30. Healing Touch
“ G lad you could join us,” Mistress Jara said from the front of the classroom. She was tall, with long blond hair with flashes of grey forming at the base of her roots. She spoke politely but with an edge of assertiveness that Aeden did not want to test.
The rest of his cohort had stopped what they were doing when he burst through the door, out of breath and sweating, having covered nearly the full length of the academy to make it. At least he could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that he wasn’t too late and hadn’t miss the class entirely.
The classroom was rectangular in shape with sixteen large tables dotted around in rows of four. Each table had two students standing at it, pencils and parchment at the ready and large maps placed on each of them.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Well, that’s enough of a disruption. Take your place at your table, quickly and quietly. The rest of you continue what you’re doing. Are there any volunteers to help Aeden catch up on what he has missed?”
The room fell silent, and Aeden looked down at the ground. For someone who hated attention, he was certainly developing a knack for it. Finally a hand shot into the air, and Rowan offered Aeden a kind smile. One that he didn’t feel he deserved.
“Thank you, Rowan. If you could talk Aeden through the exercise, so I don’t have to repeat myself.
” Mistress Jara spoke with an air of irritation.
To be fair, that was entirely Aeden’s fault, and he knew that.
He was just grateful it was one of Mistress Jara’s lessons and not Master Storme’s.
Mistress Jara was one of the nicer faculty members, and Aeden appreciated that she addressed each of them by their first name and not their last.
“Sorry again,” Aeden said, walking over to Rowan’s table.
He passed a table where Harrison and Vivienne were standing together.
Serene was working with Cassian, and Aeden kept his head down, avoiding the eye contact the others tried to make with them.
He hated how he was treating them, but he couldn’t see any other way to keep them safe.
He noticed Harrison tut when his attempts to acknowledge Aeden failed.
That’s what he wanted. Hopefully they would get frustrated and stop trying. He couldn’t bear to see any of them get hurt because of him again.
“You’re making a habit of this,” Rowan said, her soft voice a nice change in a hostile academy.
Aeden had been keeping her and Cassian at arm’s length too, but in these situations, he had no choice but to engage.
He tried his hardest to keep conversations strictly work related, but this was hard with Rowan.
She had a natural air about her that made him feel at ease, like he wanted to open up with her.
“Thank you,” Aeden said. “I was working on some stuff with Nyra and Lyric.” He looked over the map that was laid out across the table.
It was an intricate map of both Nevaria’s mainland as well as the northern and eastern islands that sat in a cluster.
The southern regions were illustrated with an array of mountain ranges, forming a natural defensive wall against Soldova.
The true threat came from Ostrafar, a nation across the seas and from the west. Aeden wasn’t familiar with the territories beyond the islands of the north and east, but he knew that the threat came from all around Nevaria.
It was their unrivalled access to Aer-Kin that kept them safe.
The details and lines etched onto the map were incredible.
The time and expertise that had gone into creating it must have taken years, if not decades.
Aeden then wondered how they had made so many copies for the classroom and suddenly understood why they were told to take such care of them while working.
To the side of the map was a piece of parchment and charcoal pencil where Rowan had been making notes. Her handwriting was neat and tidy, as if she were a master of calligraphy. Aeden could only dream of having handwriting that clean.
“What am I looking at?” he asked, scanning over the map and cross-referencing the list of names that Rowan had already started.
“It’s a simple session, really. We just need to match the coordinates that Mistress Jara has given us to the locations on the map and list them. I already have six of them, so we should be able to get all of them noted down by the end of class.”
“It’s simple if you already know how to read maps,” Aeden said, raising an eyebrow. This was one of those subjects that Aeden didn’t excel at; no matter how hard he tried, he struggled to get his head around the concept of map reading.
“Well, it’s a good job you have me then.
” Rowan leaned across the table in front of him and grabbed hold of the compass that sat on the table’s surface.
Aeden was greeted with a sweet floral smell that he found alluring.
He shook his head to concentrate on his work.
Whatever it was that he was drawn to, he needed to compartmentalise it and focus on his work at the academy.
