Arthur reached across the table and set his hand over hers on the beaker, stroking the spot where her palm curved into herwrist. He dragged the beaker back under the alembic. “This needs to be here.”
She watched his fingers moving on her wrist, flicking her eyes over to the supply room. “Hmm, I must have been distracted by something.”
There was the soft tap of heels on the old tile floor, and Maggie pulled her hand away from Arthur’s so fast, it was like she’d been burned. The beaker twirled and tipped over the edge of the lab table, but Arthur reached out and caught it easily.
“Oh! Excellent catch, Dr. Taliesin,” Dr. Silva gasped. “Shattered glass certainly would have put a damper on the morning.”
Maggie glared at him, her cheeks flushed. It was a familiar expression, one he’d felt boring into his back for weeks before their agreement. It was almost like seeing an old friend, and he tried, very hard, to keep from grinning.
“You started it,” he mouthed across the table, but she looked away from him, focusing instead on Dr. Silva, who was now adjusting the beaker back under the equipment.
Maggie busied herself with unzipping the collection kit and removing the gloaming creeper. She untwisted the small tube of water that they had clasped around the stem to keep the vine fresh, discarding it in the sink.
“A perfect specimen,” Dr. Silva cheered. “I hope it wasn’t too difficult to retrieve.”
Maggie’s eyes shot back up to Arthur. It was a look that let him know she was replaying every moment of their time in the Wilds just like he was. “Not at all,” he said. “It was right where you told us it would be.”
Dr. Silva scanned their table and the supplies they’d arrangedto begin prepping the decoction. “It looks like you have almost everything you need to get started. Did you have a chance to review the decoction procedure?”
Arthur nodded. They had looked over it together in Maggie’s bed the night before, discussing the finer points of the step-by-step instructions Dr. Silva had carefully explained to them. It was several pages long and, unfortunately, a three-and-a-half week process to transform the plant into a spell-magnifying liquid that could be combined with chalk and chalk paint to cancel out the effect of the river confluence on the pall.
“Is there anything we can do to speed up the process?” Arthur asked, already knowing the answer.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Taliesin. I know that we are racing against time here and that the pall is growing stronger every day,” she said sympathetically. “This process normally takes four weeks, but I’ve shortened the steps as much as I can without compromising the decoction. You’re incredibly lucky that the waning crescent moon is in two nights’ time. Otherwise, we could have been twiddling our thumbs for weeks waiting for the moon to be in position.”
Maggie pulled her safety goggles over her eyes and leaned down over the equipment on the table. She pressed her finger to the rune on the burner while muttering the Diadhan word forignite. The burner burst to life.
Dr. Silva stayed for a moment to watch their progress, asking about the pall and its strange characteristics. Maggie answered while she worked, but Arthur anxiously began filling a bulbous alembic with water from the sink at the center of the table. He didn’t want to talk about the pall’s growing strength. He couldn’tstomach the thought that all of his time with Maggie, whatever she would deign to give him, would be spent on campus, babysitting the decoction and reinforcing wards all while the pall grew more dangerous. And he had no one to blame but himself. Guilt and frustration coiled in his gut.
“Thank you for all your help on this,” Maggie said to Dr. Silva as the professor returned to her office. “I promise we’ll get over to your house this week to reinforce those wards.”
He was still lost in thought when he heard Maggie tsk. He looked over at her as she began dividing the leaves from the gloaming creeper, plucking them one by one from the twisting vine. Some of his worries disappeared as he watched her methodical work. “Yes? Is there something you’d like to say?” he asked.
“I just see some flagrant disregard for lab safety.” She nudged a pair of safety glasses with her elbow. “Wear them.”
He reached across the table and put them on over his glasses. “Be careful, Maggie,” he said, his voice low. He was certain Dr. Silva couldn’t hear them over the flame of the burner and the rolling bubble of the boiling water. “I like it when you order me around, too.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Like every other moment since he’d waltzed into her life, Arthur Taliesin was currently making Maggie’s life difficult. He sat across from her in the botany lab, looking so proud of himself for that comment, which he knew would leave her squirming and blushing. And, sure enough, her stomach had flipped, her breath had hitched, and heat had spread along her whole body as that one sentence set off a barrage of fantasies she didn’t even know she had.
Despite the distraction, Maggie carefully ripped the gloaming creeper into fine ribbons and added it to the first boiling mixture. As it began to leach into the water, it turned the liquid to a light mauve. Once they were done, after the decoction had had time to settle, it would turn a brilliant aubergine color. Ignoring Arthur’s comment, though his smug smirk still hadn’t fallen, she looked again at Dr. Silva’s procedure. “After the first extraction, it will need to be exposed to two hours’ worth of afternoon light. Then it needs time to settle before it will sit out beneath the waning crescent moon for three nights. Then another three weeks of settling.” She bit her lip. “We’re going to have a lot of downtime.”
“Mm-hmm,” Arthur murmured as he wrote down the temperature of the first phase of the decoction for their records.When he looked up from the notes, he had that cocksure grin on his face again. “I think we’ll be quite busy.”
“Oh?”
“Of course.” He leaned forward just slightly, and his voice was low like he was about to say something lascivious. Instead he said, “There are so many wards we should be fortifying.”
Maggie groaned. He was right, of course. Already the wards that had been strengthened by students before they left for the summer had begun to fade. The force of the pall’s magic was putting too much pressure on them.
“Yes, absolutely. Obviously, we should be fortifying the wards. We have plenty of time for that. But what if you also took me to the beach?”
The small dose of sunlight Maggie had experienced in the Wilds when they’d walked beyond the influence of the pall had awoken something in her. Maggie needed sun. She needed to bask, to lie out like a lizard until she felt warm from the inside out, and to melt the effects of the pall from the outside in. Atlantia, with its broad, busy beaches, was not covered by the pall’s relentless cloud. Atlantia, where Arthur lived.
Arthur’s eyes flitted to her chest, completely covered by her lab coat, and she wondered if he was imagining her in a swimsuit. She already knew which one she’d wear—black and constructed out of what looked like two wide ribbons that wrapped around her cleavage and her waist. It was very annoying to put on and even worse to take off and she wanted to see if Arthur was up to the challenge.
“I feel bad taking a break from all this”—she gestured around them—“but it might be…” She didn’t finish the thought.Itmight be our only chance to do something fun.She was too aware of their impending deadline. “The decoction will be ready three and a half weeks from now. What if we just see how much we get done this week? If we fortify every ward and I get through most of the translation, we could go next Saturday. That will still give us a few days afterward to finish any last-minute preparations.”
