Chapter 15 The Kiss
I am distracted for the rest of the day as Marton takes me on a tour of the Academy—room after room of books, sorted by category and time period and location.
And then building after building of rooms full of books, scrolls, artwork, petrified spars, fossils, skeletons, rocks and crystals, and assorted old items found on archeological digs.
The campus turns to a blur before my eyes, my mind too occupied trying to figure out what bothered me so much about the Headmaster.
He was not colored like dragon, nor a wyvern, nor a manticore.
But there are many other species of protectorkin that I've never seen and have hardly heard of.
Could he be one of them?
Or is it something else?
Some human discrepancy that I need to be wary of?
I know I should be focusing on the contents of the libraries around me, on finding the information we need to go after Cherry and Vakhrin, but.
..it doesn't seem as if we'll be getting any research done today.
As word spreads that Marton has returned, our tour becomes more of a parade. Everyone has heard of Marton's return after his mysterious disappearance. They come to gape and gawp and pretend at a friendliness that seems false for most of them.
All the human men who come to greet us stand a cautious distance away, smiling with varying levels of sincerity and looking on with alternating bewilderment and suspicion.
More than one gaze goes to me in curiosity—Marton's sudden wife—but their eyes flit away just as quickly.
Their instincts discerning—and shying from—what their minds do not believe in.
Altogether, it is an exhausting afternoon, and I'm relieved when Marton finally leads us along an empty corridor on the second floor of one of the dormitory buildings.
"Want to tell me what's going on with you?
" Marton asks conversationally, leaning back against the closed door of the bedroom we've just entered.
His bedroom, I realize belatedly. The smell of him is thick in the air.
Man and sweat and paper and herbs.
I turn to gaze over the room with interest. It is not a large space, but not cramped either.
There is a desk against one wall, stacked with books and loose parchment, quills and ink and assorted knickknacks.
And stacked against the walls, scattered across the rug by the newly lit hearth, even tangled in the sheets of the bed—more books.
It is a very...Marton sort of room.
On a table beneath a narrow window are rows of potted herbs, which look half dead from neglect after Marton's lengthy absence.
They smell of lavender and rosemary, thyme and bergamot, mint and sage, their scents even more distinct as their leaves and petals dry.
It's clear that no one has been tasked with cleaning or caring for the room since Marton left, although someone has recently been in to light the fire and put fresh candles in the wall sconces.
A few crumpled tunics are strewn about the floor, while others are hanging up in a standing wardrobe with one door ajar.
Most of the clothes are white in color—the color of the pundits' and masters' tunics, the color of distinguished scholars.
Marton had a whole life here, with accomplishments and purpose and...belongings. And he walked away from it to chase down fantasies.
He's prepared to walk away from it again, for me. I wish I could feel as if I deserved it, but I worry he is blinded by his desire to be near real magic.
"Tarah?" Marton prompts.
"Are all of these things yours?" I walk to his desk, picking up an object that catches my eye. It's some puzzling metal contraption, with rounded bits and straight bits connected by joints of metal that all move together when I toy with it.
"That's a sextant," Marton offers.
"A what?" My face feels hot.
"It's a tool used for measuring angles. Like the distance between the moon and other celestial bodies. Sailors use them for navigation, but it's also a took for astronomers."
Embarrassed to admit how much of that I do not understand, I replace it and pick up another object, scrutinizing it at eye level.
This one is clearly a skull of some kind, but I can't tell what it is from.
It's about the size of dog or a cat, but the shape of the jaws and teeth are wrong, and the snout too long and rounded.
"I read an old legend written by an archeologist who discovered bones like those, who said they belonged to a creature called a chupacabra—a beast who drinks the blood of livestock—though I'm not sure if it's true." Marton draws close to my side as he explains.
I sit the skull down, and run my fingers over a row of crystals and ingots in shades of white and green and purple.
Blue and gold and silver. I touch another metal contraption that captures my attention, this one bronze and circular, almost like a flattened clock but missing the numbers, and with another circle placed asymmetrically within the clockface.
"Astrolabe," Marton says quietly.
I don't ask what this means. I am feeling a great distance between Marton and myself right now. It makes me . . . sad.
Finally, my eyes land on a framed portrait done in miniature.
It shows a young boy with a smiling man and woman on either side of him.
The boys is obviously a young Marton, with lighter hair and bigger eyes, bright green and brimming with hopeful dreams. And these must be his parents. He has two of them.
