Page 32 of The Alchemists

Keeping her face neutral, Lily turned to Daphne, who rolled her eyes at her sister behind her back.

“I have a lot of work to do, I should get going,” she signed to Daphne.

Daphne nodded. “Same. I have fifty art history slides to memorize before tomorrow.”

Lily grimaced. Every student at Windermere had both a magical and a mundane major. Lily’s traditional major was ostensibly psychology, but she would be dead two weeks after she had to declare. Daphne had chosen art history, which was especially punishing in the first two years, filled, as it was with endless lectures and memorization for identification tests.

“See you later.” Lily didn’t bother saying goodbye to Gemma as she slid past her.

She headed for the woods. Being an arboretum, Windermere had plenty of weird and rare trees, but Lily liked the woods on the southwest side of campus, filled with ash and hickory, sycamores and maples. There was a creek that ran through the woods, spilling out of Orchard Lake, that eventually made it all the way into the Hudson. Sometimes, depending on the rain or snowmelt, it could turn into a torrent, and she’d fallen in more than once while trying to cross downed logs, and had to bike home with chattering teeth and ice-block feet.

Spring was her favorite time in the woods, as the snowmelt rushed and the ferns unfurled from hibernation. Every year at the beginning of April she gathered the fiddleheads that her mother loved to sear and dress with ramps and almonds. Sometimes, if she was exceedingly lucky, she found a handful of morels, pushing up out of the black dirt like wrinkled gold. Spring was her favorite time anywhere, and she had a hard time imagining that it could be better anywhere besides Windermere, with its cavalcade of blossoming trees that turned the air itself into a honey-scented dream in pinks and creams.

This will be your last spring.

Lily forced her thoughts away, burying her feelings—an art she’d perfected over a short lifetime—and thought instead about the golden fall. Here in the woods, it felt less performative, more organic. She settled in the root-made crevice of one of her favorite trees, throwing her light jacket on the ground to protect her pants from dirt, and began to read.

* 白雨落平湖 (báiyǔ luò pínghú)—“White rain falls on still lake,” from the poem 《曙光石湖》 “Dawn at Stone Lake” (shǔguāng shíhú) by 黄轼 (Huáng Shì), Tang Dynasty.

SEB

They’d skipped the bout, both of them. He and Tori fought regularly, sometimes like it was its own sport, but she’d never skipped a match, and it stung more than his recent loss ever could. He wanted to go straight home to apologize, but there was a red-clad figure blocking his path.

“Sebastian! Fancy meeting you here.”

“Hey, Gemma.” His insides uttered a grievous sigh.

“It’s a shame about the alchemy assignments. I feel like we’d be so much better off together.”

Her words sparked a light in his memory. “Sure, yeah. Speaking of, though, you do have Lily’s number, right? I really need it.” He’d tried and failed to get it Thursday, having found quickly that entering Gemma’s dorm room was a terrible mistake. He’d decided to cut his losses before he accidentally ended up naked.

“You don’t want her number,” Gemma purred.

He frowned at her. “Isn’t she friends with your sister?”

“Hardly. What a weirdo.”

“What’s so weird about her?” He adjusted his duffel, realizing that there was no quick getaway here.

Gemma laughed throatily. “What isn’t?” She began ticking a list off on her fingers. “She hardly talks, she’s always lurking somewhere like the woods or, I swear it, inside the walls; she’s weirdly good at spontaneous magic; oh, right, and she’s cursed.”

Seb blinked his frown away. The woods were hardly strange, but inside the walls?

“So, do you have her number?”

“How about this.” Gemma’s cornflower eyes flashed. “I’ll trade you her number for dinner.”

He was beginning to regret their hookup. Deeply.

“Fine.”

She whipped out her phone and scrolled through her contacts, holding it so that he could copy it down. She smiled. “Catch you later.”

He waited for her to flounce away before he headed for the woods.

The woods weren’t particularly large, but they were imposing enough that he wasn’t quite sure where to begin. Once he passed the lake, which was really more of an ambitious pond, he followed the creek. After tromping along the edge of the stream for a few minutes without luck, he called her.

A phone rang. He followed the sound.