My Sister Is The Villainess

The lecture hall smelled like old paper and expensive perfume, an odd combination that told me exactly what kind of institution I was sitting in before anyone said a single word.

I sat crammed between Arthur and a girl I did not know yet, rows of first-years stretching out in front of me in neat, orderly lines, everyone dressed identically in black.

I could still feel the ghost of Sera’s warning from that morning.

”Do not embarrass the family, Eddie.”

”When have I ever embarrassed the family?”

”I am choosing not to answer that.”

A door at the front of the hall opened, and the room went quiet the way a room only goes quiet when everyone already knows better than to test the person walking in.

She was tall, sharp-featured, silver hair pulled back so tight it looked like it was actively trying to escape her skull. She did not smile. She did not introduce herself. She simply set a stack of papers down on the podium and looked out at all of us like she was already disappointed.

”Professor Iris Vane,” Arthur murmured under his breath. ”Etiquette and Royal Protocol. My sister says she once failed a count’s son for holding his teacup wrong.”

”That cannot be true.”

”She held it in her left hand.”

I decided not to ask any follow-up questions.

”You are here,” Professor Vane said, voice cutting cleanly through the hall without her raising it at all, ”because someone decided you were worth educating. I intend to find out, individually, whether that decision was correct.”

Nobody moved.

”Royal etiquette is not decoration. It is survival. You will bow correctly, address titles correctly, and understand precedence correctly, because the alternative is embarrassing your house in front of people who will remember it for the rest of your natural life.” Her eyes swept the room once, slow and unhurried. ”A baron’s son who cannot address a viscount properly is not charming. He is a liability.”

I felt my stomach drop slightly at that, mostly because I was fairly certain I qualified as exactly that description.

She spent the next half hour running through bows, address forms, and a truly baffling number of rules about who was allowed to speak first in a room depending on rank, lineage, and apparently the phase of the moon for all I could tell. I took notes. Actual notes, with actual ink, my handwriting getting steadily worse as my hand cramped up from disuse.

Arthur, beside me, was drawing a small, badly proportioned horse in the margin of his own notes instead of writing anything useful at all.

”You are going to fail this,” I whispered.

”I am going to charm my way through this,” he whispered back. ”Watch and learn.”

”That is not a real strategy.”

”It has worked for sixteen years.”

Professor Vane’s head turned toward us with the precision of a hawk spotting movement in tall grass, and both of us straightened up so fast I nearly dropped my pen.

”Mister Eesper. Mister Rhys.” Her voice did not rise, which somehow made it worse. ”Is there something more interesting than royal precedence happening at your table?”

”No, Professor,” we said, in unison, with the exact same guilty tone.

She held our gazes a moment longer than necessary before returning to her lecture, and I decided that whatever charm offensive Arthur was planning, it had not started particularly well.

By the time Professor Vane dismissed us, my hand ached and my head felt stuffed with more rules about bowing angles than any reasonable person should ever need to know. We spilled out into the hallway with the rest of the class, a river of black coats moving toward whatever came next.

”Combat,” Arthur said, checking a folded timetable pulled from his coat pocket. ”Then lunch, then divination basics. Then apparently a free period, which I assume exists purely so professors can recover from teaching us.”

”You get a copy of the schedule too?”

”Everyone gets one. Did you not check your bag?”

I had not, in fact, checked my bag, and a quick search through it produced a neatly folded sheet with my name at the top, a full week’s worth of classes laid out in small, precise handwriting. Etiquette. Combat fundamentels. Unorthadox Creature Studies. Wilderness Survival.

’This is a lot. This is genuinely a lot.. Especially Unorthadox creatures and the Unorthadox realm.’

”Professor list is on the back,” Arthur added, peering over my shoulder without asking permission first. ”Vane for etiquette, obviously. Combat is a man named Draeus, he is apparently a former Royal Army Captain.”

We made our way down the corridor together, following the general flow of black coats toward the next hall, and for a moment I let myself just exist in it, the noise, the nervous chatter, the sheer normal chaos of being a new student surrounded by other new students who had absolutely no idea what they were doing either.

’This is the part the book never showed. This exact hallway, this exact moment, none of it mattered enough to make it onto the page.’

It should have felt insignificant. Instead, walking through a hallway that had never existed in any version of the story I had read, surrounded by people the book had never bothered naming, I found myself grinning like an idiot for absolutely no good reason at all.

”What is funny?” Arthur asked.

”Nothing,” I said. ”Just glad to be here, I think.”

He gave me a strange look, the kind reserved for someone who had clearly said something a little too sincere for a Tuesday morning, and then shrugged it off entirely.

”Come on,” he said. ”If we are late to Draeus’s class, I hear he makes you run laps before you are even allowed to sit down.”

I decided I did not want to test that theory, and quickened my pace to match his.