Chapter 16 – A Song for Sir Nobody

The interior of the hunting lodge was not where Lillia wanted to wake up ever again. It stank. She stank. Stale alcohol clung to her like she’d been on the wrong side of the bar for years. Everything about her was sore, from her joints to her butt to her ego. At least whatever was left of it.

Lillia went to wipe the sleep from her eyes. The back of her palm brushed against the dried salt on her cheeks. That was fine. That was fine. That was fine.

It wasn’t her fault. It was just because it had hurt. That meant it didn’t count. That meant that she hadn’t cried. That meant it…

Lillia stretched out as best she could without putting her legs in her blood or the chitterpede’s guts.

The princess was wrong about smelling only like alcohol, the over-sweet smell of the chitterpede’s innards had sunk into her dress as well.

The worst part was she didn’t think that part smelled that bad. She shook her head to try and throw that thought into one of the corners.

Lillia was slow to get up, using the wall for leverage to make up for the effort her legs didn’t want to put in. The wood was rough, unsanded, as if someone had just chopped it from the tree as Lillia had walked into the room. Luckily, Lillia didn’t pick up a splinter on the way up.

Once she was on her feet, Lillia tried to force a deep breath down. She was lightheaded. Filling her lungs all the way felt wrong. Her body told her to keep taking shallow breaths. Told her that she needed to keep wallowing in the panic. That she needed to—

Lillia slammed her fist into the wall. There was no echo behind the wood. It hurt her hand. The princess sighed as she shook her right hand and then tried to massage the future bruise away. While a splinter would have been unfair, bruising in response to the punch was justified. She wasn’t supposed to act like that.

No matter how bad it got.

Unlike the hunting lodge, which had forgotten that Lillia had ever been there, the landing clearly remembered all of Lillia’s crimes, namely the splattering of Havoc’s blood that she had spread across it through multiple attempts to see whether the hobgoblin was alive yet.

Frustrated, upset, and somehow tired despite just being asleep, Lillia dropped to her knees beside the knight and began the labor-intensive process of extricating a corpse from the armor it died in. She was halfway through the first gauntlet, halfway through the chill of armor that had been lying in the middle of the dungeon forever. Halfway through the bones rattling within each time she moved the gauntlet. Halfway through, the realization struck.

Lillia slowed, stopped. The princess sat with her hands on her knees as if she were praying before the knight. Maybe she should have been praying. Maybe she should have been doing something more for him than just pulling him out of armor. He deserved more than that, didn’t he? Lillia balled her hands, taking fistfuls of her new dress. She heard the crackle of dried blood stretching across the pulled fabric where her leg had been punctured by the chitterpede. She felt the blood around the dress’s neckline scratch against the bare-fresh skin that the potion had replaced.

Sir Nobody might have been a nobody but he had probably been through something like Lillia’s yesterday. He deserved something more than this. Luckily, while Lillia wasn’t an adventurer and while Lillia continued to discover new and exciting ways that she was ill-suited for this place, Lillia could do pomp. Lillia could do circumstance. Lillia was a master of ceremony.

She wasn’t wearing black but maybe black wasn’t fashionable where Sir Nobody was from anyway. Red… blood-stained red would have to do.

Lillia worked faster with the understanding that she was doing something right. The somber action of de-armoring a knight, removing bones from plate that had contained them for dozens—hundreds?—of years was a less somber task when re-framed from desecration to preparation. The re-framing also helped with the creeping realization that bones were icky and she probably shouldn’t be touching them.

Oh! Of course. Lillia just needed to change back into her other dress. It had gloves. She reached inward toward her chest and thought about the chitin dress. Nothing came to her hand. Over time the text in the periphery of her vision changed to a list of her inventory.

[Inventory]

[Key Item – Note of Sir Nobody]

[Empty Bottle x 1]

[Rusty Knife x 1]

[Ruined Royal Slippers x 1]

[Scroll – ??? x 1]

[Potion – Basic Healing x 1]

[Soap of Empowered Scrubbing x1]

[Chitterpede Chitin x 1]

[Architect’s Spellmauler]

[Amulet of Creator’s Calling]

[Rite-Powered Inkshield – Incomplete 1/2]

[Architect’s Inkblood x 4]

Lillia stared at the list. There was everything she hadn’t sold to Rickshaw, and everything she’d picked up off of the architect—the same items she’d planned to show Havoc upon meeting him again—but her dress… the chitin battle gown was missing.

During the fight, when she’d taken the burnmite cloth in that last moment of desperation and turned it into her new dress…it had saved her from the fire but did that mean that the other dress was gone?

No. It couldn’t be.

Lillia checked the list again, despite knowing that it would have been hard to lose something in a twelve-item list. She waved at the text in front of her, trying to move it in a way that would suddenly reveal the chitin battle gown.

No. It was gone. Putting on her new dress had burned it away. The princess slumped. The battle gown was so shiny.

Lillia looked over her shoulder, back to the hunting lodge. She hadn’t taken the rewards on the way out. The corpse of the chitterpede was still oozing on the floor in the back room. If she wanted the battle gown back she could just grab it and replace what she was wearing, but—

It took a moment. Maybe several more moments than it should have, but staring at the dead bug on the ground, Lillia realized that specific gross dead bug was not in her pocket but some chitterpede chitin was.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Lillia’s battle gown was no longer a battle gown. Lillia’s battle gown was once again bug parts.

At least it solved her glove problem.

Lillia took out the chitterpede chitin and, without needing to ask the interface, crushed it into brilliant fine powder in her fist. The dust twinkled in the torchlight as it slipped between her fingers. Lillia closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

Rank. Gross. Disgusting.

Lillia was soaked. Architect blood was pressed between every scale of the battle gown. Even the small shift that it took for the princess to open her eyes arrived with a cascade of squelching and sticking. The armor was stiff with the aftermath of her battle. Ink had gotten through her neckline and was stuck to the inside of the dress. Lillia didn’t scream. Lillia sat there covered in the architect’s gallons of blood in front of the knight. She blinked once. Twice. Thrice.

Took a deep breath.