“No way.” As if in confirmation, the doors to Ilex Hall crashed open and Taliesin spilled out onto the steps. He was barely upright, but one of his slime-covered students, fortified by the sunshine and warm air, went over to help him down the stairs. Taliesin waved him off, and Maggie didn’t even try to contain her eye roll. Couldn’t the guy take help when it was offered?
Even at this distance, Taliesin looked rough. Maggie had severely underestimated how much of the pall he’d breathed in.His skin had gone from pale to slightly green, and he looked like he was about to lose his lunch at any moment. These were classic symptoms of pall exposure, along with the fatigue clearly plaguing him.
Starting with Taliesin’s own students, a smattering of applause started up and swelled through the crowd. Maggie rolled her eyes again and Dahlia bristled. “Man saves the day from self-inflicted catastrophe,” Maggie muttered.
“Alert the media,” Dahlia finished, and Maggie flashed her friend a wicked grin.
Taliesin lifted a hand slowly in appreciation of the applause and finally took the assistance of another alchemy professor, who held him up as they limped toward the infirmary.
“It’s going to take time to clear out that pall,” Dahlia complained. “Everything is going to stink like ether and death.”
“At least your apartment is on the other side of town,” Maggie whined. “This thing is going to attract every wraith, ghoul, and banshee for miles. I’m never sleeping again.”
“I told you being able to walk to work was overrated.” Dahlia had, in fact, mentioned something of the sort. Maggie leaned her head against the hawthorn tree, suddenly exhausted now that the imminent danger had passed. Hopefully the pall would be nothing but a nuisance now. Fantasmia—especially the ghouls, banshees, and wraiths that would be drawn to the otherworldly magic—would be more frequent, but there were protections against them. Having the third floor cut off from the rest of the building during the rush to the end of the semester would be the worst of it. A dissipation spell would have to be crafted, but it shouldn’t take more than a few days.
Her students had already scattered, their panic forgotten in the sunshine. A game of Frisbee had picked up where it left off, and someone had started blasting music. The sound had a tinny, far-off quality that told Maggie the student was using some kind of rune to amplify it but had misjudged the calculations.Whatever gets them to practice.
Maggie stared up at the windows of the third floor of Ilex Hall. The pall was visible, giving the glass a deep purple tint. Inside, the swirling unease of gas and dust and slime that made up the pall passed by the windows, illuminated by the faefire lights that flashed with the surge of magic. The pall looked alive as it undulated through classrooms, offices, and labs. When a particularly bright cloud moved by one window, she could just make out a rune on the glass, drawn in the same careful strokes she had seen in the hallway when Taliesin had stolen her chalk. Each window, she now saw, held the same rune, drawn in the same careful hand. She turned, just in time, to see Taliesin hobble into the building that housed the infirmary.
Chapter Three
It was Saturday morning, Maggie hadn’t had a drop of coffee yet, and she was walking into work. It was a crime. Dean Clearwater’s email announcing the emergency faculty meeting had arrived late last night while she was well into her second shower, trying to remove the sour odor of sulfur and the sticky slime residue from her skin. Despite her scrubbing, she could still smell the pall on the ends of her hair, and she wondered if she’d ever be free of it.
She was already two minutes late for the meeting, but she stopped in the faculty lounge anyway and was thrilled to hear the coffeepot bubbling, no doubt thanks to Edna. She was Dean Clearwater’s admin, who treated all the faculty and staff like they were her own grandchildren. Unfortunately, barista she was not, and the swampy coffee needed heaps of cream and sugar to be palatable, but Maggie still gulped half of it while she walked to the auditorium.
The meeting was well under way as she slipped in quietly, scanning the audience for Dahlia and finding her resting her head on an open palm, looking as tired as Maggie felt. There was an empty seat beside her holding her bag, and Maggie made her way toward it. An audible groan from the gathered faculty echoed in the chamber, though she missed what exactly had seteveryone on edge as she slid into the seat next to her friend. Dahlia greeted her with an eye roll.
Dean Clearwater, a small white man with an impressive, fluffy beard and eyebrows to match, sat on the edge of the auditorium stage, putting him at eye level with the faculty seated in the audience. He cringed against another groan, waving his hands as if he could ward off the incoming barrage of complaints.
“It’s temporary,” the dean reassured, the fluff of his beard twitching. Whatever Dean Clearwater was asking them to live without…well, she’d been working at a small college long enough to know thattemporaryoften becamepermanent. Often becamejust the way we do things.
Dean Clearwater continued his plea. “The pall is well contained on the third floor and in the northern stairwell. We don’t expect any additional seepage into Ilex Hall or the wider Hawthorn campus.” His tone was careful as he went on. “However, based on our initial examination of the pall, we expect the team working on its removal will need three to four weeks to complete the task.” Maggie straightened her slouch and sat up, exchanging another look with Dahlia. Murmurs filled the auditorium again.
