Page 54 of The Alchemists

“I like her,” he said quietly, so as not to wake Tori, though there was no risk of that. “Lily.” He glanced toward Seb.

“Me too.”

“She’s good for you.”

Seb risked looking over. The afternoon light poured gold through the tight coils of Asher’s high-top fade.

“She knows there’s more to life than Windermere.”

“I know there’s more to life than Windermere.”

“Not just Windermere—magic. Society.” Asher watched for his reaction. “She knows what the real world has to offer.”

“Our world is real.”

Asher gazed out the window. “Sometimes I wonder. We say the mundane world doesn’t matter, but we work so hard to blend in. We say it’s not a threat, but somehow her existence is a curse.”

Everything he loved most about the world was Magic. He tried to imagine a version of himself that wasn’t a Magician, that only studied English. Could he ever be satisfied with that?

“Would you have said ‘yes?’”

“What?” Seb’s palms were suddenly slick against the leather-wrapped wheel.

“If you weren’t going with Gemma, would you have gone to the dance with Lily?”

He was silent, his heart racing ahead past endless dotted yellow lines.

“Seb.” He looked at Asher, found him solid and real. He remembered that no one knew him the way Asher did—he knew nearly every one of Seb’s horrifying secrets. “I would have gone to NYU if my parents wouldn’t have disinherited me. You can be honest.”

He had to work to stop his voice from trembling. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I probably would.”

LILY

She found it when she was least expecting to, curled up under her softest throw, leaning against Martin, her stuffed turtle, currently squashed into the space between the mattress and the wall. The shade on her lamp washed the room in pink shadows.

The letters, a mixture of facsimiles and typed transcriptions, were dusted across her bedspread in loose piles. Their sorting spell had worked eventually, but they’d made the instructions too vague, so the task remained enormous. The stack of letters specifically mentioning the “Argent Lune” was disappointingly shallow and hadn’t let on to their identity at all, so now she was sorting through all the letters addressed to women.

The ring glinted dully on her finger. If she’d doubted its origin in magic, the fact that it fit her as snugly as it fit Sebastian dispelled it. She wondered if he was in Québec by now, and if he was, what he was doing. Sunday still smarted, a hollow ache of embarrassment, but his gesture had dulled the cramp. It was probably better, anyway, that he wasn’t interested. Relationships seemed complicated, possibly more complicated than they could be worth, especially when one party had less than eight months to live. They could be friends, complication-free, and she could just enjoy it.

She focused back on the letters, actually almost believing herself, and picked up the next facsimile. Cornelius Windermere had atrocious handwriting, worse even than Seb’s calligraphic scrawl.

My Selene,

Lily straightened. This was the first letter to any Selene. Most of his letters to women were to his daughter Thèresa in France. Only his letters to the Argent Lune had a passing shred of emotion or sentimentality.

My Selene,

I think of you often; of the art that created the curve of your brow, the sweep of your hair against your white neck. If it were possible to distill the light that you emanate, my fortune would put Midas to jealousy. I have always wanted to create something lasting, something that would weather the storms and shames of time, but always I come up short. As you have oft said, I possess a ‘surfeit of practicality and a dearth of imagination.’

Yet somehow Fate, that slow-weaving, merciless and merciful mistress, has thrown us together, like twin opposites, into the alembic. How many empires had to fall, how many threads to be plucked ‘just so,’ to bring you to me? For you have what I lack—imagination and warmth, grace and conviction. Is it not as though we were created solely to complete, to complement the other?

‘As above, so below,’ our founder decrees, and surely I must be ‘that which is below,’ for you were born of heaven and walk in starlight. Together, if we are strong and persevere, from our work may come a sort of Mercurius. I can only hope you may see beyond the base impropriety of this insinuation—I shall content myself with your spirit, for I would rather possess that which is intangible, and Ætheric of you, than none of you.

Yours,

Cornelius

Somewhere in the reading, Lily’s heart had stopped, and it reawakened in a jolt, leaving her gasping. The letter trembled in her hand, sending a current up her arm and through her skin, igniting something urgent in her. She reread the letter once, twice, feeling like a trespasser at its intimacy.