Page 207 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“I resent that. Is that what you think of me? That I’m some sort of chauvinist?”
I chuckled. “No. I just know how upset you get when I challenge you. I can’t imagine how you would have dealt with a female instructor whose job it is to correct you for an entire year. I just know how much you love to be wrong, how it gets under your skin.”
All of a sudden I found us standing in the middle of the doorway to the loathed hall, our noses so close they were nearly touching. I was close enough that I could smell all of the things that made him unique—the wild scent of freshly fallen rain lingering in a forest melded with the more subtle scents of the ink, paper, and just a hint of blood to remind me of just how feral he really was under the glasses and corduroy jackets.
I inhaled and closed my eyes.
“I do know how to get underyourskin, don’t I?” Jonathan murmured, though it was more a growl than a whisper.
“You’re not touching me,” I replied, my own voice a deep hum. “You have no idea what’s going through my mind right now. I could be remembering every scene fromAnnie Hall. I could be imagining Woody Allen’s bad hair.”
I opened my eyes to find such a peculiar expression on Jonathan’s face—frustration mixed with a strange combination of desire, longing, and respect. His fingers lifted and hovered over my cheek. Just as they grazed beneath my eyes, his thoughts filtered through.
Just ask what you really want to know, Cass.
I blinked at him, but his eyes held mine fast.
I swallowed as his hand fell away. “I wanted to know…what was your easiest year?”
It was a copout. But I wasn’t ready. Not yet.
He sighed. “Latin, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?” I had taken enough Latin to know that even though it was rife with cognates to the rest of the major languages in Western Europe, it was certainly not an easy language to learn. Not to mention that as a dead language, its proper pronunciation was all but lost, which seemed to be an important element of spellwork.
He lifted one shoulder in a particularly Gallic gesture. “Well, it’s effectively my first language. I grew up speaking Ladin.”
“How can you grow up speaking Latin? It’s been a dead language for nearly five hundred years. Did you leave something out about your birth date?”
“No, La-Din,” he corrected me, overpronouncing the “d.” “It’s a form of vulgar Latin, spoken where I was born. Not quite the same as classical, but close enough that I had an edge.”
Something was bothering me. “How can they teach an immersion-based curriculum using a dead language? Did your instructors just make up the pronunciation as they went?”
“Some of the instructors here are very old, though they might not look it. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that a few of them lived as monks and priests. There are some in this building who have lived for more than fifteen hundred years.”
Well, that was one good thing about being dragged here. No matter what happened with the Council, the possibilities open to me as a fae scholar of Celtic antiquity were legitimately exciting.
A hand found mine again, and Jonathan pulled me back to face him.You’re distracting yourself with this talk.
I didn’t deny it. I didn’t need to.
Just ask, he thought.Whatever you really want to know, just bloody ask me.
Why were you afraid to tell the Council that we’re mates?The thoughts burst from my mind like a wave, and Jonathan flinched as if he had been doused with cold water.What is it you’re afraid of? Death?
We both knew the eventual consequences. Caitlin had as much told us we were doomed if we gave into this supernatural connection.
Not mine.
And yet, fear turned to terror too chaotic for conscious thoughts. His mouth opened like he was going to say something out loud. But before he could, the doors to the administrative entrance opened with a bang that echoed through the gallery.
“The seeress may come with me,” Celine called. “The Council will see her now.”
57
THE COUNCIL OF THE MAGI
Your ancestors were placed there not to be lords over the people, but to settle and plant the country, and you are still among the people whom you have neither conciliated nor subdued.
