She sighed, rubbing away a tear before it could fall. “I run a translation seminar every fall semester for fourth-year students who are considering academic careers. It’s a graduate-level class, and it involves a field-study trip at the beginning of the semester that the students base their research on. Without the field study,I’d have to restructure the entire seminar. Which I absolutely didn’t have time to do this year. So, when I found out my budget was cut, next year’s class was canceled. Done. When I checked the budget committee’s recommendations, guess who signed off on the cut?”
Arthur closed his eyes and sat back. “Mine.”
“Yours.”
He looked exhausted in the pale light filtering through her tiny window. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” he asked quietly.
The tears Maggie had been trying so hard to avoid welled up, and with them, more frustration and anger. “Because every time I would think about talking to you about it”—she gestured toward her face—“this would happen.”
She turned away, angling her chair so she was facing her computer, and hiccuped as she brushed away the tears that fell down her cheeks. She knew she probably looked mottled and blotchy, but she didn’t care. She hated the way she was thirty-three years old and so out of control of the way her body responded to anger. She should have better control over her emotions, just like the Bryn Ridge linguistics department director had warned her all those years ago.If you can’t even stop yourself from crying, maybe you’re not ready to be in this program…
“Maggie,” Arthur said tentatively, but she didn’t turn around. She heard the wheels of his desk chair scoot closer to her.
“I know what people—what men—think of women who cry at work,” she mumbled. “I know this is unprofessional.”
Arthur touched her shoulder gently, turning her around toface him. “The only person who was unprofessional here was the one who was so checked out of his work that your program suffered. I don’t even remember half of those budget meetings,” he admitted. He reached his fingers up, almost like he was going to graze her cheek and wipe a tear away, but he must have thought better of it. He tucked his palm underneath his leg. “Is this why you asked for eight thousand dollars when we made our bargain?”
“Obviously,” she answered with a hollow laugh. “This year, I was going to work on my own translation ofBranagh’s Aubade, so it probably stung quite a bit more than it would have any other year.”
“I wish you had told me,” Taliesin said, but then he added, “I wish I had been paying attention in those damn committee meetings.”
“I thought…” Maggie chewed on her words, trying to figure out whether he had earned any vulnerability from her. “I thought you didn’t think the program was worthwhile.”
He made a small sound, but she couldn’t quite tell what it was. Exasperation or frustration. “You’re getting the money you asked for. I don’t care if you stop helping me right now. I’ll fix this. You and your students can take the trip in the fall.”
She smiled at him sadly. “Even with the money from the bargain, it will be too late for the fall. Students won’t have had a chance to sign up.”
“Then you’ll just have to go in the spring. If I have to plan your trip to Branagh’s yew field myself, I will. I’ll go to Dean Clearwater right now and get it sorted,” he said, standing up.
“No!” Maggie nearly shouted. That was the last thing she needed, for the dean to think she had done something to get Arthur Taliesin to put in special budgetary requests for her. “Dean Clearwater will think I blackmailed you or something.”
He smirked. “Or something.”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t go to the dean. It wouldn’t go well for me. We’ll figure it out after the pall is taken care of.”
Heat bloomed on her cheeks as her anger unspooled, but she still felt better with the desk between them, with the fizzing dregs of her anger still in the air. “As long as we clear this pall by next spring, I suppose I could make the seminar work,” she said.
“Above and below, if this thing isn’t gone by July, I’m going to be the one crying in this office.” He watched her expression carefully, as if to make sure she was okay with the crying comment, and she rewarded him with a small smile. His own grin widened, but only for a moment before it fell and his furrow was back. “I’m sorry. This year has been hard, and even before the pall fell, I haven’t been focused. I thought coming to Hawthorn would…oh, I don’t know, reinvigorate something that I lost at Dartwood. But I’m still a little lost. And people keep getting hurt because of it.”
Maggie wasn’t sure how to ease this for him. More, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. There was some truth to the statement, after all. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she finally said.
Taliesin’s gaze was distant for a moment before he replied, “Me, too.” With a small shake of his head, he seemed to cast offwhatever feeling or memory he had gotten lost in. He looked up at the ancient clock that sat above a curling poster for the student-run literary magazine and sighed, testing the limits of his too-small desk chair by leaning back. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I still have to enter a few more grades before the end of the day.”
“You better get to it, or Edna will have something to say about it,” she said, and she almost sounded like her normal self.
Chapter Eighteen
Like every year, making it through finals week and reaching the commencement ceremony felt like the end of a sprint. Arthur had avoided Edna’s admonishments and turned his grades in on time, his graduating students had completed their capstone projects, and he had even remembered to clean his regalia, shaking out another year’s worth of dust. Despite his protestations, Arthur was seated on the stage between a visiting professor in medical botany and the valedictorian, one of his own students. She was going off to Dartwood—he’d written her a glowing recommendation.
Arthur looked out at the crowd, recognizing many of his students as they marched in, but he was searching for someone else. She was easy to spot. Her auburn hair stood out beneath her black cap and against the bright white of her regalia. It seemed like she had a wave and a big smile for every single student, who all undoubtedly came through her introductory phonology and incantation translation courses. What stood out to him, though, was the way every student returned the greeting, their faces brightening whenever they recognized her. They loved her. Of course they did.
When all the students were seated, the college president, a woman named Dr. Stone, whom Arthur generally liked, stoodin front of the crowd of students, faculty, staff, and family members positioned in chairs on the south lawn instead of in front of Ilex Hall as usual. As she explained that an abnormally strong pall meant that everything between Ferox Hall and the Wilds was closed off to students and families for the day, there were a few curious murmurs in the crowd and more than a few askance glances toward the Wilds from parents.
Power rippled from the edge of the forest like static, a background hum that Arthur—and he was certain everyone else—couldn’t quite ignore completely. Extra warding had been placed throughout the school, but especially around Ilex Hall.
Thankfully the weather and the warding held, mottled sunlight filtering through low clouds that broke for a peek of blue as if the wards cast away the gloom, too. When Dean Clearwater stood to greet the students, Arthur wondered if he would make further mention of the pall, but he didn’t. It wasn’t the same decision that Arthur would have made, but, from the beginning, Dean Clearwater had insisted that the school do its best to keep quiet about the pall.
When Arthur had explained what happened to set off the pall, the dean had thanked him for his candor. They had been in the infirmary, with its sparkling white tiled walls and fussing physician and nursing staff. “If news of this pall hits the wider community, it will be a nightmare for admissions. Do you have experience with the dissipation incantation for a pall?”
