Rawlins
As soon as he opened it, he found the organization of Ellsbeth’s ritual annoying and slightly pretentious; she was employing the two-column structure popularized by European scholars in the nineteenth century, which required the reader to ping-pong between elemental activations and diagrams. The style was probably thanks to the time she had spent reading Wentz; he found it stuffy and counterintuitive.
Even with these mistakes and imperfections, he was struck, upon reading it, with a singular, certain conclusion: It was brilliant.
It would work.
Somehow, Ellsbeth had—in a weekend, with little input beyond what she could glean from some antiquated volumes—constructed an original written ritual from the ground up. For a banned magical practice. That, in itself, was a miracle.
In a sense, she had actually found a very clever way to reconstruct a very old ritual.
Ellsbeth had determined the ritual’s function by combining a vague allusion in Wentz (a binding useful for restraint of the accused) with a document on sixteenth-century courtroom procedure, which dictated that a defendant’s wrists ought to be tied and their legs immobilized.
Ellsbeth had then extrapolated the forces necessary to achieve such a binding through arcane mechanical forces by cross-referencing a wide array of related effects.
It was an astonishingly impressive feat of scholarship. Rawlins would be tempted to think the work was plagiarized if not for the fact that he couldn’t even imagine where one might find a source to copy from.
Perhaps she had gotten lucky? Not likely, given the density of ideas needed to populate a ritual of this complexity.
Layers of new thoughts and extrapolations.
Connections that couldn’t be looked up in the back of any book or searched for on the internet.
Perhaps she had been helped by someone else?
That seemed even less likely, given the foolishness of involving a stranger in her banned topic.
Or perhaps she was truly, prodigiously gifted at the study of arcane mechanicals.
Perhaps she had arrived at his door with her vast ability completely obscured by the unique circumstances of her aborted attempt at the Arcanus exam.
Perhaps she was a singular mind with the potential to revolutionize his field of study.
That was the possibility that troubled Rawlins most of all.
He closed his laptop, and gray spots appeared in his vision as his eyes adjusted to the night. The view of Newlyn at dusk swam into clarity—the valley below him, the river that cut through town, the red-brick buildings of campus hugging its curves.
Amid the familiar buildings, his gaze found the Pembroke dorm. Rebuilt and renovated years ago, but he could still see, in his mind’s eye, the blue flame that had once consumed its top two floors.
On Tuesday afternoon, Rawlins ate lunch alone in the faculty dining hall while flipping through a dull paper on thaumaturgy for one of the conferences he chaired, when he was interrupted by a familiar voice.
“Afternoon, Tad,” said Paul Gallway as he slid uninvited into an empty chair.
“Wanted to chat about something. Cone of silence.” He clearly expected that would get Rawlins’s attention; Gallway always loved to invoke an air of collegial secrecy, but Rawlins saw through the transparent strategy and found it grating.
“It’s about the Taylor Prize,” Gallway added when Rawlins didn’t reply.
The Taylor Prize was the most prestigious student award in the field of the arcane arts; the winner was always a graduate student from one of the most elite universities, and the schools all bragged about the number of Taylor Prize winners that had matriculated from their programs. Newlyn had had its share, but it had been half a decade since the last one.
“You’re nominating someone?” Rawlins asked, thinking about the students whose thesis committees were chaired by Gallway. “Victor Hamada?”
Gallway shook his head. “Actually, I’m hoping you’ll nominate someone. And certainly not Hamada. I was thinking Curt. He won the MacGregor Fellowship already. He has a legitimate shot!”
Rawlins squinted. Curt becoming a MacGregor Fellow was impressive, but also, to Rawlins, utterly baffling for such an ordinary scholar. He suspected there may have been a late disqualification, or that Curt had family connections pulling strings on the committee that granted it. Probably both.
“Curt is a fine student,” Rawlins said. “But he’s not exactly a genius.”
“Come on, Tad. This isn’t a field for geniuses anymore.
And honestly, that’s a good thing. We’re not going to find a place within the culture by pioneering esoteric use cases.
It’s about practical applications that have social benefit and commercial value.
