Strictly speaking, the Practicum wasoff limits to all but the graduate students of the College of the Arcane Arts. But the entryway, an airy rotunda inlaid with mosaic tiles, was open to the public—it was a frequent stop on tours of wide-eyed high school students applying to the university, easily awed by the centuries-old architecture designed as a celebration of Greek and Roman philosophical ideals.
Still, as Ellsbeth stood there, chilled by the marble, she felt conscious of her intrusion. She could hear voices from inside: a chronomancy ritual, she guessed, based on the rhythmic chanting of one ofthe students, who, even muffled by the door, Ellsbeth could tell was pronouncing the phrases with an accent so exaggeratedly perfect it verged on smug.
Ellsbeth waited. The Practicum would end soon enough, and she would get her chance to talk to Professor Rawlins face-to-face. She straightened her sweater and flattened the back of her hair with her hand. She reapplied her lip gloss. And then she waited some more, pacing the tiled floor and reading and rereading the motto carved into the marble in the archway above the door to the Practicum:Hic, Fides Et Ratio Ambo Vincunt.Here, Both Faith and Reason Prevail.
Finally, she heard the energy in the room let out: the sound of books being gathered, bags being zipped. But then she heard Rawlins’s voice, and Ellsbeth pressed her ear to the seam of the wooden door to try to make out his words:“Would anyone like to try being theobjectof the ritual?”
Ellsbeth almost had to stifle a laugh. It was illegal—everyone who had taken a middle school arcane mechanicals class knew that. She heard Professor Rawlins commend whichever of the cohort students pointed that out, but Ellsbeth identified something unmistakable in his tone: disappointment. Hewantedto try the induction. But more than that: He wanted someone who was willing to try the induction with him. She was right about him.
A few seconds later, Ellsbeth pulled away from the door just before it swung open and the graduate students filed out from beneath the archway. A few of them shot Ellsbeth sidelong glances as they passed. She straightened her back and tightened her grip on the two cups of tea she held in her hands, steam still inexplicably pulling itself from the narrow openings in their lids. Finally, when all of the students had exited, Professor Rawlins emerged from the Practicum, closing the heavy wooden doors behind him and locking them with a large metal key.
“Professor,” Ellsbeth said before he finished turning around. “I’m Ellsbeth Storer. I emailed. You missed our appointment to meet for tea, and so I brought some to you. I have Earl Grey and jasmine. Whichever you prefer.”
He was taller than Ellsbeth had realized, with lean shouldershunched beneath a well-fitted blazer and long, aristocratic legs. He turned, and Ellsbeth saw, for the first time, just how startling the blue of his eyes was.
Rawlins blinked. “Ms. Storer.” He eyed the cups as if they might be poisoned. “Seeing as we had not formally agreed to meet, this is less of an accommodation and more of an ambush.” He deposited the Practicum’s metal key snugly into the pocket of his blazer. “And I dislike tea.”
Without hesitating, Ellsbeth took a sip from one of the cups.
Rawlins inhaled through his nose: “The Practicum is restricted except to those admitted to the program.” Ellsbeth thought she heard his voice catch with a mocking lilt on the word “admitted.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “Were you listening in at the door?”
“No,” Ellsbeth said. “Of course not.”
He took a step closer to her and allowed his height to loom. He was close enough for Ellsbeth to smell his aftershave, woodsy and tannic. “Auditing an undergraduate lecture is one thing. The content of a graduate-level Practicum, that is…”
“I’m not here to eavesdrop,” Ellsbeth said. “I’m here because I want to do meaningful research. And because this is where Ibelong.”
“Your Arcanus score—or rather, the lack thereof—tells a different story,” he replied, and he strode past Ellsbeth, out of the entryway rotunda.
