There were all manner of suitable causes to which he might accredit his insomnia. The obscene workload he had taken on—three (!) graduate students he was advising, in addition to the advanced studies seminars he taught. His needlessly time-consuming undergraduate lecture. Pressure from Lennox to draft the wholesale order of ritual elementals for the Practicum. His failure to get his editor a draft of his manuscript over the summer break (and his knowledge that he had hardly begun).
Yet when he woke on Friday at 4 a.m., after falling asleep past midnight, the first name on his mind, against all odds, was not that of the chancellor or the dean or his publisher. It wasEllsbeth Storer.
He had noticed Ellsbeth Storer, of course, in his introductory class the other day, sitting off to the right—a girl with long brown hair in an oversized sweater. The animal part of his brain had immediately been alerted to her presence in his lecture hall, as though instinctively registering a threat. Upon scrutiny, of course, the notion that a twenty-something pseudointellectual posed any sort of danger to him was laughable.
But now, he realized, his intuition had been reasonable: Shewasa threat. To his serenity, certainly, and to thesanctityof the subject of arcane mechanicals. If youthful entitlement and “passion” were sufficient to force oneself into a life of magical study, the field would be overrun with power-hungry dilettantes. There was nothing more dangerous than a young mind that felt it wasowedknowledge and power. That was a lesson Rawlins had learned the hard way, and he would not repeat the mistake. Not with Ellsbeth Storer or anyone else.
Still in bed, he reread her last email several times. The invitation to meet her could be construed as casual, but he knew better. She wasassuminghe would be there. Counting on his curiosity about her misfortune to drive him there…and counting on hisguiltto prevent him from standing her up. But he saw right through her. He imagined her sitting there, brown hair still damp from a recent shower, waiting to drink a cooling cup of tea while glancing for him at the door, and felt irritated with himself for feeling bad at all. She did not deserve his guilt, or even his pity. She had presumptuously thrust this situation upon herself.
Yet he kept returning to her in his mind. Something about the girl’s name felt familiar to him, though he was certain they had never met. The image of her face, for reasons he could not articulate, kept projecting intrusively upon his closed eyelids when he tried to sleep. It was preposterous; of all the things to lose sleep over, another arrogant student to whom he owed nothing. Ellsbeth Storer was just another among the handful of usually young, usually pretty women who emailed him about their admiration for his long-ago book, idealizing a life ofmagic,with no appetite for the rigorous dedication it demanded. (And, he allowed himself to think, idealizing a version ofhim,the decades-ago boy with bright-blue eyes and a knowing smile. A boy that no longer existed in the man now past forty.)
Rawlins pondered his options for getting back to sleep. In the past, he had occasional success with Winograd’sSoporificum—but it was forty-five minutes of work and required several expensive elementals. Far simpler to take a sleeping pill, and he had a medicine cabinet full of options—but at this hour, they would leave him foggy for the entire morning, and he’d rather be bleary-eyed but sharp.
So Rawlins surrendered to the day. He pulled back the sheets and stepped out of bed, the floorboards creaking loudly as though mocking his defeat.
Rawlins often had the impression that his house was a living being—and if so, it was a real asshole. It was nearly two centuries old, a quasi-gothic two-story that hugged the side of the hill, showing its age but nonetheless commanding in its perch over the town. The arched windows resembled half-lidded eyes, perpetually passing judgment on the campus below.
The house had come up at auction five years earlier, when Rawlins had recently gotten tenure and was thus (barely) in a position to afford it. Most of the other residents of the town found its grandiose eeriness off-putting, but Rawlins was instantly drawn. It was more house than he needed, and even at auction a stretch for his budget, but he’d dipped into the reservoir of savings from his book sales to affordit.
He grumbled about the decision nearly every day, especially as the perpetual need for repairs ate into his limited free time. Every burst pipe or leaky roof tile felt like a taunt from the house, as though it knew he would resent the intrusion and took pleasure in mocking his scholarly fastidiousness by forcing him to learn more about replacing copper pipes and repairing drywall than he ever wanted to know. If he were ever fired from the university, he was confident he could now make ends meet as a handyman, thanks to the litany of complaints the house had demanded he correct.
