I Transmigrated as an EXTRA, So Why Is the PLOT OBSESSED With Me?!

The Knight Who Did Not Find Me Amusing

I woke up the next morning with a plan.

The plan was simple.

Step one: avoid etiquette lessons.

Step two: find more bread.

Step three: continue avoiding the plot for approximately ten more years, ideally while eating snacks.

It was a very good plan.

It lasted exactly until breakfast.

"Your Highness," my maid said, setting a tray in front of me with the calm patience of someone who had clearly done this before and expected to do it many more times. "Today you have a new lesson added to your schedule."

I looked up from my porridge.

"A new lesson."

"Yes."

"Is it bread-related?"

"No, Your Highness."

"Then I'm not interested."

"His Majesty requested it personally."

I paused with my spoon halfway to my mouth.

That was different.

The King rarely requested anything regarding me personally. Mostly he just existed nearby, looking at me like I was a very beloved ghost, and occasionally touched my hair like he was afraid I'd dissolve.

"What kind of lesson?"

"Basic self-defense, Your Highness. Beginning today, at the training grounds."

I blinked.

"Self-defense."

"Yes."

"For a five-year-old."

"His Majesty was very insistent."

I set my spoon down.

This was interesting. Suspicious, even. Novels didn't usually bother giving insignificant background princesses combat training unless something was going to happen to them eventually, and "eventually" was a word I intended to personally murder before it got anywhere near me.

But also — and I would like it on record that this was the real deciding factor — it sounded more fun than etiquette.

"Fine," I said. "Lead the way."

The training grounds were nothing like the delicate gold-and-silver elegance of the rest of the palace.

They were loud.

Dusty.

Full of grown men hitting each other with wooden swords while shouting things like "AGAIN" and "YOUR STANCE IS AN INSULT TO YOUR ANCESTORS."

I loved it immediately.

A knight in gleaming armor approached, bowed to me with the exact correct depth of a bow to a princess, and introduced himself as Sir Halvard, apparently my new instructor. He had kind eyes and the general build of a very polite bear.

"Your Highness," he said, "today we'll begin with the basics. Balance. Footwork. Nothing dangerous."

"Can I hit someone?"

"...Eventually."

"How eventually?"

"Several years, Your Highness."

I sighed dramatically.

"This kingdom is full of delayed gratification."

Sir Halvard looked like he wasn't entirely sure what to do with that sentence, so he simply handed me a wooden practice sword roughly the size of my entire torso and told me to hold it "naturally."

I held it like a fishing rod.

"...Not quite, Your Highness."

I held it like a broom.

"Closer, but no."

I held it like a very serious weapon of war.

"There we are."

I grinned, victorious, and immediately dropped it on my foot.

This was going to take a while.

I was in the middle of losing a very serious battle against my own balance when I noticed him.

A boy.

He stood near the edge of the training grounds, watching a group of older cadets spar, completely still, arms crossed, expression carved out of something colder and more serious than a child that age had any business wearing. He looked about eight, maybe nine. Dark hair. Sharp eyes that missed absolutely nothing, including — I noticed with some alarm — me, currently sprawled on the ground with a wooden sword lying dramatically across my stomach like I'd died in battle rather than tripped over my own feet.

He did not laugh.

He did not even smile.

He simply looked unimpressed, in the specific, devastating way that only children and cats are capable of.

I sat up and dusted myself off with as much dignity as I could summon while wearing a nightgown-adjacent training tunic three sizes too big for me.

"You're staring," I informed him.

"You fell down."

"I was testing the ground for structural integrity."

"It's dirt."

"Exactly. Very structurally suspicious."

He blinked once, slowly, the way one blinks at something mildly defective.

"Who are you?" I asked, because apparently I had decided we were friends now, a decision he had not been consulted on.

"Kael Veyron," he said. Then, after a pause, as if it pained him to add anything further: "My father commands the northern garrison."

"Impressive."

"You're the princess."

"Also impressive."

"You held your sword like a broom."

"That was a strategic choice."

"It wasn't."

"You weren't there for the strategy meeting."

He stared at me.

I stared back.

Somewhere behind me, Sir Halvard made a sound like a man watching a slow-motion carriage accident he was too far away to stop.

Kael's eyes moved, briefly, to my knee — the same one Caspian had panicked over the day before — where a faint bruise had bloomed from my recent battle with gravity.

"You should learn to fall properly," he said. "Before you learn to fight."

"There's a proper way to fall?"

"Yes."

"Show me."

He looked at me like I'd asked him to personally solve every problem in the kingdom.

"That's not my job."

"It could be."

"It's really not."

"Kael Veyron," I said solemnly, "I am a princess, and I am ordering you to teach me how to fall down correctly."

He opened his mouth. Closed it. I watched, with great satisfaction, as he did the math on refusing a direct order from royalty versus the mild inconvenience of teaching a five-year-old to fall over without concussing herself, and arrived, grudgingly, at the correct conclusion.

"...Fine," he said, like the word cost him something personal. "Once."

That was how I spent the next twenty minutes learning to fall down properly under the supervision of an extremely serious eight-year-old who corrected my form with the enthusiasm of a man filing tax documents, while Sir Halvard watched from a safe distance with an expression I could only describe as deeply relieved someone else was doing this.

Kael, it turned out, was precise about everything. Precise about how I tucked my chin. Precise about where I placed my hands. Precise about the exact angle my knees needed to bend to avoid, in his words, "breaking something important."

"You're very serious," I told him, after my fourth successful controlled collapse.

"Falling is dangerous."

"You're eight."

"Age is irrelevant to physics."

I laughed. He did not.

"Do you ever have fun?" I asked.

He considered this with the gravity of a man being asked to explain a foreign concept.

"I like training."

"That's not fun. That's suffering with better posture."

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. More like a smile that had heard the concept of smiling secondhand and was deciding whether to try it.

"You talk too much," he said instead, which I chose to interpret as a compliment.

By the time Sir Halvard finally called an end to the lesson — mostly, I suspected, because I had begun using my practice sword as a walking stick and narrating my own tragic limp — the sun had shifted well past midday, and I was covered in a truly heroic amount of dirt.

Kael was still there. Watching. Always watching, apparently, like it was a full-time occupation.

"Same time tomorrow?" I asked.

"I don't have lessons with you."

"You do now."

"I never agreed to that."

"You taught me to fall. That makes you responsible for me now. It's basically a magical bond."

"That's not how anything works."

"Says the boy who just spent twenty minutes teaching a princess to fall on purpose."

He opened his mouth to argue and, for the second time that day, apparently found no good counterargument, which I was beginning to suspect was going to become a pattern between us.

"...Fine," he said again, in the exact same put-upon tone as before, and something about the way he said it — reluctant, precise, already resigned to a fate he hadn't chosen — made me grin so wide my face hurt.

I didn't know, sitting there in the dirt with a wooden sword across my knees and a serious little boy scowling at the sunset like it had personally offended him, that I had just acquired the first of several people who would spend the next decade being unable to leave me alone.

I only knew one thing, clear and simple and deeply satisfying.

I had made a friend.

And he hadn't laughed at me once, which — considering the day I'd had — felt like a personal triumph worth celebrating with an enormous amount of bread.