Chapter6 You're the only one this year

Wren Hale's POV

Lennox finally raised his eyes, and I saw confusion in them.

"Your ears," I said, trying to make it sound like an ordinary thing to ask. "I've never touched an elf before. Just once. Please. I washed my hands."

He went completely still. The hand resting on his knee tightened, the knuckles standing out. I could tell he was angry.

"No," he said. His jaw set into a hard line, and his gold eyes held on me for a long stretch of time. Then the pupils narrowed. Sharp and quick, two thin black slits standing upright in all that gold, exactly the way the sheep's eyes went when a dog wandered too close to the fence.

I blinked, and the black slits were gone — round pupils again, set in all that gold, his gaze already drifting somewhere past my shoulder like nothing had happened there at all. I didn't know enough about elves to know if that was normal.

I must have been seeing things. I'd spent too long around the sheep, staring at their eyes, long enough that my own eyes had started playing tricks on me.

"I'm sorry," I said, and looked down. Ruth had always said that when you did something wrong, you apologized. That was how you got forgiven.

He didn't answer. He turned his face away. He hadn't forgiven me.

I sat there, my ears burning. Then I worked it out — probably every species has parts of the body you don't touch.

Back home, we had rules about putting harnesses on horses. Somebody else's horse, somebody else's reins — reach for them without asking and you'd get your fingers broken.

Elves were the proudest people in this school about who they were. I remembered reading that somewhere. Their ears were probably the worst thing you could grab at, the thing people recognized them by.

Being asked to let some stranger pet them like a curiosity was probably worse than being asked what you cost.

Once I'd worked that out, the burning eased off a little, but it didn't go away.

"Wren Hale? Sorry — are you Wren Hale?"

The voice came from behind me. A girl jogged up and stopped beside me, her chest rising and falling. She followed the direction I'd been facing, saw who was on the bench, and her feet caught for half a beat.

She straightened up at once and dropped her voice.

"Lennox Beck. Sorry, I didn't know you were here."

It took me a beat longer than it should have, and then it settled into place. He wasn't the person Iris sent for me. I'd assigned him that job myself, and I'd never once asked him to confirm it.

I turned back, fast, and gave myself no room for an excuse. "I'm sorry. I thought you were the person I was waiting for. My mistake."

He looked at me. In that look, I caught the gold again — the kind of gold molten metal goes when light crosses it, pretty enough that for one second I forgot I was apologizing.

Then he said, "It's fine."

I stood there, then turned and followed the girl out.

Ten-odd steps out, I couldn't help looking back. His eyes weren't on me anymore. He'd gone back to exactly the way he'd been before I walked up to him — just sitting there in silence, staring at nothing.

"I'm so sorry, really. I should have been earlier." The girl apologized the whole way, talking fast and hardly stopping for air, one hand swinging out every few steps to point at one strange building after another. I said something back. I don't know what.

Most of me was still on that bench, so her voice went by like something from another room.

"Vanguard, the training grounds are over there. Arcanum faces the main square. Companion Studies is in the north tower. We're in Restoration — this way."

She said the dorms were sorted first by division, then split again by species and habits. Vampires got the light-sealed floors, werewolves got the open, well-ventilated stretch, elves got the quiet zone.

"Iris should have told you, right? There aren't many humans studying here," she turned and winked at me. "We're like elves in the human world. The moment we show up, we get all the attention."

It hit me all at once. "So when I first walked in, the new students weren't whispering because of Iris. It was because of me? Because I'm human?"

She nodded. "Humans have a hard time awakening to magic at all. We're nothing like the species that are born with it. But when we do awaken, it's almost always mutation-class magic. The kind of power that surprises everyone."

Listening to her, I caught the important part. "You just said 'we.' You're human too?"

She smacked her own forehead. "Right, I haven't introduced myself. I'm Grace Whitmore, the sixth human student this school has taken in. You're the seventh. You're the only one this year."

"But I heard Aurelis Academy hasn't admitted a human student in over ten years."

Grace stuck out her tongue. "Yeah. Who said I was a new student this year? I'm a proper senior, thank you. Aurelis doesn't run on years. It runs on stages. You don't move up until the instructors decide your magic is ready for it, and you don't leave until you've passed the last one. Most people take eight or nine years. Some take twenty. A few never leave at all — they stay on for research, or because their awakening came out in a shape nobody knew what to do with. Anyway, I've been here for over ten years, so I know basically everything about this school. And you and I are both human, so we live about the same way. We can help each other out from now on."

I was a little stunned. Wait — she could stay at this school for more than ten years and still not graduate? Setting graduation aside — Grace looked far too young for that. She didn't look thirty-something at all.

Grace seemed to guess what I was thinking. She leaned in close to my ear, all secretive. "Past the third stage, aging mostly stops."

She straightened up and grinned at me. "You'll find out."

The whole way, Grace talked to me about school gossip — teachers, students, even the Blight Zones.

I asked her what had happened to the humans who came before me. She didn't answer that one — she was already three sentences into a story about a werewolf and somebody's stolen chickens, and she just kept walking.

It was all right. There was no rush — I'd be at this school a long while yet, and I could take my time looking for word of my parents. The only thing I had to worry about was tomorrow's Magic Resonance Test.

According to Grace, this test didn't matter much to the other species, but to humans it mattered a great deal.

Grace patted my shoulder. "So today we rest up at the dorm, and tomorrow I'll take you to the test."

I nodded and hurried to keep up with Grace, heading toward my dorm at Aurelis Academy.