“Curiosity,” he murmured.
That was about as close to the truth as he was willing to get.
Curiosity.
It wasn’t a lie. Not really. It wasn’t completely truthful, either, of course, but it wasn’t a lie. Not at all.
“Curiosity,” she repeated. “Right. Well...”
This was it.
She was going to tell him.
It was going to be the first real story he’d heard...well, maybe ever.
No, that wasn’t quite true. Was it? Suddenly, something flashed in Felix’s brain. A memory, perhaps. Something lost. Something long forgotten.
A woman sits in a chair holding a book. She looks down at the little boy in her arms and smiles. She rubs her belly, which is big and swollen.
“This is the story of the littlest dragon,” she says.
“What’s it about?”
“Why, a little dragon, of course?”
She smiles at the boy, and he laughs. He’s safe with her. She’s his mother, his mama, and she’s going to make sure that nothing happens to him.
“What’s wrong? Felix? Are you okay?”
Felix looked over sharply. Tabitha was no longer relaxed or calm. She was afraid, he realized instantly. Something was wrong.
“Nothing’s wrong. You’re safe,” he said.
“You looked afraid. You had a strange look on your face.”
“I was...remembering something...from long ago. Something I’d thought I’d forgotten.”
“Oh,” she said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. I want to know why you want to kill Ursula.”
“Because she slaughtered my people,” the woman finally said. Tabitha spoke quietly, and her voice trembled just a little. That made Felix’s heart hurt.
“What happened?”
“I was in the Mages Guild. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“It’s a group of powerful witches and wizards. We protect things. We protect people. Sometimes a mage or a group of mages are assigned to watch over someone important, or to watch over a special place.”
“What happened?”
It sounded like an important job. It must have been hard for Ursula to kill these people.
“My parents were mages, too. I grew up on one of the smaller islands: Kunzite.”
“That sounds like a pretty island.”