The Convincer’s Apprentice
7
Emily had problems unrelated to magic, and they caught up with her the next morning between her last classes of the semester.
“Oh, there you are,” said Professor Fletcher, standing in the doorway that led into the honeycomb of history offices. The department chair looked even more no-nonsense than usual in a charcoal-gray suit, her dark hair twisted into a tight knot. “Step in for a moment.”
Emily followed, clutching her bag full of final exams and hoping for a lecture on proper meeting etiquette—not a conversation beginning with we have reevaluated the necessity of your services next semester .
Despite the workload, despite the low pay, despite everything, this job was an opportunity she couldn’t afford to waste. People with doctorates in history were far more numerous than full-time faculty positions. She needed Ashburn to ask her to stay once her one-year contract was up.
The instant Fletcher closed her office door behind them, Emily blurted, “I apologize for my behavior yesterday.”
Fletcher’s expression was difficult to read. So was her tone of voice. “I’ve been asked to get your assurance that it won’t happen again.”
“It won’t. I promise.”
“Department employees must comport themselves professionally at department meetings, or so I’ve been asked to tell you,” Fletcher said, settling behind her desk.
“Yes.” Emily shuffled her feet, hands shaking. “I’m really very sorry.”
Then Fletcher—unsmiling, pinched-looking Fletcher—leaned back in her seat and laughed so hard her shoulders shook.
“Oh, Lord,” she said finally, expression transformed into something positively mischievous. “That was the best meeting I’ve ever been in.”
Emily opened her mouth, decided no response could possibly be adequate and closed it.
“Listen,” Fletcher said, grin fading. “I know your schedule is rotten. I wish I could fix it for you, but I can’t. All I can offer is a bit of advice: The only lecturer who turned a contract job into a tenure-track position here had excellent feedback from students and several published articles.”
Emily sighed. A rework of her thesis was scheduled to appear in a minor journal within a few months, but that was it so far. Her in-progress paper about Enlightenment magic and gender was half-researched at best, thanks to her punishing schedule. Well, okay, that and the time eaten up on current-day magic and Hartgrave.
She returned to the Inferno in the afternoon, her bag now overflowing with exams, which she intended to zip through so she could take Fletcher’s advice to “get cracking.” But she couldn’t help pausing when she saw Bernie. He sat slumped on his couch, surrounded (and partially covered) by essays, and he looked thoroughly disgruntled. He wasn’t even wearing a hat.
“I have to stop being such an entertaining lecturer,” he groused. “Do you know I have forty students in my intro to medieval lit course? Forty! A specialty in medieval literature ought to ensure minimal interest from the masses.”
“You’re teaching two classes. I have zero sympathy for you.”
“Oh? Do you know that one of my so-called students defines the first circle of Dante’s Inferno as ‘punishment via an eternity of limboing’?”
She laughed.
“Or,” he said, thwapping an essay in his lap, “that I counted three different spellings of ‘Chaucer’ in this thing, two of them in the same paragraph?”
“I’ll see your misspellings and raise you an assertion that Alaska is an island south of California. Would have made the gold rush a lot more convenient.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “You don’t know awful until you’ve read last-minute literary analysis. Consider the sophomore who repurposed a paper on Moby-Dick to discuss the King Arthur legend.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll bite. How do you know it used to be a paper about Moby-Dick?”
“He called Cornwall ‘a symbol of good, evil and the dying whaling industry.’”
She gasped.
“I know,” Bernie said, misunderstanding her shock. “What’s worse, until that sentence it was actually a pretty good essay.”
She stumbled back to her office, mind whirling. Cornwall. How could she have forgotten that the English county where Hartgrave earned his degree was also the supposed birthplace of King Arthur? It couldn’t be a coincidence. Cornwall, King Arthur, Merlin . That had to be why Hartgrave moved there.
Except why would he leave?
As soon as she graded the last exam, she re-read two King Arthur books—guiltily, knowing she needed every free minute to work on her academic research. (Perhaps she could shoehorn King Arthur in? The legend was still relevant in the Enlightenment ...)
The books offered no clues, unless she was supposed to see parallels between Hartgrave in his underground lair and Merlin sealed up in a cave by the witch Nimue. So she turned to Bernie, but none of his tidbits seemed pertinent.
After that, she could do nothing but ask the one person with answers. She didn’t expect Hartgrave would give her any, not if they had something to do with his strange fear of being connected with Cornwall, but an angry no-comment would prove she was on the right track.
To her disappointment, her question about Merlin—asked the first day after his question-free week—didn’t provoke so much as an irritably raised eyebrow.
