Inside, it felt like someone’s home instead of a university building. In one room, original furniture—fussy things covered in ornate, lush fabrics and tall, glistening wood cabinets—was arranged as it had been when this was a guesthouse for the main manor. Arthur felt like he had walked into someone’s grandmother’s house. Someone’s very rich grandmother, anyway.
They stood in the small entryway, idly looking at the antiques, when a small blond woman wearing a pantsuit came down the crooked staircase at the back of the cottage. Arthur had gotten so bad at telling how old anyone was, but she seemed a little bit younger than him and Maggie. “Welcome to the Annex,” she said. “I’m Pearl Paige.”
“Thank you so much for meeting us on short notice, Dr. Paige.” Arthur held out a hand for her to shake.
“Please, Pearl is fine.” Arthur noticed the slight blush on her cheeks as she talked to him, but he ignored it, even as she stumbled over her words slightly. He may be Artie among his family and his brother’s friends, but for most of his life, he had been Rowena Taliesin’s son. And then, in the last five years, people had started to get nervous around him for his own sake as he built a name and reputation for himself in the alchemy world. It didn’t matter that it had been happening for as long as he could remember, it still made him uncomfortable.
“This is Dr. Maggie Linden,” Arthur said, to give Pearl something and someone else to focus on. Thankfully, it worked. Dr. Paige visibly calmed talking to Maggie.
“I teach in the Linguistics and Incantation Translation Department.” Hawthorn was a small campus, but it wasn’t so small that they knew every professor or researcher who worked there. “It’s been so long since I came over to the Annex,” Maggie said, and Arthur suspected she was trying to put Dr. Paige at ease. “I think the last time I was here was when I first started, but that was when your predecessor worked here. Dr. Milliner?”
Dr. Paige nodded in recognition and then settled into a well-rehearsed speech explaining how the Annex functioned as arepository of all things Hawthorn history. It housed information on the original owners of the manor house from more than a century ago and on the transition of the property from private residence to public college. The modern records in the building were about Hawthorn’s integral role in the local community in the present day.
“While our antiques often entice visitors”—Dr. Paige mentioned offhand, and Arthur’s gaze darted to Maggie, who seemed to be waiting for him with arched brows as if to say,Who is coming to look at these dusty old things?He hid a grin behind his hand as Dr. Paige went on—“the main draw is our collection of antique maps and information about Galloway and the Wilds. We serve as a historical record for the town, too.”
She led them out of the main room, with its stuffy furniture, to a wide room off to the side. This one was bright and had been modernized, unlike other parts of the house. Instead of smelling like dust, it had the faint scent of disinfectant and paper. Large metal flat files that went from floor to ceiling lined the walls, along with stacks of filing and storage cabinets. Dr. Paige tugged her key off her neck, the retractable wire making a zipping sound, and unlocked two of the cases nearest to them. She slid open one of the drawers, revealing rows of documents in neat folders. On her other side, she opened one of the flat files at hip level to reveal a yellowing stack of papers as wide and long as a table. Arthur could just make out topographical notations on the top one.
“The documents are organized chronologically,” Dr. Paige went on, patting her hand on the wide drawer. “We have records going back about two hundred years, but the vast majorityare from about fifty years before the manor was built and onward.” She gestured to filing cabinets on the other side of a long table in the middle of the room. “Those cabinets over there contain hard copies of periodicals and newspapers, but we also have those recorded on microfiche.” She gestured to a particularly ancient-looking, dusty machine and then squat cabinets in the corner of the room, where the ceiling started to slope downward. “Those cabinets have town records—deeds, election ballots, that sort of thing—organized by decade.”
“This is an impressive collection,” Maggie said, picking up a corner of the map in the flat file and looking at the one beneath it. Maggie was right. There had to be something here that could help them uncover what was feeding the pall.
“Yes, it was imperative to the first president of the university that the school’s history was preserved, along with its connection to Galloway,” Dr. Paige explained. “We’re fully staffed by university librarians who float between the Annex and the library throughout the school year. But, as you know, we’re closing up shop for the summer in a few days, so I’m very happy we could squeeze you in.”
