Chapter Thirty-Four
Arthur and Maggie stood on the third-floor landing of the southern stairwell of Ilex Hall. If you once had asked them, they would have said this was where their story began, but now they both knew the truth. It had started much earlier.
Even now, Arthur barely thought about what they were preparing to do.
Instead, he remembered that frantic afternoon when Maggie had emerged from the fog of his panic, and he’d nearly toppled her down the stairs.
Maggie, who had evacuated all of his students one by one, who’d tried to run into danger without a thought for herself until he’d pulled her back.
Maggie, who would never be his again. This may not be where their story began, but, he supposed, this was where it was going to end.
After today, their bargain would be done.
There was nothing left to research. He would move out of her office for good.
And, he supposed, they would go back to barely saying a word to each other during faculty meetings.
That thought broke his heart all over again, and he hoped Maggie couldn’t see it on his face.
Gods below, he needed to focus. It didn’t matter what was going on between him and Maggie when they were in the pall. If he couldn’t keep it together, he wouldn’t be able to protect her, and wasn’t that why he’d agreed to this arrangement to begin with?
“Ready?” shouted Dahlia from down below.
The tinny voice of Jim coming from her phone responded, “Affirmative!” like he was playing pretend with walkie-talkies.
Each of them was prepared to cast spells to contain the pall if Maggie and Arthur failed at their task.
Dahlia had already drawn runes in her careful marks, each one in the light-purple chalk paint infused with the gloaming creeper decoction, just waiting for their Diadhan incantation.
On their landing, Maggie stood before the door.
Her hands trembled, and she bit her lip.
Arthur had been where she was before. When he’d returned to the pall after his memories tangled with the boy’s, standing here had brought them all back to the fore.
It had been confusing, frightening. It had filled him with an unpleasant longing for what lay beyond the fissure.
“How are you holding up?” he asked gently. Was that a question he could ask, now that he had been relegated to colleague? He didn’t care. Not right now.
“I just want to get this over with,” she muttered.
Arthur stepped closer, just barely, but it was enough for Maggie to eye the space between them. He wanted to think she was daring him to close it, to come stand next to her, but he didn’t make the move. Instead, he said quietly, “I can go in alone.”
She rolled her eyes and huffed. “As if I’d let you get all the glory.
Are you kidding?” Arthur felt relieved. He knew this Maggie.
“If you think the paper we write about this is going to be authored by ‘Taliesin et al.,’ you really don’t know me.
” With a new determination in her movement, she reached up to wipe away the rune.
“Wait,” Arthur said, and then the words tumbled out of him before she could tell him to stop, before the pall pressed on the door and overtook them altogether.
“Before we go in there, I have something I need to say. I should have said it earlier, but…gods below, Maggie, I was just so broken by the end of that conversation.” She started to interrupt him, but he kept going.
“I’m sorry. I should have listened to what you needed. ”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because tomorrow, when I’m just your colleague, I’m going to be professional.
I’m going to do exactly what you asked. But I don’t know what’s going to happen when we erase that rune, and I couldn’t risk you not knowing.
” She watched him carefully as he added, “You don’t need to say anything.
I’m not asking you to forgive me or absolve me.
I know what I did. I just wanted you to know. ”
She was quiet for a moment and then said, “Thank you.”
If there was anything else she wanted to say to him, she didn’t say it now. Maybe there was nothing left to say at all. After one last lingering look between them, they pulled up their masks. He nodded toward the rune, and she wiped it away.
Every time Arthur entered the pall, there were small, subtle shifts. It had always felt like a living, breathing thing that grew and changed, but that was nothing compared to what the pall had become since they were there last.
The air had grown thicker with otherworldly dust and sludge.
It took effort to walk through the pall, like moving through something viscous and slimy.
It felt wrong, and Arthur’s stomach turned with every step forward.
Objects that before had been careening through the air were now stuck, like fruit in gelatin.
Wraiths, no longer content to swarm on the lawn below, had made their way to the third floor with their long, dark shadows looming in corners.
This close to the fissure, they suddenly had firmer edges, and Arthur shivered as one took on a vaguely human shape with a wide, clownish grin.
The grimace in the scrunch of Maggie’s eyes mirrored exactly how he felt.
“I know they’re mostly harmless, but do they have to be so terrifying about it?
” he said awkwardly, trying to defuse the tension that had spun between them after their conversation.
She rewarded him with a smile that he couldn’t see, but her mask bobbed.
Across the hall, the wraith slinked along the wall, and he wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, but its grin seemed to grow.
They had both decided that the dissipation spell needed to be done in his lab, near the fissure, so there was no reason to dawdle in the other rooms. They walked as quickly as the soupy atmosphere would let them.
The smell of sulfur and ash in the air was overwhelming, even through the mask he wore over his mouth and nose. His hangover certainly didn’t help.
When they reached the door to his lab, Arthur didn’t think before grabbing Maggie’s elbow.
She flinched, and he pulled his hand away.
Arthur tried to keep the heartbreak out of his expression, but he knew he failed.
Fortunately, Maggie wasn’t looking at him; she was staring at the place where he’d held her.
“We’ve already done the hard part,” he finally said.
His voice hitched, and she looked back up at him.
