Chapter Twenty. When You Receive an Anatomy Lesson
CHAPTER TWENTY
WHEN YOU RECEIVE AN ANATOMY LESSON
JAMES
The sun blazes bright the next morning in sharp contrast to how I’m feeling.
Farren’s contempt for me has settled in like never before, and for once I can’t shake how bleak my future appears.
Maybe not always under the thumb of my father, but under the thumb of society upholding the shiny vision of a silver-crafter—never letting anything mar their reputation, their metal.
For the past decade I’ve woken early and trained. My body refuses to break routine. Today though I push myself until my thoughts run dry. After lifting metal for hours, I jog up the stairs to the loft only to find Farren knocking at my door. She turns at my approach.
When she faces me though, I freeze. She’s pinned half her hair back with a blue ribbon to match her dress and there’s all these front pieces too short to stay tied back. I want to tuck those strands behind her ear for her.
“I see you’re still waking up ungodly early,” Farren breaks the silence before her eyes sweep over me. “Did you just work out?” As she questions me in disbelief, she adjusts three books tucked in her arms.
“Don’t pretend I’m the weird one. That makes more sense than studying at six in the morning.
” I try to get past her. I don’t know where we stand.
After her spiel of all my faults I spent the rest of yesterday alone and thinking.
A bad combination, but it occurred to me I never needed to ask to pretend to hate one another.
Farren just had to continue to be Farren.
It’s me who has to hide every ounce of affection I’ve gathered over the years.
I clench my hands as I pass her, turning my body sideways so even her books won’t brush me.
As I open the door, I intend to ask Farren why she’s here. I don’t get the chance. She follows me inside like we’ve done this a thousand times before, almost like she lives here too, with me.
Like normal, I don’t know exactly what to say, so no words come but a questioning “Um?”
“I have your clothes.” Farren thrusts out a bag I didn’t notice she was carrying. “Cleaned your sweater.”
“Oh.” Is that all this is? A part of me wants to tell her to keep it. “I have your clothes too.” I go into the bathroom and fold her dress I’d hung to dry.
When I hand over the clothes, she frowns down at the green fabric. “You washed my dress?”
“Yes.”
She glances around the loft. “Like hand-washed my dress?”
“Yes.”
She beams and I almost stumble back at how bright her smile is. “Wow, thank you.” She sets the clothes and books down on the table like she’s settling in. My confusion intensifies.
“What did you think of yesterday?” she asks.
“Good enough? I think I fooled my mom, but both my parents are a little too perceptive.” She paces.
“I’ve never been this angsty. Slamming that door felt strange, but also a little cathartic.
” She finally stops and looks at me. “Do you slam doors in your house?”
“Yes, though most of the time it’s not me doing the slamming,” I answer, not processing the beginning of her speech. She’s asking my opinion on her … acting? “That was a performance?” I ask.
She frowns, adjusts her glasses. “What do you mean?” I don’t know what my face conveys, but it must tell her enough because her dark eyebrows rise in surprise. “I was that good? You think I hate you too?”
Yes. Too good. “You did say you wouldn’t even have to pretend yesterday morning,” I rationalize.
“That was a joke.”
“A joke,” I repeat.
She bites her lip. “Obviously, a bad joke.”
“So, you don’t hate me and you’re here to—?” I wait.
Farren motions to the books. “Enact the first part of our deal. I was going to ask your help to collect scales with me and while we do that, I can talk you through some of my father’s procedures.
” She taps one of the books and I realize it’s a journal, loose papers stuffed into the binding.
I could probably learn more from that journal than any textbook I’ve ever read. Learn more from her than any class.
My mood suddenly matches the sunshine pouring into the loft. “Okay.”
“Okay.” She brightens as she grabs her books. “Time to give you the tour, properly this time.”
Jeffrey and Shelly were right. Farren talks a mile a minute when it comes to dragons.
I walk beside her, hanging on every word.
I notice she likes when I ask questions, so I do, even if I had already learned the answers the hard way or stolen a small opportunity to ask Dr. Walsh or Jeffrey these past weeks.
I don’t dare with any “I know,” because we are starting over.
Joy blooms in my chest with each passing minute. We’re having a normal conversation and more importantly Farren is acting like herself. Knowing her secrets has cast aside that facade she’s been wearing for the last year.
