Fledgling
Page 27
Chapter Twenty Six
“So you do remember,” he smiled. Austin waited for him to clap his hands together, like he always did when he was pleased, but she remembered that his limbs were all restrained, “So, are you going to do now?”
“What?” she asked. She hadn’t thought that far. Mr. Smith was here. He was a dragon.
He was a chaos.
“I would have thought that you were looking for Aiden, but you remained hidden while he was here, so that can’t be it. Still, you could finish the job. He’s realized that I’m not going to be of any use to him,” he said in that always calm voice of his, “So today, as soon as he comes back from his lunch, he is going to kill me. You could do it for him.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” she said, her voice dry.
“Why not? I’m a chaos dragon, after all. You despise us,” he talked as if he knew, as if he had listened in on her conversations with Kai and Aiden. Maybe he was just guessing.
“I’m not going to kill you,” Austin said again. She was at a loss for another option, “What else can I do?”
Mr. Smith stared at her, his smile still serene. He knew what she would do, and slowly, she started to know, too. She couldn’t stay at Anathaem. That wasn’t an option, no matter what she did. She had to leave.
Would she leave him here to die? Would she go back on her words and do it herself?
She looked around her and saw what Aiden had dropped. It was his knife, the one carved with a beautiful pattern. She took it in her hands, feeling the weight of it and the worn handle. She bit the inside of her cheek and sliced down.
The ropes fell open and Mr. Smith rubbed at the raw skin on his wrists. She handed him the knife and looked away as he freed his legs.
“Thank you,” he said. She shrugged and tried to force down the warm feeling she got with her teacher’s praise, “Am I right in thinking that we’ll leave together? Or are you staying?”
“They found out,” she said, her voice blank, “That I’m a Halfling.”
“Oh,” he said. Clearly this wasn’t news to him, “That’s a shame. You were getting along well with the storyteller, were you not?”
“What?” she asked, her eyes wide. How did he know all these things?
“It’s no more of a coincidence that I was your teacher than it was that Kai, Aiden, and Chelsea were your classmates,” he slid on his jacket and winced as he tore open some wound in his side, “It was my job to watch over you.”
“I don’t need a chaos watching over me,” she couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eyes, so she settled for staring at the tear on his jacket.
“Then I suppose we’ll go our separate ways,” Mr. Smith turned and started to walk. She took a step after him.
“Wait,” she said, and mumbled, “Sorry.”
“Apology accepted. It’s okay to be confused,” he said, “Now, shall we?”
She stumbled after him into the midday forest, trying not to think about what was happening. The thoughts came anyway.
She was running away from her family, a family that accepted her, because of a society that didn’t. More than that, she was running away with a chaos. But that wasn’t quite right, because Mr. Smith wasn’t like the chaos that she was used to hearing about. She couldn’t picture him killing anyone, and she doubted that he ever had. He moved through the forest like a ghost, but he wasn’t one. He was solid, and he was just like any other dragon that she had met.
“What kind of dragon are you?” she broke the silence that was beginning to settle.
“Chaos,” he answered immediately, expecting the question.
“I mean, what kind of dragon were you before?” she clarified.
“There was no before,” he slowed so that they were walking side by side. He smiled, “Austin, I am a descendant of K herself. She had many kids with the chaos males she turned. Chaos was dominant in all of her children.”
“How old are you?” she asked. She didn’t want to think that he a pure chaos. She wanted to know that there was some scrap of decent blood in him.
“How old are you?” he asked, teasing her. She frowned at him, and he decided to answer, “I’m old, very old.”
“You only look thirty,” she pointed out.
“The purer one’s blood is, the less their body ages. The originals did not age at all once they hit maturity, or so the story goes,” he informed her. She found herself nodding, like she would do during one of his lectures, “And it’s okay to be sad as well as confused.”
“I’m not sad,” she said. She said nothing about being confused.
“You’re leaving everyone you’ve ever known, including your storyteller,” Mr. Smith said, “You and him looked like good friends. If you’re not sad, something’s wrong with you.”
The words burst out of her mouth, “I barely got to say goodbye to him.”
“Friendships like that never end,” he assured her, sounding like he was speaking from experience, “You’ll see each other again.”
“Do you promise?” she asked. She was putting her trust in a chaos, a crazy thing to do.
“I promise.”