“A conjunction of three planetary bodies above a confluence of three rivers.” Arthur sighed, drawing his finger along themap in front of Maggie. She leaned over him to get a better look at the map, seeming to not even notice the way her breasts pressed against his arm. It nearly sent him into a tailspin as quickly as the unlucky—and unlikely—news that there had been a convergence. The power of three invoked on the earth or sky twice over.
Arthur’s mind was spinning. Earth magic—the way earthly and heavenly constructs affected magic—was one of the earliest and least understood branches of magic. If all spells were conduits for energy, pulling it from one place and putting it somewhere else, convergences were fonts of energy that could easily supercharge a spell—or a mistake.
“Anything else come in threes that day?” Maggie asked, scanning the map. There was a hard edge to her voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“Wasn’t that enough?” he groaned. “I swear, this kind of luck…”
Maggie glared at him over her shoulder, still not doing anything about how close they were. “Was it luck? Or being unprepared?” she snapped, her face inches from his. Arthur felt like he couldn’t breathe. “Didn’t you think to check the astrological forecast?”
“Do you check the astrological forecast before every spell you cast?” he retorted, knowing very well she didn’t. It was a good practice, but an unfavorable astrological transit alone couldn’t set off a pall. It wasn’t just the planetary conjunction fueling the pall, but its presence directly over the river confluence at the exact time of his mistake.
Her anger made the air feel charged. He wanted to riskelectrocution and close the space between them so he could press his lips against hers until she forgot about the mess he’d made.
“I wasn’t doing any class three alchemical spells in front of students!” Something had changed in her expression, a shift from an anger that burned like heat to one that doused him with ice water. “I’m sure your colleagues in the Astrology Department will be thrilled with this revelation.” She laughed, but there was no humor in it, and shook her head. “You clearly value their work as much as you value mine.”
Arthur didn’t understand what she meant. When had he ever given her reason to believe he didn’t value her work? He knew she thought he was a screwup, but the strength of her anger didn’t make any sense to him. Whatever spell had drawn them closer was well and truly broken as Maggie turned away. The silence was no longer comfortable but instead threaded with tension. He wanted to puzzle over what she had said, about the obvious untruth of it, but they had only one afternoon in the Annex.
The guilt and shame he felt about the pall settled in his stomach like a rock. Maggie seemed to have suspected that he failed in some way long before they started working together, and now here was the proof. He clenched his jaw.
The focus of their research shifted to ensuring there wasn’t another element to this convergence, and they pored over the books, maps, and documents for the rest of their hour, interrupted only once by a confused Dr. Paige. Even she could feel the way the air was thick with everything unsaid between them.
“There’s nothing else here,” Maggie finally said, after anotherhour of work. She dropped a book onto the table with a final thud. “Nothing obvious, anyway.”
She started shuffling papers and putting them away, each movement punctuated by frustration. He was afraid she was going to run off before he could make this right, before he could make her understand exactly how brilliant he thought she was, but he didn’t want to talk to her in here. Not where Dr. Paige could interrupt them at any minute, so he endured the tortured silence a little longer.
—
Maggie wasn’t beingfair, and she knew it. Somehow, every complicated feeling she had for Taliesin was being reduced to a decoction of uncomplicated anger, and she had a horoscope to blame.
When Dr. Paige had left them, they had slipped into their still-new rhythm that felt too familiar and too easy, so different from the first weeks they shared an office. She was still aware of every one of Taliesin’s movements, but she found her heart racing for a completely different reason. It was so much easier when he was infuriating her. And then, as she’d opened her planetary transit app to confirm the conjunction, the horoscope had flashed across her screen:This is the season to open yourself to the possibility of love in unlikely places.
Now the damn stars were pushing her toward Taliesin, too? She was mad at herself for even thinking it—love? Taliesin? This was…well, she didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t that. They didn’t even like each other. Not really. It would be easier to look for the masked man from Beltane, easier to find astranger she couldn’t even recognize than entertain whatever made working beside Taliesin feel so comfortable. Easy. The way working with her ex, Evan, had once felt easy before he betrayed her. She slid the notification away with so much force, she knew he noticed it with that observant gaze that was always searching her for something.
She was scrambling to find purchase, to put herself squarely somewhere safe and comfortable. So she picked the fight. Selfish Taliesin, arrogant Taliesin, was familiar territory. Better than the man who looked at her with heat in his eyes, who cared for his students, who was good at his job.
It didn’t matter that her argument was thin, that he was right when he asked her if she checked astrological transits before every spell she cast. Of course she didn’t. Plus, she had been working at Hawthorn for four years to Taliesin’s nine months, and she had never once considered the three rivers running through the Wilds as a possible convergence point just waiting for another naturally occurring power of three to cause havoc. The odds of a convergence, of a spell being cast and a potent mistake setting off a chain reaction at the exact moment the planets were square above the confluence of the river, was so unlikely…unlucky, his word that she had such a problem with, really was the right description.
But even as she could rationally agree with him, her brain worked overtime to sabotage whatever was pulling their bodies closer and closer together. He could pretend to be kind and open when it suited him, but at the end of the day, all she really knew about him was what hedid. What he did was dismiss her and her work by slashing her budget. What he did was ignorethe importance of an astrological transit on his class 3 spell and then have the nerve to call it luck.
When they left the Annex, saying awkwardhave a good summers to Dr. Paige, Maggie tried to walk out ahead of him, forgetting for a moment that their destination was one and the same and Taliesin’s legs were significantly longer than hers. He didn’t say anything, but he did keep up, the tension between them coiling tighter and tighter as they returned to Ilex Hall.
Back in their office, she dropped a book Dr. Paige had given her on Galloway history onto her desk when Taliesin had finally had enough. “What did I say to upset you?”
Maggie scoffed. She tried to keep the sound to herself, tried to keep it in her head, but of course it didn’t work out that way. “Forget it,” she said. She didn’t want to have this conversation, not now. She needed to go home and cool down so they could get through this summer working together. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Of course I’m going to worry about it,” he said, exasperated. Maggie understood—she was sick of herself, too—but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. She glanced up from the spot on her desk that she had been studying intently. He had spun his desk chair around, and his hand was curled in a tight fist on his knee. His brow was furrowed, and he looked at her like she was a mystery that needed to be solved, which only ignited another spark of indignation in her.
“Fine, you want to know what you did? You’re arrogant…”
“A jerk. Rude. Inconsiderate,” he said, looking wounded and sounding like he was reciting something. “I know, Maggie. I heard you that day in Dahlia and Jim’s office.” Her stomachcoiled with something like shame. “I know you don’t like me very much. But what isthisabout?”
“You can’t go around acting like your field of research is the only one that matters. People care what you think here,” she said.I care what you think, her traitorous mind supplied, but she managed to keep that to herself. She took a shallow breath, ignoring the burning pinpricks of tears in her eyes.
“What have I ever done to make you think I don’t value your work?” he asked as he ran his fingers through his hair. When she didn’t answer him right away, he went on. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s the problem!” she yelled. “You came to Hawthorn because you needed to get away from your life at Dartwood, and, believe me, I get it. But getting stupid committee assignments is part of the territory at a small college.” Gods below, she was rambling. None of this was coming out right, and she was afraid she was going to start crying any minute. “Did you really think that I wouldn’t notice?” His furrow deepened. “Eight thousand dollars from my budget isn’t a percentage; it’s the entire thing.”
“What did I do?” His voice had a desperate edge to it that she, frustratingly, wanted to smooth away. “I can’t fix it if I don’t know what I did.”
