2. Seb
SEB
Seb focused all of his attention on the blackboard at the head of the classroom and the man in front of it.
He had waited, he had studied, and he had made it in.
Alchemy, one of the most esoteric of the AEtheric arts, had welcomed him at last, right on schedule, for his Cert Year.
And it was almost perfect, flanked as he was by Asher and Tori; the only thing missing was Conrad.
No, don’t go there.
A few months ago, his brain might not have listened, but today it did. He hung his intensity on Professor Chant instead. That was easy; Chant was handsome, young, and brilliant, and the words flowing out of his mouth in his delicious, Welsh-tinged accent were very, very interesting.
“So,” he said, approaching the blackboard, chalk in hand.
“Who can tell me what, exactly, alchemy is? Rudimentary, I know.” He grinned at them conspiratorially, dark eyes crinkling with mischief, and Seb couldn’t help grinning back.
The room stayed quiet. “It’s not a trick question.
I know no one wants to be the first one to be wrong, but I promise: you’ll all have plenty of chances to say something that belies your age and inexperience. ”
Seb wanted to raise his hand. He didn’t.
He worked too hard at making his studies look effortless, like his grades were the inevitable result of an overabundance of capability, to have that shattered in his final year of college by unchecked eagerness.
He had plenty of talent, but no one did well at Windermere without putting in the hours.
“Anyone?” Chant raised an eyebrow in disappointment. A few hands reluctantly went up. “Ah, yes, Gemma. Thank you.”
As one, the class turned to look at Gemma.
Seb was mildly surprised by her presence in alchemy given that she was doing her Certificate Year—the optional fifth and final year at Windermere, whose successful completion allowed graduates to work in magical jobs—in mental magic and her mundane major was psychology.
She flushed, nearly matching her burgundy top.
Gemma cleared her throat. “Um, transmutation?”
“Care to elaborate?” Chant smiled at her encouragingly.
“Turning something into something else?”
“Perfect, thank you. I was hoping someone would say that.” He turned to the board and drew a circle and a square, linking the two with an arrow. The enchantment on the board kept his cuffs free of chalk.
“Is that right?” Gemma’s normally husky voice came out in a squeak.
“Oh, no,” Chant said with good nature. “Not remotely. But if it had been, I wouldn’t have much to teach you, would I?”
He turned to the class with something of a flourish.
Gemma wilted. Tori turned to Seb and raised an eyebrow.
Her appetite for theatrics not her own was terrifically low.
For his part, Seb was already entranced.
Chant could have asked him to dance naked on his desk and Seb would have done it, provided they had adequate privacy.
“Alchemy is the poetry of matter.” Chant wrote that on the board, above his shapes. “But what, exactly, do those pretty words mean? Someone tell me the third fundamental law of the AEtheric arts.”
Seb’s hand shot up. Everything was fair game now.
“Yes, Sebastian.”
“Magic cannot change matter’s essential nature.”
“Yes.” Chant wrote the law on the board in tidy script. Then he underlined it twice. “Thank you, Mr. Allsaires. Magic cannot change matter’s essential nature.” He underlined essential.
Next to him, Tori took a note with a pen she’d enchanted their freshman year. The note appeared simultaneously in Seb and Asher’s notebooks:
Very liberal with the underlining.
Asher scoffed quietly. Seb smiled to himself.
“If magic cannot change something’s essential nature, and if it is the study of transmutation—thank you, Gemma—ergo, alchemy must be the study of that which is commonly held between two things, no matter how disparate they may seem.”
Now Tori scribbled furiously, and none of these notes appeared on Seb’s page. He grinned.
“Alchemy lies in the balance between the Material and Metaphysical arts. It requires matter, yes, but above all it requires unknowability. We have the spells to turn lead into gold; I could teach you that tomorrow—” Chant paused, smirking, as eighteen spines suddenly straightened.
“But I won’t, because that isn’t what alchemy is about.
Alchemy is about finding the common thread in all of matter, in all of Magic, and in ourselves. How did you get into this class?”
Everyone looked around. Asher frowned at him, Trick question? Seb shrugged incrementally in response.
“You all signed up, yes. You spent the last two weeks shopping classes and wrote an essay and took a test. Entrance into this class is seen as reserved for the best and brightest, but that’s misleading.
” Seb’s heart jolted. “Oh, you all may very well be both best and brightest—subjective qualifications—but that’s not why you’re here.
You gained admittance due to your capacity for change.
The alchemical process is an interior one, and no progress will be gained in this class without interior work; without dissolving our ego and our ideals in the water of unknowability.
If each of you doesn’t have new Words of Power by year’s end, I’ll be crossed and cursed.
” Chant clapped his hands, breaking the class’s collective trance. “So, let’s begin.”
Three words appeared in Seb’s notebook:
What the fuck.
“What was that?” Tori said on the steps, ninety minutes later. Seb was in a daze, still reeling from the lecture.
“This class is going to be nuts.” Asher raked his hand through the gold-dusted tower of his hair and straightened his waistcoat.
It was a lovely Tyrian purple that brought out the tawny warmth of his brown skin beautifully.
He slung his blazer—purely for show today—over his angular shoulder in a practiced gesture.
Seb had borne witness to much of the practice over the years.
“This class is going to be amazing,” Seb corrected, leading the way down the walk toward their dorm.
Tori fell in step alongside him, her stiletto boots clicking out a brisk tempo on the pavement.
