Page 88 of The Warrior
CHAPTER 23
Poetry
Laura
Magni wasn’t at the school when I arrived with Finn, Athena, and Tristan.
I slept in Magni’s cabin thinking about the awful conversation we had after I caught Devlin. If only he had acknowledged a job well done on my side, I wouldn’t have gotten so mad that I chose the Motherlands over him. I bet that if I’d been one of his Huntsmen, Magni would have shown me more respect. The bedsheets smelled of him and me, and it brought back memories of the amazing sex we shared before I went to catch Devlin.
Blaming myself for telling Magni that I chose the Motherlands over him, I couldn’t sleep. It had been a desperate attempt to stand up for myself, but it wasn’t true and I was racking my brain to find a way to take back my words without seeming weak.
Boulder came by the school early Monday morning to drop off Raven, who’d spent the weekend with him and Christina. He told me Magni was on the East Coast and asked if I had talked to him.
“Not yet, but I did tell him I returned.” It wasn’t true. Earlier that morning, while still in bed, I had dictated messages to Magni but nothing sounded right and I deleted all of them.
I needed a bit more time to get my head straight before I saw him again. After a long-overdue visit with Laila Michelle to see her and her twins, I returned to the school and spent the afternoon with the children. It was easy to see why Magni was so fond of Mila. The girl was adorable and sweet to everyone.
When they had English, she whispered for me to come and sit next to her.
Kya pointed to Nicki. “I’m sorry we ran out of time on Friday, but we’re all excited to hear you present what you learned when you explored a question related to the English language.”
Nicki came up to stand in front of the class.
“My question was, why do we all speak English and not some other language?” She looked down and because she wasn’t wearing shoes, I could tell she was bending her toes. “What I found out was that English was only one out of about seven thousand languages spoken before the war.” She looked down at her notes. “English was the third most-spoken language in the world with Mandarin being number one and Spanish being number two.”
“What’s Mandarin? It sounds like a fruit,” Raven commented.
“Mandarin was spoken in a country called China. It was part of Asia and is one of the places that is now uninhabitable. With billions of people killed during the war, English was the language spoken by most survivors. That’s why the Council made it the official language in 2061.”
“Thank you, Nicki, that was very good.” Kya smiled at the girl and clapped her hands. “Now it’s time for us to work on our poetry lesson. You’re going to either write your own poem or pick one written by a child. Plato and William, did you decide on a poem you wanted to analyze, yet?”
“I found one about beer, is that okay?” Storm asked.
“Ehm, yes, I think so.” Kya looked to Marco, one of the two assisting mentors. “Could you take a look at it?”
“Sure.”
“And what about you, William?”
“I don’t like poetry,” the boy complained.
“None of us do,” Solomon, the oldest of the boys, said in a loud voice. “It’s a waste of time.”
“Fighting is a waste of time,” Shelly, the other assistant mentor, chimed in. “If you ask me.”
Marco looked up. “You don’t get to call fight training a waste of time; just because you wouldn’t know how to fight off a toddler.”
“Fighting a toddler would be easy,” Shelly retorted. “I get to practice on you all the time.”
Marco raised his right arm and flexed his impressive biceps. “Does a toddler look like this?”
Shelly looked at him and gave a serious nod. “Yes, they have the exact same facial expression when they take a dump.”
Mila’s dimples came out when the kids and I laughed. “They are always like that,” she whispered to me. “It can be very entertaining.”
Kya clapped her hands. “Can we focus on the poetry please?”
A few groans were heard but the children settled down and spread out in the high-vaulted schoolroom that had once been an old ruin of a church.