“The seven Skidders are elusive, but once you find one…” She smiles, nodding ahead. “You’ll find them all.”
I follow her eyes through the lush knee-high grass. Feet away a lump of green scales comes into view, then a head rises to peer at us. Farren touches my shoulder, pointing out the six others. All crouched with crocodile eyes watching us from the grass.
Skidders are Sprinter-sized wyverns. I know this and yet when the creature closest rises up on his winged front feet the lurching scuttle is unsettling, more animalistic than a four-legged dragon.
“Just keep calm. No loud noises. Our Skidders don’t like men.”
“Great. So, you brought me out here to kill me.”
Farren drops her books and steps in front of me. “If I was going to kill you, I’d have let Nity do it. Less of a mess.”
As the nearest wyvern lumbers closer, he sniffs Farren’s outstretched hand. He seems content before turning his snout to me, head tilted in inspection. A thick scar runs over a missing eye.
“This one’s Abe. His left eye is gone so he’s a little more defensive.” Farren pats his neck. “Likes to rely on his nose and that means getting close.” She turns to me. “Not the smartest tactic if we were trying to harm him.”
I know these Skidders were descaled, but up close?
The full-body scarring makes my throat tight.
The poachers who did this must have been only iron-crafters because they didn’t just pull the sheath of coated tin off the scale, which would be painful enough.
They pulled the entire scale off. Every single scale.
When that’s done to a dragon, the scales don’t regrow in even, healthy layers.
Each Skidder comes forward, following Abe’s lead. While all possess different colors, they share the same stout, jutting, crooked scales. We are soon surrounded.
Farren brushes the head of a teal Skidder to her right. “This is Deb. And my first big case with my dad.” She plops down in the grass and flips through the journal until she lands on an enlarged diagram of a spiked wyvern tail.
“The poachers cut the tip of all their tails so as not to get stung which—” She looks at me still standing. “Come on. Sit.”
“Oh,” I say, because yeah, sure, let’s lounge in the grass with seven wyverns breathing down our necks.
No problem. But as soon as I’m beside Farren everyone seems to lose interest in us.
She’s so trusted, it’s astonishing. These creatures were tortured in one of the most brutal ways possible.
They should despise humankind. I despise humankind just thinking of a fellow man doing this to them.
Yet, her presence relaxes them even in the company of a stranger.
Farren somehow gets Deb to turn and lay her tail before us, and for the next hour we review the entire operation from initial assessment of infection, treatment, and reconstruction.
Then we go over how the entire Walsh family helped craft the Skidder’s tin when it regrew over scars too painfully. Months of rehab and work.
“And that’s why our Skidders shed more frequently than average,” Farren declares before snapping the journal closed. “I know the storm scared them. So, help me collect the metal?”
I stare at the vast fields around us. It’s a sea of flowing reeds, swaying in the wind. “Wait, out here?”
Farren stretches out her arms, closes her eyes, and concentrates. Two seconds later tin shoots through the grass and into her palm. “First to fifty, wins.”
My mouth breaks into a smile. She’s so damn impressive. “Wins what?” I press.
“I don’t know. Just wins.” She shrugs. “Bragging rights? If we make another deal, I’m going to start to lose count.”
“Fair enough.”
When I center myself and reach out to feel for tin, it takes a second to connect.
All my training revolves around silver since I first crafted it at eleven.
Which doesn’t mean this task is impossible.
I’m just a little rusty at pinpointing the smooth pull of tin.
Most every test involving iron, tin, and copper consists of the metal sitting in front of me to shape to my command.
Mastery comes in how much and how precisely you can bend the substance to your will.
Crafting classes at school hardly preach location or sensing tactics, which I thought logical with the limitations of the classroom and the value in strengthening our control.
But as blue-tinted gray metal flies through the air around me and into Farren’s open hands, I rethink that notion.
Is it elitism that assumes this wondrous resource of dragons will always be supplied to those who can afford it?
To most of my classmates they couldn’t imagine collecting scales, facing the dragons who produced it.
They see a hunk of iron, tin, copper, bronze, or silver and never question if this piece was sourced ethically like Farren’s doing, selectively descaled like my father does, or painfully stolen like the wyvern poachers.
Halfway through our race I watch her, calling to metal like she’s a gravitational force, the lustrous gray orbiting her like moons. This crush thing would be so much simpler if Farren wasn’t so awe-inspiring.