“I’ve no idea if he really existed,” Hartgrave said. “I’m only thirty, you know.”
“Well—do you think he did?”
“Why do you think I’ve wasted any time thinking of him at all? Other than right now.”
She tsked. “Because he’s an allegedly great wizard—oh come on,” she added as he scowled at the word, “he wouldn’t have called himself a ‘convincer’—and you could learn things from someone like that.”
“Daggett, give me one example of a practical hands-on reference to magic and I’ll eat my hat.”
Completely unfair. How could she give him examples when she couldn’t test them herself? But it did seem as if King Arthur and Merlin had nothing to do with Hartgrave’s past. It wasn’t a long mental leap to the thought that she’d made an adventure out of a molehill. He might be nothing more than a private person who disliked questions. Really, really disliked questions.
She doubted it. But with nothing else she could use to come at his past sideways, she went back to her original list of questions and hit him with one the next time he appeared.
“Why doesn’t everybody know the truth about magic? ”
He crossed to her couch and settled in, arranging himself just so in the too-small space. Good grief, the man was seventy percent legs. “Why do you ask?”
She stopped staring at his body to give him a look that communicated what she thought of the question. “Because it’s bizarre that people could be hardwired for magic but have no idea it’s real, of course.”
She scooted her chair closer, the better to read his expression, but he gazed poker-faced at the ceiling.
“Before you imagine some vast conspiracy, please recall that magic fell out of favor hundreds of years ago, and hardly anyone has cared to expend any effort studying it since.”
An uninteresting explanation, so she didn’t want to believe it. Anyway: “How could technology run on magic without all the inventors and manufacturers being in on it? How could a secret that big stay secret?”
“You’re thinking of magic as something otherworldly, but it’s a key part of life.” He stopped considering the ceiling and turned his gaze to her. “At any point did you learn the fundamental forces of nature?”
She suspected he was dancing around the question, but she grasped about for physics lessons long past. “Gravitational, strong, weak and ... electromagnetic?”
He nodded. “Think of magic as a fifth force.”
It didn’t take much to throw her back into despair over her anti-magic. This was more than sufficient.
“So the world really is out to get me,” she said, slumping in her chair.
“An inflated idea of your own significance, don’t you think? ”
So much for temporarily sensitive Hartgrave. She stuck out her tongue at him.
“Oh, well put,” he said.
“Why do you say it’s like a fifth force? How do you know?”
His shoulders shifted in a lying-down sort of shrug. “It’s a conclusion based on available data. Why else can I overpower gravity or the natural inclination of a broken cup to stay broken? I’m tapping into an elemental force that allows me to manipulate the other four.”
She leaned forward in her chair and prodded one of his (long, long) legs with the tip of her shoe. “You have a knack for talking about magic in a way that drains all the magic out of it.”
“Oh? Your subject isn’t to your taste once you dig past the wild falsehoods, eh?”
The anti-magic part certainly wasn’t. “I just don’t see why you want to pretend it’s science.”
“It is science. Lack of decent research doesn’t change that. I shouldn’t even be calling it ‘magic,’ but—” He stopped, grimacing. “Force of habit.”
He had a point. Chemistry grew from alchemy. Witches healing with willow bark were the forerunners of the pharmaceutical industry. And many of the primary sources she’d read described magic rituals every bit as organized as a biology class dissection.
There was nothing very magical about the magic she studied, really, and that had never bothered her. So why did she want to argue the point with Hartgrave?
Well—because the magic she studied wasn’t the magic she actually believed in. She hadn’t stopped to think about it that way before, but it was glaringly obvious that magic, for her, was the stuff in dog-eared paperbacks read by light slanting in through the slats of her parents’ barn.
She didn’t want to allow that the real version Hartgrave practiced was a sensible concept that could be poked and prodded and explained by people in white lab coats. There was no charm in that.
Though it didn’t matter, did it, since she was—magically speaking—a black hole.
She sighed. “Are you sure there’s nothing that can be done for my ... condition? Someone might have discovered a fix.”
“No one has.”
“Have you come across anyone else like me?”
He glanced at her, one corner of his mouth wavering as if he couldn’t decide whether to smile or frown. She prepared for an inspired insult. But all he said was, “Never.”
“Then how could you know beyond a shadow of a doubt?”
“Hard experience,” he muttered. An odd thing to say.
“But—”
“Daggett, I’m afraid you’ve no choice but to live an entirely non-magical life.”
She looked down to hide her stricken expression. A few seconds passed in heavy silence.
“However,” he said.
Her “yes?” was breathless.
