Chapter 67: The Pact of Enemies, Part Ten: The One Who Didn't Defend Me

Professor Wilda has a glass jar full of paper slips and uses it every day.

It's her idea of justice: in her class nobody has a permanent seat. Every morning you come up to the front, introduce yourself with the label she considers acceptable, put your hand in the jar, and sit wherever it says. A prince can end up in the last row. A scholarship commoner can end up in front of everyone. Wilda couldn't care less either way, and that's the only good thing I'm going to say about that woman in this entire story.

We'd had two weeks of classes and the jar had never put me next to Lianza D'Tariel.

That morning it did.

"I'm Dariel Elcronne, of House Elcronne, vassal to House D'Tariel," I said, right hand open over my chest and the other parting a curtain that isn't there, exactly as I was taught. "Seat fourteen."

Wilda looked my posture up and down, searching. Found nothing wrong. That too I owe someone.

She was in fifteen.

She shifted her skirt on the bench to make room for me, without looking at me, with the automatic courtesy you'd use to make room for anyone.

Forty centimeters. I measured it later, with the ruler from my notebook, because I am exactly that kind of idiot.

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"Today there's no practice," Wilda said, setting two bundles on the desk. "Today there's inventory."

A murmur of disappointment ran through the room. Nobles love practice. Practice is showing off.

"A state ceremony isn't a party, it's an operation. And an operation has lists." She opened the first bundle. "Contributions from House Jahke, read exactly as they arrived this week at the headmaster's office."

And she began to read.

Two hundred and forty pounds of wax for the nave candles. Four cartloads of greenhouse flowers brought from the south, because in the north by early February there isn't a living flower within a hundred leagues. Twelve musicians. An officiant. Six hundred cups.

The bride's dress: Halvenne workshop, southern silk, gold thread embroidery on collar and train, eleven kilos in weight, four meters of train. Crafted from measurements sent in early January.

Wilda read that line with the same voice she'd used for the cups.

I didn't.

I got stuck on the date, because it had happened right after the ball, which meant someone took Lianza D'Tariel's body measurements and sent them south the moment she said "yes" to the engagement.

To my left, forty centimeters away, the interested party listened to the description of her own dress with her hands still on the desk.

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"Second bundle," Wilda said. "Contributions from the invited houses."

And this is where the class woke up, because this was competition.

She went house by house, in order of rank, reading what each family would present on the day of the wedding. The Vane contribute two hundred bottles of a wine made the year Alexia was born. The Vereth, the entire garden of the cathedral for three days, assembled and disassembled by their people. The Taint send silver. The Analazze send crystal, which is their way of reminding everyone that they once had veins.

Each name came with its figure, and each figure came with its little silence of admiration.

"House Elcronne."

A different silence fell.

"Stand, young Elcronne."

I stood.

"What does your house present?"

You see, I'd been three months in this world and knew what happened in the original web novel of hundreds of chapters. I knew how arrogant Ardwyn would become. I knew in which paragraph people died who were still eating breakfast... although I still didn't know who had murdered Dayne.

Be that as it may, I hadn't the slightest idea what my house presented.

Nobody had told me. It hadn't occurred to me to ask. And standing in front of thirty-two people, with the bundle open on the professor's desk, I suddenly understood that there had been an entire conversation about my own family taking place without me for weeks.

"I don't know, Professor."

"Correct," Wilda said.

My head came up.

"That is the correct answer, young Elcronne, and I congratulate you for not inventing one." She turned a page with two fingers. "House Elcronne presents nothing. The vassal houses of the house that gives the bride do not present contributions."

"…Ah."

"They provide service."

And she turned the bundle toward me, without bringing it closer, just enough for me to see that there was a list with names.

"Castle D'Tariel staff assigned to the banquet. Kitchens, three shifts." Her finger ran down the column. "Astara Elcronne, head chef, full shift. Your mother, I understand."

Someone in the second row let air out through their nose.

And there, exactly there, they started laughing.

Not loudly. Nobles don't laugh loudly at these things: they laugh the way you cough in church, inward, looking at each other.

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This is where she speaks.

I'd been counting on that for three months the way you count on the floor being where you step. Wilda says something about cooks and low blood, and from some seat comes a voice without standing, very proper, very calm, and Wilda goes quiet. Every time.

She was forty centimeters from me. I could see her hands.

"Princess D'Tariel," Wilda said. "Correct me if I'm wrong. The house that gives the bride, does it contribute or does it serve?"

"It serves, Professor."

She said it without thinking. Without turning her head. With that exam voice of hers, the one that answers before the question has finished hitting the floor.

"And is there an exception for three-generation vassals?"

"There is no exception, Professor."

"Thank you, Princess."

Nothing more. That was all. Two correct answers and not a single word that wasn't true.

You see, on the first day of class that woman had me frozen for ten minutes in the middle of a botched curtsy, using me as an example of what not to do, and corrected me with ruler pokes: two in the shoulders, one in the back, one on the hands to make me open them, another on the back of my neck to make me look down.

That day, when I was still nothing to Lianza D'Tariel but an accident she'd been assigned, she sneezed at the wrong time to cover one of my mistakes. A sneeze. She didn't even look at me. But she did it.

That morning nobody touched me. Wilda didn't raise her voice at me once, she simply read a list, and the person who's spent three months putting herself between the world and me answered two protocol questions with the rigor of an exemplary student.

I prefer the pokes. Let it be written.

"Sit down, young Elcronne."

I sat. Forty centimeters.

We stayed like that for fifty minutes, shoulder to shoulder, while Wilda finished reading who scrubs and who serves and who clears the plates at the wedding of the person sitting next to me.

At some point during the last quarter hour, Lianza moved her left hand on the desk. One centimeter toward me. Maybe less.

It stayed there, still, until the bell rang.

And then she withdrew it, gathered her things, and left first.

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Alexia Vane was waiting for me at the door with her fan closed and her freckles lit up.

"Two hundred bottles of wine," she said. "Two hundred. For people who won't even taste it. It's obscene and I'm embarrassed by my surname."

"It's not your fault."

"Right." She struck the fan against her palm. "Hey. If you need someone to accompany you to that wedding, let me know."

And she left before I could answer, which was a blessing, because in some corner of my head a mandatory-mission-shaped ember had lit up and I was hating myself at a remarkable pace.

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I caught up with her in the hallway. I shouldn't have.

"Lianza."

She kept walking.

"Lianza. My mother."

That stopped her.

She turned around slowly, and the cold arrived before she did, and the eight people coming behind us became three, because there's a way of being still that Lianza learned from her father and that clears hallways without saying a word.

"Your mother has been serving in that kitchen for twenty years," she said. "It's news to nobody except you."

"That's not what I'm asking you."

"I know what you're asking me."

I waited.

And for a second I thought she was going to say it, whatever it was, right there, in a hallway, with three people watching. Something moved in her face, something that looked very much like her expression at eleven at night on the other side of a wall.

Then she raised her hand and adjusted her glasses.

"It's fine, Elcronne."

And she went to class.

It took me until nightfall to understand what had me so wrong, and when I understood I sat on a step.

She had adjusted her glasses.

That means she's lying, and she knows perfectly well that I know what it means, because she taught me in a carriage three months ago, dying of laughter.

So she was warning me about something, something I still hadn't grasped.