Page 32 of The Deadliest Candidate (The Last Grand Archivist #1)
Chapter thirty-two
The Truth
Despite her late start to the morning, it was almost midday when Lautric joined Fern in the Invocation Wing, a leather folder wedged under one arm.
She cast him a quick glance. He wore a large rust-brown sweater over plain black trousers and a white shirt, one half of the collar peeking out. He must have used some sort of salve because both the bruising around his eyes and the cut on his mouth had healed inordinately fast, a pink line crossing the bloom of his lips.
“Are we… are we deciding our Invocation type today?” he asked as he sat down, speaking almost sluggishly, as if struggling to remember what he was trying to say.
He looked as exhausted as Fern herself felt. He smelled of coffee and sugar.
Fern was torn between two warring emotions. Sympathy for Lautric, who appeared overwhelmed and troubled, understandably so after the previous night’s events, but also impatience. If she could force herself to set aside all her tiredness and anxiety and questions to focus on their assignment, why could he not?
She thought of his low score in the past assignment, and worry prickled through her, sharp and unpleasant.
“Did you have a look at the notes I left in your tray yesterday?” she asked.
“Mm…” He hesitated, casting her a sidelong glance before rifling through his leather folder. “Yes.”
A blatant lie. Fern looked at him in disbelief. “You didn’t even look at the notes? The bibliography? Did you find any of the books I recommended?”
Lautric sighed. “I am content to defer to your opinions in this case.”
Oh, he was, was he?
Their companionship of the previous night, their tenuous, delicate alliance, was snapped like a silk thread under too much tension. Fern was reminded of who he really was, all the arrogance and entitlement of his house crashing down upon her.
“You’re a scholar of Transgressive Invocation,” she said. “You’re not going to push for us to focus on it?”
Lautric tilted his head. “Is it the most powerful form of Invocation?”
Fern narrowed her eyes. “I don’t know, Mr Lautric, is it? Why don’t you tell me.”
“I’m not sure.” He rubbed his hand across his face, long, slim fingers digging into the skin around his eyes. He rifled through his papers, the disarrayed chaos of them. “Was it in the notes you gave me? I can’t remember.”
Fern stared at him. It was clear he was exhausted, but more than that, he seemed foggy headed, as though he was genuinely trying to remember things that had happened only the previous day. Fern knew it had been a long night for both of them, but even in her exhausted state she could remember yesterday’s events.
“Why don’t we go through the notes now?” she said, suppressing a sigh of frustration. There was no use being angry, they had too much to do to waste time on confrontation.
Lautric nodded. “Yes.”
She pulled out her notebook, reading through the notes she had made and her observations based on what reading she had managed to fit in. Lautric sat at her side, slumped against the surface of his desk, cheek resting in one palm. He listened, watching her as she read. His gaze was direct, and quite unabashed, eyes moving slowly from her eyes to her hair, to her cheeks, lingering on her mouth.
Fern read on, refusing to be set off-course and let his distraction infect her concentration. When she was done, she lay the notes firmly down, clicking the cap off her pen.
“In short, we have to consider Transgressive Invocation, Summoning, and both Conjuration and Banishment. We could probably set aside Occlusion and Warding as the most commonplace of the Invocations.” She paused, waited, then prompted, “Well? What do you think?”
Lautric’s eyes moved reluctantly back up from where they’d been lingering on her mouth as she spoke. He tapped his pen to chin, thinking for a moment.
“Summoning or Conjuration, surely,” he said. “Oldest and grander in scale. No? ”
“Oldest, yes. Grander in scale—yes, the Divine and Elemental summons are some of the most impressive spells known to us. But are they the most powerful ? Necromancy, too, is old, and death magic can be far more powerful than elemental magic.”
Lautric shook his head. “Transgressive Invocation is a risk, and necromantic incantations are complex and cunning. They’re true Sumbral spells, designed to lead their casters into error. Not to mention illegal. Besides, we’re going to have to perform our chosen spell during our assignment. I’ve no desire to defile the dead for the sake of a job interview—do you?”
Fern had not expected such scruples from him. She wanted to challenge him, to ask, why study Transgressive Invocation if you never intended to get your hands dirty with dark magic?
But it would not get them closer to a decision, and besides, Fern also had no desire to defile the dead, even for a role she’d coveted for so long.
“Very well,” she said. “Summoning or Conjuration, then. We’ll need to choose between the two and justify our choices, so I think we should start with some of the seminal works. Allencourt and Gibson’s Book of Summoning , maybe Paulina Lire’s Encyclopaedia of High Summons , Amwan and Choris’s History of Conjuration ?”
Lautric, having whipped out the small notepad from his pocket, dutifully scribbled down the names she had just mentioned. Fern paused, awaiting his response. He looked at her with polite curiosity.
“Well?” she prompted.
“Well… yes, let’s look at those. ”
“Any suggestions of texts to add to the list?”
“Not particularly.”
Fern narrowed her eyes. “Have you actually read any of those texts?”
Lautric shook his head. “No. I will.”
“But you studied Transgressive Invocation. Didn’t you say you have a doctorate? You must have done detailed research, read extensively?”
Or had his powerful father bought his prestigious education, his intimidating doctorate?
Lautric gazed at Fern in silence for a moment. His face was soft in the pale gold of the lamps, framed by the gilded marble of the arched bookshelf behind him as though he were a painting. There were emotions in his brown eyes that Fern could not fathom, like an unmapped constellation.
When he finally spoke, his voice was calm, his gaze intent.
“My life before I came here was… complicated. There are things I wish I could tell you, but I cannot. I have no desire to lie to you, Fern, so I will simply have to withhold the truth for now.”
Fern blinked, staring at him, speechless. She had not expected this at all, this frank admittance that he was not being truthful. Did he hope that by acknowledging his secrets, he would make her feel like his equal? All he had revealed was that he was woefully unprepared for this assignment.
Baudet’s words echoed in her mind, the furious insult he’d spat into Lautric’s face.
You vile, manipulative wretch .
“What a blessing and a curse it must be,” Fern said, incapable of withholding the scorn now dripping into her voice, “to be a Lautric. To be handed everything you want because of your name, and yet know deep down how undeserving you are of it all.”
He was utterly silent for a moment, and then he leaned forward, closing the space between them. Fern caught her breath, not fearful, but nervous. Lautric stopped with his face inches from hers; there was neither anger nor resentment in his expression.
“Here is a truth I can share with you: everything I want is beyond my reach. No matter how far I am willing to go, no matter how much I’m willing to sacrifice.”
Fern said nothing, her throat a dark, tight passage, a tomb for the words she had just spoken. Lautric smiled, a peculiarly melancholy smile.
“Everything in my life is just like you, Fern. Seemingly, painfully close, yet quite unattainable.”
His words, as though he had murmured an incantation, seemed to transmute the space between them. The distance between their bodies became hot and compressed, and the silence that lingered after he spoke grew velvety, lingering, a moonlit cemetery of unspoken things.
Fern hardly moved, hardly breathed. Lautric leaned a fraction closer, and she thought—she feared—that he was about to kiss her again, like he had done the previous night, his tenderness a surer weapon than any dagger.
Instead, he picked up the piece of paper bearing the bibliography Fern had drafted before, stood, and walked away without another word.