“Hi Ilona,” he began.
She smiled and he immediately forgot what he was going to say. There were two older boys and several girls in the group. He had all their attention.
“Nice … um … weather?”
It was one of those days when the curtains were drawn across the heavens and someone had left all the doors open.
She looked uncomfortable. Everyone else smiled.
Aedan wasn’t exactly sure whether it was him or her or the crowd, but he wasn’t getting that have-a-seat-why-don’t-you feeling. He considered sitting anyway, but another look around the group put an end to the idea, so he made an excuse and went for a long blustery walk, explaining to himself that this was how things went, and that he couldn’t expect to be at her side all the time, that she needed her own space too …
He kicked a pile of leaves into the wind, thinking what rotten weather they were having.
The next day, after class, Ilona called him over and asked if he would have lunch with her, seeing as her group was split apart for a while by differing schedules. He leapt at the invitation without even pretending to consider. Later, he found her waiting for him at a little table in the shade – and was it little! The table was delightfully small and Aedan blessed it under his breath as he sat down.
“You’ve been distant for a while,” she said.
“I …” He stopped. He wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her about being punished, it would make him look younger and smaller, and he certainly didn’t want her knowing what form the punishment had taken. “I had to do some extra work for Dun, so I …”
“You silly boy! You forget I have a cousin who doesn’t mind telling me about your reeking punishment duty.”
“Oh … um …”
“He really doesn’t like you,” she said, “or Liru. Sometimes Malik actually frightens me the way he holds a grudge. But please don’t think I’m like that. I’ve got lots of other friends, so why would I be cross with you if you were kept away?”
A slight furrow sank into Aedan’s brow. He wasn’t sure how being cross came into it. He had hoped that she would speak of missing him, not being cross with him.
“Don’t be disappointed with yourself,” she said, “I can’t expect you to be perfect.”
Now he was starting to get cross.
“Oh, there’s something else I should tell you,” she continued. “It’s not really a good idea for you to join my usual group. I don’t think you’ll fit in very well. Let’s just spend time together like this, when it’s only you and me. What do you say?”
As she leaned forward on her elbows and raised one of those arched eyebrows at him, the wild churning that took hold of his insides displaced whatever else he was feeling and everything he was thinking. For the remainder of lunch they talked, perhaps not easily, but at least amicably, and with frequent lingering looks, eyes locking and darting away to the music of deep sighs.
She loved him.
Boys could not pass the table without turning and gaping. They simply bled envy. And how could they not? Ilona was one who leapt from a crowd.
It was the most exciting meal Aedan had ever eaten, and he didn’t taste a single mouthful. That was perhaps what enabled him to swallow the waxy rind of the cheese and a charcoal crust of burned-rye. Now that he considered it, he could recall some uninspiring flavours that had reminded him strongly of Harriet’s cooking, and which had been accompanied by quizzical looks from Ilona.
For a week they met and shared lunches. To Aedan, the rest of the world was forgotten – a pale, unexciting thing out there on the edges of this numbing, exhausting perfection. They talked in the way toddlers might throw playthings around the room. There was seldom any catching of an idea and sharing it. When the lunches were over, individual opinions lay scattered about in a delicious jumble only ever one layer deep.
If Aedan had allowed himself to be searchingly honest, which he did not, he would have realised that there was a voice, somewhere between his belly and his brain, that was telling him the most absurd thing – he was lonely in her company. No matter how small the table, or how she leaned forward and drowned him with her smile, they were far, far apart. But this, indeed, was absurd.
Then her friends returned and Aedan tried to join their group. He had somehow thought that what Ilona had said about staying away from the group had been a passing thought, obliterated by their closeness. Apparently it was not.
She greeted him with a flicker of a frown and turned away to resume her conversation when he sat. From then on he may as well have been a dead log quietly rotting beside her. It was as if she hadn’t even noticed his arrival. In order to cover his awkwardness, he tried to join the conversations of the others in the group, and they certainly noticed him. They made him feel like a horsefly. He could not remember being so uncomfortable or unwelcome since that evening at the marshals trials. His hand kept going to the hair over his left ear, pulling it down, covering that patch in which others found such interest. Afterwards he stamped his way back to class, kicking leaves again like someone visiting vengeance on a sworn foe.
It was a lonely week that followed. He avoided Peashot’s I-told-you-so presence and spent a lot of time hanging on the paddock fences, watching Murn go through his restless antics, wishing he could have been a horse without the cares and woes of the broken-hearted.
“You come here often, don’t you?”
Aedan jumped. It was Ilona. She placed her elbows and chin on the rail, only inches from Aedan, then turned and gave him a long, tender look.
Surely she adored him.
How could anyone that beautiful who made him feel like this not imply devotion when she looked at him?
“I like it here,” he said. “Always feel welcome.” It was a risk, but he wanted to see what she would say.
She turned to the paddock where Murn cropped, tossed and stomped a few yards away, glistening in the sun. “I like this horse,” she said. “What’s its name?”
Aedan sighed. “Murn. Short for Midnight Hurricane. Liru helped me name him.”
Ilona pulled a face. “That will have to change,” she said, half to herself. “Can you ride him yet?”
