Chapter Five #2
Maggie’s first-year students had turned in assignments practicing the interdimensional phonetic alphabet.
During their coming final, they would have to listen to seven spells spoken aloud in Diadhan and write out the sounds precisely.
Her second-year students had also turned in papers this week, tracking phonetic shifts in modern Diadhan pronunciation and how it affected spells.
She worked through a second year’s paper—tracking the way influence from modern language had altered the pronunciation of the Diadhan word for drying something wet, often unintentionally producing heat instead of just a drying effect.
As she graded, her mind wandered to the poem she had tucked safely in her desk, the one she’d been translating for well over a year.
Literary translation didn’t exactly fall under the purview of the Applied Linguistics and Incantation Translation Department or her official research, but her translation of the classic Diadhan epic poem Branagh’s Aubade was a pet project, one that she was supposed to work on only when her mind wasn’t occupied by more pressing tasks.
Her translation had inspired her research, even if it wasn’t the direct focus.
She had long been interested in the way art and science intersected in spellcraft.
Diadhan poems and songs could give clear clues for scholars creating de novo spells who searched for the right word or combination of words to activate a rune.
Branagh’s Aubade wasn’t the most well-known Diadhan poem.
It wasn’t required reading for students or one that had been adapted a dozen different times, but it was one that Maggie had loved since she was a child, when she’d pulled a dust-covered version of the classic off her grandmother’s shelves.
Her translation often seeped into her thoughts when she very much should be paying attention during a faculty meeting or focusing on grading papers.
Like now, when the light bounced off a suncatcher—she hadn’t thought, when she bought it, that you really needed sun for a suncatcher to do much of anything, but it sometimes caught one of her twinkle lights just right—and she found herself puzzling over the way the poem used descriptions of light to mark the passage of time.
She would have to carefully pay attention to the words she chose for the translation so the meaning didn’t get lost. As she thought through whether there were any practical differences between the words shimmering and gleaming, she was startled out of her thoughts by a very real, very harsh light and a gruff sigh.
“You’re here early,” Dr. Taliesin said, snaking through the office furniture and setting his own steaming mug of coffee on his desk.
“Good morning to you, too,” she replied, giving the student a mark and turning over their paper with a dramatic flourish. Before she could remember Dean Clearwater’s plea, she said primly, “I was trying to get some work done before you invaded my space. And turn off the big light, please.”
He was already sitting at his desk, his back to her, but she could see the way his jaw tightened slightly as he opened his computer. “It’s too dark in here,” he said, entering a password into the machine. “I can’t see a thing.”
She got up and turned the overhead light off. “Then it sounds like you need to scrounge up a desk lamp out of the storage room.”
The spell used to create the faefire lights in the basement were just too bright, probably in an effort to cast out the gloom. She didn’t want to admit it to Taliesin, but they often gave her migraines that she spent all weekend recovering from, so she kept them off as much as possible.
She expected to see that muscle in his jaw flex again, expected him to argue, but instead he stood up from his desk and slipped around her, careful to give her space, and walked down the hall.
When he didn’t return for ten minutes, Maggie thought she might have scared him off for good.
Maybe he was going to Dean Clearwater right now to express how much he truly hated having Maggie as an office mate.
Her stomach dropped as she thought of Dean Clearwater’s barely hidden demand that she needed to keep Taliesin happy. And they hadn’t even lasted one week…
She was spiraling when Taliesin returned after twelve minutes, carrying a squat purple lamp with a fringed shade.
The fringe jiggled as he set it down carefully on his desk.
He tapped the rune on its base and muttered the Diadhan word for ignite.
The faefire beneath the shade brightened slowly until it covered his desk in a halo of warm light.
—
Taliesin ignored her for the rest of the morning, but his presence drove her to distraction.
She had searched in vain through her desk drawers for a discarded pair of headphones but found nothing that would block out the scrape of his pen against paper, fingers grazing the vellum of an ancient tome, a sniff, a cough, his shoe making a dreadful squeak against the floor.
