting them~" I leaned on the rail next to her, close enough to be obnoxious about it. Her hair was down and it went most of the way to her waist. The wind kept lifting it off her back, so I got about four seconds to look at her neck and at the way she was sitting, one thigh flattened against the rail, the rest of her balanced over fifty feet of nothing, before she turned her head and caught me at it. "Great view up here. Do the boys down there know you can see everything they’re doing?"

She sighed.

"What do you want, mutt?"

"What happened with Lily?"

Serena went still. Her leg quit swinging, her hand closed around the rail, and she looked out at the trees instead of at me.

"Ask her about it."

"I did! I got shouted at. Lily Everdawn, who apologizes to air, raised her voice at me in our own room and then nearly cried about having done it. She fell asleep holding a rice cake. Do you have ANY idea how upsetting that is to look at?"

"You should have brought her a second one."

"Oh, so you’re funny now? Nobody warned me. I would have prepared."

Serena turned around and looked at me properly. I could see her eyes fine in the dark, and she had a mean one loaded up before she even opened her mouth.

"You claim to have the sight. You made a great performance of it in my room, on your knees, with my hand on your throat, and you told me things about my childhood I have never once said aloud. If your eyes work forward and backward, then use them. It was ten minutes in a forest, Sakana. Go and look at it."

[Except it isn’t a novel scene. My skill only shows me what I actually wrote down, so I have no idea what came out of your mouth in those ferns. That’s the whole problem.]

"I’d rather hear you say it."

"Why?"

I tried to think of something deep to say.

"Because a vision won’t tell me why it hurt. I’d get the words and none of the good stuff." I propped my chin on my hand. "Also, honestly? I climbed three flights of illegal stairs in the dark for you, and one of them tried to kill me on the way. Throw me a bone."

Serena’s ears went red at the tips. She turned back to the drop, her shoulders sank, and her head dropped forward until her hair covered her face.

I sat down on the platform boards and got comfortable, since I figured this was going to be long.

"We used to date."

I blinked at her.

"... Eh?"

"Do you need it spelled out? Everdawn and I were together for the better part of a year. Then we weren’t, and that is the entire reason she cannot stand to be in a forest with me." Serena said all of it to the treeline, without looking at me. "Which you would have known already if your gift were worth anything."

[WHAT?]

"You... The two of you..."

"Her mother’s household served mine. Everdawn came to the estate at thirteen and worked in my wing. She brought my tea, my letters, my clothes. She was in my rooms every single day for four years, because my father thought it appropriate for me to have someone my own age nearby." Her leg started swinging again. "He arranged for me to be raised alongside a very pretty commoner who had no ability whatsoever to tell me no. You can imagine how that went."

[I cannot, actually! I wrote you these girls as ENEMIES! They’re supposed to meet in Chapter whatever, where Serena calls her a peasant and Lily cries about it. That’s the entire relationship!]

"Uh huh," I said. "So this was a professional arrangement?"

"She was sixteen when it started. I was seventeen." Serena’s voice had gone flat. "She kissed me first, for whatever that is worth, which is nothing, because I was the one who could have had her dismissed. I’ve thought about that particular detail rather a lot."

[LILY kissed HER first!? EXCUSE ME???]

"And then it ended," I said, "because...?"

"Because I ended it."

"Sure, but why? People end things for reasons, and you have never once in your life done anything without one."

Serena’s head turned. Her hair was loose, her mouth was a hard line, and she was angled at me like she was picking out which of my bones to break first. She was, unfortunately, the most attractive person I have ever written into existence.

"You know why," she said.

I thought about it.

[... Oh.]

She sat on that bed with her shirt on for two hours while Lily asked her six separate times. She called eight o’clock late, she left, and Lily spent the next year trying to work out what she’d done wrong.

"Serena..."

"Don’t." She got off the rail. "You came up here for a thing and now you have it. Don’t follow me down, don’t say her name to me tomorrow, and if you tell anyone, I will freeze your tongue to the inside of your own mouth."

She went down the stairs. They creaked the whole way, and I stayed where I was, sitting on the boards with my legs stuck out in front of me.

❖ MANUSCRIPT

A record exists beyond the one you wrote.

New function unlocked: RECOLLECTION.

View a past scene from this world’s history, as it occurred.

Cost: 10 MP.

I stared at the box.

[Hold on. That thing has been showing me my own draft this entire time, and now it’s telling me it can pull up stuff I never wrote? Since when?]

The philosophy of it could wait.

[Ten MP is nothing. And this is research! Vital, necessary research, undertaken purely for the purposes of story maintenance.]

I hit yes fast enough to hurt my finger.

RECOLLECTION — 10 MP.

The tower went away.

I was standing in a bedroom the size of my entire dorm hall. There was a fire going in the hearth, and Lily Everdawn was in Serena Frostfall’s lap in the chair beside it with her apron half untied. She had a knee up on either side of Serena’s hips and her mouth on Serena’s mouth. Serena had one hand on the back of her neck, the other one flat on her ass, holding her down against her. They were loud enough that I looked over my shoulder to check the door.

Lily broke off to breathe and went for her throat instead.

"The door," Serena said.

"I locked it. I lock it before I’ve got my shoes off, so you can stop asking me that every single time." Lily was already working the buttons at Serena’s collar. She got two of them open, then her hand slid down past the ribs, past the waist, almost to the belt, until Serena caught her wrist.

"Not there."

"You never let me touch you below the collarbone. Is there a rule about it? Did somebody write it down somewhere, because I would genuinely love to read it."

Serena kissed her hard enough to end the conversation and hauled her hips forward with the hand she had free. Lily’s apron finished coming undone and hit the rug. She ground herself down against Serena’s thigh, once, twice, until Serena’s whole body went rigid underneath her.

Lily didn’t notice a thing.

The vision cut out. I was back on the platform on my hands and knees, at night, with a dry mouth and a heartbeat I could feel in my teeth.

[... I need to sit down.]

I was already sitting down.