Blythe was faced with a ton of things to do once she got home from school.

  Leaving homework aside, there was the pressing matter of getting her things packed and ready for moving into the dorms tomorrow. Five servants were waiting in one line outside her room when she got there. Apparently, her parents had sent them here to receive instructions on what to pack into Blythe’s luggages.

  She handed Suzy the packing list she’d prepared, asking her to help them with locating the items when necessary. She’d used the recommended packing list provided by the school as a guideline for creating her own.

  While they began packing, Blythe went to take a quick shower. She had too many things to do tonight to bother with a bath.

  Being able to luxuriate in a bathtub with a platter of whatever snacks she asked Suzy to bring to her was something she was going to miss. Sure, she could still do it on the weekends when she came home, but it wasn’t the same as being able to do it whenever she wanted on a weeknight.

  She came out of her bathroom to find the three large suitcases on the floor, with the five servants playing Tetris with her belongings. Suzy left talking to one of the servants about the packing list to towel-dry Blythe’s hair.

  A knock came on the door while Suzy was halfway through drying her hair.

  “Lady Blythe, His Grace has requested your presence at the main estate for dinner when you’re ready,” a tinny voice announced.

  “I’ll be there,” Blythe called out.

  Once her hair was as dry as it would get, she got changed and went for dinner.

  Alasdair and Tatiana were already at the obnoxiously long dining table, along with Reuben, waiting for her. Her parents looked so pleased to see her. Reuben nodded at her in the brusque sort of acknowledgement.

  As Blythe was sitting down across from Reuben, Tatiana asked, “How was your day, darling?”

  “Good. Thanks, Mom. How was everyone’s day?”

  She blinked in surprise as green light filled her vision for a split second.

  When she glanced at her brother, his normal expression didn’t give away the increase in favorability at all.

  Maybe he liked that she thought to ask about them.

  She started on the French onion soup one of the servants served her. The rich, savory broth was delicious. It was all she could do not to slurp from her spoon.

  Alasdair talked about how he’d spent his day thinking of how his dear daughter would soon leave the nest to be away from them at school, despite the heavy workload he was dealing with. Reuben snorted, pointing out that Blythe would still come home on the weekends. Tatiana lovingly chided him for exaggerating.

  By the sound of it, it’d been an uneventful week for all of her family members. Blythe was kind of jealous.

  “Speaking of school, you have quite the healthy appetite lately,” Tatiana commented. “I’m so glad you’re starting to eat more. Your body is still growing! Although I am a little surprised at how many stick candies you’ve been ordering.”

  “Too much candy is bad for you,” Alasdair reminded. “But I trust that you have enough self-control to keep it at a reasonable amount.”

  Blythe gawked at them. “How did you know?“

  Raising an eyebrow, Tatiana said, “What do you mean by that?”

  “How did you know what I’ve been eating?”

  They didn’t have dinner together as a family every night, so Blythe had most of her meals away from them. Were they somehow keeping an eye on her at school? And how were they doing it?

  This time, Tatiana squinted as though Blythe had said something very odd. “You’ve been ordering multiple items from the library café.”

  She was so baffled by this singular statement that she didn’t even think before asking, “Which means …?“

  “Which means,” Tatiana said slowly, “that we received an itemized bill of the excess. Your school fees are inclusive of one food item and drink from the café per day.”

  “Oh.” Now she saw where she’d messed up. It wasn’t just Tatiana now—both Alasdair and Reuben stared at her with wide eyes.

  “Blythe, dear, are you alright?” Tatiana asked. “You already know that.“

  “Yeah, I’m alright! I just, uh—temporarily forgot!” She pushed out a fake laugh, smiling like she wasn’t dying on the inside berating herself for not paying closer attention to the hints in Tatiana’s earlier body language. “I must have been too distracted thinking about my school work, sorry!”

  “Wow,” Reuben said, cutting up his lamb chop. “Must be some tough school work.”

