Page 10 of A Tower of Half-Truths

Five

He pressed his forehead to the closed door. He was exhausted in a way he could scarcely remember feeling. His mind reeled, his hand ached from that bout of frenzied writing. His throat was raw from speaking the most he’d spoken to another person in…gods, he couldn’t even remember how long.

His conversation with Mave had been far from a perfect example of human communication. But it had gone better than he would have anticipated, had he anticipated anything of interest happening today—a visitor, least of all.

Upon hearing the knock at his door, he’d wondered whether he would find one of the Elder Wizards of the High Council, if not the Archmage himself, standing on the other side of it.

Instead, he’d found a woman with striking green eyes and an air of quiet determination about her.

At first, he’d assumed he’d been on the receiving end of another of Declan’s pranks; his colleague would be the type to use an attractive woman to lure a reclusive wizard from his cave. But Mave was just an ordinary mage.

No, “ordinary” was doing her a disservice. She’d managed to bypass his wards long enough to knock. No one, not even anyone from the University, had managed that over these past months.

Without the wards in place, the air was eerily still. There was no familiar, steady rhythm of magic—a sensation so subtle, it was detectable only by spending years learning to attune oneself to it. Or, by nature of being a Senser, like the woman who had just exited his apartment.

The woman he had just hired.

He considered throwing open the door, running down the corridor, stopping her before she reached the lift.

He’d apologize profusely for his momentary lapse in judgment, but he had no business taking on a new assistant.

Though she claimed to have no intention of becoming a wizard, he was certain he would find some other way to fail her, just as he’d failed all the others before her.

He wasn’t ready for this. Definitely not now, and potentially never again.

But it was likely too late to catch up with her now.

He turned away from the door and returned to his armchair. With shaking hands, he seized his teacup and drained it. The liquid had gone cold, but it calmed his nerves enough to allow him to think practically about what had just transpired.

Mave Reynard—if that was actually her family name—was more than a talented Gardemancer. She was a Senser. He couldn’t pass up an opportunity that had so serendipitously arrived at his doorstep. She would return on Onisday, and today was…

For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. Before she returned, he would need to reacquaint himself with a calendar.

He picked up his notebook and skimmed the notes he’d recorded during their interview. The end result of his hastiness was dreadful penmanship accented with inkblots, but he couldn’t blame himself for being excited. This was the first spark of inspiration he’d had in ages. Not since—

Gods, no. Of all the things to dwell on, don’t dwell on that.

He instead forced himself to refocus on his notes. When he reached the final unfinished sentence, he let loose a sigh of…satisfaction? Relief?

Mave’s testimony aligned with everything he already knew about arcane hypersensitivity—a subject that had long fascinated him, if only because the body of literature on it was so sparse.

Most scholars approached Mave’s condition with a heaping dose of skepticism, as they tended to do with anything that didn’t fit neatly into one of the eight Schools of Magic.

But where others saw anomalies, he saw possibilities.

Already, ideas were beginning to form. They would either lead to the break his career needed—or the final nail in its coffin. Regarding the latter, he doubted it was possible to tarnish his reputation in the wizarding community any further.

And so, with nothing left to lose, he would give this new assistant a chance, see where his ideas led.

He would have started his research right then and there, had he any clue where he’d left his books on Sensing.

He looked around the room and sighed again.

This time, it was out of frustration with himself.

He’d grown so used to living in these conditions, he’d forgotten how dire he’d allowed them to become.

Months ago, he’d attempted to tidy up the place.

But no matter how hard he tried, it seemed the piles always continued to multiply, the dust always continued to thicken.

At some point, he’d decided it was easier to simply live with the mess than to attempt to mitigate it.

Even if Mave stayed in his employ for only a week, she was bound to make more progress than he’d done in nearly a year.

But he had a more pressing matter to attend to: he had to put an end to those blasted newspaper ads.

He ripped a blank page from his notebook, then found his spare pen at last. It had been with him all this time, lodged between the cushions of his armchair.

He spared a single laugh at his own foolishness, then set to work.

He was halfway through writing his letter when he realized he’d never given Mave his name.