Ellsbeth followed through the breezeway and onto the green, trying to match the pace Rawlins managed with his long legs. His speed increased as he approached the department building; Ellsbeth sensed he was looking forward to sealing himself behind his office door. “I’d like totell you what happened,” she said, to his back.“If you’ll justlisten.If you’re not soclosed-mindedthat you can’t consider the possibility that—”
“That what?” Rawlins said, stopping suddenly in front of the bronze statue of Gregory Hale, a railroad magnate who donated enough in the nineteenth century to fund half the buildings in the College of the Arcane Arts. “That yourfeelingsabout what youdeserveare more important than therulesof this institution?”
“No,” Ellsbeth said. “No, that’s not it at all. If we could maybe go to your office—”
Rawlins shifted his weight slightly. Perhaps he sensed thatindulging Ellsbeth might be less trouble than the alternative. “If you have something you feel the need to say to me,” he said stiffly, “you may do so here.”
“Fine,” Ellsbeth said. “It’s about my sister.”
Though she had planned exactly what she wanted to say to him for weeks, thought about the words and how they would feel in her mouth, now that she was standing in front of him, Ellsbeth felt shockingly naked, exposed, and vulnerable. She sat on a bench and cleared her throat, inviting Rawlins to sit beside her. Mercifully, he did. She placed the two cups of tea at her side.
“Okay,” she said. “It was January twelfth. My Arcanus. Obviously, I had prepared, and it was going—forgive me—very, very well. But—” She paused and sucked in, trying to pull courage out of the air. “Then came the augury portion. It was—”
“Scrying,” he said. It was a ritual in which an arcanist could conjure an image in a shallow basin of water. Though theoretical arcanists had proven that foretelling the future should be mathematically possible, it had yet to ever actually be achieved in practice. That the ritual was still called scrying was a quirk of academic convention; the image was always, stubbornly, a scene happening somewhere concurrently, in the present.
“I’ve always been very good at scrying. And the ritual worked. I saw my sister.” Ellsbeth looked at her skirt then. “She was…in the bathtub. And there was so muchblood.” Ellsbeth could feel Rawlins stiffen next to her, but she tried to continue on, forcing out the words. “My younger sister. She was still breathing—I thought she was, at least. I had to go tell someone. I had to call someone. I had to try and save her.”
Finally, Ellsbeth allowed her eyes to meet his. Light blue and unblinking, narrowed with something that might be concern or pity as he nodded absently. Ellsbeth knew that expression well. It was the one that happened when she gave an account of Bertie’s death that rang a bell in someone’s memory—that poor girl who killed herself, the tragedy whose details they had forgotten. But Rawlins didn’t say anything, so Ellsbeth kept talking. “It was a choice between my future…and my sister’s life. I had been selfish enough. I went to school overseas. Left her alone. She was a student here, actually. Undergraduate. Shehad just finished her first semester. It was there—” She tilted her head toward the south end of campus. “In the Perkins bathroom. Her name was Bertie. Roberta, but I always called her Bertie. She didn’t make it. Suicide.” She wiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “Or they said it was suicide, I guess.”
When Rawlins finally spoke, his voice was low and neutral. “I am sorry,” he said. “I understand that must have been difficult to see.” He cleared his throat, ineffectually, unnecessarily. “But it sounds like you made your choice. And personal tragedy is not a qualifier for admission into a graduate studies program.”
It took Ellsbeth a moment to register what he was saying. She felt her eyes prickle with tears, and for a moment she was afraid she was going to begin crying. But then fury rose to the surface in the form of a tiny laugh of disbelief. “I’m not asking to be let into the program out of pity. Look at my records. Look at my examination scores. Test me! Try me! Ask me a question—any ritual, any initiation.” She rose to her feet. Rawlins remained sitting. “I belong in this department and I would have been here—or at Cambridge, or at Yale, or at Persky—if I had finished my Arcanus.”
Rawlins didn’t remove his gaze from the patch of grass between his feet.
“The graduate student cohort was selected months ago,” he said. “I don’t allow late admissions.” His voice sounded very far away.
“So you won’t even consider allowing me into the program,” she said. A statement not a question.
