Aaron #2
“I don’t want it.” He says it flat and final. “And you know what? Just like you always do, you make a promise and you don’t keep it. You’re real good at that.”
“Seth, that’s not—“ I take a step toward him.
He’s already moving, past me, shouldering through the door and into the hall. The rest of it dies in my mouth. The door swings shut behind him and leaves me in my clean, empty classroom, my hand half-raised at nothing.
“Shit.” I drag both hands down over my head and hold them there.
I give it a minute. I don’t go after him, because there’s nothing I can say that won’t turn into one more promise, and he’s right, I’m too good at those.
I straighten up and step out of the classroom and head for the Conjuring Hall, because my mother and my sisters are waiting on a decision I haven’t made out loud yet, and if I don’t say it to them today I’m not sure I ever will.
I take the main stairs down toward the Academy side. The route carries me past Tyrion’s classroom, his door propped open. I mean to walk past. I get one step beyond the doorframe before I stop.
He’s got the telescope out. He’s lifting it down off its high shelf with both hands, the brass tripod tucked under one arm.
The sight of it brings me up short. That telescope.
Torin, Nala, and I saved the better part of a year to buy it for him when we were kids, scraping coins together.
Then the world fell apart before we could, and it took us fifteen years to make it right.
He keeps it polished to a shine, like it’s the one thing he owns.
He looks up and sees me in the doorway, and his face opens into a smile.
“Ah. Aaron.” He sets the telescope on the bench. “At last I am permitted to catch up with you. You have been a ghost in these halls.”
I step inside, and the second I’m over the threshold his head comes up, his nostrils flaring, and I watch the dragon in him read me. His blue eyes widen.
Delight breaks over him. “This is a new man who walks into my classroom. No longer the boy I taught, not even the Aaron I knew a season ago.” He tips his head. “You have moved as a star does when it is pulled into a larger orbit. I can see it on you.”
“Well.” I huff a quiet laugh and take in the room, the star charts, the worn stool by the window where I used to sit. “Something like that. A lost man finally finding his way home.”
He beams at that, the whole of his face folding into it.
“From your scent,” he says gently, “it appears you have come to say goodbye.”
I turn back to the charts, because it’s easier than looking at him.
So many years live in this little room. A kid with no father on that stool in the dark, learning the names of the stars from a dragon who never once treated him like he was less.
“I really do hate how you shifters can pull a man’s mood right out of the air,” I tell him.
“Takes all the suspense out of a conversation.”
Tyrion shrugs, easy, and comes around the bench toward me, his hands folding behind his back.
“What is happening, Aaron?” he asks. “Where are you going?”
“Heavy is the head, isn’t that how it goes.” I try to make it light. It doesn’t come out that way.
He puts it together on his own, and a grin comes up slow.
“I always knew Wintermoon was too small to keep you,” he says. “Even when you were a boy stargazing through your supper, I saw it. The sky does not point at ordinary men. It points at you.”
“I wish that weren’t true,” I tell him.
“The brightest stars burn the hardest, and the loneliest.” He says it like a fact of the heavens. “It is the cost of the light.”
I raise my hand. I don’t cast anything, don’t say a word, just open my palm and want it, and the room fills with stars.
A whole galaxy unspools across the ceiling and down the walls, a wheel of light slowly turning, the exact spiral he has charted over his bench, and it hangs there glowing soft over the both of us.
Tyrion stares up at it. Even he has nothing to say, struck silent under a sky I made out of nothing. Then he laughs, amazed, and shakes his head.
“And I take it this is a small trick for you,” he says. “Which tells me you are capable of a great deal more.”
“I haven’t tested it.” I let the galaxy keep turning. “I don’t know yet what I can do. I don’t know what Mother Fate wants from me. I just know it’s more than this world needs.”
“There was a Blackwood coven once, long ago, before they fell to Aya Bailey.” He says it up at the galaxy, not at me.
“Even then, before any of this, your bloodline could do things the Baileys never could. You come from something old and rare, Aaron. A line this world has all but forgotten.” He brings his eyes down to mine at last, and there’s no question left in him. “You will make an honorable king.”
I stare at him. My mouth won’t work. I start to bring my fist to my chest, the salute you give a man you respect. It’s the one thing my body knows to do.
