Page 81 of A Tower of Half-Truths
He turned to her again. From the top step, Mavery peered down at him with a heavy brow.
“I’ve been meaning to ask…” She took a deep breath. “You’ve kept me around despite knowing about my past, despite knowing why I sought you out in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it, but I’ve been wondering…why?”
Alain hesitated, recalling the words she’d spoken shortly after reviving him. In the days since, he’d replayed those words countless times:
I decided you were worth more to me than any potential score.
“Because, in the end, you choseme,” he said. “That alone means more than you could ever realize.”
She opened her mouth but seemed unable to speak—a sensation he knew too well. Before his own emotions got the better of him, he turned around.
“Good night, Mavery,” he said over his shoulder, then climbed into the carriage. As the vehicle pulled away from the curb, he hazarded a glance out the window, but she was now too distant for him to make out her expression. The driver’s clicking tongue cut through the clacking hooves and rattling wheels.
“You should’ve kissed her back there,” he said.
Alain wanted to tell the driver that, while a not-so-small part of him was in complete agreement, he couldn’t cross that particular line. He knew all too well that nothing good would come of it.
Furthermore, he wanted to scold the driver for eavesdropping on a private conversation. And in addition tothat, he hadn’t asked anyone for romantic advice—especially not someone who looked young enough to be one of Alain’s first-year students.
But instead of articulating any of that, he shut the window between his and the driver’s seats. He spent the rest of the trip home stewing over his thoughts in silence.
Twenty-Five
“This can’t be everything,” Mavery said.
Tristan, the arcanist on duty, had taken her to a corner of the University of Leyport’s library that received few visitors, judging by the thick dust and cobwebs. The Sensing “section” comprised a single shelf, and from her thorough cataloging of Alain’s library, she already knew many of these titles.
“You’re telling me, out of a hundred thousand books, these are the only ones about Sensing?”
“I’m afraid so, Ms. Culwich,” Tristan said. He was a lanky man with shoulder-length hair that had gone completely white. His clean-shaven face was a rare sight among the men on campus. “These are the only books on arcane hypersensitivity that have been deemed fit for scholarly research.”
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know whatthatwas supposed to imply.
“Do you have any books by Enodus the Second?” she asked. “And Deventhal the…sorry, I can’t remember which number he was. Whoever was the most recent—and a Senser.”
“I can find that out easily enough.” Tristan jotted down something in his notebook. “I should return within half an hour, if you don’t mind waiting.”
“That’s fine.” If it came down to it, she would spend the whole day here.
After Tristan stepped away, she pulled the unfamiliar books from the shelf, then carried them to the bench in front of the nearby window. Several stories below, people lounged about on the verdant quad as they took advantage of the warm afternoon. Most of them appeared to be students, though Mavery spotted the occasional black robe hurrying between the towers. Part of her yearned to be out there, rather than in the dustiest corner of the library, but she had work to do.
She turned her attention to the book on the top of her stack. Its spine emitted a worrying crack as she opened it, and a cloud of dust particles danced in the beams of sunlight. Coughing, she began reading the introduction.
The first occurrence of arcane hypersensitivity is widely disputed, but historians agree that the terminology itself was first coined in a letter written by an unknown healer from the former Kingdom of Selona, now part of the Dauphinian Empire, in the year 452 of the Modern Era…
The rest of the paragraph was equally dry, and it became a blur as her attention wandered back to last night. She flexed her fingers at the memory of grasping Alain’s hand. Her face warmed as she recalled how, instead of pushing her away, he’d laced his fingers with hers until the final applause. A pleasant chill ran through her as she remembered him asking about her romantic interests, and how he’d understood her answer in the way few others had. And then there had been that brief moment, after walking her to her front door, when she’d thought he would kiss her—and the disappointment she’d felt when he hadn’t.
And why did you expect anything else?
Of course he hadn’t. The man cared about following protocols and upholding decorum. Yet, between that moment last night and the look she’d seen in his eyes on the night of his resurrection, there wasa part of him thatdidn’tcare about those things. As for whether he would allow that part of himself to take the lead…
Mavery looked up from the book and let loose a groan that echoed through the room. Somewhere in the distance, a voice responded with an indignant,“Shh!”
She was here to learn everything she could about Sensing. Yet, her eyes had scanned the opening paragraph at least three times, and she hadn’t absorbed a single word. She pushed aside the less important thoughts—she could revisit those later—and forced herself to focus on reading.
As Kazamin had once said, some wizards viewed Sensing as pseudoscience. The wizard who had penned this book was among that crowd: his thesis was that all arcane hypersensitivity research was based on flawed methods. He would spend the next five hundred pages defending that claim. A waste of good paper, in Mavery’s opinion. Not bothering to finish the introductory chapter, she set the book aside.
The rest of the books proved equally unhelpful. If they didn’t seek to debunk Sensing’s existence, they sought to trivialize its usefulness or overstate its dangers. While Mavery didn’t love the side effects of her condition, she had never felt they werelife-threatening, as some of these scholars implied. One scholar even argued that Sensers were possessed by demons, his primary evidence being a small sect of Sensers who claimed to communicate with them. Mavery was tempted to toss that particular book out the window.
