I turn from the door and scrub a hand down my face, and I think the room clean while I do it, the bowls floating to the wash bin, the chalk dust lifting off the boards, the worktables wiping themselves down behind me. By the time my hand falls, the classroom’s spotless, and Seth is on his feet and coming around the worktables toward me.
“You’re leaving,” he says. It’s not a question. “For the Glen. You’re going, and you’re not coming back.” He stops a few feet off, his blue eyes hard on me. “I can taste it in your scent. You already decided.”
“It’s the right thing to do, Seth,” I say, and I hold his stare and don’t look away from it.
Seth doesn’t let it go. “What about our deal?”
I look at him. “Deal?”
It’s the wrong thing to say, and I know it the second it’s out of my mouth, because the anger breaks loose in him. A growl climbs up out of him, his canines lengthening, his hands curling at his sides. His eyes go bright and furious. And there it is. The thing he asked me for once before, the one I’ve been walking around ever since.
“Are you serious. You still want this. You still want me to take your magic out of you.”
“Yes.” It comes out of him cracked and raw. “Yes, I do.”
“Seth—“ I start.
“We had a deal.” He cuts me off. He’s not shouting. It’s worse than that—low and raw, pleading. “You went quiet that day, and you didn’t say no. You looked at me like you understood. You let me believe you’d do it. We had a deal, Aaron. Please.”
“Why do you hate who you are so badly?” The words come out of me rough. “Do you know what I’d give to make people see you the way I?—“
“I’m tired, brother.” He says it low, and it stops me where I stand.
His shoulders drop. His eyes fill, and he doesn’t wipe them away.
“I’m so tired,” he says again, quieter. “I spend every single day fighting to fit into two worlds, and neither one of them wants me. You don’t know what that’s like. You walk into any room and you belong in it. I walk in and the wolves smell the warlock, the warlocks smell the wolf, and the whole time I’m trying to earn a corner to stand in.”
“What you have is special, Seth.” I hear how thin it sounds even as I say it. “What you are—both of those things at once—that’s a gift most people will never?—“
He wipes the tears off his face with the back of his hand, fast, like he’s angry at them for showing up.
“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.”
