Page 24 of The Alchemists

“Leper Lily.” Conrad’s face wrenched into something ugly that Seb had seen plenty of times but previously chosen to ignore. “Rotten fucking luck.”

He didn’t respond. Words weren’t safe around him. The gash was reopened and now he could betray himself just as easily as Conrad had. Inside his neck his pulse thudded, and he clutched the ring in his pocket with suddenly clammy fingers.

Conrad was one of those people who hated, truly hated, the half-magic girl. Seb hadn’t given much thought to it before; had given the whole sordid matter a wide berth, the way his mother had always instructed with distasteful or uncomfortable things. Now, though, having seen the real Conrad, or at least a different Conrad than he thought he’d known, he understood—she was a threat.

Sitting with his back against the tree made Seb vulnerable. He wanted to stand, square off against Conrad as if he were a Cantrèa opponent, but he didn’t trust his legs to hold him. He tipped his head back against the bark instead, looking for another point of solidity, projecting an air of carelessness.

“What do you want?”

His Words rushed through his head, streaming together in a desperate torrent, I call the phantoms of a thousand hours; Each from his voiceless grave…He imagined himself as a stream, flowing with swift purpose, dark with leaf tannins, reflecting its environment and belying nothing of the dangers below. Magic pulled together, thickly, in his chest. Its richness settled on his tongue, flooding him with sudden warmth.

“Came to check on a friend. We said we would still be friends.” His voice, if anything, sounded hurt.

Conrad’s sculpted face looked the same as it always did, his blue eyes as soft as a cotton sky, which was the thing that threw Seb the most. It was the question that had kept him up night after night all summer, as larch pollen wafted through the windows and settled on his hard bed, making his throat ache in the morning. It was the question he’d run ragged as he clutched the windowsill, staring at a sliver of the Oracle’s Moon in the pink-tinged August half-night as he turned twenty-two alone, once the midnight sun had passed.

Does he mean it? Does he know?

The answer, of course, was unknowable, at least without illegal spellwork that was decidedly not in his wheelhouse. There was simply no way—magical or otherwise—to know, so he’d sent it, and that part of himself, up in fire in a stone ring in the middle of the boreal forest.

Seb pushed himself up and walked away.

LILY

The sunset speared through the leaded glass windows, carving a sharp path across her book, illuminating the words “The process of Solutio is often depicted as a drowning.” She felt like she was drowning now, or at least getting swept away in a current she had no hope of fighting against. Was she supposed to let it subsume her, or was she supposed to keep kicking, trying to keep her head above water?

She shut the book, pressing her cheek against the cool glass, and looked down onto the library roof and the wide granite steps, the lawn beyond shaded by an ancient, spreading sycamore. One of the squat roof-spout gargoyles, the one she called Ned, looked particularly grim today. His face was twisted up in either mockery or shock—she wasn’t sure which.

This incomprehensible room was her favorite of many hiding places on campus. Growing up so close to Windermere, she’d spent hours by herself after Ætheric Study School lessons on the weekends, discovering the hidden world beneath and behind Windermere’s brick and ivory façade. Mostly it was occupied by dust and mice, but sometimes it disgorged treasures. This room was unequivocally the best treasure the school had given her.

The room’s intended purpose remained oblique to her, even after all these years. It sat alone on the hidden fifth floor of the Gothic library’s square central tower, reachable by only one of the narrow, echoing spiral stairs tucked inside the tower’s spires. Magic and a padlocked iron gate guarded the room against intrepid students.

Even at twelve, the wards had put up as much resistance against her power as a cobweb strung across a doorframe. The padlock, however, had taken a trip powered by furious uphill bicycling on Ashmont Avenue to the locksmith’s, where she’d procured a pick set with a guilty face. Afterward, she’d practiced for weeks with whatever she could get her hands on.

When she’d finally shouldered open the ironclad door, she stumbled into a sanctuary of dust and sunbeams. The room was empty, untouched, with soaring Gothic windows on three sides, each composed of three elaborate panes forming a pointed arch. In one corner, the remains of a cane-seated chair had expired, and in another, a rusted iron chandelier slumped in neglect.

It was perfect. The next day she’d snuck into one of the library’s supply closets and stolen a broom, dustpan, and trash bags. Several days later she’d liberated a cheap floor lamp from one of the dorm basements. After that, turning the echoing room into a personal sanctuary had become one of Lily’s leading preoccupations. It was aided chiefly by yard sales and Windermere’s “curb week,” where students too rich and too lazy to store their belongings for the summer placed them instead in the common rooms for anyone to claim.

Her two biggest feats had been the addition of the couch and her own set of wards. The transference spell for the couch had taken her weeks to prepare with the aid of a fourth-year collegiate textbook and had left her seeing prismatic rainbows for days. Her wards had taken months. They didn’t prevent anyone from entering the way she had, but instead they shrouded her belongings, making the room appear as it had when she’d first found it. She was leaning hard into aegistics as her magical major; walls of all sorts had become second nature to her.

She set her book face down on the flat-pack end table to mark her spot and began pacing, catching her own reflection in the bank of cheap mirrors she’d scavenged from various curb weeks. Music hummed softly from her speaker, and she wanted to kick it. Lily was used to her life not being something that she had any meaningful control over, but never had it been so offensively obvious. She felt like a pawn that Fate was suddenly shuttling around a chessboard, hurtling in the direction of Allsaires’s black knight. It was too much to feel like rote coincidence, but her strong pragmatic streak refused to believe anything else.

And then there was the fact that the very first time he’d actually spoken to her, he hadn’t been horrible at all, and she was left to either lean into a stubborn notion that was a bit much, even for her, or to reframe him as someone who might also be human beneath his wealth, and looks, and talent. He had been such an easy figure to pin her bitterness over Magic, of their society, on. He was supposed to be the perfect symbol for everything that was wrong with Magic, stuck three hundred years in the past, as it was.

Lily shoved her hands into her pockets, and they mashed against a crumpled piece of paper. She pulled it out, finding her hasty sketch of the symbols the bonfire had spat out at the Revelation.

Her mother’s words thudded in her skull—"You’re not thinking of competing this year, are you?”—and her insides squirmed as she shouldered her backpack and followed the spiral stairs five flights down to the archives.

Allsaires was waiting for her outside the studio the next evening, even though she’d arrived early so she could warm up alone. He peeled himself off the wall and gave her a sheepish quarter-smile that seemed incongruous with his white joggers, which were somehow not only not ridiculous on him, but flattering. She let herself envision how they might look sprayed with her vomit.

“Hi,” he said, then fidgeted as she didn’t return the greeting and keyed in the code. “I tried to get your number from Gemma, but she uh. She wasn’t in.”

Lily paused, hand hovering over the keypad. From the flush creeping up his gold-dusted skin, she could tell that Gemma had very clearly been in. Somewhat incredulously, she imagined the pride-swallowing that must have occurred for him to seek out his rebuffed, drunken hookup in order to get the number of the least-sought-out girl in school.

How does he even know that Gemma would have my number?

“How did you know Gemma would have my number?”

He picked up his gym bag and squeezed past her as she held the door. “You’re friends with Daphne, right?”