Chapter Eleven
The next morning, Rory and Simon returned at an hour that Arthur could only describe as horridly early.
In fact, if pressed, he would have said it was the middle of the night, actually.
There was barely a hint in the sky that dawn was approaching, but at least the overly strong coffee that their father liked to brew was percolating away.
In the near darkness, a bleary Arthur filled a mug halfway with cream and leaned against the counter, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing.
Rory barely said a word to him, his eyes practically closed at the table as he tried to persuade Simon to stop bouncing from side to side and eat his toast.
Barry emerged from his room wearing his fishing vest, stinking like decades-old seawater and remnants of fish guts. “Ready, kiddo?” Barry shouted, and Arthur and Rory groaned while Simon whooped.
“I need everyone to speak several decibels quieter,” Rory said.
Simon bounced on his tiptoes and asked his next question in a theatrical whisper. “What can we catch today, Poppy?”
Barry ignored Rory’s plea and spoke in his normal, booming voice. “I listened to the fish report when I woke up, and they’re catching flounder and bluefish in the cove.”
“Flounder!” Simon screeched at a pitch a dog would struggle to hear, and Rory glared at his father. “Uncle Artie, have you ever seen a flounder? They look so weird. One time, I caught a flounder as long as Poppy’s arm, and he said it was the biggest he’s ever seen.”
When Arthur had been small, his father had sometimes taken him out fishing early in the morning before he went to work and Arthur went to summer camp on the beach, his hair and skin smelling like salt, sand, and sunscreen for weeks at a time.
He was fairly certain his father had told him he’d caught the biggest flounder Barry had ever seen, but Arthur supposed he could concede the record to his nephew.
“We’re not going to catch a thing if we don’t skedaddle,” Barry said, clipping his keys to his vest and gathering a handful of sparkling fake tadpoles from a clear container that he kept unfortunately close to the cooking ingredients.
He held one in his hand and whispered a Diadhan word that Arthur didn’t quite catch, tossing the fake tadpole to Simon, who squealed when it wriggled in his hand like a living thing, glittering as if it had caught a sunbeam.
“New at the bait shop! Looks real, doesn’t it?
” Barry explained. “See how it’s bright with its own light? ”
“Show him on the boat, Pop.” Rory yawned as he zipped up Simon’s lime-green life jacket.
Down on his son’s level, he scruffed up Simon’s hair and kissed him on the cheek.
“Listen to Poppy,” he reminded the boy, handing him a tube of sunscreen.
“Stay in the boat. I don’t care that you’re wearing a life jacket.
Do not jump in. And make sure Poppy takes you out to lunch.
I don’t want to see you back here until two o’clock, at the earliest.” Rory gave their father a pointed look to make sure he understood those words were really for him, and Barry gave him a thumbs-up behind the boy’s head.
Simon leaned into Rory and whispered loudly and knowingly, “Because you have to help Uncle Artie with his problem.”
Rory glanced over at Arthur with an apology in his grimace.
“That’s right,” he said, planting a kiss on the boy’s head as the three of them walked out the door.
The stars were only just beginning to wink out as Rory buckled Simon into the truck and then said something to Barry, who nodded and waved off his younger son.
Arthur hadn’t told Rory much last night before he went home.
Just that he needed some advice. And then he’d casually said the one phrase that he knew would get Rory to drop everything: about a woman at work.
Fortunately, the already-planned fishing trip gave them the perfect excuse to spend the day together, but now that Barry and Simon were pulling out of the driveway and Rory was returning to the living room, Arthur was faced with having to tell him everything about what had happened.
All he wanted to do was return to his too-small bed.
As the front door slammed, Arthur grumbled, “I’m going back to sleep.” They could discuss Maggie at a reasonable hour.
Rory grabbed his shoulder and turned him around, pushing him down onto Barry’s old corduroy couch.
Rory claimed Pop’s chair so he could sit across from Arthur.
“We don’t have time for sleep,” his brother said.
“I’m pretty sure you’ve never once asked for my advice, so things must be bad.
We’re going to need every minute between now and two.
” There was a preening, self-satisfied look on Rory’s face that almost made Arthur smile despite his exhaustion.