“We really appreciate it.” Maggie looked eagerly at the document cases.
“Is there anything in particular I can help you find?”
Arthur walked around the room, dropping his head slightly to avoid the sloping roof. “Where would I find information about the original surveys done on the land, from before the manor house was even built? We’re hoping to find maps of the Wilds over time, too.”
She patted the cabinet on her right. “The earliest records arein this cabinet here. You should find the early survey work, and I know there are diaries from naturalists who documented the Wilds in there.”
With a quick goodbye, and a reminder about proper document handling, she left them with a key and a promise to return in an hour or so to check on them. Maggie immediately descended on the drawers, carefully pulling out old survey maps and laying them gingerly on the table in the center of the room. Arthur chose to read through one of the journals, this one from a naturalist who explored the Wilds about a decade before the manor house was built.
For a while, they pored over the documents in silence, the only sound between them the shuffling of pages being turned or the scratch of pen across paper. Arthur liked this quiet work, side by side. He liked that Maggie didn’t feel like she had to talk to fill the air around them. He liked when their silences weren’t awkward, only content.
He wished that they didn’t have to be trapped in some kind of bargain to make it happen. He wished he were brave enough to take the mask swinging from her rearview mirror as a sign that Beltane had affected her as much as him. But he had convinced himself that she wouldn’t feel the same when she realized it was him, couldn’t imagine that she would want to work with him closely after she found out.
He realized he had read the same page a half dozen times when Maggie’s clear voice cut through the silence and the prattle in Arthur’s brain. “Take a look at this.”
He walked over, leaning close until he could smell hershampoo. She was looking at a map of the Wilds and the yet-unincorporated town of Galloway when it was just a frequently traveled trail for horses and a couple of stables. “About thirty years before they built the original Hawthorn manor house, they attempted to build a road through the Wilds.” The map showed the proposed road, a straight line through the Wilds to the marshland on the other side. “The road would connect with a ferry station, giving more direct access to Atlantia instead of having to go all the way around the Wilds to get there.
“As far as I can see, they’ve attempted to build this road no less than six times since.” She pointed to reference files connected to the maps she looked at. “Every time, the construction sites are overrun by fantasmia, the trees don’t stay still, and the very land itself seems to rebel against the idea that it can be tamed. We already know that fantasmia activity within the Wilds is higher than the rest of this part of the country. What if it’s some sort of feedback loop? The presence of all those ghouls and wraiths creating energy that feeds the pall.”
Arthur thought for a moment. “That could be contributing, but if it were just that, don’t you think there would have been palls like this in the past?” He paused again, chewing on his lip as he thought. “Why are there more fantasmia in the Wilds? Why are the Wilds so strange to begin with?”
Maggie sighed in frustration and returned to her research, while Arthur had entirely too difficult a time pulling himself away from the smell of her hair. When he finally managed it, the scent lingered.Lavender. He probably wouldn’t have recognized it a week ago, but now it was burned into his memory. Hehad felt hypnotized as he had rolled that lavender candy over his tongue—he thought it tasted like a candle, and it definitely did nothing to calm down the way he felt when he looked at Maggie’s lips.
Gods below, focus. He opened the journal, found the passage he had already read three or four times, and started again. The naturalist, a man by the name of Wheatly, was diagramming a strange vine that grew in the Wilds that was only found climbing the pale mottled bark of the river birch. River birches were plentiful even among the Wilds’ more common pines because of the three rivers that coursed through the forest. Three rivers that converged into one…
“Maggie,” he said, breathless, and she was next to him in an instant. “What if there was a convergence?”
She scrunched up her nose. “The odds…”
“I think we are working well outside the realm of likely already.”
She pulled out her phone, opening an astrological app, dismissing with a huff a horoscope that he only just caught a glimpse of.Open yourself to possibilities of…
“Well, damn,” she said, turning the phone so he could get a better look. On May 6, the day the pall fell, there had been a lunar conjunction—the moon and two planets, appearing all in a line in the sky. It had lasted approximately thirty-six hours, with its peak for the latitude and longitude of the Wilds and Hawthorn College landing right at…“Three fifty-four p.m.,” Maggie said, her voice heavy with disbelief.
