Chapter 75: Boring

"Heh?"

Lily got a hand under the stack before the whole thing went over. She stood in the middle of the dark path with dishes up to her chin, staring at me.

"The mountain," she said. "The one the steward stood up in front of two hundred people and pointed at?"

"That’s the one!"

"He told us nobody goes up it, twice."

"Right, and he wouldn’t do that unless there was something really cool and probably sword-shaped up there." I fell into step beside her. " Look, he gave us all these rules. The river’s fast, the doors are paper, the baths run on the bell. Perfectly reasonable, all of it. Then he gets to the mountain and it’s just no, with nothing behind it. Just ’don’t go up there.’ Doesn’t that bother you?"

"Not even slightly! It’s a completely normal thing for a man who runs a shrine to say to a big group of teenagers, and the reason is obviously that somebody fell off it once."

"Then he’d have said that. ’Don’t go up the mountain, a boy died on it.’ That’s a much better rule and perhaps then I would have listened to it."

"Maybe he’s being kind to the family!"

We went past the storehouse. Somebody had left a lantern burning on the step, so Lily put the whole stack of bowls down on the wood, blew it out, then picked them back up.

"Kohaku, listen to me. We’re guests here. The shrine is letting two hundred students sleep in their halls and eat their fish. Professor Corvaine said in the yard that the faculty weren’t told anything about the peak either, so if something goes wrong up there, nobody is coming to get us."

I narrowed my eyes at her.

"So you’re thinking about it~"

"I’ve thought about what would happen, which is not the same as thinking about doing it!"

"Why isn’t it the same?"

"Because I..." She stopped in the middle of the path.

[Uh oh.]

"Hold on. Why do you want to go? You still haven’t said. You’ve been picking the steward’s reasoning apart for five minutes and none of that is a reason for a person to climb a mountain in the dark!"

"Doesn’t have to be the dark. We could-"

"Kohaku!"

She looked upon me with suspicion.

Problem was, I couldn’t exactly say what the reason was.

[Your legendary sword is up there. You’re supposed to pull it out of a rock in front of a crowd while a choir sings about it, and I’ve knocked so many dominoes over that I don’t know if the rock is even standing anymore. If you don’t have it when the Calamity Queen shows up, everyone on this continent dies, including you, and i’d prefer it if that didn’t happen.]

I opened my mouth.

"Because your life is boring!"

Lily’s eyebrows came down.

"... Excuse me?"

"Boooring! Deeply, tragically boring, and it’s starting to affect me physically." I got in front of her and walked backward so she had to look at me. "You’ve gone to bed before the ninth bell every night this week. You gave a coin purse back to a noble boy who’d already forgotten he owned it. You washed my clothes, which I never asked you to do. Tonight you carried six dinner plates across a courtyard for people who won’t remember it tomorrow!"

"T-Those are all good things!"

"They’re wonderful things! You’re the best, most kindest greatestest person I know!!! And yes, that’s a low bar, since everyone else I know is either a woman who bet her rent against a prodigy or a wolf who wants to put pups in me without a date first." I kept walking backward. "But in forty years, when you’re sitting in some very nice chair being extremely respected, what have you got? A stack of clean laundry that belonged to somebody else. I’ll be dead in a ditch by then with better stories than you."

"That is not something to be proud of!"

"It’s what I’ve got, so let me have it." I stopped, and she nearly walked into me. "One rule. That’s all I want. You’ve never broken one in your life and I’d like to see what your face does when you do."

Lily stood there with the dishes. Her ears had gone red, and she chewed at the inside of her cheek while she looked off at the trees.

"T-T-That’s manipulation!" She blushed. "You just did a whole speech at me in the dark like some kind of stage villain!"

"Sure. Was any of it wrong, though?"

"... Some of it. I’ll think of which part later and then you’re going to hear about it."

"Uh huh~"

"I’ll think of one!" Lily’s voice went up loud enough that a shutter banged open somewhere in the west hall. She went red, hunched down over her bowls, and dropped to a hiss. "F-Fine! I’ll go up the stupid mountain with you! But we go in daylight, we tell nobody, and if I say we’re turning back then we turn back. You have to actually do it, not agree with me and keep walking."

"Deal."

"I mean it, Kohaku. Say it properly."

"Absolutely, on my life, on the Saint, on your laundry."

She looked at me for a long moment with her mouth pushed out in a proper pout. Then she took her dishes and marched off toward the kitchens with her ears still red.

I went back to the room, lay down on the futon, and grinned up at the ceiling.

[Heh. I’m so good at this.]

---

We got up before the fifth bell.

Lily had packed the night before, obviously. She had a rolled blanket, a water skin, a coil of rope she’d gotten out of the storehouse by asking somebody nicely, and a cloth bundle of rice balls she’d made at some point when I wasn’t watching. She’d brought her sword too, the plain academy one with the chipped guard, and she was working the belt over her hip with her tongue between her teeth.

On my end... I brought a knife and three of Fenna’s courtship pears.

[Not like it would make a difference what I bring. Lily’s OP.]

"Where’s Serena?"

Lily’s hands didn’t stop on the buckle, though her shoulders came up about an inch.

"Gone since before I woke up. She left a note on the beam by the door, which is what she does instead of saying things out loud to people, and apparently the Stellaris-Vane family is taking breakfast at the governor’s house this morning and she’s expected there. Three hours down the road. She’ll be back tonight." Lily gave the belt a hard yank. "Very good for her."

"Uh huh."

"It is! It’s a wonderful opportunity. His mother is one of the most important women in the kingdom and Serena’s going to sit at a table with her and be extremely charming, and I hope she has an absolutely lovely time eating eggs with her future in-laws."

[Oh my god.]

I stood there with a pear in each hand and looked at the back of her head.

Because that’s how you talk about an ex. That’s the exact voice, the one where every word is technically nice but every sentence sounds like it’s physically painful to deliver. I have written that voice into probably nine different characters without ever once hearing it come out of Lily Everdawn.

Then I tried to remember the last time she’d brought Serena up on her own, and I couldn’t, because there wasn’t one. Two months in that room together. Two months of Lily telling me about her classes, her homework, the noble girls, the boy in Saint Course who cries, the state of my laundry. Serena Frostfall has been the most famous student in our year that entire time and Lily has said her name to me maybe four times, all of them because I asked first.

[So there was nothing to notice. She’s been leaving a person-shaped hole in every conversation we’ve ever had and I sat right next to it for eight weeks.]

"Anyway," Lily said brightly, "we should go before the halls wake up."

Then she picked up her bag.

She’d tied the blanket into a roll and strapped it across her back. She had the rope coiled over one shoulder and the water skin on the opposite hip so the weight sat even. There was a folding knife on her belt, a flint tin in her breast pocket, and a length of cloth wrapped around one wrist that I could not identify at all. She’d tied her hair up. She’d tied her sleeves back. She was wearing boots I’d never seen before, laced past the ankle, and she was crouched down testing the give in the sole by rocking forward on her toes.

I looked her up and down.

[... Do you run a survival tv show or something? What is this?]

"What?" she said.

"Nothing! No, nothing. You look ready."

"The steward said the river is dangerous, so if we cross running water I’d rather have rope than not have it, and if we get caught out past dark I’d rather have fire than not have it." She stood up and adjusted the strap across her chest. "You brought fruit."

"I brought a knife!"

"You brought a knife you use for fruit."

She got to the door first and slid it open about six inches, then stopped and looked back at me with her hand still on the frame.

"You’re sure about this?"

"Nope~"

Lily made a small noise of despair, and we went out into the grey.