I set down the fork I was polishing back onto the table and gaped. "You're a duke's illegitimate daughter?!"

"I'm a duke's illegitimate daughter."

"Which one?"

"Duke Chesterfield."

My jaw dropped a second time. "The High Duke?!"

"Yes."

"But, but your dad!"

Rosa Chesterfield (?!? She has a last name now! Like a true noble!!) nodded serenely. She did not seem surprised at all. "Mother had me before they married." And got pregnant four more times with him, apparently. May his soul rest in peace now.

She picked some lint off of her clothes, sniffing in mild interest. I, on the other hand, nearly ripped my hair out. "Rosa! A duke's daughter! You!"

"What about it?"

I stared at her. "What about it? What do you mean what about it? You're a noble now! This changes everything!"

Rosa rolled her golden-brown eyes. That's right, I thought dimly, neither her mother nor her dad had those golden, glittering eyes. "Stop exaggerating, Fi," she was saying, which was totally unfair. I thought I was giving the most proper reaction to this bit of news, and she was the weird one. As always. "This changes nothing."

I looked around us. "Ro, we are in a restaurant that will turn into a bar by evening today, and we work here. Noble daughters do not work in restaurant bars."

She scoffed. "Nobody else knows but the two of us."

"Not for long," I muttered. I knew the cook was somewhere at the back of the kitchen, and by the way I was screaming out all this news in my shock, the whole town and then some would be waltzing by to say hello to our newest noble by tomorrow.

She ignored me and flicked off some more lint instead. "Relax, the Duke's not even interested in me. He won't be for, oh, two more years or so anyways." She smiled a bit nastily, though the sparkles that seemed to pop up around her begged to differ. I'd known her long enough to see through those, thank goodness. "And by then," she said, lowering her voice into a whisper, "it'll be too late."

I leaned back. "Okaay, not what I wanted to know. How do you even--" I stopped myself. "Actually, I don't want to know that either. Don't tell me." Sometimes, leaving Ro to be her weird little self was easier on my stress levels. The apothecary had told me last week to take it a little easier, anyway, so let Ro be Ro. I sighed. "It's just, now I have so much to think about. What are you going to do from now on? What does this mean? Why did the High Duke of all people come out now, sixteen years later, to suddenly come back and claim you as his daughter?"

She opened her mouth, and the calm look in her eyes just told me she somehow had all the answers to that. Oh boy. "Political motivations, as you might guess. His son got in trouble a few years back, you know."

"No, I didn't know." I narrowed my eyes. "I don't even know his name."

"Doesn't matter. What's important is that he really needs a charitable image, and what's better or easier than taking an illegitimate daughter and 'generously' claiming her as his birthright? To nobles, that would be like taking an orphan and giving them a whole new dazzling life." She shrugged. "Typical dukes."

She talked as if she was familiar with the way of dukes. The closest we'd physically been to an actual duke had been at the city parade, where we could spot his balding head glinting in the sunlight five hundred meters away. 

Yup, weird Rosa would always be Rosa.

I picked up polishing cloth again and reached for a fork, frowning. "Shouldn't you be more worried about your own future?"

"Why should I?" she said, then went to the back to get a polishing cloth herself.

"Because," I said, twisting to look at her, "daughters of the High Duke will most definitely have to go to you-know-where."

Rosa froze immediately at the mention of "you-know-where" because yes, she knew exactly where. 

Out of many, many strange details about Ro that I couldn't fathom or understand, two stood out: her desperate love for numbers, and her desperate hate for everything Academy-related.

The Academy was the most prestigious (and frankly only) learning institution for pre-college students in our nation, Durova, usually reserved for the high and mighty nobles and their families. It was way too expensive to ever be considered an option for anyone who wasn't at the top of society, so lower-ranking nobles were excluded from this school. But for the High Duke of Durova, who would be maybe fifth in line to the throne, he'd most definitely be able to afford it, and then some.

You'd think that as affectionate as she was to mathematics, she'd be just as eager to attend a place of learning and numbers like this one. Nope. One time, a passing noble had stumbled by on an unfortunately stormy night and had been forced to find shelter in the bar, and she'd wowed him with her numbers. He had been so inspired that he'd offered to sell all his possessions and enroll her into the school, but she had downright cowered and ran off into the back of the kitchen screaming "DO NOT SELL ME TO THAT EVIL CHARTER" and hid amidst our barrels of pickled onions until he gave up and left. She had smelled like pickled onions for a week. 