  “I’ve been busy reading ahead and trying to improve my understanding of some difficult concepts,” she agreed. “I’m not a prodigy who graduated early after all. You’re so much smarter than me.”

  It was meant to distract him, and it worked. Reuben instantly preened and puffed his chest.

  “That’s right,” he said graciously. “It’s understandable that you might have been distracted. Some of the subjects can be quite difficult to grasp.”

  “Maybe you could tutor me,” she said, mostly to keep everybody’s attention off her ‘forgetting’ how the café payments worked.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Horror instantly overtook Reuben’s face, whereas her parents’ faces lit up.

  “What a fantastic suggestion!”

  “No, no, no, I can’t do tutoring—”

  “You should help your sister, Reuben, especially since you graduated at the top of your class.”

  “Mom, that’s impossible! You know how poorly the tutoring program in school worked out for me—”

  “But you were tutoring a classmate. This is your sister, so I’m sure you’d be more patient—”

  “No, Dad, I would be more impatient!”

  With the spotlight now on Reuben, no further questions were asked about Blythe’s forgetfulness. Reuben managed a hard-fought victory after a while, having successfully convinced their parents that his work-life balance would crash if he tried giving Blythe lessons. His repeated mentions of the multiple disasters that were his attempts at tutoring fellow students also helped to cool their jets. Blythe eventually chimed in to ‘help’ him, promising that she would make sure to get help from her professors instead, which would be easier since she would be at school for most of her weeks.

  Based on the way he’d guided her through her physical training, she wouldn’t have been able to guess that he was bad at tutoring people in academic subjects.

  After dinner, Blythe returned to her room and was surprised with the three zipped-up suitcases standing in one corner. The five servants had already left.

  First, she spent a good couple of hours poring over the botany study guide she’d taken from her parents’ library. Unlike with mathematics and economics, botany was quite different from any of the science subjects she’d studied in school. The focus wasn’t on plant cells or the inner workings of a plant. Rather, the main point was on the medicinal or practical uses of specific plants, as well as the ideal conditions under which they could be grown. So many of them were plants she’d never seen in her original world, which made learning slow for her. But she forced herself to keep going, knowing that if she was exposed for being ignorant of some plant she was supposed to have learned back in year one, more doubt would be cast on her.

  When she couldn’t take it anymore, Blythe resumed her embroidery for Magnus’ token. Her brain shut off its thinking processes as she worked on each stitch, keeping her thoughts on the eagle illustration she’d picked to be the reference image from the mini encyclopedia on eagles. The quietness of her room calmed her nerves.

  Before she knew it, it was already past ten.

  As soon as she put the hoop and needle down, she was met with two system notifications.

  Currently, her weekly embroidery lesson netted her ten experience points each time she put down her needle for the day. It was interesting that working on this gave her two extra points.

  Blythe wasn’t educated in the technicalities of embroidery, but she knew enough to know that it was generally considered more difficult to work with silk than linen. It probably had to do with that.

  ???

  The day of her move was finally here.

  Blythe got up at seven to work out, took a shower, and then got dressed to leave. She had the original Blythe’s journal securely tucked away in her school bag. Since she hadn’t had the chance to go through everything yet, she decided to bring it with her.

  “I can’t believe you woke up early just to train,” Reuben said. “You could have done it at school after settling in.”

  That wasn’t true. If she’d left it until later, Blythe knew she would procrastinate and end up not training her body at all. She’d never been very disciplined. The only reason she’d been keeping her nose to the grindstone was because she had to fit in to her new life as quickly as possible, but she was swiftly becoming exhausted from all of it.

  His arms were crossed as he watched their servants load her suitcases, one by one, into a nearby wagon. Another group of servants waited behind them as they held onto an armchair together. She’d taken inspiration from Noel to make a comfy sitting spot out of the bay window in her room. Sometimes it still felt surreal that she was some rich kid with servants who would help her do things instead of having to do everything by herself.