“No. Won’t be riding him for a long time. He’s still too difficult to handle.”
“So shouldn’t you sell him?”
“I’d like to train him. We’re covering ground slowly.”
“I think you are wasting your time,” she said. “That horse is going to need an experienced trainer. You’ll never manage to tame such a huge animal. Maybe we can make a deal that’s better for both of us. I have a friend who wants to buy me a horse. If you sell this Murn, you can visit when Denly’s not training him for me. He won’t mind. We can go often. We’ll get to be together lots.” She turned on a gleaming smile and Aedan’s chest shuddered.
Then that niggling voice managed to get a few words through the fog of his thoughts, something to the effect that he didn’t want to sell Murn. Then another voice wanted to know who Denly was.
“Who’s Denly?”
“Hm? Don’t you know him? He’s at the law wing. Two years ahead of us. He often sits with me.”
“Carriage for his birthday? Velvet seats?”
“My, my, Aedan. You do have something of a memory. But there’s no need for that look. You’ve nothing to worry about. He’s only a friend.”
It was indirect and only just implied, but it was there. She was suggesting, perhaps even inviting Aedan to be more than just a friend. He gulped. Gosh she was beautiful!
“So I’ll get him to settle a price with you then. I’ve no interest in such matters. Thinking up a name is where my energy will go.”
The words were taking time to sink in, but slowly Aedan was digesting her meaning. “I … I …”
“Yes Aedan?”
“I don’t really want to sell him.”
“What?” Her voice sounded almost sharp.
“Murn was a gift to me from Osric. I’ve got no right to sell him.�
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“Oh, don’t be so starchy. He won’t mind. You’ll see.”
“It would be wrong, Ilona. I can’t.”
“You didn’t have a problem with wrong before when you skipped classes to walk me through town.” Her tone had now definitely changed.
Aedan stared. The soft edges of this vision beside him were settling into some hard lines.
“Why can’t he buy you another horse?” Aedan tried in a placating voice. “There are lots of others to choose from.”
Stormy shapes were gathering over those delicate brows.
“Fine!” she snapped. “Be like that!” She turned to leave.
Aedan was stunned by the quick anger in her eyes, but there was more to come. She stopped and spun around. The next words struck like hailstones.
“Do you know what it cost me,” she yelled, “to be seen with you? You think people don’t hear your ridiculous accent or see your scar? After all I’ve given up, after all the time we spent together I thought you would be more of a friend than this!”
Aedan was too shocked to realise he had thought the same. She whirled and strode away, leaving him dumbstruck. A bit of coldness was one thing, but he had never foreseen hostility, or what now felt like treachery, and it had sunk into the flesh of his bared heart.
She hated him, and he was beginning to return the feeling.
He spent the next hour throwing and breaking anything that wouldn’t get him into too much trouble. Liru spied him from a distance and came over. After getting the story from him, she offered, with a deadpan face, to cut Ilona’s hair off and turn it into a fly swatter.
“Stupid, manipulating brat,” she said. “I pity the fool who marries her.”
“I thought she liked me. We had such nice times together. You should have seen the way she looked at me.”
“And you should see the way that she looks at all the other boys stumbling around her. She is a spider, Aedan. One web catches many. Have you not noticed? She wants you all to belong to her, but she will never belong to any of you. The sooner you get away the better.”
“Do you think I’ll ever find anyone who actually wants me, scars and all?”
“Probably not.”
Aedan looked up, taken aback, just as she landed a solid punch on his shoulder.
“Your scar is settling well now,” she said, “and the longer hair, it mostly covers the damage. In time you will find her, the right one. You will see. But we have a proverb that, in your language, will say, ‘a man too soon is a man deprived’. It sounds blunt in Thirnish. It rhymes in Mardrae. It is the last line of a poem telling us how we must enjoy our youth, not wish to escape it early. Let her go, Aedan. You have much time, and better things to spend it on while you are young.”
Aedan smiled. “You know,” he said, “you can be rather wise sometimes.”
“Meaning that at other times I am a fool?”
He glanced at her. He was faster, surely. It was time to find out. “Yes,” he said, and ran, darting around trees, between idling students who yelled for him to grow up, and twice over tables, all with his nimble pursuer streaking after him. The chase ended at the entrance to the marshals’ wing where Aedan darted in and Liru could pursue no further.
Given a few more days of reflection, Aedan allowed himself to recognise that what Peashot and Liru had said of Ilona was probably true. When Ilona tried another angle on Murn, most of the mist had cleared from his vision. Ilona’s fiery eruption cleared the rest.
Much as Aedan pitied her for her difficult childhood, he had to disagree with her mother’s assessment. That tender heart was well provided with tools and armour, and it had no qualms about using them to its own advantage.
Eventually Ilona found another horse and the anger left her. She became friendly with Aedan again, smiling and charming him with lingering glances as if nothing had happened. But Aedan’s swimmy eyes had been opened like those of the pup that yawns and settles down for the first and last time on an ant nest.
He had thought it impossible that beneath an appearance so lovely there could be anything disagreeable. It was a lesson that would not soon be forgotten. Peashot had been right. His blindness had been in exact proportion to her looks.
