She spotted a shooting star, the brightest one yet, streaking across the sky.
She closed her eyes and wished.
Chapter Six
OLD FRIENDS
Alison
Dinner in Norgate had been a pleasant affair.
Dean Whittaker had suggested a faculty-favorite establishment with generous portions of both food and ale, and by the time they had finished, Alison was adequately inebriated enough that whatever foreboding sense she’d had about High House or the surrounding woods had gone when they returned by carriage in the early hours of morning.
In the bright—too bright; she really shouldn’t have had that third pint—light of day, it was difficult to imagine anything amiss at all. Move-in had begun in earnest, and the hallways that had seemed forlorn and claustrophobic the previous evening now felt pleasantly busy, humming with the kind of excited energy Alison missed from city life. (Well, occasionally missed.)
Lady Sibba had gone with Weyland to meet a friend from the Rock who taught courses on theatre; Rinka was with Idris, helping him unpack his office; and Willow had vanished before dawn, undoubtedly hunting mice or finding the dog for use as napping material. That left Keir and Alison to wander the hallways alone until their appointment with Professor Marin that evening.
“She keeps odd hours for a ‘lectrics researcher, don’t you think?” asked Keir as he helped a Halfling fresher with a trunk that was as big as she was.
“Perhaps it’s easier to see what’s working in the dark,” said Alison as she followed him. She wanted to use a tiny bit of magic to lighten the load, but she had found that her magic, which was inconsistent at best, was downright unreliable away from Herot’s Hollow.
“Perhaps,” said Keir. He received a grateful handshake from the Halfling as he dropped the trunk into her new room, and he and Alison continued on towards the library.
Alison shared Keir’s fondness for libraries, though they had greatly different reading preferences. Keir read mostly nonfiction works in a wide variety of subjects, many of them at least tangentially related to his medical career. Alison, on the other hand, felt she had gotten to know enough about the real world by living in it. She preferred to get lost in fiction, passing her time in worlds that were nothing like hers and where anything she could imagine was possible.
And, of course, there was poetry. What had started as a coin-making venture had become something that felt as much a part of her as the color of her eyes or the way she liked her tea (one sugar and a splash of milk). It was a source of both joy and frustration, the outlet for her innermost yearnings and the imperfect medium with which to express them, limited by only her own ability to create and persist in creating.
Alison perused the stacks of poetry books, having been aided in locating them by Ms. Redclaw. She had just spotted a familiar name—Fanguk, the orc whose poetry book she had found during her first trip to Wilderise—when she heard something fall to the ground a couple of shelves away.
“Hello?” She had walked through those stacks on the way and had seen no one around, and she hadn’t heard anyone come by since.
She felt the same sense of unease from the night before, but the ‘lectric lights were bright in the library, and she found they gave her courage.
She checked the aisles near where the sound seemed to originate, but there was nothing.
Nothing but the tingling sensation on the back of her neck of being watched.
She had just returned to the poetry section to check if it was a new work by Fanguk, so that she could grab it and get out of there, when she heard it again.
“Willow?” she said. “Are you there, girl?”
And then again, only this time much closer and much more clearly: it was the sound of a book being dropped.
“Willow, come out of those shelves. What are you doing—”
This time, the book that fell was the very same Fanguk book she had spotted before. It dropped to the ground in front of her, falling open to a page somewhere in the middle.
Alison looked into the shelves where the book had fallen from but saw nothing.
But while there was nothing to see, there was something to feel—magic. Old magic. It was the same warm sensation as the path into the fairy woods, the same as the path that led her to the korrigans.
Perhaps this was a path as well.
Alison retrieved Fanguk’s new book (From Green to Grey: An Orc’s Journey) and walked through the stacks, collecting the others:A Primer on Modern Poetry, Movements and Key Playersby Dr. Serena Carter;On Commercial Writingby Stephen Duke; andPrinting Presses of Loegria: An Updated Guideby The King’s College Department of Literature.
Alison, sensing a theme, looked around once more. Surely this must have been Willow’s doing. Keir, although he technically possessed both the magic required and the knowledge of her desire to publish her poetry, would have never been so coy.
Another book fell, this time at some distance from the others. Alison spotted Keir nearby, eying a shelf suspiciously.
