38. Aurora
AURORA
With all the excitement of Imprinting an egg and all the hurt and betrayal I felt when my closest friends didn’t believe me, I somehow managed to forget about Chud Larson and his threat entirely.
He was out of my life now, it seemed, completely.
Thanks to Ryse he had been moved out of my dorm and I no longer had to take the Flight Simulator class with him either.
Someone—perhaps the Head Master himself—had moved me to Advanced Cartography instead and I was learning to draw maps, which was something scouts did when they flew their dragons over new territory.
The teacher of the class, Professor Tucker, was a kind old soul who was a retired scout himself.
He rode a restful, easy-going brown dragon so small it could fit through the hallways meant for the human students easily.
It often came to class with him and rested its head on his shoulder as he taught.
“Now, now, Br’ownie,” he would say, clicking his tongue when his dragon nuzzled him for attention too often. “Settle down—we have to teach these youngsters.”
I enjoyed the new class immensely and since I was flying and working out with Ryse every day, I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by dropping the Flight Simulator.
I also spent time with L’eesha every day. She was growing more and more impatient for Hatching Day.
“i am ready now,” she told me. “but the others are lazy and slow! I tell them—hurry up! i am hungry! i need my Auri to feed me and scratch me!”
“We’ll be together soon,” I promised her, trying not to laugh at her impatience. “But you can’t bully the other eggs like that! When all of you are ready, you’ll all hatch together.”
“they listen to me—they are trying,” she told me. “but they are still not fast enough!”
It was a good thing L’eesha was so engaging, or I would have hated to come up to the Hatching Grounds.
Whenever I was there, petting her egg and talking to her, Master Yarsmouth was always casting me sorrowful glances and shaking his head mournfully.
It was clear he thought I was fooling myself about the egg talking back to me and was certain I was in for a dreadful disappointment.
Though I tried to mute it, L’eesha sometimes picked up on my irritation with the old Master.
“i will bite him!” she vowed. “bite him hard for upsetting my Auri!”
“No, no—you can’t bite anyone!” I told her.
I took my hand off her shell and breathed deeply, as Ryse had taught me. When I felt calm flowing through me, I put my hand back on her shell, sending the soothing emotions into her little body.
The egg seemed to vibrate under my hand, and I heard a soft trilling in my mind. After a moment, I realized that L’eesha was doing a baby version of the deep, humming purr I’d heard adult dragons do.
“feels nice,” she admitted, and I wished for the hundredth time I could hold her in my arms like a baby and stroke her and scratch her eye ridges. I just needed to be close to her.
“Feels nice to me, too,” I told her. “See? Isn’t it nice to be calm and peaceful?”
“yes…very nice,” she admitted. Then, after a minute she said, “i am still going to bite him.”
I shook my head—she was going to be such a handful when she hatched and yet, I couldn’t wait for her to break the shell. I had a feeling that once we bonded, I’d feel love like nothing I’d ever felt before. Love and acceptance like I hadn’t experienced since my brother, Auren, died.
But in all this excitement, as I said, I forgot about Chud Larson…and I forgot the looming threat of the Mating Flight.