King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,19
think.
He turned, and she glanced hastily away so he wouldn’t catch her staring.
“I thought we’d start with a little bit of everything.” He set a hefty stack of books down on the table with a solid thump. The dainty table legs creaked a protest. “Then we’ll have a baseline for continuing.” He settled in across from her, pulled a book off the stack, and sent her one of his small, close-lipped smiles, his eyes warm. Honey this morning, again, safe and approachable. “How does that sound?”
“It sounds good.”
~*~
It turned out she’d managed to learn a great deal more at school than either of them had counted on. When she’d been admitted to Tabitha’s care, she hadn’t been able to stay in school full-time; only here and there, and the principal was one of Tabitha’s “special friends,” as she liked to call them, so Child Services had never heard about the truancy.
But she’d gone to public school her whole life before that, and not only had she been a model student – other children had bewildered and intimidated her, one of the many reasons she’d felt such an immediate attachment to poor Jane Eyre – and she’d loved reading besides. She’d taken lunch and recess in the library. Had checked out books to take home.
“Self-taught,” Beck said with a warm approval that left her grinning like an idiot. “Just like me.” He winked, and her skin tingled pleasantly.
“You were born after the Atmospheric Rift,” he continued, “so I say we go back to before then and work our way forward, filling in the gaps.”
They were discussing Leonidas and his Spartans when Kay harrumphed loudly from the threshold, rapped on the doorjamb, and said, “Are you gonna make that poor thing read about old, dead people all day, or are we ever gonna eat lunch?”
Ripped from the text, and Beck’s mellifluous analysis of it, Rose was startled to find that they had both leaned low over the table, heads bent together. When he lifted his head, she could count all the dark striations in his eyes; smell the tea on his breath. They were so close, and she was keenly aware of it.
For a moment, he looked lost: eyes wide, pupils enlarged, mouth half-open, caught mid-sentence. Then he sat back, composed again, and turned to Kay.
Rose dropped belatedly back into her own chair; she’d been half-out of it, balanced on her elbows and toes, like his voice was a rope that had pulled her up out of her seat.
“Lunch would be perfect,” Beck said. “What are you making?”
Kay snorted. “You leave it up to me and that’s how you get canned Spaghetti-Os.”
“We don’t have any canned Spaghetti-Os,” Beck said in the voice of someone who’d just picked up someone else’s used tissue.
“You haven’t seen my closet.”
“I shudder to think. We’ll have hot sandwiches, I think,” he said, pushing his chair back. “To go with the leftover soup from last night. Sound good?” The last he directed at Rose, along with a look softer than she’d dared hope to receive.
“Sounds good.”
~*~
They settled into an every-other-day rhythm with her lessons. One day of lectures that were more like conversations, and the next day off so Beck could work in his study and Rose could read the passages he’d assigned to her and catch up on household chores. In the mornings, when she was freshest, they worked on science: studied electricity, and rudimentary chemistry, and the ways the Atmospheric Rift had affected everything from the energy industry to the ocean’s ecosystems. Hydroponics, and efforts to reduce pollution, though they’d yet to touch on the Rift itself. Rose had the impression Beck kept sidestepping it on purpose; the great unspoken elephant in the room.
Before lunch it was world history, from the fall of Constantinople to the fall of the Reichstag. Everything up to the geopolitical upheaval of the world just before the Rift, and the crash after.
After lunch, it was mythology, and literature. She gobbled novels like candy, and he teased her opinions of them out, one gentle prompt at a time; offering counterpoints occasionally, but never dismissing, never ridiculing. Literature isn’t full of hidden meanings, he told her, but there’s no limit to individual interpretations of a work once you strip away the author’s intent.
She took to languages shockingly well, or so he told her. You have an ear for them. Spanish, and French, and the start of Latin. Beck also spoke Dutch, German, and a little Russian. You never know what might come in