“Yes, well, Sebby, not all of us are so blessed as to have spent the summer in Swedish Lapland meditating with a coven of witches.” Her Québécois accent rendered her pronunciation of “blessed” particularly snotty.
“Don’t call me Sebby,” he said, even though she’d called him that before and would call him that again.
The nickname didn’t bother him; it was everything else about her statement.
Nothing she’d said was untrue—in fact, all of it was true.
The false part was why he’d been there in the first place.
Everyone thought he’d gone as some sort of enrichment, an exclusive summer program.
That’s what his parents had said, and that’s what he’d offered, airily disinterested in elaborating, if asked.
No one questioned him, and it made him want to scream, but why would they?
Young people in the community were constantly doing magical exchanges; they had to in order to keep bloodlines fresh.
There simply weren’t enough magical families in any one place to marry together at this point without getting dangerously close to cousins, especially among the Great Houses.
After all, that’s how he’d met Tori, on a winter-break exchange in Montreal when she’d still been named André and still played Cantrèa and got blackout drunk nearly every other night.
But he hadn’t been on an exchange this summer.
He’d been broken.
Thinking of the summer recalled Chant’s speech: If each of you doesn’t have new Words of Power by year’s end, I’ll be crossed and cursed.
Seb shivered despite the temperance of the day.
Suddenly he was back in Lapland, naked in the cedar sauna, desperately trying to make something, anything happen; finding himself empty of even a single mote of Magic, the inescapable knowledge of his new reality stretched out endlessly before him.
He might have never come back if the witches* hadn’t warded him against doing anything self-destructive.
“You okay?” Asher jogged him with his shoulder, brown eyes keen and worried.
“Yeah.”
“Cantrèa?” he asked.
Seb shrugged in response, because a shrug was not technically a lie. He was an awful liar, hated lying by obfuscation to them. If anyone could understand, it would be them. He stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“I can’t believe they put the first matches the day after the bonfire. What were they thinking? Everyone’s going to be hungover.”
“They weren’t thinking, obviously,” Tori cut in. “Speaking of this bonfire, what time would you gentlemen like to put in an appearance?”
“Can’t we just…go when we’re ready?” Asher shot Seb, the perpetual tiebreaker, a pained glance.
“You know how long it takes me to get ready. I need specifics.” Tori glared.
Both of them turned to Seb. He turned his hands out inside his blazer pockets. “Why are you looking at me? I can’t stay out late or celebrate the year accordingly.”
“Rochambeau?”
Asher sighed. “Fine. If I win, we go when I feel moved; if you win, set a time. Best of five.”
Tori grinned, her teeth dazzlingly white. “Nine sounds fine.”
“I can’t believe you’re making both of us waste a cantrip on this,” he grumbled even as he began casting.
“It’s only a waste if you don’t have power to spare,” Tori said sweetly, their argument blurring to background noise in his head.
“Earth to Sebastian!”
Seb turned, tearing his concentration from the entrance of Paracelsus where a flash of dark magic had caught his eye. Magic made the world so beautiful, but this was…a brown-haired girl with a black aura rushing down the steps, her motions a deflection, as if to avoid notice.
“Who is that?” he said, frowning. “Was she in alchemy with us?”
Tori glanced in her direction. “Leper Lily? I feel like I would have noticed. Come on.”
Tori and Asher began—palms spinning together, fists coming to hover over flat hands.
They locked eyes, trying to read the intention behind blank expressions, but Seb watched power shimmer out from their closed fists.
People had taken note of the obstruction, and a few stopped to watch.
Seb squared himself between them, placing a hand over each of their fists.
Their familiar magic set a pleasant tingle in his skin.
He pulled his hands away and they began.
It went like this: three strikes of the fist, and then the hand laid palm up.
In Tori’s hand a smattering of twinkling stars sparked to life, and in Asher’s a tiny, brilliant sun.
The stars swiftly spiraled into a comet formation and struck the sun.
Flecks of spectral ash filtered down over Asher’s closing fist before disappearing.
The second round went to Asher, who threw sun again, to eclipse Tori’s tiny moon. Tori took the next round, and Asher the following. On the fifth, two shining moons orbited lazily over two tensed hands.
“Tie breaker,” Seb said, though his roommates were too focused on each other to acknowledge him.
They tied and tied again. A decent crowd had gathered by now, rumors already flying on the basis of the bet. He grinned tightly, imagining how dismayed their peers would be at the inanity of what was being settled.
“Come on,” Asher grimaced. “I’m hungry.”
“Allsaires! What’s the bet?”
“Shut up!” Tori silenced the crowd. Then, to Asher, “You can always concede.”
Two more ties, moons again, then suns. They were in the flow of it now.
The way things were shaping up, they’d go on all afternoon.
Both Asher and Tori were spectacularly bad at concession and susceptible to extreme tunnel vision.
Finally, Tori’s miniature moon flared full and bright, blotting out Asher’s stars.
Tori smiled. “Nine it is.”
Asher sighed as he shook the cramp from his hand.
A face caught Seb’s eye on the edge of the crowd, vanishing nearly immediately and taking his good mood with it—Conrad.
* In rare and specific instances, there are pockets of magical individuals who—for reasons of cultural or historical significance—have been sanctioned by the International Tribunal of Magicians to operate outside the boundaries of the Covenant that binds most of Magical Society.