Chapter 117: Tips

The next afternoon, I showed up at Sabine’s practice room carrying a fully loaded tea tray.

Sabine was sitting on the windowsill with a book. She looked up, saw the tray, and slowly closed the book.

"Kohaku," she said. "Are you bringing me tea? How thoughtful~"

"Not exactly!" I set the tray down on the floor very carefully. "I need you to teach me something. I need to learn how to grab someone’s wrist while I’m holding a tray. Fast. Really fast. Fast enough that they can’t pull their hand back."

"I see." Sabine set her book aside. "And why would you need to do that?"

"No reason!"

She looked at me, then down at the tray, with its teapot, cups, and little plate of lemon cakes.

I tried to see it from her side. A week ago, I’d asked her how to fight in a small, fancy room with chairs in it, and how to stop a man from drawing a knife without making noise. I’d asked her about black glass. On top of that, the whole faculty had probably heard by now that a fox from the commoner class would be serving tea in the royal box on the night of the play.

Sabine didn’t say anything for a very long time. The smile slid off her face. She sat on the windowsill with her hands folded in her lap and stared at the lemon cakes as if they had personally done something to her.

"Kohaku," she finally said, in a sweet, soft voice. "You wouldn’t hide a secret from your dear old teacher, would you?"

"Of course not!!!"

"Naturally." She stood up and strolled toward me. "I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent reason a student would need to break a man’s wrist while serving the Queen her tea."

"I never said anything about the Queen!"

"Didn’t you?" Sabine tilted her head. "My mistake. I must be thinking of some other fox who asked me about Church relics last week and is now delivering cakes to the most heavily guarded room in the kingdom."

I kept my mouth shut.

She circled me once, slowly, and sighed through her nose.

"Pick up your tray."

I picked it up.

Sabine took a wooden practice dagger off the wall and slid it inside her robe, right where a man would keep a knife inside his coat. Then she sat down in a chair and crossed her legs.

"I’m a guest, and you’re serving me," she said. "Your left hand holds the tray. Your right hand reaches for my cup. The cup is a lie. The moment my hand moves toward my chest, your right hand goes to my wrist instead, and you Snap. Don’t drop the tray first. If you drop the tray, the noise warns him. Understand?"

"Got it!"

I didn’t have it.

The first time, I reached for her wrist, and the whole tray tipped. The teapot slid off and smashed on the floor. On the second try, I grabbed her sleeve instead of her wrist, and she had the wooden dagger pressed to my stomach before I could blink. On the third, I was simply too slow, and she poked me in the ribs.

"Dead," Sabine said cheerfully. "Again."

We did it over and over. My arm burned, my wrist ached, and the floor of her practice room was covered in spilled tea and crushed lemon cake.

Then, on what had to be the fortieth try, I saw her shoulder twitch. I ran Tide straight into my right hand, Snapped my grip, and caught her wrist before her fingers touched the hilt. The tray in my left hand barely wobbled.

Sabine looked down at my hand on her wrist.

"Good," she said quietly. "That’s the one. Do exactly that."

Afterward, she announced that my wrist required "a thorough recovery session," which took a while and didn’t involve my wrist much at all.

When it was over, I was lying on her practice mat, and Sabine was sitting beside me, buttoning her blouse. She only made it halfway before getting distracted. One of her breasts had slipped completely out the front, and she didn’t seem to notice or care.

"Kohaku," she said, without looking at me. "If you happen to be expecting any trouble..."

"Hm?"

"You can just ask me for help." She finally looked down at me. "Or your friends. You do have a great many friends now, you know. I believe half the Wildfolk delegation has proposed to you."

I blinked up at her twice.

Then, one by one, I thought about the people around me.

Serena was an SSS-rank, and she carried the only sword in the world that could kill the Calamity Queen. Fenna was a wolf beastkin with a whole delegation behind her. Marisol had once planted a sponsorship form in my pocket without me noticing a thing. Odette noticed everything. Lily had held Tide for thirty seconds on her very first try. Sabine herself could take me apart with a wooden stick.

I’d been planning to stop an assassin all by myself, with a tea tray, while some of the strongest people in the academy were eating breakfast with me every morning. Not that all of them would be available, but still.

[Damn... I really slipped into protagonist mode these last few days.]

Sabine finished one more button, then gave up on the rest.

"Think about it," she said, and lay back down beside me.

---

Five days before the festival, a palace page walked into our café prep with a letter sealed in gray wax.

He handed it to Marisol, since she was the one standing closest to the door and looking the most important. She broke the seal, read it, and her eyebrows climbed all the way up her forehead.

"Oh, dear," she said. "Kohaku, darling, this one’s for you."

"For me?" I put down the stack of napkins I’d been folding. "What does it say?"

Marisol cleared her throat and read it out loud in her best snooty voice.

"By order of the Office of the Queen’s Secretary. All refreshments for the royal box during the Founder’s Play will be prepared and served exclusively by palace staff. Any previous arrangements made with students of the academy are hereby cancelled. With regrets, Secretary Anselm Pryce."

The napkins slid off the table.

Every single plan I had depended on that tea tray. The tray was supposed to get me past the guards, through the door, and over to the side table, three steps from Pryce’s right hand. Without it, I’d be stuck downstairs in a maid uniform while he sat beside the Queen with a knife in his coat. All my practice on the stairs and all forty of my wrist grabs meant nothing if I couldn’t get into the room.

"NO!!!" I grabbed the letter out of Marisol’s hands and read it again, as if the words might change. "He can’t just cancel it! Is he even allowed to do that!?"

"He’s the Queen’s private secretary, darling. He can do almost anything." Marisol sighed. "And there goes my royal delivery surcharge."

I sank down onto the nearest chair with the letter crumpled in my fist. My mind was already racing through the backup plans, and every one of them was terrible. I could climb the outside wall. I could hide inside a curtain. I could pretend to be lost on the stairs and hope nobody checked.

Then the classroom door banged open hard enough to rattle the windows.

"WHERE IS MY FOX!"

Hexilia Frostfall stood in the doorway in full uniform, red in the face, holding up a copy of the exact same letter. Half the girls in the room dropped whatever they were holding.

"H-Hex!"

"There you are!" She marched straight over to me and slapped her copy down on the table. "Have you seen this nonsense? Palace staff only! Previous arrangements cancelled! He didn’t even ask me! I’m the captain of the Queen’s Guard, and that box is my responsibility, and he cancelled my arrangement without saying a single word to me!"

"I... yeah, I just got mine..."

"Well, you can throw it away." Hex snatched my crumpled letter, balled it up even smaller, and tossed it over her shoulder. "I went straight to his office this morning. I told him that the security of the royal box is decided by the Guard, not by the correspondence office, and that I personally approved one fox, one tray, and one plate of lemon cakes. Then I told him that if he had a problem with that, he could take it up with the Queen, and that I’d be happy to walk him there myself."

My mouth fell open.

"What did he say?"

"He smiled." Hex rolled her eyes. "He’s always smiling. He said, ’Of course, Captain. I only wished to spare the young lady the trouble.’ Then he bowed and wrote something in his little ledger."

She put both hands on my shoulders and grinned down at me.

"So! The fox and her lemon cakes are coming up to the box, whether Secretary Pryce likes it or not. The Queen is very excited about the lemon cakes, by the way. I may have told her about them twice."

"Hex... Thank you!" I grabbed her hands. "Seriously, thank you so much!"

"Don’t mention it! Nobody cancels my arrangements." She ruffled my hair, then turned and waved to the room on her way out. "Carry on, girls! Back to your napkins!"

The door swung shut behind her.