Please Fall for the Male Lead (Not Me)

Yun Ganghwa was sharpening the fourth blade off the rack when Yeon Chae-rin came into the equipment shed with a box under her arm, and he knew from the sound of her boots on the sill that she had been standing outside for a while.

Eleven seconds. He had counted them without deciding to. It was the thing his mother's family called a gift, his father's family called a symptom, and nobody called useful. It did not turn off. It had not turned off since he was six years old, counting the coins in the offering dish at his grandfather's funeral instead of crying.

"You're the counter," Chae-rin said.

"I'm sharpening a blade."

"Everyone says you're the counter. Jang says you can look at a purse and say what's in it." She put the box on the bench, which was where he put blades, so he moved two of them, and she watched him move them and did not apologize. "I need something counted. I'll pay."

"No."

"I haven't said the amount."

"You've said pay." He turned the blade over. This one was a rack blade with a tang someone had bent, then straightened badly. It would turn in a boy's wrist on the third exchange next spring. Nobody would ever know why he lost. "I don't take money for counting. If I take money, then the number's yours, and it isn't. The number's the number."

She was quiet for four seconds, which was, in his estimate, a personal record.

"Fine," she said, and opened the box.

It was House Yeon's ledgers. Not copies. The originals, three of them, in the fat leather the accounting houses use, with the seal still on the cord of the oldest one, and a letter on top in a heavy hand that had been folded and unfolded enough times to soften at the crease.

She carried these across the yard in a box. Anyone could have opened it. Anyone in this school could have opened that box and known everything about her family by second bell.

"My father sent me the letter," Chae-rin said. She had gone to the far end of the bench, which put her back to him, which was the only reason he did not look away. "He says the arrangement with the Ha bank has been restructured and there's no cause for concern. He's said no cause for concern four times since the spring. I've counted."

"So you don't believe him."

"I believe him completely. That's why I want it counted." Her chin had come up at the wall. "If it's fine, then it's fine. I'll write, I'll say I'm sorry for doubting him, he'll be gracious about it, and I'll feel like a small animal for a month. That's an acceptable outcome. What I can't do is not know."

Ganghwa put the whetstone down and opened the first ledger.

It took him an hour and twenty minutes. She did not talk. That surprised him. He noted the surprise, set it aside. She sat on an upturned crate with her hands in her lap and let a boy read her family's whole life without once telling him how to read it. At some point she took her gloves off. At some point after that she started picking at the seam of one of them.

The numbers were not complicated. That was the part he would remember. People expected ruin to be complicated, to be a thing hidden in a clever place, and in his experience it was always sitting on the surface being obvious for years while everybody agreed not to look.

"The restructure is real," he said.

"Good."

"It moved the debt from the Ha bank to a consortium. Three houses and a merchant syndicate. The rate went from four to two and a half." He turned the ledger around and put his finger on a line. "That's the line your father means when he says no cause for concern. It's a true line. Two and a half is better than four."

"But."

"But they didn't restructure the debt. They restructured the security." He moved his finger down three lines, to a clause that had been entered in a clerk's hand in the autumn. "The Ha bank held the Gyeongha townhouse. The consortium holds the southern estate, the mill, and the water rights on the river that runs the mill. Your father traded a house he doesn't live in for the only three things that make him money. He got one and a half points for it. He thinks he won."

Chae-rin had not moved off the crate.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting NovelFire for this novel and more.

"How long," she said.

"That depends on the harvest, the river, and whether the syndicate wants the mill or the money." He closed the ledger, because the number was there and there was no sense in making her look at it while he said it. "They want the mill. Nobody takes water rights as security if they want the money. Water rights are a thing you take when you've decided how it ends and you're being polite about the timing."

"How long, Ganghwa."

"Four years. Maybe six. It won't be a disaster, it'll be a Tuesday. A clerk will write to your father. Your father will write back. There'll be eleven months of letters, and at the end of it he'll still be a duke, and there won't be a mill."

The shed was cold. Outside, somebody in the yard was being shouted at about their feet.

Say something kind.

No. That's what everyone does, and she has come to me across a whole school with her family in a box because I am the only person in this building who won't.

Chae-rin put her gloves back on. She did it the way she did everything, one and then the other, pulled tight at the wrist, and her face had gone somewhere he did not have the equipment to follow.