Tyrion shakes his head. He steps in past my raised fist and pulls me into him instead, both arms, like he used to when I was small enough for it to swallow me whole.
I do my best not to come apart. I lose. The tears get loose and run down into the shoulder of his coat. I sniff hard and hang onto the old dragon. He holds me up, and over our heads the galaxy goes on, all that light and none of it warm.
“I hope you will visit, sometimes,” he says against the top of my head. “Come and watch the stars with me. Brother.”
I pull back. “I’ll do my best to try.”
He smiles, and that’s the thing about Tyrion, the one it took me a lifetime to learn. I don’t have to give him the route or the reasons or the long ugly shape of what I’m about to do. He just looks at me and knows, and lets the rest stay unsaid.
“This is not a goodbye,” he tells me. “The stars wheel, and they always come back to where they began. We will see one another again.”
I let the galaxy fade out of his classroom. I bow my head to him, and I go.
I wipe my face dry in the stairwell, climbing toward the library, because the next stop is Mara and I’m not ready to wear any of this where she can read it.
She’s already inside when I push through the door, her laugh carrying out to me—that bright, easy one she only makes when she’s happy all the way down.
She’s tucked into one of the deep chairs in the corner, Nala leaning over Mara, one hand flat on her belly, the two of them giggling over something I’ve missed.
Mara looks up and finds me, and the laugh goes out of her.
Her smile folds up and puts itself away, worry rising in its place, and Mother Fate help me, I hate it. I hate that I’m the one who does that to her now, that she’s spent a week reading rejection off the one man who’d never turn from her.
So I do what I can. I cross the library, lean over her chair, and kiss her, slow, right on the mouth, in front of Nala and Mother Fate and everybody.
“Why so glum, honey?” I murmur against her lips.
“You.” She pulls back and glares up at me, her ears flicking. “You’re why.”
I chuckle and press my forehead to hers. “Sorry, baby.” I slide my hand down to cover Nala’s, over the swell of her belly, over our son. “Just know I couldn’t be happier than I am right now. I mean that.”
Nala squeals, claps her hands, and bounces on her heels.
“Congratulations!” She throws both arms around my neck, nearly knocking me into Mara’s lap. “Oh, this is the best news. Now we can trade off babysitting duty, you watch my two terrors and I’ll take your little one—“
Mara laughs again, her tail swaying behind the chair, the worry gone for now, and I’d give the Glen, the crown, both my hands to keep it like that.
Nala steps back, beaming between us, and I turn to my mate.
“I have to go up to the Conjuring Hall,” I tell her. “Talk to my mother and my sisters about something. You want to come with me?”
Mara’s eyes lift to mine, the nerves right there in them again, the question she hasn’t asked. For half a second I think she’s going to say yes, and I don’t know whether I’m hoping for it or dreading it. Then she shakes her head.
“Nala said she’d give me some ideas for the nursery,” she says. “We were just getting to the good part.”
The relief comes first, and the shame right behind it. I’m not ready to say it in front of her, not yet, not until I have the words in an order that won’t break her. But I won’t lie to her either, and if she’d stood up and taken my hand I’d have let her walk in there and hear all of it.
“I’ll catch you later, then?” I lean in and kiss her once more, soft.
She nods against my mouth. “Later.”
I straighten and make myself walk away from them, their heads already bent together over our future. I head for the Conjuring Hall.
The great doors swing open for me before I reach them, sensing me. The hall opens up tall and round inside, the conjuring marks burning faint gold in the floor. My mother and my sisters are up on the second tier at the rail, the four of them turning toward me as I climb the stairs.
Tiana folds her arms across her chest and arches a brow at me.
“About time you showed up,” she says.
“Hey, baby.” My mother’s voice is softer, but her eyes are sharp on me, already reading more than I want her to. “You ready to tell us the news?”
I roll my eyes, and standing in front of them, some of the weight slides off me. “I swear, word travels faster than light. I haven’t told a soul.”
“You didn’t have to.” Samara is already coming for me, my smallest sister, launching herself across the tier and wrapping me up hard enough to rock me back a step. She looks up at me, glowing. “I’m going to be an auntie! Tell me, tell me—is it a boy or a girl?”
I look at her, and under everything else, under the goodbye, the Glen, the crown waiting at the bottom of it all, there’s this one clean true thing, and I let myself feel it.
“A boy,” I tell her.