Chapter Seventeen #2
With a quick goodbye, and a reminder about proper document handling, she left them with a key and a promise to return in an hour or so to check on them.
Maggie immediately descended on the drawers, carefully pulling out old survey maps and laying them gingerly on the table in the center of the room.
Arthur chose to read through one of the journals, this one from a naturalist who explored the Wilds about a decade before the manor house was built.
For a while, they pored over the documents in silence, the only sound between them the shuffling of pages being turned or the scratch of pen across paper.
Arthur liked this quiet work, side by side.
He liked that Maggie didn’t feel like she had to talk to fill the air around them.
He liked when their silences weren’t awkward, only content.
He wished that they didn’t have to be trapped in some kind of bargain to make it happen.
He wished he were brave enough to take the mask swinging from her rearview mirror as a sign that Beltane had affected her as much as him.
But he had convinced himself that she wouldn’t feel the same when she realized it was him, couldn’t imagine that she would want to work with him closely after she found out.
He realized he had read the same page a half dozen times when Maggie’s clear voice cut through the silence and the prattle in Arthur’s brain. “Take a look at this.”
He walked over, leaning close until he could smell her shampoo.
She was looking at a map of the Wilds and the yet-unincorporated town of Galloway when it was just a frequently traveled trail for horses and a couple of stables.
“About thirty years before they built the original Hawthorn manor house, they attempted to build a road through the Wilds.” The map showed the proposed road, a straight line through the Wilds to the marshland on the other side.
“The road would connect with a ferry station, giving more direct access to Atlantia instead of having to go all the way around the Wilds to get there.
“As far as I can see, they’ve attempted to build this road no less than six times since.
” She pointed to reference files connected to the maps she looked at.
“Every time, the construction sites are overrun by fantasmia, the trees don’t stay still, and the very land itself seems to rebel against the idea that it can be tamed.
We already know that fantasmia activity within the Wilds is higher than the rest of this part of the country.
What if it’s some sort of feedback loop?
The presence of all those ghouls and wraiths creating energy that feeds the pall. ”
Arthur thought for a moment. “That could be contributing, but if it were just that, don’t you think there would have been palls like this in the past?” He paused again, chewing on his lip as he thought. “Why are there more fantasmia in the Wilds? Why are the Wilds so strange to begin with?”
Maggie sighed in frustration and returned to her research, while Arthur had entirely too difficult a time pulling himself away from the smell of her hair.
When he finally managed it, the scent lingered.
Lavender. He probably wouldn’t have recognized it a week ago, but now it was burned into his memory.
He had felt hypnotized as he had rolled that lavender candy over his tongue—he thought it tasted like a candle, and it definitely did nothing to calm down the way he felt when he looked at Maggie’s lips.
Gods below, focus. He opened the journal, found the passage he had already read three or four times, and started again.
The naturalist, a man by the name of Wheatly, was diagramming a strange vine that grew in the Wilds that was only found climbing the pale mottled bark of the river birch.
River birches were plentiful even among the Wilds’ more common pines because of the three rivers that coursed through the forest. Three rivers that converged into one…
“Maggie,” he said, breathless, and she was next to him in an instant. “What if there was a convergence?”
She scrunched up her nose. “The odds…”
“I think we are working well outside the realm of likely already.”
She pulled out her phone, opening an astrological app, dismissing with a huff a horoscope that he only just caught a glimpse of. Open yourself to possibilities of…
“Well, damn,” she said, turning the phone so he could get a better look.
On May 6, the day the pall fell, there had been a lunar conjunction—the moon and two planets, appearing all in a line in the sky.
It had lasted approximately thirty-six hours, with its peak for the latitude and longitude of the Wilds and Hawthorn College landing right at…
“Three fifty-four p.m.,” Maggie said, her voice heavy with disbelief.
“A conjunction of three planetary bodies above a confluence of three rivers.” Arthur sighed, drawing his finger along the map in front of Maggie.
She leaned over him to get a better look at the map, seeming to not even notice the way her breasts pressed against his arm.
It nearly sent him into a tailspin as quickly as the unlucky—and unlikely—news that there had been a convergence.
The power of three invoked on the earth or sky twice over.
Arthur’s mind was spinning. Earth magic—the way earthly and heavenly constructs affected magic—was one of the earliest and least understood branches of magic.
If all spells were conduits for energy, pulling it from one place and putting it somewhere else, convergences were fonts of energy that could easily supercharge a spell—or a mistake.
“Anything else come in threes that day?” Maggie asked, scanning the map. There was a hard edge to her voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“Wasn’t that enough?” he groaned. “I swear, this kind of luck…”
Maggie glared at him over her shoulder, still not doing anything about how close they were. “Was it luck? Or being unprepared?” she snapped, her face inches from his. Arthur felt like he couldn’t breathe. “Didn’t you think to check the astrological forecast?”
“Do you check the astrological forecast before every spell you cast?” he retorted, knowing very well she didn’t.
It was a good practice, but an unfavorable astrological transit alone couldn’t set off a pall.
It wasn’t just the planetary conjunction fueling the pall, but its presence directly over the river confluence at the exact time of his mistake.
Her anger made the air feel charged. He wanted to risk electrocution and close the space between them so he could press his lips against hers until she forgot about the mess he’d made.
“I wasn’t doing any class three alchemical spells in front of students!
” Something had changed in her expression, a shift from an anger that burned like heat to one that doused him with ice water.
“I’m sure your colleagues in the Astrology Department will be thrilled with this revelation.
” She laughed, but there was no humor in it, and shook her head.
“You clearly value their work as much as you value mine.”
Arthur didn’t understand what she meant.
When had he ever given her reason to believe he didn’t value her work?
He knew she thought he was a screwup, but the strength of her anger didn’t make any sense to him.
Whatever spell had drawn them closer was well and truly broken as Maggie turned away.
The silence was no longer comfortable but instead threaded with tension.
He wanted to puzzle over what she had said, about the obvious untruth of it, but they had only one afternoon in the Annex.
The guilt and shame he felt about the pall settled in his stomach like a rock. Maggie seemed to have suspected that he failed in some way long before they started working together, and now here was the proof. He clenched his jaw.
The focus of their research shifted to ensuring there wasn’t another element to this convergence, and they pored over the books, maps, and documents for the rest of their hour, interrupted only once by a confused Dr. Paige.
Even she could feel the way the air was thick with everything unsaid between them.
“There’s nothing else here,” Maggie finally said, after another hour of work. She dropped a book onto the table with a final thud. “Nothing obvious, anyway.”
She started shuffling papers and putting them away, each movement punctuated by frustration.
He was afraid she was going to run off before he could make this right, before he could make her understand exactly how brilliant he thought she was, but he didn’t want to talk to her in here.
Not where Dr. Paige could interrupt them at any minute, so he endured the tortured silence a little longer.
—
Maggie wasn’t being fair, and she knew it. Somehow, every complicated feeling she had for Taliesin was being reduced to a decoction of uncomplicated anger, and she had a horoscope to blame.
When Dr. Paige had left them, they had slipped into their still-new rhythm that felt too familiar and too easy, so different from the first weeks they shared an office.
She was still aware of every one of Taliesin’s movements, but she found her heart racing for a completely different reason.
It was so much easier when he was infuriating her.
And then, as she’d opened her planetary transit app to confirm the conjunction, the horoscope had flashed across her screen: This is the season to open yourself to the possibility of love in unlikely places.