"Thank you," she said. "That's the first."

"The first what?"

"The first true number anyone's given me about my own house." She stood. "Everyone else gives me a feeling. My father gives me no cause for concern. My aunt gives me these things sort themselves. The steward gives me a look." She picked up the box. "You gave me four years and a mill. I can do something with four years and a mill."

"You can't, though."

"I'm aware." She was at the door. "That's not the point. Knowing is not the same as being able to. You'd think it was, being you."

That's not fair.

That's entirely fair.

She got to the sill, stopped, turned around. Ganghwa saw her decide to ask something, then watched her build a whole casual person to ask it with, which took her about a second and a half. It was, he thought, the most expensive thing she had done all afternoon.

"Second question," Chae-rin said. "Free one. What does it cost to hire a vanguard escort?"

He put the whetstone down again.

"For what."

"Generally."

"Nothing's generally. An escort's a contract and a contract's a purpose. What's it escorting, where, for how long, and against what." He said it flatly, because that was how he said everything, and because a part of him had already started counting. He could not turn it off. He did not like where it was going. "There's no such thing as a general escort. There's a man with a sword and a reason."

"A field assessment," Chae-rin said. "A permit-zone. Six days. Fourth year of the cycle."

Ah.

The number came up in him the way numbers did, all at once, assembled out of things he had not known he had: the vanguard's day rate for a Ring five, which he knew because his father's house had paid it twice; the hazard multiple for a fourth-cycle permit, which was in the charter; the six days; the surcharge for a contract taken inside sixty days of the date, which was a real surcharge and an insulting one; the bond, because no vanguard signs a hazard contract for a minor without a bond. The bond was the largest part of it. Nobody ever remembered the bond.

"Eleven hundred sen," Ganghwa said.

Chae-rin did not say anything.

"That's a Ring five for six days at fourth-cycle hazard with a late-contract surcharge and a bond." He said it to the bench. "You could get it to nine hundred if you had ninety days instead of fifty-five, and you don't. You could get it to seven hundred if the school requested it instead of a person, and the school won't, because the school's position is that a field assessment is safe, and hiring a vanguard to escort it says the opposite in writing."

"Eleven hundred sen."

"Yes."

He heard her breathe out. He did not look up, because he had counted eleven seconds of her standing outside a shed door before she came in, and a person who stands outside a door for eleven seconds does not want to be looked at when the number arrives.

"I have a hundred and forty sen," Chae-rin said. "In the world. That's not the family's money, that's mine, that's what I have. I spent it on two bows in the autumn."

Two bows.

One hundred and forty sen on two bows, nine days before a contest she invented. There's one person in this school she'd have bought a second bow for. That person is going into a permit-zone in fifty-five days with a decorative core.

She hasn't said the name. She's been in this shed for two hours and she hasn't said the name once.

Ganghwa picked up the fourth blade and started on it again, because his hands needed to be doing something that was not this.

"House Yun could pay it," he said.

"I'm not asking House Yun."

"I know you're not. I'm telling you the shape of the room." Stone on steel, long and even. "My father would pay eleven hundred sen the way you'd pay for a hat. He'd do it tomorrow. And then it would be a thing he did, and it would be a thing your house owed, and in four years when the mill goes, there'd be a letter." He turned the blade. "I'm not offering. I'm counting. That's the number too."

"Yes," Chae-rin said. "That's what I thought it was."

She went. He listened to her boots go down the path, and they went at her ordinary pace, which he noted, and which cost her something he could not price.

Ganghwa sharpened the fourth blade for another minute. Then he stopped, and sat in a cold shed with a bent tang in his hands, and did the only thing he knew how to do with a feeling, which was to turn it into a sum.

Eleven hundred sen. Twelve sen a Saturday on the Hundred, which is ninety-two Saturdays, which is two years. Sixty-six sen for six days of hauling in the zone, which is seventeen deployments. Four loaves out of the hatch at half past second bell, which is nothing, which is not even on the board.

Everyone is trying to buy the same thing. Nobody can afford it. The girl it's for is going anyway, and she doesn't know any of us are counting.

He put the blade back on the rack.

Want early access to 20-30 chapters ahead? Join my Patreon here: /cw/Sturdy_701_hunter