Stepping back from the hazy sentimental marshes, he had intended to straighten his thoughts out by climbing deep into his studies, but what really did the job was far better. If Liru could have foreseen what her advice would inspire, she might never have uttered it.
The first of them began like this. One of the boys would ask the master to come to his desk and explain something on a page. As soon as the master’s back was turned to a portion of the class, a plum-sized lead weight would be tossed silently from one boy to another across the room. They never tried it with Wildemar – nothing escaped his notice, and he was far too edgy, apt to swing around at any instant – but the other masters were considered fair game. The apprentices had been engaged with this for a week when Skeet happened to spin around just as Cayde lobbed the weight across to Lorrimer.
“You!” Skeet bellowed.
When uttered with just the right tone, this is the universal name for any boy. Accordingly, all heads snapped towards the angry master. Including Lorrimer’s. The weight took him just above the ear with a soft thunk and laid him out flat.
Though it provided some amusement, it was too tame for Aedan. He hatched another idea from their exercises in balance and stealth. For this particular challenge, Rodwell was chosen, as he was given to lengthy explanations while drawing out complex political pyramids and relational tensions, and during these explanations he would not turn from the chalkboard until he was done.
Aedan asked him for more background on a particularly complex issue – limited autonomy of remotely governed cities under circumstances that could recommend breaching those limits, a situation that Castath and its prince could soon face. Rodwell was delighted by the breadth of the question. He would have done better to be suspicious, especially considering Aedan’s generally muted interest in the subject. Rodwell turned to the board with gusty purpose, drawing and pointing to various diagrams of governance structures while unloading in his shrill, excited tones.
Behind him, silent as ghosts, the boys rose from their seats which had already been pushed back for the purpose, drifted down the class, and filed out the door. Twenty pairs of eyes appeared over the outer windows just in time to see Rodwell turn around with a concluding flourish of his finger.
He stood, finger raised. He looked, blinked, looked again and glanced around as if to assure himself he was in the right place. When he began stumping down the room and bending his portly frame to search under the desks, it was too much for the boys who could hold the snorts and squeals back no longer. Not even the liberal caning could entirely silence them.
During the year, a junior master by the name of Braddoc had begun taking some of the history classes. This strange young man made it his prime object to overcome an all-too-obvious nervousness by being impressive and intimidating. Whenever a boy asked a question, he would stride up to the desk and lean his hands on it while he answered, making the boy look up at a steep angle. If anyone asked a question that struck him as foolish he would rush over, slam his fist on a page, and bark something like, “Open your ears and let the information in the first time!”
Peashot managed to get some iron shavings from the floor of the smithy and hid them in his book. Then he paid attention during the class until he could put together a question that would be sure to induce wrath.
It worked.
Braddoc flew up to him, slammed his fist on the thin pages covering the razor sharp iron shavings and, with a shriek of pain, swore like no master had ever done within the halls of learning. Peashot might have got away with lesser punishment had he not asked if that was Sulese and could Master Braddoc please spell it out for him because he needed to learn some more words.
Aedan’s natural restlessness was finding some outlet in the pranks and schemes. But he still
pined for the forests and overgrown hills of the Mistyvales and the many animals that had been as neighbours. A short walk had always put him among deer, wild hogs and foxes.
In Castath he found mostly rats.
So when he discovered a mildly poisonous grass snake trying to escape by climbing the corner between two walls, he caught and bagged it, intending to play with it later. The medical class took forever and Mistress Gilda put him on display again to demonstrate how scars continue to heal over years. From where she was exhibiting him, he glimpsed the lithe green shape pour out from a corner of his bag and slide into the assortment of models, skeletons and instruments. For an instant he worried, remembering how she had last expressed her feelings on serpents. But the mortification she was once again causing him quickly reversed that feeling, and he saw something beautiful, something poetically complete in the circumstance.
The loss of the snake was soon eased when he found a giant goblin spider. It was a hairy monster of a thing nearly as big as a dinner plate. It looked capable of preying on small dogs. He managed to catch it by tossing his shirt and knocking it to the ground where Peashot dropped a water pail on top. They kept it in their dorm, named it Killer, and fed it bugs and worms, taking the lid off only to display it to awed visitors.
Then one morning they woke up and the lid was on the ground and the pail empty.
They searched everywhere – under pillows, between sheets, inside shoes, though it would have more than filled a shoe – always expecting a hairy predator to leap out at them. The argument about who forgot to replace the lid lasted all day. For the next week they slept fitfully, jolting awake in the darkness to frantically brush off the memory of an eight-legged nightmare crawling under a shirt or chewing on an ear.
The distractions had shown Aedan that something was missing. Nothing in the predictable routine was meeting his appetite for adventure – his love of discovering things while letting his imagination lead. While focussing on his studies, he had put his nightly explorations of the academy on hold. It was time to take them up again. The place was full of secrets. Forbidden corridors led to rooms that simply had to be investigated. The only place he dared not venture was the barred passage at the bottom of the collapsing stairs. He did not question Dun’s warning about prison.
Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) Page 47