The Ghost Friend: Marn Magical Academy Book 3

1 The sofa was soft. The fireplace was filling the room with warm, red light and cracking noises. My voice was hoarse. "And the dragon told the king: It is time for me to go. The time of dragons has gone. I hope you learned how to be a wise ruler. Thus, the last dragon left, to worlds unknown, never to be seen. But the king remembered his advice and ruled wisely until he died. The end." I closed the book and tried to set it aside — but there was nowhere to put it. Nigel, the youngest of my cousins, was sitting on my lap, while Davyn was leaning on my right shoulder, following the text as I read, pointing with my finger. While Nigel, being three, wasn't too heavy, he still had a good thirty pounds in him. And Davyn, almost six, as he would tell you, was quite a scrawny little boy, so his head on my shoulder wasn't too much. No, what made me feel squeezed was the young man sitting on my left, his arm behind my back, firmly holding my waist as he, also, leaned on me. Or rather, the sofa, but there was very little space between his head and my free shoulder. I just put the book on his lap. He adjusted his position slightly and leaned to put it back on the coffee table, next to the pile of the other books I just read. "Can't you read this book now, auntie Amy?" Leila asked, handing me her book. It was thicker than the other books I'd read before. But then, Leila was seven, and the books she liked were longer than the stories her little brothers liked. I was feeling trapped. "Ask Uncle Marty," I said, elbowing said man. "Or we can listen to you read. I know you do great. Your tutors compliment you a lot." Leila, who didn't fit into the tightly octopus-like entanglement, raised her nose and looked at us from her seven-year-old towering height, as she stood in front of us. She was too old to sit on somebody's lap, her face said, while her eyes expressed jealousy. And her attempts to sit on the sofa's armrest ended with her slipping to the floor, so she now pretended she had been sitting on the floor because she wanted to. It was clear who she blamed for this situation. There was only one person who, in Leila's opinion, did not belong here. And she never missed a chance to express that feeling. "He's not my uncle," she said. "I don't like how Mr. Novak reads. And I like how you read. Please? It's a hard book. It has many words I don't know." I elbowed Marty. He should be the one solving this. He was the one with a large extended family. I have no idea how to handle the petty jealousies and sibling rivalries a large family will inevitably beget. I was an only child for most of my life, and recently, an orphan. I've only been part of an extended family for two months now. Before, it was just mother and me. "While I agree that Amy is better at reading than me," Marty said, "she's tired. She already read four books today. If you don't want me, we can ask your mother." But Leila was having none of it. She would not be reasoned with by a man she disliked. Her sympathy for me did not extend to my fiancé, Martinus Novak. While I shouldn't let this grow bigger than it is, I was quite happy at being liked. It was the first time in my life somebody wanted to spend time with me. Mother had been way too busy making a living as a single mother and was too tired during the brief moments of rest she got. Having a seven-year-old girl and an eighteen-year-old young man fight for my attention was… weird. But in a nice way. "She wouldn't be tired if you didn't take her out today," she said. "After she spent the morning at work. Why don't you leave her alone? You'll see her once you go back to school, and we can only have her for the holidays." While I couldn't turn to see his face, pinned down as I was, I could hear the amusement in Marty's voice. "You will still have her in the evenings," he said. "And it's not like we get to be together during class time. We're supposed to study, you know?" As if that argument could convince Leila. "But you can study together," she said. "I also want to study with aunt Amy." "But aunt Amy needs my help," Marty said. "Or she'll fail her classes. And you don't want to shame your family name like that, do you?" Leila considered that argument. While she was only seven, she was raised in a powerful, aristocratic family. She had been taught about honor and duty all her life, and she was conscious of her family names' responsibilities. For a seven-year-old, that is. "I can help aunt Amy," she then decided. "I'm very good at magic. All my tutors say so. We don't need you." Before Marty pointed at the absurdity of it all, I took sides. I elbowed him again, freeing my waist of his hand. "Move," I said, pushing him towards the very edge of the sofa. I then waived my hand at Leila. "Sit between us. I'll help you with the hard words, and if there's a word we both don't know, he can help us." She seemed satisfied with that solution, which involved winning over her rival, and she happily jumped onto the sofa, pushing Marty to the very edge. He looked at me with reproach, but moved aside, unable to fight us both. The book was, indeed, hard. To my shame, it contained many words I wasn't familiar with, having grown up on Earth, a non-magical world. Every day I spend on Marn, I learn new things.