In the distance, she heard a hair-raising screech that could have been a wraith or a banshee, but it was hard to tell from so far away. Up close, it was much easier to distinguish between the two. Wraiths were less substantial than banshees, mere echoes. Shadows. Maggie shuddered, wondering how long it was before one was spotted on campus.
Deep in the basement, the haunting bellows of the fantasmia were distant and muffled. She turned on her twinkle lights and a desk lamp she had draped with a scarf, bathing her office in a warm glow. Maggie pressed the button that activated her computer’s rune, and it whirred to life, booting up slowly enough that she grabbed her coffee and walked around the couch to Taliesin’s desk. It was empty except for a single stack of papers and one framed photo.
She picked up the frame, holding it up to the light, and was shocked to see Taliesin’s face in a broad grin. Taliesin was a reasonably attractive man, broad-shouldered with a strong jawline and the kind of graying dark hair that made a man look distinguished, but seeing something other than a scowl on his face was like seeing a different person. It lit up his face, revealing deep dimples and crinkles at the corners of his eyes, like smiling was something he was capable of doing all along. In the photo, he was leaned over slightly, an arm wrapped around a boy who might have been five or six. Another man on the other side of the boy, a little shorter and stockier than Taliesin, had an even wider grin. His hand ruffled the boy’s hair, the joy obvious on all three of their faces. The boy held a trophy and had dirt smudged on his cheek. There was something of a family resemblance between the three of them, though she couldn’t say whether they were brothers or cousins.
Maggie couldn’t square what she knew of Taliesin with the photo, so she filed the information away for later and sat down at her desk to try to sort through the endless grading she had ahead of her. Hawthorn didn’t have teaching assistants, so it was up to her to finish it all before the term ended. Her biggest classes, by far, were her introductory lessons on the Diadhan language and linguistics, which were required by the college.
Hawthorn was a practical arts college, focused on giving a solid, basic understanding of the three lifebloods of magic to the enrolled students: arcania, runes and sigils, and incantations.
All spells started with arcania. These precise calculations shaped spells, factoring in adjustments for time, place, or astrological season, and more complex variables. Alchemists likeTaliesin used arcania to develop new, de novo spells that required painstaking equations that went far over Maggie’s head. But even common spells that could be done by anyone required some level of arcania. Runes and sigils were the interpretation of those equations, channeling the magic of the calculation into the physical world. Finally, in order to activate the dormant power in the rune, an incantation must be spoken aloud in Diadhan.
Of course, no one spoke ancient Diadhan anymore. Not conversationally. Not in millennia. It was the language of their ancestors who once lived in one of the Otherworlds. Modern language had evolved from Diadhan but had long lost any of its power. Though it had been tried, incantations spoken in a language other than ancient Diadhan were just words. This reliance on Diadhan made spellmaking all the more complicated, especially when crafting a de novo spell. That’s where scholars like Maggie came in. Diadhan education began in elementary school, but Maggie’s classes went into detail about Diadhan grammar, how to interpret runes into incantations to get the desired result, and then how to translate that incantation into Diadhan.
It was important for her students to know precisely how Diadhan should be pronounced and how to appropriately translate concepts that might not have existed when Diadhan was a spoken language. Mispronunciations, altered meanings, false cognates—all were possible shortfalls of a de novo spell.
There were other elements to magic. Chalk or paint infused with a decoction could enhance a spell, channeling the innate magic of plants and elements like vervain or gold. This requiredthe expertise of botanists and chemists. Alchemists, in addition to being experts in arcania, focused their study on magic as transformation. Astrologers studied the movement of stars and planets and their impact on complex spells. And there were whole fields of study that applied spellwork to health care, education, technology, and beyond.
Most of the students at Hawthorn went on to study one of these practical applications of magic, using the basics that they learned from Maggie and her colleagues in Ilex Hall to master an intermediate level of spellcraft. From there, they could go on to any field of study that required regular magic use. But there were always a number of students who found pleasure in studying Diadhan for its own sake. For those students, Maggie taught a few classes every year about her true joy—Diadhan translation.
Maggie’s first-year students had turned in assignments practicing the interdimensional phonetic alphabet. During their coming final, they would have to listen to seven spells spoken aloud in Diadhan and write out the sounds precisely. Her second-year students had also turned in papers this week, tracking phonetic shifts in modern Diadhan pronunciation and how it affected spells. She worked through a second year’s paper—tracking the way influence from modern language had altered the pronunciation of the Diadhan word for drying something wet, often unintentionally producing heat instead of just a drying effect.
As she graded, her mind wandered to the poem she had tucked safely in her desk, the one she’d been translating for well over a year. Literary translation didn’t exactly fall under thepurview of the Applied Linguistics and Incantation Translation Department or her official research, but her translation of the classic Diadhan epic poemBranagh’s Aubadewas a pet project, one that she was supposed to work on only when her mind wasn’t occupied by more pressing tasks. Her translation had inspired her research, even if it wasn’t the direct focus. She had long been interested in the way art and science intersected in spellcraft. Diadhan poems and songs could give clear clues for scholars creating de novo spells who searched for the right word or combination of words to activate a rune.