  They were standing outside the palace entrance, where the carriages and wagon were waiting.

  “You were the one already up at the crack of dawn,” she replied, “and you don’t even have anywhere to go. Isn’t it your day off?”

  “For your information, I have a lot of things to do today,” he said haughtily. “I’m simply being efficient.”

  She resisted the urge to pull a face at him, wrinkling her nose instead. “If you have so many things to do, what are you doing here? Are you here to send me off?”

  She’d meant to tease him with the last question, but he rolled his eyes and said, “Why else would I be here?”

  “You are?”

  He jerked his chin in a far-off direction. “Look, Mom and Dad are here too.”

  Sure enough, a black carriage drawn by two horses came down the path towards them. When it came to stop beside the other carriages and wagon, their parents stepped out of the carriage and went to them.

  Tatiana and Alasdair took turns hugging Blythe, reminding her that she had to come home on Friday evenings and have dinner with them as a family. Reuben patted her on her head, deliberately ruffling her hair and ignoring her outrage.

  She got into the carriage with Alasdair’s help, and they all waved goodbye at her as the horses trotted away.

  All this fanfare, while sweet and touching, felt slightly unnecessary. She was going to see them on Friday anyway.

  She spent her time in the carriage reading through the botany study guide for year one students, trying to pick out and memorize any details that seemed important.

  The knights stationed as the campus security guards took one look at the Ridge family crest on their carriages—the servants her parents had sent with her occupied two other carriages, while she sat in one with Suzy—and let them through the gates. Her servants, Suzy included, trailed after her as she went into the dormitory building.

  Blythe put her hand over the door access control, and the white door next to it with ‘Student Dormitories’ inscribed into its gold plaque clicked ajar. She pulled it open. Before her was a long flight of stairs. Her dorm room was on the third floor. Her servants had to carry her luggage and furniture all the way up. She was just glad they looked like strong, young men who could handle it.

  She missed elevators.

  The room was half the size of her bedroom back at the palace, but it was still far more spacious than Blythe had expected. No wonder Noel had been able to fit a whole couch by the bay window. There was plenty of storage space as well, with a tall and wide bookcase, a cabinet, a large wardrobe, a study desk with multiple drawers and another tall chest of deep drawers coming with the room. There was even a vanity dresser near her bed.

  Her servants asked for her directions on where to put her things and promptly got down to work. Suzy did the same. Impressively, they were done within an hour, and it only took that long because Blythe was indecisive about what items needed to go into which drawers or cabinet shelves. She made sure to put Sophie’s plant plushie on her study desk.

  Once they were done, they retreated, bowing and wishing Blythe a great stay before leaving.

  She flopped down onto the bed, allowing the comfortable mattress to erase the lethargy in her limbs. It wasn’t as luxurious as the one at home, but it was still an incredibly high-quality mattress nonetheless.

  As she stared up at the white ceiling, sleepiness started to wash over her in languid waves.

  She didn’t feel like calling Jessica or Sophie to tell them she was done. She just wanted to lie here and maybe nap for the next hundred years. She didn’t want to wake up to face all the things she had to do.

  Then her stomach growled, the noise loud in the silence of the room.

  With a small sigh, Blythe cast a glance at the wall clock set over her door. It was a little past twelve. According to the information packet the school had given to her on Monday regarding campus living, the dining hall was only open during specific time intervals for each meal of the day—breakfast, lunch and dinner. Outside of those times, students could grab a pre-made sandwich from a designated cooler to stave off their hunger.

  Lunch timing was between 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

  If she fell asleep now, there was a possibility she wouldn’t make it to the dining hall in time, even if she set an alarm.

  Blythe didn’t feel like eating a cold sandwich.

  This is what I get for skipping breakfast.

  Fighting the urge to let her eyelids slip shut, Blythe miserably crawled out of bed and dug for her VocAvis scroll in her bag. She’d nap later.