She passed him the compass and then pointed at another piece of parchment. “This one has all the coordinates we need. See here? I’ve marked off the ones that I’ve already done.”
Aeden noted that they had a series of crosses next to them.
“So, you’re going to use that compass tool” – she passed him the instrument, which had a fine needle point at the base – “and use it to map out those coordinates until you find the point of the map that it’s referencing. Then we’ll add it to the list.”
Aeden looked down at the map. A thin series of horizontal and vertical lines intersected across the map. In the top righthand corner, there was a compass reference pointing north, east, south, and west, sketched into the map in a fanciful way .
Aeden looked at the compass tool in his hands and fumbled around with it. He didn’t have a clue what he needed to do with it.
“Or,” he said hopefully, “you could show me how to do it by doing it.”
“How will you learn if I do it?” Rowan whispered.
“Because I’ll be watching, and I’ll also owe you one.” He smiled at her, but it was a desperate smile.
Rowan laughed. Aeden liked it when she laughed. “That would only work if there was something that I wanted from you.” She was playful in how she spoke, and Aeden felt a flash of heat rise in his cheeks before setting off into a mild panic.
He lowered his head to face the map so that Rowan nor anyone else in their class could notice. He glanced up to see Mistress Jara’s eyes focused on him. He was going to have to do this.
Aeden used the compass tool as best he could, looking at the coordinates and cross-referencing them while Rowan watched over him.
The heat in his cheeks quickly passed as his focus turned to the map reading.
He mumbled to himself as he used the cartography tool to pinpoint the location on the map.
After a while, he landed on a cluster of mountains.
He placed his finger on it, reading it out to Rowan.
“The Windless Mountains,” he said. “These coordinates are for the Windless Mountains.” A mountain pass that Aer-Kin avoided, due to the still air. He would be lying to himself if he didn’t feel smug about it. Rowan thought he would fail, but he had managed to read the map.
“Are you sure?” Rowan asked.
Suddenly Aeden felt less confident. “I am,” he said a little too defensively. “Am I?” He looked at the coordinates one last time and cross-referenced them again, retracing the steps that he had taken.
“Well, you would be, had you not just done that the wrong way around. Here, you’re reading it back to front. Your logic was right, but your application was wrong.” Rowan held out her hand expectantly towards Aeden. It took him longer than it should have to realise she wanted the compass tool.
“Oh,” he said, “here you go.” At least now he knew they would get the right answer.
Rowan set out using the compass tool with ease, as if it were as natural to her as breathing.
She traced each of the coordinates to land on a location at the opposite side of the map, a small island in the eastern territories that read ‘ Boratia ’.
The only thing Aeden knew of this island was a small fruit that was considered too much of a delicacy for him to have ever come across.
“See, that wasn’t too hard.” Rowan smiled as she leaned across the map in front of Aeden, giving him a flirtatious smile.
“Yup, I’m out of excuses. I am seriously bad at map reading,” Aeden said as he distracted himself by grabbing the parchment. “Shall I write it on here, or are you doing that? I just don’t want to mess up how tidy this looks.”
“It sounds to me like you’re just avoiding doing any of the work,” she said with a frown. “Is that what you’re doing, Aeden?”
“I promise I’ll do the next coordinates, but my handwriting is bad, especially compared to yours. ”
“Well, cartography is in my family’s bloodline, so I suppose I do have a bit of an unfair advantage. Being a Scout, we have to be able to read and draw maps, and do it well.”
She did have a point, and Aeden picked up the list of coordinates to read the next one.
“Shit,” Rowan said as she dropped the cartography tool onto the map. It fell on its side and a splash of red dripped onto the bottom of the illustration. Rowan clasped her hand around her finger.
“What did you do?” Aeden asked.
“I caught my finger with the needle. It’s just, I’m not that good with blood” – all colour drained from her face.
“Oh, shit,” Aeden said as he helped her sit in her chair.
The rest of the class stopped for a second to see what the commotion was about.
“Concentrate on your work,” Mistress Jara said. “Is everything okay, Rowan?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, “I’ve just nicked my finger.”