“All we need to do now is draw the rune, say the incantation, and this is done. And stay away from the unsettled dead.” Maggie’s eyebrows furrowed together, and he knew what she was thinking.
He’d thought it himself, but it was impossible.
“You won’t find her again. But she knows—she knows what you’re trying to do. ”
“Do you really believe that?”
He shrugged, thinking about the boy he’d gotten to know through his memories. “I want it to be true,” he admitted. Above her mask, Maggie’s eyes softened, but then she turned to face the door to his lab.
Arthur placed his hand on the doorknob, and, on Maggie’s nod, he swung it open wide, revealing the blinding fissure.
Like the rest of the third floor, the pall in this room had grown soupier, too.
The unsettled dead that collected around the fissure were frozen in place, tiny pinpricks of light like a constellation of stars that Maggie and Arthur carefully angled their bodies around.
Each one burned with an entire life. Each one was a memory.
An echo. A person. And they all needed to go home.
Seeing the unsettled made it easier to put aside his heartbreak.
They fell into their easy rhythm as if nothing had changed.
They measured the distance they would need to complete the complicated rune and, starting at opposite corners, began drawing their careful lines with the chalk paint infused with the gloaming creeper decoction.
Even before they muttered any incantation, the chalk shimmered iridescent, not unlike the layer of pall slime that coated most surfaces, growing thicker by the minute.
Maggie and Arthur concentrated on their lines, careful to avoid the touch of any of the unsettled dead.
It wasn’t long before the unsettled were awakened and attracted by the allure of the magic pulsing from the rune, drawn to the energy, or maybe even to the promise of home.
They began to glide through the thickened pall, concentrating closer and closer to where Maggie and Arthur were working.
“Shoo, shoo,” Maggie muttered, trying to wave the dots of light away and creating small ripples in the pall. “We need to change our plan. One of us draws, the other waves them away.”
“I’ll keep drawing. Then when it’s time to do the incantation, we’ll switch,” Arthur said, and Maggie slid through the pall slime until they stood back-to-back.
He wasn’t surprised to find that her presence behind him was still a calming balm as she gently scooped her palms and scooted the unsettled dead away from them.
It didn’t take long for the pinpricks of light to try to return, but she waved them away again and again until he was done.
When the final line of the rune was drawn, the purple chalk glimmered in the light, a single line of illumination snaking from end to end.
Arthur let out his breath, some of the pressure in his chest easing for the first time in months.
“I think this is going to work,” he said, turning to see Maggie’s auburn hair aglow with the shine of the rune. “Ready?”
In answer, she set her palm on top of the lines he had drawn and then looked at him expectantly.
He needed to touch her for the incantation, but he hesitated with his hand outstretched.
Before, he would have placed his palm over her hand, lacing their fingers together with a reassuring squeeze.
Now, he didn’t know what to do. Was she feeling the same agony he was?
In the end, he gripped her shoulder. It felt safer than holding her hand, but as she began the incantation and power flowed through them, she gasped and brought her other hand to Arthur’s on her shoulder, squeezing him hard. Gods below.
Diadhan word after Diadhan word fell from Maggie’s mouth.
When Arthur spoke Diadhan incantations, the words felt like cotton in his mouth, fuzzy and imperfect.
His incantations were passable, his knowledge of grammar better than average, but he always had collaborators help him develop de novo spells.
But Maggie? He felt the power in every word, every sound.
This was what she was meant to do. This was her art.
He marveled at the changes she had made to the incantation, pulling phrasing from a Diadhan poem about a flowing river and a trail of stars to mirror the convergence powering the pall.
If Arthur hadn’t already been in love with her, this would have done him in, in an instant.
Love. He tried to push that thought away, but how could he when the vise around his chest was loosening only because Maggie held his hand?
He needed to stay focused, but Arthur’s brain grew muddy again with exhaustion.
His calculations were complete, his runes drawn.
He just needed to lend his support to Maggie by keeping his grip on her shoulder tight.
They were still in a world of danger as the pall around them grew more and more chaotic with each word in Maggie’s incantation.
Shadows collected behind him and above him, the dust and grime and pinpricks of lights of the unsettled dead swirled, and the loud sound coming from the fissure only grew louder.
Through his muddy thoughts, Arthur felt a strange tug toward the fissure, like something was waiting for him on the other side.
He felt a peculiar curiosity about it, felt drawn to its darkness.
He tried to ignore the unsettling thrall of the fissure, but as Maggie neared the end of the incantation, the purple iridescence in the chalk paint growing brighter beneath her palm, the urge grew more insistent.
Without thinking, he yanked his hand out of Maggie’s grip, ignoring the gasp and pause in her incantation.
He just needed to know what was waiting for him…
He took a step toward it, then another. Maggie tried to pull him back, tugging on his hands, and then wrapping her arms around his middle. There was a part of him that knew this wasn’t right, a small voice that was trying to drown out his curiosity with warning, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“Arthur, stop!” Maggie cried, but the sound was far away, and he was so close to the fissure, his hand outstretched to touch its blurring edges. He thought maybe Maggie was yelling, but he couldn’t be sure.
Then, before he could touch the fissure, a tiny pearl of light collided with his open palm, exploding in a burst of bright rays, and then Arthur felt nothing, nothing, nothing.