“Three to fourweeks?” Dahlia whispered.
“That’s after graduation!” Maggie whispered back.
Whatever incantation had ignited this pall must have been nasty work, with a tangled mess of calculations and a particularly tricky incantation translation. It was the type of spell that typically needed triple and quadruple checking by other experts. Diadhan, the language of magic, was Maggie’s specialty,and she was often pulled into collaborations with other academics to consult on difficult incantation translations. Sometimes, she was only one of many translators working on a Diadhan spell. She shuddered to think how a spell of this magnitude was set off in the same building as hundreds of students. In Arthur Taliesin’s lab, no less. Was it his spell? Or had one of his students conjured something?
“In times like these,” the dean went on, “we so appreciate that Hawthorn spirit that brings us together. Over the next few days, myself, Dean Bobbin, and other administrators will work together to adjust class schedules in the least disruptive way to find available, empty classrooms. And sharing offices with affected colleagues will, hopefully, be a minor inconvenience for everyone.”
Ah. Maggie now understood the collective groan and whispered conversations. She had expected the need to move classrooms around to accommodate everyone, but she was less than thrilled at the idea of squeezing another professor into her small office for the remainder of the semester. It was in a dank corner of the basement that smelled like a century of dust and mildew. She had livened it up with twinkle lights, shelves stocked with books and tchotchkes, and vintage maps of this world and the Otherworlds, but it was still a dark basement office with a narrow window that let in only a sliver of light during the brightest part of the day.
Meanwhile, the third floor was home to the comparably plush accommodations of the Alchemy and Transmutation Department. It was full of bright offices filled with alchemical contraptions, sturdy mahogany built-ins, and ergonomic chairs thatwould prevent the dull ache that constantly plagued Maggie’s back. Out their windows were scenic views of the lawn and downtown Galloway to the west and the Wilds buttressing the eastern edge of campus. She’d quickly learned that those kinds of offices were for well-funded departments and splashy magic. For departments that didn’t have to fight for every cent their programs spent, with big budgets that weren’t decimated when a bit of funding got shifted around for something else. Not for Diadhan linguists whose work and instruction were essential, sure, but not the kind of thing that got written up in alumni magazines.
The dean droned on about collaboration and camaraderie, unaware that he was on the verge of losing the audience completely, when Arthur Taliesin walked onto the stage, standing slightly in shadow. The color was back in his cheeks and there wasn’t a hair out of place on his head, but he certainly didn’t look thrilled to be standing up there. His mouth was constructed in a downturn, and his eyebrows were pinched together behind his glasses, now smudge-free. It may have been a Saturday, but Taliesin was dressed like he was going to be giving a lecture later in a button-down and slacks. He cleared his throat lightly to alert Dean Clearwater to his presence, but the dean still startled.
“Oh, Arthur! Thank you for joining us,” Dean Clearwater said, gesturing for Taliesin to take a seat next to him, but Taliesin pretended not to notice and continued to stand. Maggie let out a low scoff and shook her head. Taliesin certainly didn’t seem like the sit-on-the-stage-because-we’re-all-friends-here type.
“I guess Clearwater is still trotting out Taliesin like he’s the department mascot,” Maggie said under her breath so only Dahlia could hear. It had been nearly nine months ofLet’s see what Dr. Taliesin thinks of thatandHave you asked Dr. Taliesin to weigh in, and Maggie was tired of it. “I would have thought setting loose a pall would put a stop to that, but what do I know.”
“He needs to get the most out of his celebrity hire.”
Onstage, Taliesin cleared his throat again, and his hand was in his pocket, fidgeting slightly. His unease surprised Maggie. She was used to seeing him in meetings where he commanded attention, or even catching glimpses of him in front of his class, where his students watched and participated in his lectures with enviable concentration.
Taliesin had been quite the get for Hawthorn when he joined the faculty in the fall. He was well known, even outside academic circles. First, because of his mother’s fame for her pioneering theoretical work in physical transmutation, but then in his own right. Even at his young age—young for academic success, anyway—he had made a name for himself by building on his mother’s work. He transformed her alchemical theory into practical, world-changing spellcraft. Maggie had several items in her apartment right now that worked the way they did only because of Taliesin’s early research. Hawthorn was an unexpected, and confusing, choice for him. He could have taught at any university he wanted, or he could have gone into lucrative private work that would have paid sums of money Maggie could hardly imagine.
But she had been pleasantly surprised when she first met Taliesin last August. He seemed to care, deeply, about both hisresearch and his students. It was a rare combination, especially in someone who could have easily rested on his laurels. But that was before. Before November, when he’d slashed funding to one of her programs during a budget committee meeting without a thought. Before he was irresponsible enough to set off a pall in his own classroom.