The stairs squeaked on his descent as his hand skimmed across the well-worn wood of the banister, finding his way in the dark; at the bottom, he navigated around boxes of books that were still awaiting a home on a shelf. Rawlins’s book collection had long since overflowed the library, and he had added more shelves whenever possible, packing them with volumes of arcane study and items collected on his scholarly travels: a ritual mask from Fiji, a pewter cauldron from ancient Mesopotamia. Even though the house was immense, every room and nook and hallway feltfull.
Dean Lennox, on a visit last summer to discuss the curriculum, had remarked on the indiscriminate expansiveness of his collection, then asked pointedly, “You afraid that if there’s any space, someone else will try to move in?” Rawlins had frowned at the question. Not because shewas wrong, but because it revealed an assumption that heshouldwant to share his house, his life, with someone else. That there was somethingwrongwith his commitment to a life of the mind.
He wasn’t a recluse, or even antisocial, by any means—he spent hours every week teaching and interacting with his colleagues. He wasn’t immune to the pleasures of sex, either—just careful to set expectations and keep it separate from any lasting entanglements.
Why did Lennox, and everyone else, seem to find something morally wrong with him knowing his priorities and keeping his life orderly? Why did people assume that being alone meant he had to belonely?
Rawlins didn’t begrudge anyone else their relationship, he just didn’t see what was to be gained by romantic partnership. Inviting someone into his home and his life would allow them to make demands upon his decor, his space, his time. In exchange for what?Company?It struck him as little to gain relative to the immense cost.
Lennox, of all people, ought to understand why he felt that way.
The espresso machine hummed as it warmed up; he packed grounds into the tray, loaded it, and while he watched it fill, his thoughts returned to Ellsbeth Storer. Sitting in that café, waiting for him. Hedidwant to know why a girl whose entire life seemed to revolve around arcane mechanicals would fail to even complete her exam. Perhaps he could stop by and see her, just to get the answer. Just to show her that her sob-story would still not compel him.
But no. He would not give her the satisfaction of arriving on her terms. He sipped his espresso, preparing to face the day and attempting to banish her from his mind.
The graduate cohort was waitingfor him in the Practicum when he entered, all straight-backed and eager. He had been instrumental in selecting the group, and he could not have hoped for a more impressive and well-heeled collection of students, carrying eager minds and impressive résumés; they were a credit to Newlyn. Neither he nor the institution would ever beembarrassedby a single one of them.
Yet as he surveyed the group, searching their eyes, he could nothelp but wonder: Would any one of thempushthe field further? Would any one of them make a genuinely new discovery or challenge a long-held assumption?
It shouldn’t matter. The goal of his instruction was not to revolutionize the field of arcane arts; it was to produce responsible stewards, practitioners, and instructors. That was enough.
And yet.
The Practicum was an airy but windowless chamber with a gleaming black-and-white-tile floor. Down one wall, neatly labeled cabinets and drawers contained a bewildering array of materials, from the prosaic (table salt) to the volatile (mercury, hareheart). On the opposite side, glass cabinets displayed a variety of vessels (beakers, vials, cauldrons) and tools (mortar and pestle, droppers, tongs). The center of the room was dominated by a twenty-by-twenty platform with a chalkboard floor.
Rawlins sat on the edge of the platform, and the students gathered round. Once the pleasantries were out of the way, he began the speech he had delivered at the start of the term for more than a decade already. “We will have sixteen weekly sessions of this Practicum, along with two exams, midterm and final. Each Practicum will be devoted to a different advanced ritual.”
Rawlins paused. He knew the next words of his script by heart, but he was struck by the immediate realization that if he continued, the rest of the semester—and by extension, the rest of his career—would be utterly predictable. Predictability had been the goal for a long time…but suddenly it felt like death. He had been rendered a passenger on the ride of his own life.
He blinked and looked out at his students. “Today,” he said, “we’ll be starting with chronomancy.”
A ripple of interest coursed through the cohort. For years, his first Practicum of the semester had always been a sneaky little bit of numerology—fairly simple, but still impressive enough in its demonstration to leave the students excited for the semester. But today would be different.
He continued on, as though oblivious to his students’ murmurs and confused glances among themselves. “Manipulating time is considered an advanced practice but is in fact one of the moremathematically straightforward applications of arcane mechanicals. As long as your variables are carefully defined, the outcomes could not be more predictable. Now…” He opened the textbook to a lengthy treatise on the ritual of dilation. “Who will serve as our first Initiator?”
There was a long silence and an exchange of glances. Rawlins shook his head, irritated: “You’ll all go first eventually, so one of you might as well get it over with.”