And the way their desks were angled…she had demanded this particular configuration, but she hadn’t considered what this would mean for her view.
Every time she glanced up from her work, there was the back of Taliesin’s head.
He was hunched over his small desk, a large dusty book open in front of him.
His dark hair had been trimmed since yesterday, and the fact that she noticed this startled and annoyed Maggie.
The precious space in her brain that she needed for her work was suddenly being taken up by this man and his hair.
The faefire light of his new lamp caught the smattering of grays shot through the dark brown.
She remembered the way it had come loose as he fought back the pall, falling into his eyes until he’d had to brush it away.
Now, he sometimes ran his fingers through it as he worked, as if he still wasn’t used to its new length.
The same strong jaw that had telegraphed his annoyance with her was now tense with concentration.
Did it ever get a break? Or were his shoulders always in his ears, his feet always bouncing with unreleased fervor?
His long legs were scrunched under the short desk, the top of his knee bumping the bottom of the desk as his foot tapped.
Despite the chill caused by the pall, his shirtsleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing a hint of the strength he had needed to grab her to stop her from tripping down the stairs on the day the pall fell.
She remembered the way his hand had felt as it gripped her arm, strong and sure. Safe.
And as her mind wandered, she wondered what those arms would feel like if they wrapped around her in a hug so she could figure out what he smelled like.
It had been bothering her all morning, she was so sure she’d smelled it before somewhere.
It was something woodsy and a little bit floral, a surprising choice.
She wondered what it would smell like on her own skin…
What was that? She had thought she was cataloging all the things that annoyed her about him, but instead it was his hair, his muscled forearms, his broad shoulders.
She bit back a groan. She didn’t need him asking her what was wrong, especially not when the answer was that it was driving her absolutely batty that he was, objectively, a striking man.
And it was completely unfair that such a good-looking person had such a terrible personality.
This wasn’t like her. Maggie didn’t fantasize about her colleagues wrapping their strong arms around her.
She didn’t wonder what their cologne would smell like on her skin.
Her ex, Evan, had been a colleague. They were both grad students at Bryn Ridge, and after that relationship ended disastrously and nearly cost her everything, she made a promise to herself about mixing work and pleasure.
But somehow she couldn’t dislodge thoughts of Arthur Taliesin’s forearms or his fingers wrapping around her wrist from her mind.
She shook her head, trying to go back to the papers in front of her.
By late morning, her annotations swam across the page.
Taliesin had been in and out, amassing a stack of ancient reference books.
Ones that Maggie knew, for a fact, weren’t usually allowed outside the library walls.
She wondered if he’d had to bribe one of the librarians or if his name did the work for him. Certainly, it wasn’t his charm.
A knock at the office door gave Maggie a much-needed break from the endless thoughts about Taliesin.
She waved in Jordan, one of her students, who sank into the couch, grabbing a Mothman stress ball from the cart that Maggie kept stocked with candy and small anxiety-relieving toys around exams. Jordan squeezed Mothman until his little red bug eyes bulged.
“Do you need the room?” Taliesin asked. Maggie turned to Jordan, gesturing to let her know that it was completely up to her.
“No, Dr. Taliesin, this will only take a minute. Dr. Linden, I need an extension.” Jordan’s Advanced Phonology class had a paper due in three days, their last assignment before the semester’s end.
It had required recording different people doing the same spell and comparing the results to see if there were different outcomes of the spells based on the Diadhan.
“Sure,” Maggie answered. Jordan began to explain her reason, but Maggie shook her head. “It doesn’t matter why, unless you want to talk about it? I can kick Dr. Taliesin out.” Jordan shook her head and gave Taliesin a small smile. “When do you think you’ll be able to turn it in?”
“Is Wednesday okay?” It was only two days later than the original deadline.
“You got it.”
Visibly relieved, Jordan tossed Mothman back on the cart and took one of the candies. “Thank you!” she called as she left the office and dashed off to whatever it was that occupied Jordan’s time.