by Kathryn Moon
2. Callum
I was late for dinner. Again.
I tried to kick the front door shut behind me—gently, because Isaac listened for that kind of thing—when a knife went sliding out of…somewhere and clattered to the floor.
“Put those away before you slice your damn toe off,” Aiden called from the dining room.
I winced and tiptoed up to the closet door, lowering myself just enough to keep from dropping the entire mess I had taken in to class with me, and doing my best to open it silently. Then I threw the entire lot in at once and snapped the door shut before anything could escape. It would all find its way back to wherever it was meant to go…sooner or later. As long as neither Aiden or Isaac went looking for their coat tonight.
I pushed the hair out of my face before taking the hall down to the dining room.
“I’m late, I’m so sor-” I stopped in the doorway.
Aiden was grinning at me from the table, lounging back in his chair with his feet up in my seat. The empty table. How late was I?
“I put off making dinner,” Isaac said, appearing from the kitchen, steaming dishes in hand. “Feet,” he said, raising a dark eyebrow at Aiden’s sprawl in front of the table.
“I was holding your seat,” Aiden said, not even bothering to be convincing.
“I’ve left the wine,” Isaac mused, glaring at the table.
“I’ll get it,” I said. He’d left the bread and the salad as well, but I didn’t mention it, just juggled it all up into my arms.
“Did either of you get to the library today?” Aiden asked as I returned. His face was blank aside from the slight wrinkle of his eyes that meant he was fighting a smile.
“I took your book back for you in the morning,” Isaac said.
He glanced at me for a moment and we both turned back to stare at Aiden. He’d seemed smug when I’d walked in and he was using the slow, drawling tone he adopted when he wanted to drag a good story out. He blinked at Isaac’s words and frowned for a moment.
“Why?” Isaac. “Did you get to the library today?”
“I…I wasn’t expecting to,” Aiden hedged, eyes widening. “But there was a symphony-”
“Oh alright,” Isaac said, rolling his eyes and stealing the wine from my arms before taking his seat. “Get to the point, Aide.”
Aiden glanced at me and I sighed, dropping plates to the table and taking my seat so he could enjoy his dramatic reveal.
“Woollard’s gone and found some ingenue from the middle of nowhere and set her up working in the library,” Aiden said, grinning at us both. Isaac and I exchanged another look, both of us frowning and Aiden added, “I’m fairly certain she’s even given her a set of her very own dour clothes.”
“Ah!” I said, remembering the younger woman I had nearly plowed straight through on my way to class. “Tall, with hair,” and I waved a hand around my head thinking of the way her hair had floated around her head like dark feathers, unsettling with the breeze.
“An artist’s eye,” Isaac muttered to his wine glass.
“Face like a startled little woodland fae,” Aiden said, nodding.
She had seemed startled, at first, those wide dark eyes staring up at me with an ancient axe in her delicate hand. And maybe a little skittish. But there had been a wry slide to her smile as she left, carrying the charm from me on her back that would see her safely home.
“See?” Aiden said, nudging Isaac and pointing at my face. “He noticed her too. And he doesn’t notice anyone.”
“I notice plenty,” I said, serving myself. I just wasn’t usually interested.
Isaac made a little ‘hem’ing sound and shrugged at me. “You’re picky,” he said.
“But you’ve never been wrong,” Aiden added with a toast of his wine glass to me. “Your better judgement is why we are still a lonely three man coven without our fourth. But at least it isn’t the wrong fourth.”
I huffed softly at my plate. I don’t think Aiden had ever bothered being lonely if he didn’t really have to.
“Is she very magical then?” Isaac asked us.
“I don’t think so,” I said at the same moment Aiden said, “She certainly looked so.” I laughed despite myself.
She had seemed…significant, in a way. Or maybe Aiden was right and I took so little notice of people outside of our coven and the scene of my classroom that striking someone down on the sidewalk was what it took to shake me out of my pattern.
“She wouldn’t have to be,” Isaac said, more to me than Aiden. “Not with the three of us.”
I hummed something that might pass for agreement and took a bite of fish. Isaac was right. Between the three of us, magic was covered. Hell, between Aiden and Isaac even the domesticities of the house were covered. We just needed the right energy to temper us together. Make something cohesive out of all of our pieces. Aiden called it a family. I had a less generous view of the word but I did know something was missing in our home.
“See what you think,” I said to Isaac. I tried not conjure her face in my head but it was right there, staring back at me from the empty place across the table.