He sat up, eyeing her. “With practice, you might be able to exert some control over your magic disruption. ”
“Oh!”
“Might . And it wouldn’t change your inability to do magic.”
It would still be an improvement. She leaned in. “What did you have in mind?”
“I think your body is pumping out magic-disrupting molecules just as mine produces magic. There seems to be no ‘off’ switch—trust me, I’ve tried—”
“On me?” She wondered what he’d done.
“On myself.” He’d slipped into the glassy-eyed expression she’d often noticed on researchers deep in a knotty problem. “So your best chance is learning to dispel what you produce. Magic in the atmosphere doesn’t hurt you, correct?”
“Right. Only when it’s—well, clinging to you, if that’s the word.”
“Because it’s not inert then. Let’s assume anti-magic works the same way. Knock your disagreeable particles out of your orbit, and they’ll float about harmlessly. I regularly push my magic off me and into the general atmosphere.”
She squinted at him. “Wait—didn’t you say you need to pull it in to cast spells? Why would you push magic away from you?”
He stopped gazing into the middle distance and snapped back to attention. “Health reasons.”
“What—”
“Do you want to learn how or not?”
“Yes!” She dashed to the table to sit at the chair she hadn’t scooted within a yard of him, snatching up a pen and spare piece of paper .
He made a sound that was probably a swallowed laugh. “This isn’t a lecture, Professor, it’s an experiment. Put those away and close your eyes. Right. Now, focus all your attention on sensing the aura around you.”
“How?”
“Just focus.”
She didn’t think much of his teaching technique. Entire minutes slogged by as she tried, with increasing frustration, to identify something that seemed indiscernible.
He finally cleared his throat. “Well?”
“I can’t feel it at all,” she admitted.
The couch creaked. His boot heels clacked against the stone floor. “How about now?”
Her breath caught in her throat. This time she could feel something, the barest hint of pressure on the back of her right hand, like hair or a feather.
She opened her eyes. He was standing on the other side of the table, his hand an inch above hers—and she couldn’t help but jerk back at the thought of the pain if he brushed against her.
He winced. “I wasn’t going to touch you. I just wanted to show you how far my aura extends. Anyway, I was fully charged up those two other times.”
“You’re not now?”
“Magically speaking, I’m as close to normal as I can get.”
She gave this due consideration and then held out her hand. “Okay. Let’s see what that feels like. For curiosity’s sake. ”
“Your motto, as near as I can tell,” he muttered, but he retrieved the other chair and sat.
She braced herself. He simply looked at her hand for a moment—she thought of chiromancy, what you might tell about a person’s future from the lines on their palm—and then he pressed the pads of his fingers to hers. A tentative, barely-there touch.
Miracle of miracles, it didn’t hurt. She slid her hand into his.
It felt ... odd. Not at all uncomfortable, but definitely not like anyone else’s hand. Her skin prickled, tingled.
Very interesting. In a … scientific way.
She let go, clearing her throat. He stared at his own hand, the one she’d been holding. A question—she ought to ask a question. “How do you knock magic from your orbit?”
He looked up, blinking as if he’d just come back from a mental place far away. “Sorry?”
She repeated herself. He shrugged. “Once you learn how to sense it’s there, it’s not hard. I’m hoping that’s true of anti-magic.”
How she hated that name. Anti —diametrically opposed to what she wanted and could never have.
“We really should think of something better to call it,” she said, as if that would make a difference.
“It suits, you realize. Do you know anything about antimatter?”
She did, in fact. It sounded like science fiction, so it made an impression. “It’s basically the opposite of normal matter. When the two come into contact, they—” Oh. Right. “They destroy each other,” she muttered .
“And there’s little antimatter in the universe, a nice parallel.”
How much magic had she fried in twenty-six years? How many gadgets had she unknowingly broken? She groaned, head in her hands.
Hartgrave rapped his knuckles against the table. “ Focus , Daggett.”
“I know, I know, it just feels like—like I’m guilty of magic manslaughter. Unintentionally evil.”
“Magic,” he said, voice flat, “has been put to uses that are quite intentionally evil.”
This suggested all sorts of questions. How do you know , for starters.
But the moment was gone. He’d galloped onward. “Remember, the less anti-magic clinging to you, the closer to normal you will be, and the more likely you’ll be able to use a computer without my continual intervention.”
She nodded, but he wasn’t finished. “Or to have magic done to you.”
“Oh!” She grasped the table with both hands. “Do you think you could make me weightless? I’ve always wanted to fly—always!”
He stood, a maddening half-smile on his lips. “Practice, then, Daggett.”
He passed so close by as he swept out that his aura made her skin prickle.