“Something like that,” Sigrid said, rolling her eyes at Thomas.
“Well, listen, the application for the position at Chancellor Duhamel’s office is due next Friday. I don’t want to be a pain, but it’s a position in his office, like his actual office, and—”
As Annabel went on about the potential of collating the chancellor’s personal memos, lights began to dance at the corner of Sigrid’s vision, amorphous shining shapes that spun across Annabel’s face. They broke apart into tiny pinpoint stars, rotating in foreign constellations. Thomas’s magic worked this way sometimes, when he wanted to show Sigrid something beautiful, or when he couldn’t rein it in. The lights formed a halo around Annabel’s face, then broke apart to ring her neck.
Altering another witch’s sight or mind was reserved for sorcerer-level graduate students, spellcraft neither condoned nor achievable for almost anyone at university level. But Thomas had been showing Sigrid private magic since first year. She’d never told Annabel or anyone else; both she and Thomas had worked so hard to hide the extent of their powers. At times, Sigrid worried Thomas had hidden it too well. He was nearly invisible to their classmates and, besides her, hadn’t made any real friends. She wished it was possible to praise the beauty of his spellcraft and show him off to the world. But ultimately she did as she always had: kept the special parts of Thomas close, and secret, and safe.
The stars dissolved as Thomas rubbed at his eyes, yawning.
“Sig? Hello?” Annabel raised an eyebrow.
Sigrid blinked, clearing her mind. “Sorry.”
Annabel shook her head, smiling. “I think you hung with me there for about ten seconds. A record!” She nodded to the stack of papers behind Sigrid. “How’re your applications coming?”
“Oh, you know . . .” Sigrid held up the partially crumpled sheet. “Swimmingly.”
“Right,” Annabel said drily. “I’ll remember this moment when you get every position you apply for, per usual.” She backed away from the door. “Well, let me know when you get to it.” Annabel sauntered down the hall. Sigrid stood in the doorway, watching her.
“If you want evidence that magic is shrinking, look no further than Annabel Bates,” Thomas said. “She couldn’t conjure a sense of direction.”
Sigrid threw a pen at his head. “Cork it, you elitist hag.”
Thomas swatted the pen, sending it flying. It snagged a hanging mobile of tarot cards, sending the hand-painted figures spinning: empress, page of wands, fool, death. Sigrid moved to the bed, displacing pillows to sit beside Thomas, forcing their limbs together into a comfortable jumble. Magic had a particular warmth, a kind of glow that lingered after a series of spells had been cast. Thomas seemed to radiate that heat all the time. The khat leaf made him smell ever so slightly of licorice. Together those elements felt like home. Thomas was the only one who knew—really knew—what Sigrid was. At his side was the only place she could relax.
“The way you look at Annabel . . .” Thomas shook his head. “She’s the one making you think you want a boring normal life. But you’re Sigrid, the Viking queen.” He put an arm around Sigrid’s shoulders and pulled her in. “You’re destined for something more. You could be a legend.”
She knew Thomas meant to be reassuring, but Sigrid wasn’t sure whether a destiny like that was a blessing or a curse. She watched the tarot mobile slow. The last shaft of sunlight illuminated the tower card, a portent of change, on which two medieval figures plummeted to their deaths.
The tea in the Pendle Hill fourth-year clubroom was always weak and a little too cold, its scattered couches so worn they felt like sacks stuffed with hay. But its makeshift library was a sanctuary, with books packed two-deep on gently sagging shelves and stacked in leather-bound stalagmites. Thomas had read them all so Sigrid felt she had, too. He’d begun reorganizing the collection using a mix of the Dewey decimal system, alphabetical order, and unknowable whimsy.
Thomas was stretched over the room’s sole table, piles of open books before him. At his elbow was a legal pad jammed with frenetic scribbling. His feet were tucked under the chair, half fallen out of cheap loafers that had begun to fray, clinging desperately to peeling soles. Sigrid wanted badly to reach down and tuck his ankles back in.
At the click of her approaching heels, Thomas looked up. He gave her outfit a once-over. “Looking positively witchy.”
Sigrid wore huge sunglasses and a ratty tweed overcoat purchased at the estate sale of a rich, eccentric crone. “Cadaverous was how one man on the street described it.”
His smile was luminescent. “Yes. That’s it exactly.”
Sigrid tripped on one of the books piled at Thomas’s feet and stopped in her tracks. Gingerly, as though handling an ancient artifact, she picked up the navy hardcover. She held a gasp in her throat.
The book was so familiar to Sigrid, she could have drawn its cover from memory: a gold foil outline of Scotland’s northern coast, with a giant X floating in the far northeastern sea, just past the last island.
“Where did you get this?” Sigrid asked.
“Which?” Thomas looked up. “Ah. Rummage sale. Felt old in all the right ways. Why? What is it?”
“It’s Unnatural Troubles,” Sigrid said. “A biography of Alice Gray. I had this exact book as a kid—read it so many times I about had it memorized . . .”
“Alice Gray?”
She raised an eyebrow at Thomas’s confused look. “Of the Hether Blether expedition?”
He shook his head.
“Seriously?” Sigrid removed a stack of volumes from the other chair and sat on the edge, clutching the book in her lap. “Oh, but you’ll love this story,” she said. “I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it. That’s what you get for being born a Yank.” She cleared her throat, relishing the moment.
“It was about twenty years ago, right after McClatchkey introduced his theory of magical scarcity,” Sigrid began. “Alice was attending Pendle Hill at the time. She was an incredible witch, top of her class, had a position with the International Chamber lined up—the works. When the McClatchkey study proved that magic was a static resource being stretched disproportionately over a bloating population, everything was chaos. It was the end times—countries were hoarding magic, charlatans claimed they could create more.”
“This part I know,” Thomas said.