3. Joanna
I was back in the library at dawn, loading stacks of returned books into the small elevators that carried them up their respective floors, unloading them onto wheeled racks, finding their homes on the shelves, and starting over again. I found a student sleeping beneath a shelf of sigil texts and woke him up.
“When does the cafeteria open?” he growled at me.
I shrugged. “I have no idea but it’s morning.”
“I know that,” he said, and then rolled his back to me.
Three students and one professor stopped me in the hopes I had seen books that the circulation desk swore were not on site. I found an abandoned pen and notebook on a shelf and started myself a list titled Books To Find. Gwen checked on me for the first few hours, nodding at me from the end of a row of shelves, or glancing up at me as I passed the balcony on the third floor.
It was more work than any day in the Bridgeston library but it made the minutes tick faster and I had never had the opportunity to see so many titles, so many subjects, and all of them the kind of magic no one bothered with in the country. Theories and strategies and ancient traditions and symbolism. The section on domestic charms was exquisitely small in comparison to the volumes of weather magic, astronomy, shadow walking, dream travels. Concepts I had never even heard of and words that I practiced on my lips in silence.
I had just finished re-shelving the east wing and was leaving the art and color magic section when I stopped in front of a painting stretching floor to ceiling like a window into a scene straight out of the town I’d left behind two days before. I caught my breath, tasting soil and the dry musty scent of wheat, and stared at the stretch of the field reaching across the land to the old line of border oaks. The bristles of the stalks gleamed in the sunlight and all but shifted on the canvas with some breeze of brushstrokes. An ache bloomed in my chest and a longing for the stretch of uninterrupted sky burned at the back of my throat.
But I had only been away from Bridgeston for what felt like hours. I couldn’t be homesick yet. Or at the very least, I hadn’t been up until that moment.
“You look unhappy with that painting,” a voice asked from behind me.
“It’s making me think of home,” I said, frowning.
I turned to see who had joined me and my throat dried at the sight of him. Was it mandatory at Canderfey to be so handsome? At least this time the man at my side was staring up at the painting instead of at me. The angles of his face were strong and broad and there was something watchful and animal in his gaze although I couldn’t decide if it was predatory or merely observational. He had black hair curling down to the back of his neck and a shadow of a beard over his jaw.
When he turned to look at me I moved my stare to the painting, avoiding his eyes.
“It looks like Bridgeston,” I said. “Where I’m from.”
“Real
ly? It’s Hammish scenery, but I suppose there isn’t much difference,” he said.
I looked at him again. He had the dark hair and tanned skin and broad shoulders so common where I grew up in the southern area of Enmairian countryside. I glanced back at the painting and saw how he fit within the frame, and realized all at once that it was his painting. His homesickness.
“You look Hammish,” I said, feeling braver now. Hammish wasn’t so far from home and it’s people weren’t so different from mine. Even if he was wearing the vivid colors and lush fabrics of the university people.
“Do I?” he asked, grinning. The smile, and the dimples within it, softened the edges of his face. “You don’t look Bridgestony.”
“Thank you,” I said, and he laughed with open surprise. I blushed and added, “Not that there’s anything wrong with…I didn’t mean that.” Embarrassed, I took hold of my cart and started my escape.
“No, no, I know exactly what you mean. I ended up here, didn’t I? Before you go,” he said, stepping closer still smiling with the laugh in his voice. “There’s a book I’m looking for.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. Of course he had spoken up because he’d needed something while I’d been busy looking at art instead of working. I grabbed up my new notebook from where I’d left it in the cart and flipped it open to my list where I’d tucked the pen. He leaned over, peeking at the words on the page, and I could smell the ink and oil from him. There was a spot of vivid blue paint behind his right ear, smudged into the skin there.
“Mmm, you’ll never find those,” he said, reaching out and pointing to two titles I had scribbled down for a couple students. “Friends of mine have been looking for them for ages. Lost decades ago as far as anyone can tell.”
I put little stars next to where I had written Gatekeepers; a Compendium of the Old Guard and Resonants.
“It won’t hurt to remember their names,” I said, shrugging. “What was the title?”
I looked up and found the studying examination he had given his own painting now focused on my own face. “Color Magic,” he said, still staring. “By Felix Amesbury. And Blue in Study, now that I think about it,” he said. He glanced back down at the notebook and I rushed to fill in the words.
“Thank you…what was your name?” he asked.
“Joanna,” I said, finishing adding his titles to my list.