For the first time since the pall fell, he felt a wave of calm wash over him.
Rory may be his little brother, but giving someone else the reins was all Arthur wanted right now.
Let someone else figure out this mess he’d found himself in.
The last five years of parenthood had aged his little brother, though to Arthur he still looked so young.
He always wondered if people could tell they were siblings.
They both had brown hair, with enough grays that it was noticeable, but Arthur favored his mother and the rest of the Taliesins in most other ways.
His skin was her same milky pale, while Rory tanned easily.
Arthur was tall, with gangly limbs even as he’d grown soft in adulthood, while Rory was shorter with a broad, muscular build.
Of course, anyone who knew both Arthur and Rory was more likely to compare their personalities.
Rory was charming. He had an army of friends, people he’d met at every stage of life, many of whom had stepped up to help him with Simon over the past few years.
Arthur, on the other hand, had been so single-minded and focused on his research that he hadn’t had time to maintain the easy friendships of college.
The moment he had been accepted into Dartwood’s alchemical doctorate program, notoriously competitive and demanding, the rest fell away.
Sure, there had been people in his labs that he liked, that he might consider friends if he weren’t their boss, but he always kept a very appropriate distance between himself and his employees and colleagues.
And since most of his time had been spent in his lab, he rarely had a chance to meet someone who didn’t fall into one of those two categories. It was lonely.
“Do we have time for breakfast?” Arthur asked as he finished the last of his coffee.
“Later. After you tell me everything.”
Arthur tried to swallow his nerves. He didn’t want to tell Rory everything.
He hadn’t mentioned the pall or what happened that day to cause it.
What good would come out of it? Rory would probably be furious about the way he had been putting himself in danger to try to dissipate the pall.
Worse, Rory would probably tell him that it wasn’t his fault, when it most decidedly was.
After a few false starts—it just felt so unnatural to admit to his baby brother that he was floundering—he told Rory about how he met the woman on Beltane.
He told him how he had been so confident and so not himself that he hadn’t known what witchcraft had come over him.
He told him how electric it had been to kiss her as they danced, as the bonfires burned around them and the gods begged for fire, for love, for lust.
And then he told him about the small basement office he’d been sharing with his prickly colleague—“Pricklier than you?” Rory interjected and Arthur ignored him—who seemed to hate him for reasons he didn’t understand.
But he didn’t tell him about the magic he shouldn’t have done, much too intricate for his undergraduate students.
And he didn’t tell him how he had messed up that spell, all because he’d been distracted.
Instead, he told him how a single touch of the softest skin at Maggie’s wrist had been enough to break the spell the mask had cast over his memory.
Rory was quiet, and Arthur fidgeted, rubbing the palm of his hand over the worn corduroy ridges of the couch.
When he finally spoke, Rory’s voice carried a mixture of awe and annoyance.
“First of all, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about Beltane.
” Arthur had ripped off his mask the second he’d walked through the dunes and returned to the truck so that he wouldn’t have to tell his brother the truth of what had happened.
“There was nothing to tell!” Arthur insisted. “As far as I knew, she was a stranger I’d never see again, and even if I did, I wasn’t supposed to recognize her. It wasn’t supposed to be Maggie.” Arthur buried his face in his hands. “What am I going to do, Rory?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I should tell her the truth. That’s the right thing to do. But how do you tell your coworker, ‘We have absolutely had our tongues down each other’s throats and, oh, by the way, I’ve known for days’?”
“Maybe leave that last part off,” Rory suggested unhelpfully.
“She’s never going to speak to me again.” Arthur knew he sounded ridiculous and whiny, but he couldn’t be normal about this. Not about that kiss. Not about Maggie.
Rory rolled his eyes. “And if she finds out you knew and you kept it from her? What will she think of you then?”
Arthur should make himself do the right thing, but he was selfish.
He wanted to do whatever would make Maggie hate him the least. He just didn’t know what that was.
He wasn’t fool enough to think that Maggie would ever like him, but at least she might not hate him quite so much.
Rory watched him thoughtfully, like he was turning over Arthur’s problem in his mind.
“How exactly do you think that rune worked?”