Page 17 of Liminal

He taps the large case by his side, then lifts it onto the table at the front.

Frowning, because I hadn’t realised that would be an issue, I consider for the hundredth time updating the Arcanaeum. I’ve been resisting because the building itself has never seemed keen, and because my presence tends to fry the devices patrons have brought in.

I didn’t hesitate to bring in proper indoor plumbing. Perhaps I’m becoming obdurate in my old age.

By the time I come back to myself again, the magister has finished setting up a dusty lantern projector and the first students have begun trickling in.

“Boss!”

Oh no. He’s in this class, too?

“Mr Winthrop,” I acknowledge him, pre-emptively ghosting away to avoid the first hug of the day. “Perhaps Magister Hopkinson will be able to teach you the art of silence in these classes.”

He grins so widely that those deadly dimples make an appearance, and I swear the girl under his arm swoons a little.

“North, over here!” Lambert calls across the room, apparently physically incapable of lowering his voice. “Boss lady is sitting in on the snooze-fest. We might actually learn something.”

“You might learn something if you looked at the board, rather than down Miss Talcott’s shirt,” Magister Hopkinson calls, unfazed by Lambert’s casual disdain for learning. “Now, everyone, get settled, and do try not to get us banned.”

My fingers twitch, and I want nothing more than to give Lambert a strike for his constant yelling, but I refrain. Selfishly, I want to at least experience one class before I banish them all and go back to my quiet life.

Lambert claims a cushion as close to my chair as possible, making me groan, and North takes one on the other side of the table before the—admittedly very pretty—Talcott girl can sit down. She looks at her beau, as if expecting him to object, but he just shrugs.

“Sorry, sweet. Bros before ho’s.”

“Mr Winthrop, that’s a strike for sexist language,” I hiss, his blank card in my hand once more.

The Talcott girl offers me a small smile. “Sisters before misters, huh, Librarian?”

“Hey, you have to give her a strike now,” Lambert protests. “That was sexist too.”

Growling, I allow his card to dissipate, unblemished, as Miss Talcott finds a different table. “Mr Winthrop?—”

“Okay, okay, I think we’re all set up now!” Hopkinson calls from the middle of the room, where his projector is beaming a steady square of light onto the wall.

I quickly turn the paint white, clearing up the image, and he nods his thanks. While I was busy scolding Lambert, the rest of the class has arrived. Arcanists generally attend the University of Arcane Arts after completing study at an inept university, alongside their own private magical tutelage. So the classes can be fairly diverse in age, but it’s rare to see anyone younger than their early twenties in the Arcanaeum, and this is no exception.

Still, they seem young to me. Perhaps having them sit on cushions was a mistake. Not that desks would make them appear older but surely it couldn’t hurt.

Then, at the very last second before the clock on the wall strikes ten, Galileo slides in, claiming an armchair in the back-most corner without anyone noticing. Is he in this class, too? All three of them in one place, so soon after they left together to plot magic-knows-what?

If I still had skin, it would be crawling. As it is, I level them all with a suspicious glare.

“Now, for the first ever lesson permitted inside the Arcanaeum, I thought we could begin with a history of the building.” Hopkinson slips the first slide into place, and I smile softly at a familiar painting.

“No one has seen the building from outside for centuries, but this is the last painting we have of it as part of the university, dated 1502. Five years later, the building disappeared, and was only rediscovered almost a decade after that, when Thomas McKinley—a divinator who had spent years searching for the building—sarcastically knocked on a door and spoke the incantation ‘ad Arcanaeum’.”

He looks at me as if he’s waiting for me to add something.

I shrug. “I was just as surprised as he was.”

Thomas was a liminal bastard who’d been claimed by the Magister McKinley when he failed to produce a true-born adept heir. His admission was a terrifying thing, and the process was messy as we both tried to figure out what was happening. I don’t think even the Arcanaeum itself knew what was going on.

“Since then, the Arcanaeum has judged patrons and admitted those with the strongest magical lineage?—”

I frown and interrupt, “That’s not the criteria at all, or you yourself wouldn’t have been admitted.”

His own bloodline is one of my favourites because its members tended to eschew the entrenched notion of adept purity, but he’s weak—despite having scraped a pass mark in divination to acquire his title. That’s why he teaches the earlier years, and not the more advanced schools of magic.