This, I thought, is probably not a topic to pursue further. “So,” I said, trying something different. “What is your Talent?”
Bastille gritted her teeth, glaring out through the windshield.
“Well?” I asked.
“You don’t have to rub it in, Smedry.”
Great. “You… don’t have a Talent, then?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I’m a Crystin.”
“A what?” I asked.
Bastille turned – an action that made me rather uncomfortable, as I thought she should have kept watching the road – and gave me the kind of look that implied that I had just said something very, very stupid. (And, indeed, I had said something very stupid. Fortunately, I made up for it by doing something rather clever – as you will see shortly.)
Bastille turned her eyes back on the road just in time to avoid running over a man dressed like a large slice of pizza. “So you’re really him, then? The one old Smedry keeps talking about?”
This intrigued me. “He’s mentioned me to you?”
Bastille nodded. “Twice a year or so we have to come back to this area and see where you’ve moved. Old Smedry always manages to lose me before he actually gets to your house – he claims I’ll stand out or something. Tell me, did you really knock down one of your foster parents’ houses?”
I shifted uncomfortably. “That rumor is exaggerated,” I said. “It was just a storage shed.”
Bastille nodded, eyes narrowing, as if for some reason she had a grudge against sheds to go along with her apparent psychopathic dislike of Librarians.
“So…” I said slowly. “How does a thirteen-year-old girl become a knight anyway?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bastille asked, taking a screeching corner.
And here’s where I proved my cleverness: I remained silent.
Bastille seemed to relax a bit. “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m not very good with people. They annoy me. That’s probably why I ended up in a job that lets me beat them up.”
Is that supposed to be comforting? I wondered.
“Plus,” she said, “you’re a Smedry – and Smedrys are trouble. They’re reckless, and they don’t like to think about the consequences of their actions. That means trouble for me. See, my job is to keep you alive. It’s like… sometimes you Smedrys try to get yourselves killed just so I’ll get in trouble.”
“I’ll try my best to avoid something like that,” I said honestly. Thought her comment did spark a thought in my head. Now that I had begun to accept the things happening around me, I was actually beginning to think of Grandpa Smedry as – well – my grandfather. And that meant… My parents, I thought. They might actually be involved in this. They might actually have sent me that bag of sands.
They would have been Smedrys too, of course. So, were they some of the ones that “got themselves killed,” as Bastille so nicely put it? Or, like all these other relatives I was suddenly learning I had, were my parents still around somewhere?
That was a depressing thought. A lot of us foster children don’t like to consider ourselves orphans. It’s an outdated term, in my opinion. It brings to mind images of scrawny, dirty-faced thieves living on the street and getting meals from good-hearted nuns. I wasn’t an orphan – I had lots of parents. I just never stayed with any of them all that long.
I’d rarely bothered to consider my real parents, since Ms. Fletcher had never been willing to answer questions about them. Somehow, I found the prospect of their survival to be even more depressing that the thought of them being dead.
Why did you burn down your foster parents’ kitchen, lad? Grandpa Smedry had asked. I quickly turned away from that line of thinking, focusing again on Bastille.
She was shaking her head, still muttering about the Smedrys who get themselves into trouble. “Your grandfather,” she said, “he’s the worst. Normal people avoid Inner Libraria. The Librarians have enough minions in our own kingdoms to be plenty threatening. But Leavenworth Smedry? Fighting them isn’t nearly dangerous enough for him. He has to live as a spy inside of the shattering Hushlands themselves! And of course, he drags me with him.
“Now he wants in infiltrate a library. And not just any library but the regional headquarters – the biggest library in three states.” She paused, glancing at me. “You think I have good reason to be annoyed?”
“Definitely,” I said, again proving my cleverness.
“That’s what I thought,” Bastille said. Then she slammed on the brakes.
I smashed against the dash, nearly losing my glasses. I groaned, sitting back. “What?” I asked, holding my head.
“What what?” Bastille said, pushing open the door. “We’re here.”