Curt’s work might not seem intellectually exciting to you, but it is the future of the arcane arts. ”
“So why don’t you nominate him?” Rawlins asked.
“Because I want him to win the damn thing. I’m his adviser, and it reflects better on both of us if someone else puts him forward. Plus,” Gallway added, “your name still has a certain…cachet. Fame, you know. The bestseller. Don’t be modest. Your endorsement would give him a leg up.”
Rawlins was not entirely immune to flattery, but Gallway’s attempt had backfired; the subtext of the word “still” spoke volumes, implying a despite that went unspoken.
Despite the fact that you haven’t published a new book in several years.
Despite the fact that your contributions to the field are effectively finished.
“So you want me to do the work of nominating him, while you accrue the benefit,” Rawlins said. It was true that nominating a student was not a simple matter of writing a letter; to limit the number of applicants, they had made the process laborious and time-consuming.
“Oh, don’t worry about any of that.” Gallway put a hand on Rawlins’s shoulder and shook it playfully. “I’ll take care of all the work. I just need you to personalize the letter and then sign off on it all.”
“Sorry,” Rawlins said. “I just don’t view him as the caliber of scholar that the award is meant for.”
“Come on now. You know it would be good for our program,” Gallway said. “And it’s not like there’s anyone else in this cohort who’s better qualified for it.”
Rawlins checked his watch. “Maybe,” he murmured, then picked up his bag. “I’ve got a class to teach. And if he’s qualified for the prize, I’m sure the nomination of his own adviser will mean more than mine.”
While Rawlins was teaching his Tuesday lecture section, he discovered that he now had two different Ellsbeth problems, which were distinct but not wholly unrelated.
The first was the question of how to handle a particularly gifted student.
His approach with Max had been unrestrained encouragement, and that had ended disastrously.
He could not help but wonder if his praise had stoked the boy’s ego, convinced him of his own power and entitlement, when what he had needed were boundaries that would have kept him safe.
There was a simple lesson Rawlins took from that tragedy: Among students, effort should be more valuable to him than talent. He praised discipline now, not potential.
So he forced himself, with difficulty, to give Ellsbeth no special treatment. The girl had already admitted her own impatience, he didn’t need her walking around convinced of her own genius.
But after reading her ritual, treating her like any other student wasn’t easy.
He was excited by her insights and opinions: When he asked the class a challenging question about the theoretical basis for performing a thermomantic ritual on a liquid-state substance, Ellsbeth’s hand rose immediately, and Rawlins found himself genuinely curious to hear her reply.
For a moment, he wished they weren’t in class at all, that he was sitting across from her in a restaurant, discussing rituals over dinner.
That was the second Ellsbeth problem: For the first time in his professional career, he was fiercely attracted to one of his students.
Plenty of pretty girls had come through the program, and he’d entertained idle fantasies, but this was different.
His mind was constantly pulled toward Ellsbeth, the same way his gaze was pulled toward her in class.
He would turn away from the blackboard, and suddenly their eyes would meet, and he would experience a thrill—a tingle on his scalp as he wondered what she was thinking—followed by a rush of nervousness, as though surely the moment of eye contact had given away the connection between them.
Ellsbeth would look down at her notebook, and he would see the ghost of a coy smile on her lips.
He would lose his place and need to vamp, grateful that he had done this lecture a dozen times, and even his rambling had the weight and cadence of importance.
It wasn’t merely a physical attraction; Ellsbeth lingered in his mind like a wine stain. He liked her. Her humor, her flirtatiousness, her brazenness. Their email exchanges left him charged, energized as if he had just downed several small cups of espresso.
It was intoxicating—which only added to the problem.
The force of his desire left him unmoored, but it also made him distrustful—of his own thoughts, yes, but of her motivations as well.
Wanting like this did not simply happen; it was cultivated, it was caused.
And while it seemed paranoid to view this bookish girl as some sort of femme fatale, it was true that she had pursued him, from the very beginning, with an agenda.
To get into the program, to study a forbidden discipline.
Which was more likely: that she might have happened to fall for him while getting what she wanted, or that the two were connected?