“Thank you, Joanna. Isaac,” he said, holding out a large hand stained with color. I tucked my pen away and shook his hand, ignoring the heat in my cheeks. “If you find them, would you bring them to my office? Professor Metclaffe in the Burgess Building. Woollard won’t mind.”
“I…sure,” I said.
His lips quirked and he nodded, turning and walking away. There was more blue paint at the back of his neck and for some reason the sight of it made my stomach flip. I pressed the backs of my palms to my cheeks and grimaced when I found them warm to the touch. A little cough echoed behind me and I jumped, finding a student blocked between two shelves by my cart. I muttered a quick apology and dragged it out of the way, hurrying to move on in my work.
By the time I had finished with my re-shelving I had collected three more missing book titles. Gwen came to find me in the afternoon just as I was heading up to browse and check on the staff only area.
“Take a break. Eat something—before your eyes start crossing,” she said, leading me back to the break room.
The shelves behind the circulation desk were already filling up with returns and I wondered when I would ever find the time to work in the restricted section. Gwen was dragging me back through the swinging bookshelf when I saw it, gold block letters glittering down the spine of a thin black spine. RESONANTS.
I pulled back and stopped in front the shelf, pulling the notebook from my skirt pocket and flipping it open. Already I could see the two texts Isaac had mentioned waiting on the shelf. I ran down the list, checking off every last title. Gwen glared at the books on the shelf and then down at my notebook.
“What a coincidence,” she said dryly, looking hawkishly at me through her lenses.
It was coincidence or, more likely, Gwen was joking at my expense. Perhaps the library had its own kinds of charms in place, bringing books back when it was ready to or when they were needed. The most it signified to me was that I needed to track down Isaac Metclaffe.
I lost track of time in the library that evening, finishing my work and ending up nose deep in an old textbook outlining the ancient seasonal rituals. (In the country the rough shapes of the holidays were still practiced, although nothing so elaborate as the festivals and performances of history.) The Burgess Building was closed by the time I remembered where I was supposed to be so I went the next day when Gwen shooed me out of the stacks to eat lunch.
The building was swimming with students when I arrived, classes just letting out, and I felt like a fish battling the stream trying to get myself up the stairs. It cleared out enough by the second story for the din of chatter and feet on stone to fade and for me to stop by a group of girls leaning against a railing together, paint stained smocks still hanging over their jewel tone clothing.
“I’m looking for Professor Metclaffe’s office,” I asked, trying not to shift as they looked me over head to toe with puzzled expressions.
“Oh!” one said, face softening and cheeks blushing. “It’s on the third floor, down by the windows.”
“Thank-” I started.
“He won’t be there, though,” another added. “He was working with us today so he’ll still be in the studio for awhile. Top floor, on the left.”
I hesitated on the third floor. It would be just as easy, easier really, to leave the books in his office with a note. Gwen knew where I was and the errand didn’t require me to speak to him. Or to see him. But I turned up the stairs and followed them up two more flights. The top story of the building was surrounded in windows. Even the rooms had windows facing the hall that stretched up the roof and let the light stream through every room in bright sheets.
Isaac Metclaffe sat at a canvas with his back to the doorway, the afternoon sun catching on the palette at his side. There were feathers stretched across the painting and my muscles ached with the urge to run, to flee, to escape until I fixed my eyes on the back of the painter instead of his creation. I wanted to sit down and ask a million questions. How did he put magic into an image? Did it begin with brushstrokes or sooner, in the mixing of the paint? The stretching of the fabric over its frame?
“It’s injured,” I said, glancing at the painting again, seeing the way feathers at the bird’s stomach were ruffled and stained, feeling a hot tear in my own gut.
Isaac glanced at me once, ‘hmm’ing in agreement and turned back to his work. Then he startled in his seat and spun the stool to face me.
“Joanna!”
I tried not to get carried away, pleased that he’d remembered my name. “Your books turned up,” I said, pulling them out of the bag at my side. Blue in Study was, from what I could tell, a book made entirely of blue. Every shade and hue shifting from page to page to like moving liquids. Color Magic was a crumbling collection of browning pages and curling leather that I was too afraid of damaging to even take a glimpse of. I wrapped it up in a sheet of white paper with For Professor Metclaffe written at the front.
He blinked at them for a moment and then at me. “Just like that?” he asked.
“They were waiting on the circulation shelf after you left. You probably just missed them,” I said. I held them out to him, wanting both to have a reason to stay and also an escape from the studying look in his eyes.
“Where did Woollard find you?” he said under his breath.