I touch their likenesses within the frames. The woman is beautiful, with the same blonde hair as her son, though her eyes are blue and not as dreamy. The man is tall and stern-faced, but his brown eyes are warm. He has his arms around his wife and son.
"My parents," says Marton, unnecessarily.
"Why did you leave them?" I don't mean to ask the question, and I sort of already know the answer, but the thought slips out of me anyway.
He had two parents, with enough money to take care of him.
They did not send him away, as far as I can tell.
From what I know of parents—from my own story, from Cherry's, from Vakhrin's—that's not nothing.
Marton swallows audibly. "I know it may seem silly, compared to your own experiences, but my parents.
..though they loved me, they could not understand me.
They wanted me to go out in society, to attend parties with their friends, to learn the family business.
They could not fathom what I found so interesting among the pages of dusty old books.
Even I could not understand it sometimes.
The way it crawled inside me...Magic.
From the first tale I ever read about it, I could not be the same boy I had been before. I was changed. Unfit for anything else.
"But my parents did not want to hear me talk about naiads and selkies when we attended social events on the lake.
They did not want me speaking of dryads in the gardens of our home.
They were...ashamed, almost, of my interests.
Like it was some embarrassing thing I was doing to them, just by.
..caring about what I cared about. I begged for them to send me to the Academy because I thought it would be filled with people like me.
People who believed." He laughs softly, devoid of humor.
"But that did not work out, either. Everywhere I have gone, I have been a wrong thing.
Never quite matching the pitch of the minds and hearts around me. "
"I might know something about that," I say lightly, trying to take some of the abstracted distance from his eyes.
A smile comes over his face, and his gaze finds mine. "Yes, I know." He laughs, off kilter as he steps away. "I told you it would sound ridiculous. Poor me, right? The rich boy who could buy any future he wanted, and still found a way to be disappointed with it."
"That's not what I was thinking at all." I look down at the desk, at all the things there. Thinking about riches. About value.
Because maybe neither of us are being fair to him.
I thought he had given up one good thing after another, chasing some starry-eyed daydream.
That I was the consolation prize—the slightly magical thing he latched onto because it was as close as he could get to what he wanted.
The same way he left his parents to come to the Academy, he left the Academy to find me.
And how long until he realizes that I am not exactly what he is looking for either?
But...perhaps magic is not what he's been after all this time.
Everywhere I have gone, I have been a wrong thing. Never quite matching the pitch of the minds and hearts around me.
Didn't I feel that way for thirteen years of my life? Never quite being the daughter my mother needed or wanted. Never quite being someone the other children in my village could play with. Never being someone the villagers could trust.
With Cherry I found something...different.
I became more truly a monster than ever, doing what I thought I had to do to keep her safe.
But I also found friendship and acceptance for the first time.
All the years I spent with her, I thought she must secretly hate me.
That she only put up with me because she had to.
But when we left our tower, when we found out the truth about our life there, she still wanted me. She still loved me. She never thought I was a monster. To her I was...a protector.
We had grown together over the years, forged like twin daggers. Inextricable.
And Marton has never had a friend like that. A friend who knew every jagged and strange corner of his heart and still wanted him. A friend who understood him. Accepted him.
Is that what he's really been looking for all this time?
"Did you still feel that way," I ask softly, "Like a wrong thing—when you were with Vakhrin and Cherry and me?"
"I have never felt wrong around you."
I exhale a breath I didn't know I was holding.
"Do you know...I think it is the same for me?
That is just how I have always thought of the way that other humans—and recently even other protectorkin—reacted to me.
I thought of it as them being able to sense the wrongness of me.
But you— You never seemed to feel it. You have never cringed away from me, or mistrusted me.
You just...came in with your heart wide open.
" I am whispering by the end, full of awe at the recollection.
"It never occurred to me to feel differently."
"I can see that, now." I have to laugh, though the sound comes out strained. I can't quite bring myself to look at him. "You're like that with everyone, aren't you? Ready to share your whole self if they'll let you."
"I suppose? I don't know. They don't usually let me." His voice goes wry as if he's trying to make a joke.
I sigh, nodding. So this is where we truly stand. I am more special than I thought, because he does not only care about me because I am a dragon. But I am still not too special. He only wants a friend who will accept him.
I can be that, I decide. I am very good at that. I've practiced with Cherry—one of the most difficult people who ever walked the earth, who I love with all my heart.