Completely unfair. How could she give him examples when she couldn’t test them herself? But it did seem as if King Arthur and Merlin had nothing to do with Hartgrave’s past. It wasn’t a long mental leap to the thought that she’d made an adventure out of a molehill. He might be nothing more than a private person who disliked questions. Really, really disliked questions.
She doubted it. But with nothing else she could use to come at his past sideways, she went back to her original list of questions and hit him with one the next time he appeared.
“Why doesn’t everybody know the truth about magic?”
He crossed to her couch and settled in, arranging himself just so in the too-small space. Good grief, the man was seventy percent legs. “Why do you ask?”
She stopped staring at his body to give him a look that communicated what she thought of the question. “Because it’s bizarre that people could be hardwired for magic but have no idea it’s real, of course.”
She scooted her chair closer, the better to read his expression, but he gazed poker-faced at the ceiling.
“Before you imagine some vast conspiracy, please recall that magic fell out of favor hundreds of years ago, and hardly anyone has cared to expend any effort studying it since.”
An uninteresting explanation, so she didn’t want to believe it. Anyway: “How could technology run on magic without all the inventors and manufacturers being in on it? How could a secret that big stay secret?”
“You’re thinking of magic as something otherworldly, but it’s a key part of life.” He stopped considering the ceiling and turned his gaze to her. “At any point did you learn the fundamental forces of nature?”
She suspected he was dancing around the question, but she grasped about for physics lessons long past. “Gravitational, strong, weak and ... electromagnetic?”
He nodded. “Think of magic as a fifth force.”
It didn’t take much to throw her back into despair over her anti-magic. This was more than sufficient.
“So the world really is out to get me,” she said, slumping in her chair.
“An inflated idea of your own significance, don’t you think?”
So much for temporarily sensitive Hartgrave. She stuck out her tongue at him.
“Oh, well put,” he said.
“Why do you say it’s like a fifth force? How do you know?”
His shoulders shifted in a lying-down sort of shrug. “It’s a conclusion based on available data. Why else can I overpower gravity or the natural inclination of a broken cup to stay broken? I’m tapping into an elemental force that allows me to manipulate the other four.”
She leaned forward in her chair and prodded one of his (long, long) legs with the tip of her shoe. “You have a knack for talking about magic in a way that drains all the magic out of it.”
“Oh? Your subject isn’t to your taste once you dig past the wild falsehoods, eh?”
The anti-magic part certainly wasn’t. “I just don’t see why you want to pretend it’s science.”
“Itisscience. Lack of decent research doesn’t change that. I shouldn’t even be calling it ‘magic,’ but—” He stopped, grimacing. “Force of habit.”
He had a point. Chemistry grew from alchemy. Witches healing with willow bark were the forerunners of the pharmaceutical industry. And many of the primary sources she’d read described magic rituals every bit as organized as a biology class dissection.
There was nothing very magical about the magic she studied, really, and that had never bothered her. So why did she want to argue the point with Hartgrave?
Well—because the magic she studied wasn’t the magic she actually believed in. She hadn’t stopped tothink about it that way before, but it was glaringly obvious that magic, for her, was the stuff in dog-eared paperbacks read by light slanting in through the slats of her parents’ barn.
She didn’t want to allow that the real version Hartgrave practiced was a sensible concept that could be poked and prodded and explained by people in white lab coats. There was no charm in that.
Though it didn’t matter, did it, since she was—magically speaking—a black hole.
She sighed. “Are you sure there’s nothing that can be done for my ... condition?Someonemight have discovered a fix.”
“No one has.”
“Have you come across anyone else like me?”
