Chapter 5
FIVE
GWENNA
I’m surprised how invested I am when classes resume on Tuesday.
I wake up early to pack my bag with textbooks and looseleaf and pencils. In the Camlann House kitchen, I review notes from previous lectures over coffee—something I think I’ve never done before in my life—and I head out with ample time to be a full ten minutes early to class.
It’s a brisk ten degrees above freezing, but not windy, for once, and the campus looks almost alive despite the graying snow and pale sky: students crisscrossing footpaths, books in their arms, chatting or laughing or hurriedly comparing notes in case of a not-so-pop-quiz.
I slow my steps, realizing I’m in no hurry myself. And as I do, a vision of an alternate reality plays out in my mind: a reality where none of this had happened.
Gwenna, mid-semester, freshman year. Neck-deep in reading, spending hours alone in the library, hunched over behind stout walls of books that I flip back and forth between, scribbling notes.
I’m busy, untidy, disorganized, stressed—relatively speaking—and blissfully happy.
I’m mapping out course choices for the next semester, and the one after: can I fit in Old English Poetry, finally tackle Beowulf, or will it conflict with the Byzantine History seminar that’s only offered every other year?
Should I plunge on in Latin or should I switch off for a year of intense Ancient Greek?
I’m up late reading, I’m playing around with potential thesis topics, I’m considering studying abroad—Paris, Rome, Edinburgh.
And all the while, I’m here, living here and learning here, immersed in the little perfect snowglobe of gothic buildings and cramped classrooms and wrought-iron gates that is Caliburn University.
Then I shake my head, and the vision clears.
Because there’s no them. No Kingston, no Kai, no Lanz, and no Callahan.
And even thinking of that feels like carving my heart out of my chest.
I stamp the snow off my boots and settle in the middle of the Art History classroom, take diligent notes in the dark as Professor Lazar flicks her slide carousel around and around.
It’s not even the sex, I think. Although, I admit, thinking of yesterday, of Callahan and Lanz taking me together like that…
I squirm in my seat a little bit, glad that the lights are off.
It is, and it isn’t. I guess I never knew I liked sex that much, that I could like it that much, but most people do, so in principle it’s not exactly surprising that once I tried it, I’d enjoy it.
No, more than that, more than anything mechanical or physical or theoretical, it’s them. That they would so plainly do anything for me, that they already have, on a scale and scope that is almost too big to even fathom.
For me. For just me.
Fuck, I realize. I am so, so badly in love.
The morning passes too quickly, no matter how I try to linger and draw out every step of coming, going, and studying in class, and too soon, it’s time for my last class of the day.
Classics building, top floor.
Kingston’s waiting when I get there, just outside Emrys’s classroom. I haven’t seen much of him since Easter, and he looks better—somewhat.
Especially, I can’t help but notice, now that he sees me.
I move for the door, but before I can enter, Kingston gently catches my elbow. I stop, and he lowers his hand, interlacing his fingers with mine.
“Do you mind?” he asks.
I flush a little, thinking of what Kai said the other day. “I don’t really think it’s a secret,” I mumble.
“I suppose not,” Kingston says, after a moment. “But that’s not what I asked.”
Right. I shake my head again. “No,” I confirm. “I don’t mind.”
I just want to get this over with.
When we come in, Dr. Emrys gets to his feet, the troubled crease in his brow melting into relief.
“It is good to see the two of you,” he says. “Very good indeed.”
Kingston nods, and Emrys’s eyes flick to our joined hands. Suddenly, an impulse seizes me, and I let go of Kingston and barrel forward to wrap my arms around our professor.
“Oh,” Emrys says. “My.” But there’s a smile in his voice.
“Sorry,” I say, pulling back. “I’m just glad to be alive, I guess.”
Emrys smiles. “That makes three of us, I’m sure.
” He gestures for us to take our desks, which we do—although not before Kingston helps me out of my coat.
It’s almost as though we’re about to start a regular class: the same bookshelves of yellowing pages, the same faded posters, the same blackboard and creaky floors.
But we all know nothing is really the same.
“So, then,” Emrys says, looking between both of us. “I suppose one of you ought to fill me in.”
“I can,” Kingston says, and the gratitude I feel towards him is almost palpable.
Kingston tells the story, as quickly and briefly as possible, beginning with our arrival at St. Ignaty's. As Kingston speaks, Emrys's face is grave. I close my eyes, like I'm seasick, listening to just the edges of the details so I can know when it's over.
Mercifully, when Kingston gets to the very end, he keeps it all general. Broadest of broad strokes. They got her. Tried to kill her. We stopped them.
And then it’s over.
“Well.” Emrys has settled behind his desk, hands folded, staring into the middle distance, but he swiftly returns to Earth. “What do you propose we do?”
“You’re the teacher,” I mumble, almost sarcastically. “You tell us.”
I just want to be given an assignment, I think. Something normal, almost mundane. I am craving simple, human, low-stakes work.
