Chapter 4: Flowers
FALL TERM - DAY 7 (Continued)
It was one of those early autumn afternoons where the sun burned hot but the breeze was cool. I knew that days like this existed more from books than lived experience.
"It gets like this in Hyhill sometimes," Aisling said. We were sitting out on a sunlit courtyard on the wide ledge of a dry central fountain. I was still flipping through my combat class textbook, trying to figure out just how I could have gotten the Chapters so mixed up.
Aisling had learned a new spell today that she was using to coax wildflowers into sprouting up through the cracks in the pavement so she could weave them into a flower crown.
"Did you ever have weather like this in Caburh?" she asked.
I was momentarily so fixated on the text in front of me, I nearly missed her question. "No... we didn't. Not a lot of sunny days in Caburh."
"Right," Aisling nodded. "With the vampires. Silly me." She went back to fiddling with her flower crown. "I heard it's going to get cold here soon. Hot summers, cold winters. Can you imagine that?"
I was still only half listening. I had the casting diagrams for be still laid open in front of me. "You don't have that in Hyhill?" I asked. I wasn't trying to ignore her, but I also didn't want to show up unprepared for Blackclaw's remedial lesson. Already a week in and I'd managed to stick myself in remedial lessons. It would be a much smaller class and it didn't take a genius to guess who else would be there. I couldn't make this a habit.
Aisling shrugged. "I hear it's different. But... we don't have to talk if you're busy. You look busy. And you're making that face."
"What face?"
Aisling scowled and her eyebrows turned thicker and dark, more like my own, and twisted into a furrowed glare. On her it looked absurd. I laughed if only because I couldn't help it. And that made her laugh too. Her face morphed back to her usual features.