They both worked for a while after they ate, and slipped into bed at ten o’clock like an old married couple, reading side by side. She smiled at him before she turned off the light on her side, and gave him a kiss that was unmistakably an invitation to more. But he met her lips with a perfunctory peck and continued reading, while she rolled over on her side.
Rawlins tried to focus on his book but found himself increasinglyrestless, while Ellsbeth dozed peacefully beside him. He was familiar enough with the rhythms of his insomnia to know that staying in bed at this point was useless; he’d have to get up and try again later.
Downstairs, he got himself another drink and took it to the study, which had still not been cleaned up entirely from the obscuration ritual he and Ellsbeth had conducted the day of the ballet. Pleased to have a worthwhile but mindless task, he started putting away the elementals that had been left out, pushing drawers shut softly so the sound would not carry upstairs and wake Ellsbeth.
As he filed away the vial of yellowish silver iodide powder, he smiled at the memory of Ellsbeth’s brilliant idea, which had indeed worked out perfectly. But as he recalled the very ease with which it had come to her, he paused. Troubled. Literature on obscuration was all ancient and obtuse, with nothing about specific elementals. So how could she have known with such confidence that it would work in exactly the way she anticipated?
There was only one way: If she had already tried obscuration herself.
Rawlins looked around the study, remembering the afternoon he and Ellsbeth had done the obscuration ritual together here—her excitement to try it, her eagerness to see if it worked, the effortless intimacy between them that had lasted all night…and suddenly, he felt very much like a fool. Had she been pretending that whole time? When really, she had used obscuration before and knew perfectly well that it would work. The thrill of shared discovery had been a lie, a performance; he bristled at being so utterly condescendedto.
Of course, the fact that Ellsbeth was already using obscuration should not have been shocking, considering thathehad used it as well, and kept that fact secret from her. But he had a very specific purpose that justified what he did. A worthwhilereason.What could she possibly be using it for? Was she really just testing it out on a whim?
No, he realized with a certainty that hit him like a swallowed brick. She had wanted to pursue this line of inquiry since the beginning of the semester; it had been an outgrowth of her studies into writ magic. She had brought up the idea of studying obscuration so casually, but now he felt certain that it had always been her plan.
What could she have wanted that required obscuration, bending someone else’s mind to her will? He played through the timeline in his mind, trying to understand.
Ellsbeth had begun studying obscuration around November—the same time he had tried to put an end to their affair. They had agreed to “no feelings,” but then it had slid into…not just feelings but professions of love. And the night of the ballet…that was not just an illicit sexual game, but an outing, a properdate,and afterward he was left wondering if they could actually be together, have a relationship publicly.
He had changed his mind about her in a way that surprised even him—at the exact same time she was studying the magical manipulation of the human mind.
Were his thoughts about her really his own? Were thefeelingsthat caused them even real? Or were they the result of an obscuration ritual, implanting ideas and emotions into his brain so deeply that he would never suspect?
Suddenly every romantic thought he’d had for the last few weeks felt suspect. The way this felt so different, so unique, sounlike him.Was sheplayinghim? How could he ever possibly know?
His mind dove back in time to the one occasion he had been in love before—with Lennox. If he was honest with himself, it had never been truly reciprocal. She had always had all the power, a fact that was only revealed when the proverbial shit hit the fan, and he was left devastated and damaged while she sailed on smoothly with her life.
With Ellsbeth, it felt different. He was the older one, in the ostensible position of power. Shelikedbeing in the submissive role. And yet, despite that, their relationship felt uniquely egalitarian. In the last few weeks, as they had opened up to each other, it all felt soreal.But that was the horrible beauty of obscuration—if it was artfully practiced, the subject might never know they had been manipulated.
Rawlins walked out of the study. His breathing had become shallow as spiraling thoughts spiked his anxiety. He saw Ellsbeth’s backpack, discarded on the floor by the kitchen island. He could not help himself; he paused and knelt, tentatively probing a finger around inside it. He knew it was a violation of privacy, and hoped that he was just beingparanoid—but he froze when he noticed, at the bottom, a rolled-up cloth handkerchief.
Tentatively he took it out and opened it, as though pulling the petals from a flower, dread building in his chest as he revealed the secret at its center: a lump of compounding clay. Exactly like the one he had used on Greywall.
Heat flooded his body—a mix of fear that his worst suspicions might be true and anger, already building, at the very possibility that they were. The fact that she was using obscuration on her own was undeniable. The questions that assaulted his mind now were about whom she had used it on, and when, and how. Had she used it onhim? It was hard to believe she had not, and his stomach twisted with the sickening discovery that he could no longer trust her, or his own mind, at all.
He wrapped the compounding clay back into the handkerchief and returned it to her backpack, certain that he would not be sleeping tonight, and doubtful that he could ever share a bed with Ellsbeth again.
Ellsbeth
It had become a habit, glancing over at her phone as soon as her alarm went off and seeing a message from Rawlins. Usually it was just a simple good morning, but occasionally it was an article he knew she would like, or a very specific memory from the previous night he told her he’d relived in a dream. Ellsbeth was only slightly dismayed when she woke up that day to find nothing from him.
The morning after the Mary-Abigail incident, he had been cold and distracted, kissing her on the cheek before she left and mumbling something about a conference he needed to prepare for. That had been several days ago, and they hadn’t made any plans since. “I’m going to be tied up with this lecture,” Rawlins had said, not meeting her gaze. Ellsbeth had responded to his stiffness with stiffness in kind, refusing to be the one to initiate communication with him again.
On some level, she couldn’t blame him for pulling away after the disaster back in his office. It was a miracle, really, that she had still had the compounding clay in her backpack. She had frozen the moment she saw Mary-Abigail pale as a ghost in the doorway, but when the wash of adrenaline allowed her to move again, she had sprung into action.
“Mary-Abigail! Wait!” Ellsbeth called to her back.
Mary-Abigail didn’t stop walking. In fact, she slightly hastened her pace.
“Wait,” Ellsbeth called again. “Please. I just need to explain.”
Mercifully, she stopped, and Ellsbeth managed to cross the space between them. She caught her breath while unzipping her backpack. “Here,” she said. “Let me just show you something.” And then she had forced the compounding clay against the exposed inside of Mary-Abigail’s arm. The obscuration took effect like a shade being drawn over Mary-Abigail’s face. She told her to forget what she had seen, to go home, to forget that she had planned on seeing Professor Rawlins at all.
And then Ellsbeth had followed her out of the department building, and sat on a stone bench turned to ice in the December cold, and tried to remember to breathe.
When she had seen Mary-Abigail, instinct had taken over; she hadn’t even thought about what she was doing—her vision had narrowed, she had become an animal, clawing with whatever power she had to save herself, to save Rawlins. Ellsbeth looked at her chapped hands, cuticles pulled and raw. She had been squeezing the compounding clay; the undersides of her nails were bright red. Objectively, she knew what she had done was unforgivable. She had manipulated a girl’s brain, wiped out a piece of her memory.
But even worse than what Ellsbeth had done, there was a single terrible truth that settled in her brain like mold. It had been easy for her to use obscuration on Mary-Abigail. The truth was, it hadn’t felt like anything at all.