“I’m the professor,” Emrys corrects. “And forgive me, but given all you’ve just told me, I’m disinclined to put anyone’s noses to the grindstone.” He exhales, thinking. “I should like to read something. Not study, for now. Just read. Wouldn’t you?”
I nod. Eagerly. Emrys smiles, and walks to the bookshelves, scanning past the historological texts, the broad volumes of facsimiles, the sourcebooks of transliterations, and to the smaller, more ordinary bindings. Terence, Vergil, Ovid. Comedies, poetry.
Kingston blinks. “But—”
“Reading may be done for pleasure, you know, Mr. Pendragon,” Emrys interrupts, not eyes still fixed on the shelves as he picks out some offerings. “And contrary to what many seem to think, it’s wholly advisable to do so once in a while.”
We spend that class on verse. Latin love poems, clever little things with the Roman equivalent of flirty wordplay. The next class, it’s the Heroides, Ovid’s poems of famous women. Then excerpts from Vergil’s Eclogues, pastoral poems of bright green fields and grazing sheep.
“The locus amoenus,” Emrys remarks one class. “The pleasant place. A favorite topic of poets, and a welcome choice for days such as these.”
He glances out the classroom window to the dismal gray outdoors, and I can’t deny he’s right. If I can’t be enjoying a proper campus spring, at least I can be reading about leaves and flowers.
Kingston, maybe, is less content that Emrys is humoring us this way, easing up slightly and letting us more or less read for fun.
Not me. Humored is what I desperately need to be.
Because my other classes certainly aren’t relenting.
Caliburn is still Caliburn, and its syllabi are still packed with the heaviest, densest, and most obscure of readings and assignments even in the latter half of Spring semester.
I am tearing through hundreds of pages a week, scribbling page after page of notes in hour after hour of lecture, flipping through dictionaries in four languages and composing essays in two.
I find Callahan to be the best study partner—less as a collaborator, per se, since we don’t share any classes, and more as a human presence to read alongside—and we gradually stake out the first-floor study in the back corner of Camlann House as our workspace, where he remains sweet but painfully shy, as if he could easily never touch me again unless I broach the subject.
Kai, for his part, keeps himself busy, almost suspiciously so, with whatever remains of Luther’s affairs, coming and going at strange hours to the point that I wonder if he’s consciously avoiding me.
But not so much as Lanz, who, save for that encounter in the living room, has practically become a ghost. And Kingston…
Kingston I see in Latin class, of course. At meals in Camlann House. In passing, through the halls.
But also in his room. And my room. And the bathroom shower, once,
As far as the rest of campus knows, I am still Gwenna Vale, unwilling standout scholar in an already academically self-selecting student body and avowed social companion of the once-insular fencing team.
I study in the library, I read over coffee in Holy Grounds.
Some evenings I even tramp through snow to the dining hall with Morgan to circulate amongst our classmates, and…
And it’s not so bad. It’s…quite nice, really.
Because we are all here with a common purpose, for the short span of years we’ll share together in this strange, carved-out place.
Everyone, every last student on the Caliburn campus, from Elena Shalott to Ponytail Brett, chose to come here because, on some level, they wanted to learn.
To learn more than anything else, at least for a while.
And everything here, from the dormitories to the dining hall to the library—of course—and even the chapel, is centered around that purpose. Learning, studying.
Where else on Earth can you find something like that?
Even when I wake up to another iron-gray sky, to temperatures verging on freezing and air that’s cracklingly dry and harsh, I am here.
A locus amoenus. A pleasant place.
Not that it’s perfect.
“Hey, dude.”
Someone knocks against my table at Holy Grounds, and I look up from my book to see the barista, an apologetic look under his facial hair.
“Sorry, but we’ve gotta close up.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, to the kitchen and coffee machines and trivia chalkboard asking In the book of Exodus, how many plagues did God send upon the Egyptians?. “Pipes froze. No water.”
I blink. “Really?” Indoors? I add silently.
He does a comically exaggerated shrug. “Search me,” he says. “But can’t wash up, can’t serve food. Condolences.”
Or a few days later, crossing campus, how on the still-dead grass, these strange white patches start bloom up from under the earth. Not frost, not snow, but—
“Salt?” Callahan nudges at a clump with the toe of his shoe, and it crumbles, sandy and glinting and stark white against the gray of the dirty slush. He looks up at me, concerned, and I can only shake my head—how should I know?
Or later that same night, nearly asleep on Kingston’s chest in the warm dark of his bedroom when something rankles the silence.
A buzzing.
Kingston hears it too. He slides out of bed, goes to the window, and catches something from the pane onto his finger.
A bee.
Frowning, Kingston leans over the window sill, cranks open one of the heavy panes, and the little thing zips out without so much as a second thought—even though it’s bitterly chilly out and there are no flowers to be seen.
I don’t know why that, of all things, unsettles me. But it’s the first night since we got back that I don’t really sleep.