Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
GWENNA
Only Kai is awake when I come downstairs.
“You packed?” he asks, pushing a mug of coffee across the kitchen island. His sleeves are rolled to his elbows, and there are three individual Nicotine patches on his forearms.
I accept the coffee and shake my head. Seeing my stare, he looks down at his arms.
“Smoking’s a filthy habit.” He cracks a grin. “Besides, apparently it’s a ‘federal crime’ to tamper with airplane smoke detectors.”
I laugh, in spite of everything.
“Better get packed,” Kai goes on. “Wheels up in, like, an hour.”
“Yeah.” I nod, but don’t move. Don’t even sip my coffee.
Kai frowns. “What’s wrong? No clean underwear?” He winks.
I ignore that. “No. Just…” I glance out the window, to the clouds gone the color of orange sherbet where they dip into the sun and the tall, pebbly faces of campus buildings. A lump springs in my throat. “You won’t miss it?” I say at last. “Caliburn?”
“School?” Kai says, in the same tone you might say a root canal?. He gives a short, dark laugh. “No. Don’t think I will.” I must wilt, because he softens. “I’m sorry for you, though. I know this is your kind of place.”
“I’d stay here forever if I could,” I murmur into my coffee.
“Well, flunk enough classes and maybe you can. So long as the tuition checks clear, anyway.”
I roll my eyes. “You know what I mean. Like, become a professor.”
“Mm.” Kai blows on his coffee.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just, I could see you doing that. Research, teaching, the whole publish or perish bit, tenure.” He spins a hand. “Only thing you’d be missing is the houndstooth jacket and the long white beard, but otherwise? Textbook medievalist.”
He grabs for my chin, smirking, but I push him away.
“Okay, okay. I need to get packed.”
I don’t mind the teasing, actually. It’s just too sad to think about what isn’t going to happen.
I'm upstairs, folding a sweater, when it hits me.
Only thing you’d be missing is the houndstooth jacket and the long white beard.
My mind leaps back to Morgan, at Porter’s, talking about whoever taught Vivian magic: It’d be pretty fitting for medievalists here, wouldn’t it?
The photograph. The man in the beard, next to her. The look in his eye—the admiration, the awe…
You are the finest pupil I have ever taught, Ms. Vale. Well, so far as I know, anyway. We’ll see what the past brings.
I freeze, sweater half-folded in my hands.
The photograph. The bearded man. Those bright eyes, like he was seeing something no one else could.
Like he's astonished to have ever met such a creature.
"Oh my God," I whisper.
The sweater drops from my hands.
He wasn't just standing next to Vivian in that photograph. He was looking at her like she was a miracle. Like she was his star pupil.
Because she was.
Vivian was Emrys’s student.
He trained Vivian. He taught her magic. He knew her.
I didn’t clock the bearded man as him in the photograph, because of course I didn’t. Normal time logic means of course my present-day Latin professor wasn’t also a much older gentleman in a picture taken over a century ago.
But Emrys ages backwards. Which means in the 19th century, he would have been older.
And if he knew her…
If he will know her…
Then maybe there’s one last chance we can connect this whole thing.
In four steps I’m out of my room and down to the landing. Below, in the foyer, Callahan has his coat on, looking into the living room.
“Morning mass,” he’s saying, to whoever’s there. “I’ll be back.”
I thud down the rest of the stairs as the front door swings shut after Cal, so fast the last of the cool outside air washes over me.
“Gwenna?” Kingston, in the living room. Packed, ready, in a black pullover and jeans. He gets to his feet. “What’s—”
“I’m, um, going to chapel too,” I say quickly. “I’ll be back.”
Before anyone he can react, let alone object, I grab my coat and slip out the front door.
Above me, the sky is a sickly lavender; the air is chilled but thick, humid, my breath barely showing. I don’t want to remember Caliburn this way. I don’t want to leave Caliburn this way.
I glance left: Cal’s fairly distant by now, close enough that I could run to catch up, but not so close that he’ll hear me and turn around. Good.
I all but run across the quads, holding my unbuttoned coat to my chest to keep it from flapping off my arms. The lamps are glowing orange; no one is out except a few dark figures coming and going from the chapel. No one is rushing except me.
I am going to find Emrys. I am going to make him, make me, make sense of all this.
I can think, and as long as I can think, I can do something.
Anything I’ve ever done in this world, good or bad, has been because of all my goddamn thinking.
It’s the only thing I’m good for, really.
The only thing I’m good at. The only thing I can do, right now, or ever.
For some reason, my mind goes to Cal and his philosophy paper. I think, therefore I…can. I almost laugh at my own stupid joke. Eat your heart out, Descartes.
I fly up the stairs in the Classics building two at a time, breathing hard under my coat, the strange out-of-time feeling of being in a classroom building past instructional hours somehow just as energizing as it is eerie.
That’s what this place is for, I think, boots pounding.
What we do here. What I do here. I am going to use what I know and what I can find out and I am going to solve a problem.
And I am not going to leave Caliburn for dead.
Finally, panting, I stumble onto the top-floor landing. It’s quiet, of course, save the soft flutter of some bulletin-board flyers as I whoosh up at top speed. I pause at the top step, gripping the handrail, and catch my breath.
What am I going to say?
Dr. Emrys. It’s you. You were the one—you will be the one—to teach Vivian what she knows.
To give her the magic that binds her to this place.
When you’re older, in the past, you’ll meet her here and you’ll…
make her your student. You already know what she knows because everything she knows she learned from you, even though you haven’t taught it to her yet.
So whatever reason she’s asking me this, whatever magic is tied up in that riddle… you have to know it already.
Don’t you?
I press a hand to my forehead, where the skin is faintly damp with sweat.
God, it’s so much. Like a sentence written on a Mobius strip.
Like a Rubik’s cube printed in colors beyond the visual spectrum.
Like something the stupid Michelangelo Matrix could only dream of cooking up.
But he’ll know what you mean, Gwenna, I tell myself. He’ll understand it.
He’ll help you think.
With my breathing slowed, I walk for the classroom in relative quiet. And I hear…something. A sound. Nothing loud or overt, nothing like voices or footsteps or even the clanking of that awful radiator.
A hum.
It gets louder, and louder still, as I get closer to the door. A space heater, I think, or a small fan, except it’s too strong for either of those, especially through wood panels. And it comes and goes, a soft crescendo up and down, a swell of sound back and forth, seemingly at random.
Something feels off.
And then the gears click.
Magic, I think. Of course.Who knows what Emrys gets up to on his own, especially when he’s not expecting intrusive students to stop by and bother him.
If he can render me and Kingston fully mute with the wave of a hand, he can probably do much more, probably does do much more to…
keep in shape, or whatever. Hand poised to knock, I hesitate.
But no, I think. This is too important.
“Dr. Emrys?” I rap my knuckles, raising my voice just slightly as the hum intensifies. “Are you in there? It’s Gwenna.”
No answer. The sound lulls, buzzing down to a murmur. Then roars back to life.
I knock again. “Dr. Emrys?”
Still nothing.
I grab the doorknob.
Black, furious, buzzing, pelting through the door, a cloud, a swarm, of humming, whirring, crawling, things flying at and around and over me. I can’t see, can’t hear, do the only thing I can think to and fling up my hands, shield my face with crossed wrists, and scream.
Bees.
A vicious, endless, swarm of bees.