Chapter Five
By Friday, the unseasonably warm weather was gone, and a heavy, cold fog descended on campus and the surrounding village.
The damp couldn’t quite be described as rain, but was more like walking straight into a cloud, with a fine mist that left everything wet.
Umbrellas were useless, so Maggie gave up trying to look presentable.
Her hair fell in uneven, frizzy waves that barely dried by her first class, and she’d taken to keeping dry socks in her desk drawers.
The weather suited her mood. This time of year, sleep often eluded Maggie, but the past few nights had been even worse, and the exhaustion weighed on her.
Life seemed to have gone topsy-turvy since Beltane, as if those masks hadn’t only hidden who she was, but turned her inside out, too.
She had started to dread coming into work, and she wasn’t sure if it was the looming presence of Arthur Taliesin or if it was the pall itself, casting its unrelenting gloom over her.
She would much rather be at home, tucked under her covers, letting her mind wander to the kiss she’d shared with a stranger in the moonlight.
Unfortunately, the week hadn’t eased the awkwardness of sharing her office.
Every pair dealt with the office sharing differently.
Jim seemed to use his office as an afterthought, only checking with Dahlia occasionally to see if any students had been by.
His students seemed to know to schedule meetings with him in advance, which he’d take as he walked briskly from class to the dining hall.
It suited Dahlia fine, and soon Jim’s desk was covered in Dahlia’s detritus.
Others had come up with schedules so only one professor was in the office at a time.
Those seemed like fine plans to Maggie, but Taliesin was uninterested in all of them.
When she suggested he meet students in the library or an empty classroom instead of the cramped office, he had frowned.
It was an impressive feat, considering she had only ever seen his eyebrows furrowed and his lips in that downturn that varied between sullen and angry, but his expression deepened.
“I take my student meetings in my office,” he said stiffly.
“It’s more professional that way. Students know what to expect.
Why don’t you meet your students elsewhere? ”
She hadn’t dignified that with a response. She wouldn’t meet with students elsewhere because it was her office. If he wanted his work interrupted by student meetings, so be it. She wouldn’t have any problem sending him out into the hall when one of her kids showed up for a meeting.
But it also meant that her work was interrupted so often that she found it difficult to concentrate.
She supposed she could have worked elsewhere, but she was digging her heels in.
She had complained about this basement office endlessly for four years, but she had made it her home away from home, and she would be damned if some pompous asshole from Alchemy and Transmutation was going to take that away from her.
So, instead, she had taken to arriving at work earlier and earlier.
With a steaming mug of coffee in one hand and a heavy tote of papers over her shoulder, Maggie walked across the campus.
The early fog had barely lifted off the grounds, but bright morning light cut through the gloom until she got to the hawthorn tree.
Beneath its branches, the miasma of the pall cast strange, long shadows on the lawn, and the light glimmered an unnatural purple color.
The pall swirled with otherworldly dust and debris.
Within the boundaries of the wards, everything slowed down thanks to the drag of the pall’s magic, like time itself moved through a sieve.
Shadows took on heft and weight, and echoes of the underworld flashed in the corner of your eye.
Unsettled souls who had once found their rest in the next world were sometimes pulled into this world by the force of a pall, and it made Maggie’s heart hurt to think of their confusion and pain if any had found their way into Ilex Hall.
In the distance, she heard a hair-raising screech that could have been a wraith or a banshee, but it was hard to tell from so far away.
Up close, it was much easier to distinguish between the two.
Wraiths were less substantial than banshees, mere echoes.
Shadows. Maggie shuddered, wondering how long it was before one was spotted on campus.
Deep in the basement, the haunting bellows of the fantasmia were distant and muffled.
She turned on her twinkle lights and a desk lamp she had draped with a scarf, bathing her office in a warm glow.
Maggie pressed the button that activated her computer’s rune, and it whirred to life, booting up slowly enough that she grabbed her coffee and walked around the couch to Taliesin’s desk.
It was empty except for a single stack of papers and one framed photo.
She picked up the frame, holding it up to the light, and was shocked to see Taliesin’s face in a broad grin.
Taliesin was a reasonably attractive man, broad-shouldered with a strong jawline and the kind of graying dark hair that made a man look distinguished, but seeing something other than a scowl on his face was like seeing a different person.
It lit up his face, revealing deep dimples and crinkles at the corners of his eyes, like smiling was something he was capable of doing all along.
In the photo, he was leaned over slightly, an arm wrapped around a boy who might have been five or six.
Another man on the other side of the boy, a little shorter and stockier than Taliesin, had an even wider grin.
His hand ruffled the boy’s hair, the joy obvious on all three of their faces.
The boy held a trophy and had dirt smudged on his cheek.
There was something of a family resemblance between the three of them, though she couldn’t say whether they were brothers or cousins.
Maggie couldn’t square what she knew of Taliesin with the photo, so she filed the information away for later and sat down at her desk to try to sort through the endless grading she had ahead of her.
Hawthorn didn’t have teaching assistants, so it was up to her to finish it all before the term ended.
Her biggest classes, by far, were her introductory lessons on the Diadhan language and linguistics, which were required by the college.
Hawthorn was a practical arts college, focused on giving a solid, basic understanding of the three lifebloods of magic to the enrolled students: arcania, runes and sigils, and incantations.
All spells started with arcania. These precise calculations shaped spells, factoring in adjustments for time, place, or astrological season, and more complex variables.
Alchemists like Taliesin used arcania to develop new, de novo spells that required painstaking equations that went far over Maggie’s head.
But even common spells that could be done by anyone required some level of arcania.
Runes and sigils were the interpretation of those equations, channeling the magic of the calculation into the physical world.
Finally, in order to activate the dormant power in the rune, an incantation must be spoken aloud in Diadhan.
Of course, no one spoke ancient Diadhan anymore.
Not conversationally. Not in millennia. It was the language of their ancestors who once lived in one of the Otherworlds.
Modern language had evolved from Diadhan but had long lost any of its power.
Though it had been tried, incantations spoken in a language other than ancient Diadhan were just words.
This reliance on Diadhan made spellmaking all the more complicated, especially when crafting a de novo spell.
That’s where scholars like Maggie came in.
Diadhan education began in elementary school, but Maggie’s classes went into detail about Diadhan grammar, how to interpret runes into incantations to get the desired result, and then how to translate that incantation into Diadhan.
It was important for her students to know precisely how Diadhan should be pronounced and how to appropriately translate concepts that might not have existed when Diadhan was a spoken language. Mispronunciations, altered meanings, false cognates—all were possible shortfalls of a de novo spell.
There were other elements to magic. Chalk or paint infused with a decoction could enhance a spell, channeling the innate magic of plants and elements like vervain or gold.
This required the expertise of botanists and chemists.
Alchemists, in addition to being experts in arcania, focused their study on magic as transformation.
Astrologers studied the movement of stars and planets and their impact on complex spells.
And there were whole fields of study that applied spellwork to health care, education, technology, and beyond.
Most of the students at Hawthorn went on to study one of these practical applications of magic, using the basics that they learned from Maggie and her colleagues in Ilex Hall to master an intermediate level of spellcraft.
From there, they could go on to any field of study that required regular magic use.
But there were always a number of students who found pleasure in studying Diadhan for its own sake.
For those students, Maggie taught a few classes every year about her true joy—Diadhan translation.