Branagh’s Aubadewasn’t the most well-known Diadhan poem. It wasn’t required reading for students or one that had been adapted a dozen different times, but it was one that Maggie had loved since she was a child, when she’d pulled a dust-covered version of the classic off her grandmother’s shelves. Her translation often seeped into her thoughts when she very much should be paying attention during a faculty meeting or focusing on grading papers. Like now, when the light bounced off a suncatcher—she hadn’t thought, when she bought it, that you really neededsunfor a suncatcher to do much of anything, but it sometimes caught one of her twinkle lights just right—and she found herself puzzling over the way the poem used descriptions of light to mark the passage of time. She would have to carefully pay attention to the words she chose for the translation so the meaning didn’t get lost. As she thought through whether there were any practical differences between the wordsshimmeringandgleaming, she was startled out of her thoughts by a very real, very harsh light and a gruff sigh.
“You’re here early,” Dr. Taliesin said, snaking through theoffice furniture and setting his own steaming mug of coffee on his desk.
“Good morning to you, too,” she replied, giving the student a mark and turning over their paper with a dramatic flourish. Before she could remember Dean Clearwater’s plea, she said primly, “I was trying to get some work done before you invaded my space. And turn off the big light, please.”
He was already sitting at his desk, his back to her, but she could see the way his jaw tightened slightly as he opened his computer. “It’s too dark in here,” he said, entering a password into the machine. “I can’t see a thing.”
She got up and turned the overhead light off. “Then it sounds like you need to scrounge up a desk lamp out of the storage room.”
The spell used to create the faefire lights in the basement were just too bright, probably in an effort to cast out the gloom. She didn’t want to admit it to Taliesin, but they often gave her migraines that she spent all weekend recovering from, so she kept them off as much as possible.
She expected to see that muscle in his jaw flex again, expected him to argue, but instead he stood up from his desk and slipped around her, careful to give her space, and walked down the hall. When he didn’t return for ten minutes, Maggie thought she might have scared him off for good. Maybe he was going to Dean Clearwater right now to express how much he truly hated having Maggie as an office mate. Her stomach dropped as she thought of Dean Clearwater’s barely hidden demand that she needed to keep Taliesin happy. And they hadn’t even lasted one week…
She was spiraling when Taliesin returned after twelveminutes, carrying a squat purple lamp with a fringed shade. The fringe jiggled as he set it down carefully on his desk. He tapped the rune on its base and muttered the Diadhan word forignite. The faefire beneath the shade brightened slowly until it covered his desk in a halo of warm light.
—
Taliesin ignored herfor the rest of the morning, but his presence drove her to distraction. She had searched in vain through her desk drawers for a discarded pair of headphones but found nothing that would block out the scrape of his pen against paper, fingers grazing the vellum of an ancient tome, a sniff, a cough, his shoe making a dreadful squeak against the floor. And the way their desks were angled…she had demanded this particular configuration, but she hadn’t considered what this would mean for her view. Every time she glanced up from her work, there was the back of Taliesin’s head.
He was hunched over his small desk, a large dusty book open in front of him. His dark hair had been trimmed since yesterday, and the fact that she noticed this startled and annoyed Maggie. The precious space in her brain that she needed for her work was suddenly being taken up by this man and his hair. The faefire light of his new lamp caught the smattering of grays shot through the dark brown. She remembered the way it had come loose as he fought back the pall, falling into his eyes until he’d had to brush it away. Now, he sometimes ran his fingers through it as he worked, as if he still wasn’t used to its new length.
The same strong jaw that had telegraphed his annoyance with her was now tense with concentration. Did it ever get a break? Or were his shoulders always in his ears, his feet alwaysbouncing with unreleased fervor? His long legs were scrunched under the short desk, the top of his knee bumping the bottom of the desk as his foot tapped. Despite the chill caused by the pall, his shirtsleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing a hint of the strength he had needed to grab her to stop her from tripping down the stairs on the day the pall fell. She remembered the way his hand had felt as it gripped her arm, strong and sure. Safe.
And as her mind wandered, she wondered what those arms would feel like if they wrapped around her in a hug so she could figure out what he smelled like. It had been bothering her all morning, she was so sure she’d smelled it before somewhere. It was something woodsy and a little bit floral, a surprising choice. She wondered what it would smell like on her own skin…
What was that?She had thought she was cataloging all the things that annoyed her about him, but instead it was his hair, his muscled forearms, his broad shoulders. She bit back a groan. She didn’t need him asking her what was wrong, especially not when the answer was that it was driving her absolutely batty that he was, objectively, a striking man. And it was completely unfair that such a good-looking person had such a terrible personality.
This wasn’t like her. Maggie didn’t fantasize about her colleagues wrapping their strong arms around her. She didn’t wonder what their cologne would smell like on her skin. Her ex, Evan, had been a colleague. They were both grad students at Bryn Ridge, and after that relationship ended disastrously and nearly cost her everything, she made a promise to herself about mixing work and pleasure. But somehow she couldn’t dislodgethoughts of Arthur Taliesin’s forearms or his fingers wrapping around her wrist from her mind. She shook her head, trying to go back to the papers in front of her.
By late morning, her annotations swam across the page. Taliesin had been in and out, amassing a stack of ancient reference books. Ones that Maggie knew, for a fact, weren’t usually allowed outside the library walls. She wondered if he’d had to bribe one of the librarians or if his name did the work for him. Certainly, it wasn’t his charm.
A knock at the office door gave Maggie a much-needed break from the endless thoughts about Taliesin. She waved in Jordan, one of her students, who sank into the couch, grabbing a Mothman stress ball from the cart that Maggie kept stocked with candy and small anxiety-relieving toys around exams. Jordan squeezed Mothman until his little red bug eyes bulged.
“Do you need the room?” Taliesin asked. Maggie turned to Jordan, gesturing to let her know that it was completely up to her.
