I darted forward and snatched the potion from each of them, then flung each one in a different direction. I couldn’t repeat Castellton’s mistake—I had to keep the potions separated, even not knowing what they would do, what I would hit.
They both gaped at me like shocked undergraduates whose proctors had confiscated their rum.
I snatched the rowan twigs out of Jermiah’s satchel and turned back to the stones, whose mortar was alarmingly crumbly. With one in each hand I tapped them once, twice, and then brought them down hard enough to snap in the cool night air the third time.
As if by a magic far beyond me, the moon half-clouded over, and the rain drizzled down.
The stones’ moaning spiraled up to a tooth-aching keen. My molars vibrated uncomfortably. My arms ached, leaning the broken rowan twigs into the stones. And then I had to jump back, because the entire wall was falling down into the unfathomable darkness that the Potions Vault had become, and then silence and the smell of mold and stagnant water from inside. And the pink glow trickling toward my boots.
I windmilled my arms to keep my footing, but even a few steps behind me the ground had been built up, and the river was no longer in flood. I would leave them no choice.
I leaned forward and thrust the remnants of the rowan twigs into the entrance. I heard an agonized gasp behind me. My boots were soaked to the ankles, and I would probably have to go through three rituals to destroy them safely. I wouldn’t sleep through the night for two weeks from the smell of that water.
But the entranceway’s arch slewed further, like someone had twisted it out of shape with a crowbar. No one would be able to wall up that entranceway again—the arch was not stable. They’d have to build a new arch. Or, I hoped, actually cope with the problem.
Because I remembered that night. I remembered someone running up to the Alchemy building shouting, “The river’s breached the Potions Vault, all hands, all hands!”
And I remembered the boy down the hall from me, broad-shouldered and strong, trained in petromancy, leaping to his feet and heading out the door at a dead run—in the other direction. He had had a choice, between help and safety, and he had chosen safety, and I remember standing frozen for an infinite moment before making the other choice. I still was not sure what it was that had made me choose it.
The university had had a choice for twenty years. And I was not going to let them retreat back into it.
I turned around to face Jermiah in relief, having finally done what he’d brought me home to do. Having proven my old master’s pride in me was justified.
He was lying on the ground.
Castellton crouched over him with a knife.
I staggered back. I felt a fool. Just because she was an alchemist, and an elderly alchemist at that, I had forgotten that the weapons of the mundane world were available to her. If she’d had moments longer, would she have gotten to me as well? He had been there first. He had saved me. “Jermiah,” I whispered.
There was no answer.
“Cazzie.”
“He’s gone,” she said, and her voice was empty, and the pink glow kept lapping at my boots. I took another step toward her.
“Cazzie.”
The professor who had taught me to cast an invisibility charm. The professor who brought Jermiah noodles when he had ghast shock. Always wiser. Always more experienced.
It barely took any of my strength to knock the knife out of her hand. I was in my prime, and she was so old. But so was Jermiah, and he had been as desperate as she was, and had had no knife. And I had been bending the arch so far out of plumb that the administration couldn’t slap a new wall over the problem, and had not seen to protect him.
He was my advisor. He would have wanted to protect me anyway.
Jermiah still had rope in his pack from the rowan twigs I’d asked for. I tied her with it and put her on the wet, pinkened grass with him, gently, too gently for what she deserved.
“This is, this can’t be.” She looked up at me, but all I saw was fear, not regret. “You have to shut it again. We need this university to be what it was for you. We need the students to keep coming, for themselves and for us.”
“Those families need their youths not to be dragged into vortices. Your cleaning staff, your guards, need jobs, not one or two a year, not ‘we hope it’s not a promising sophomore,’ not ‘oh dear it’s one we cared about, but at least only one.'”
“It’s too big for us,” she whispered.
I shook my head. There was no way out of something too big for us but to keep doing the small pieces of it. And see how far we could get. Or die trying.
As Jermiah had died trying.
As Jermiah had not had to die trying.
I sat down on the grass next to her. We had been through so much together, and I wasn’t sure I could make her understand anything, anything at all. I sorted through those memories, decades old, trying to find one that would help. “Do you ever hear from Ev Minor? Know what he’s doing?”
Castellton looked up at me, hope sparking in her eyes that perhaps I would still treat her as my old professor after all, perhaps I would still see her as what she had been. In the thin moonlight through the clouds she looked like what she was, a pathetic and defeated old woman, and not like what she also was, a murderer who had left something rotten festering as long as it only killed people she didn’t value. “I... think he’s, he’s selling perfumes? He wasn’t strong enough to keep working in magic after the floods like you were, Ellis. He was very upset.”
“We all were,” I said quietly. There had been so few of us who understood, and she had shown she was not one of them after all.
But she didn’t know what she didn’t know. She jumped on my words. “Yes, we all wanted to put it behind us.”
“Putting something behind you doesn’t mean ignoring it. It means making sure it can’t hurt you any more. It means making sure it can’t hurt anybody any more.”
Castellton looked up at me, eyes dimming.
“This isn’t going to hurt anybody any more, Cazzie. And neither are you.”
And I waited for the university caretakers to come and bring the Provost, and the rain fell on my face. The pink glow around the broken stones was the same, the smell of water and blood and green growing things and sandstone was the same, but for the first time in twenty years, I could let the knot in my chest when I breathed dissolve into tears.
© Copyright 2020 Marissa Lingen
Marissa Lingen - [BCS311 S01] Page 2