Ellsbeth
Strictly speaking, the Practicum was off limits to all but the graduate students of the College of the Arcane Arts.
But the entryway, an airy rotunda inlaid with mosaic tiles, was open to the public—it was a frequent stop on tours of wide-eyed high school students applying to the university, easily awed by the centuries-old architecture designed as a celebration of Greek and Roman philosophical ideals.
Rawlins blinked. “Ms. Storer.” He eyed the cups as if they might be poisoned. “Seeing as we had not formally agreed to meet, this is less of an accommodation and more of an ambush.” He deposited the Practicum’s metal key snugly into the pocket of his blazer. “And I dislike tea.”
“That what?” Rawlins said, stopping suddenly in front of the bronze statue of Gregory Hale, a railroad magnate who donated enough in the nineteenth century to fund half the buildings in the College of the Arcane Arts.
“That your feelings about what you deserve are more important than the rules of this institution?”
“Okay,” she said. “It was January twelfth. My Arcanus. Obviously, I had prepared, and it was going—forgive me—very, very well. But—” She paused and sucked in, trying to pull courage out of the air. “Then came the augury portion. It was—”
“Scrying,” he said. It was a ritual in which an arcanist could conjure an image in a shallow basin of water.
Though theoretical arcanists had proven that foretelling the future should be mathematically possible, it had yet to ever actually be achieved in practice.
That the ritual was still called scrying was a quirk of academic convention; the image was always, stubbornly, a scene happening somewhere concurrently, in the present.
“I’ve always been very good at scrying. And the ritual worked.
I saw my sister.” Ellsbeth looked at her skirt then.
“She was…in the bathtub. And there was so much blood.” Ellsbeth could feel Rawlins stiffen next to her, but she tried to continue on, forcing out the words.
“My younger sister. She was still breathing—I thought she was, at least. I had to go tell someone. I had to call someone. I had to try and save her.”
Finally, Ellsbeth allowed her eyes to meet his.
Light blue and unblinking, narrowed with something that might be concern or pity as he nodded absently.
Ellsbeth knew that expression well. It was the one that happened when she gave an account of Bertie’s death that rang a bell in someone’s memory—that poor girl who killed herself, the tragedy whose details they had forgotten.
But Rawlins didn’t say anything, so Ellsbeth kept talking.
“It was a choice between my future…and my sister’s life.
I had been selfish enough. I went to school overseas.
Left her alone. She was a student here, actually.
Undergraduate. She had just finished her first semester.
It was there—” She tilted her head toward the south end of campus.
“In the Perkins bathroom. Her name was Bertie. Roberta, but I always called her Bertie. She didn’t make it.
Suicide.” She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “Or they said it was suicide, I guess.”
When Rawlins finally spoke, his voice was low and neutral.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I understand that must have been difficult to see.” He cleared his throat, ineffectually, unnecessarily.
“But it sounds like you made your choice. And personal tragedy is not a qualifier for admission into a graduate studies program.”
It took Ellsbeth a moment to register what he was saying.
She felt her eyes prickle with tears, and for a moment she was afraid she was going to begin crying.
But then fury rose to the surface in the form of a tiny laugh of disbelief.
“I’m not asking to be let into the program out of pity.
Look at my records. Look at my examination scores.
Test me! Try me! Ask me a question—any ritual, any initiation.
” She rose to her feet. Rawlins remained sitting.
“I belong in this department and I would have been here—or at Cambridge, or at Yale, or at Persky—if I had finished my Arcanus.”
Rawlins didn’t remove his gaze from the patch of grass between his feet.
“The graduate student cohort was selected months ago,” he said. “I don’t allow late admissions.” His voice sounded very far away.
“So you won’t even consider allowing me into the program,” she said. A statement not a question.
He didn’t respond.
Ellsbeth turned to walk away, but she spun back on her heels before she could stop herself.
“I have one more thing to ask you,” Ellsbeth said, relieved that there was no quiver in her voice.
“It wasn’t really a test, was it? Back in the Practicum, when you asked for someone to stand in for the time-dilation ritual…
you played it off, but you would’ve gone through with it. ”
“I thought you weren’t listening,” Rawlins said. “But if you were, you would have heard what Miss Fitzwilliams said. It’s illegal.”
Ellsbeth twisted her lips into a bitter smile. “I just want you to know, I would’ve volunteered. They’re scared. But I’m not.”
She held Rawlins’s gaze for as long as she could manage before she turned away again to begin her walk back toward her apartment on Governor Street, the shame and disappointment in her stomach slowly souring into something closer to heartbreak.
Rawlins called her name as she was walking, but Ellsbeth didn’t turn around. She would not let him see her cry.