Ever since then, she would hide every time she saw anyone on the street who had the Academy uniform on (which was pretty often, seeing as the Academy was only ten or fifteen miles away from our small town of Minstia). She shuddered at the merest mention of the place, and froze if anyone ever joked about how great it would have been if she'd gone there. Exactly as she was freezing now, actually.

I waited to see what she would do, but the panic I read in her eyes didn't fade away. After a minute of absolute silence (was she starting to hyperventilate?), I sighed in defeat and twisted back around. "Okay, okay, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."

She didn't respond even after I finished polishing two forks and a knife, though she slowly came back around and sat down on a nearby stool, so I continued. "But honestly, Ro, the Academy shouldn't be that bad, don't you think? I mean, you'll get to study all the numbers you want!"

Ro finally looked up at me, her blank stare as haunting as ever, eyes filled with fear. She whispered, "No, Fi, the Academy is not a place for learning."

"What--"

"The Academy is a place for flirting and relationships and building specific images of yourself so that high-ranking male students of your choosing with strangely dark and disturbing pasts will fall for your clumsy acts and alligator tears until they do everything to your bidding. If you make a wrong choice, you die, or they die, or someone else dies, or the whole world dies, and nobody can ever end up happy, and learning is never a factor in the entire scheme of things unless it's to catch the attention of another handsome student that wishes to see you as someone smart enough for them. That," she said in ominous monotone, "is what the Academy truly is."

...okay.

Not strange at all.

"How do you even know that?" I asked for the second time that day, dazed, then shook myself back to my sense. I grabbed her arms and stared straight into her eyes. "Get a grip of yourself, Ro!" I cried, shaking her. "E-even if it's like that, you don't have to take part in it! You can just learn!"

"No!" she cried back, her voice wobbly with my shaking. "I'm the heroine! It all depends on me!"

I frowned, pausing slightly. What did that mean? "I don't know what that means, but no! Don't give up, Ro-Ro! You're more than just a heroine! You can learn!"

"I doubt any professor at the Academy will even have the smarts enough to challenge me!"

"Nonsense!" I all but roared, shaking her even harder. "If anything, they'll be able to teach you the history of Durova!"

Rosa shook some of her loosened hair out of her face for a second as she considered this. "Good point," she admitted, nodding. "But that's not the point."

I let her go, dusting myself off a bit. "Then what is the point?"

"The point is," she said, and she looked around with narrowed eyes, leaned in conspiratorially, and hissed, "death."

Of all the answers I could have expected from her, this was not it. "Death?" I echoed.

"Death," she nodded, as serious as ever. She tucked some of her light brown hair behind her ear. "If I don't do anything, someone will die." She looked around suspiciously, which frankly only made her look more suspicious than anyone else could be, and continued. "I've already seen it."

"Sometimes I wonder if you really do have powers of divination," I sighed, reaching for a stool and slumping down on it. This was another weird thing about Rosa-- she always spoke of her future like it would affect everyone else around her, and she knew exactly how that would come to be. I picked up a spoon. "You don't hold all the responsibility of this world, Ro."

When she didn't answer right away, I looked up and instantly recoiled. She was looking at me with absolute pity in her eyes, so I wrinkled my nose. "Rosa, stop that."

She sighed as well. "How carefree you must be."

"Huh?"

"To know nothing of the world you live in."

"Excuse me?"

"What bitter life you lead as a mere number in a long list of infinity."

Was I supposed to know what that meant? 

When she sighed for what must have been the fifth time in the last thirty seconds, I slammed down my spoon. "Rose, stop."

"I can't. The game must go on."

"No, I mean stop filling this entire restaurant--" I waved my spoon around to emphasize my point-- "with your negativity!"

"Then what am I supposed to do?" she whined, slumping down.

"I don't know, do what you always do!"

"What I always do?" she blinked.

"Yeah!" I waved my spoon around some more. "You know, like, use your numbers!" I shrugged. "Plan things out! Prepare!"

Let it be known that I successfully polished off five more spoons and two knives before she responded with the loudest shout all of humanity in Durova had ever heard. 

"Filian, you are a genius!" Rosa (now a Chesterfield) shouted, flipped over the entire rack of silverware, screamed, "Whee!" for two seconds before she rushed off into the outside.

And I, left with an overturned case of spoons, forks, and knives, wet from the droplets they splattered on me as they did gracious back flips in the air, stood there for a good five seconds unable to move before I responded with an angry roar of my own.