3. Lily
LILY
Lily biked home slowly, savoring the mild warmth of the equinox, her mind still in the alchemy theater.
The class gave her a delicious, dangerous thrill that no other class at Windermere had so far, not even Practical Applications of Aegistics, which involved getting to hurl spells at her classmates.
Alchemy felt real, closer to the essence of Magic itself than anything Lily had encountered, and it terrified her.
She’d always felt distant from Magic, though she had it in spades.
It had always felt like it wasn’t really hers to wield.
She was constantly worried that it might wise up and disappear from her at any instant, recognizing her as the imposter she was.
Better not to get attached. She’d put in for alchemy on a whim, not thinking she’d be accepted, and now she was worried she might fall in love with Magic after all, far, far too late.
A large, cynical part of her tried to blame it on Professor Chant—on his enthusiastic soliloquizing, his easy laugh, and his bright eyes—but she’d scrambled to keep up with his diagrams and tables, his AEtheric Laws of Transitive Substance, and now she had four pages of jumbled notes and two hundred pages of reading to try and make sense of before next Wednesday.
Chant’s drama seemed primarily due to unbridled passion.
Collegiate-level teaching positions were almost nonexistent in magical society, and acquiring one was a cutthroat business by all accounts.
Chant had a PhD in Symbolic History from Oxford’s AEtheric program and had been inducted into the Guild of Alchemical Sciences in Prague.
As for his fashion—well, she couldn’t fault anyone for wanting to look the part, especially when they did it in such well-fitted trousers and custom brogues.
She swung her leg over her bike, balancing on one pedal as she coasted into the weedy driveway of the Queen Anne, where she lived with her mother and grandmother.
Already the oak in front shed leaves onto the strip of grass between the house and the drive.
Lily kicked a spray of early golden foliage into the air as she hauled her bike up the steps of the covered porch.
Her family used the first floor and Lily’s bedroom on the second, while they rented out the remaining rooms, which had been converted to small apartments on the second and third floor.
There were four other people who lived in the Victorian on Fountain Avenue—a couple rented the remainder of the second floor, and two girls who were juniors at the Catholic college in town rented the sprawling attic.
Lily always knew when the girls had been partying because they came in through the kitchen and went up the narrow staircase in order to avoid Lily’s grandmother.
Gran had lived with Lily and her mother for Lily’s entire life.
She’d lost her only child and gained a granddaughter in one fell swoop, and she hadn’t been about to let Lily’s mother fend for herself.
Sometimes Lily imagined that May. Her mother had been nearly across the finish line at Windermere, and she’d thrown it all away—or lost everything, depending on one’s perspective.
The best way to keep magic a secret was, naturally, with magic.
The Tribunal was never worried about overly talkative Magicians because the only way any Magician could talk about magic with an outsider required both the courage and stupidity to remove the AEtheric mark through self-mutilation.
The Tribunal thought no one was that stupid, or that stubborn, and they were almost completely right.
Her own parents had disinherited her, siding with the Tribunal, and how could they not? Windermere had expelled her, and she’d been left with nothing except her youth, nine fingers, and a colicky baby that she didn’t know how to care for.
Gran had told her about the woman her mother used to be—vibrant, in love, defiant, and full of Magic.
It was nearly impossible to conjure that vision when Lily was confronted daily with the reality of her mother as she knew her.
It was hard to see someone who had risked—and lost—everything for love in her mother’s faraway eyes, her bone structure so delicate it might shatter, her blonde hair shocked white just shy of forty.
At least there had been Gran. She’d taken them in; first in her little stone cottage on the outskirts of town, and then when Lily was older, here to this house—in a better school district, with easy access to the train station, and though no one said it, close to Windermere.
Gran knew everything about the magical world.
Once her mother had removed her mark, she could tell anyone—and because the Tribunal had stricken her from the Covenant and stripped her magic, they didn’t care.
Magnolia Bellarius could have run stark naked through the streets screaming about magic, but she was a twenty-two-year-old single mother and college dropout, and no one was going to believe her.
It seemed the worst sort of punishment, Lily often thought, to have stayed here, raising her child in the long shadow of the world that had thrown her out on her ass.
“How was your last first class of the year?” Gran called from the sitting room.
Lily stashed her bike in the foyer and joined her, sinking onto the striped loveseat and kicking off her canvas high-tops.
“Fine.”
Lily’s mother appeared in the doorway, one thin hand on the doorframe, the absence of her middle finger fully visible.
It was hard to cast an invocation without all of your digits.
“All that money spent on education and all you can say is ‘fine’?” She exchanged a glance with Gran.
“Teenagers,” she sighed in a joking-not-joking sort of way.
“Did you ever take alchemy?” Lily said, steering the nascent conversation away from her age.
“No, didn’t make it in.” She joined Lily on the loveseat, picking up her feet and draping them across her lap, giving them a squeeze. “I was never as fierce a student as you are.” She gave a wistful half-smile.
Lily kept her face carefully blank. Her mother had been a fierce student. Last year, Lily had looked up the records. This was just one of her mother’s many coping mechanisms, pretending she hadn’t had a future in magic, and Lily couldn’t begrudge her.
“He said we’ll all have new Words by the end of the year.”
Now it was her mother’s turn to keep her face blank at the mention of June.
“Are you going to the bonfire tonight?” she said instead.
Lily startled, before remembering that the equinox bonfire was an old, old tradition. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
“What on earth are you going to do instead?” Gran said.
“Two hundred pages of reading for alchemy, plus I have a reading response due Monday for Psych therefore, Lily was what her mother would lose.
This was the year of the Chalice—Windermere’s Chalice, whatever that meant—and the full Wanderer’s Moon rose at midnight on midsummer’s eve.
She’d known exactly when she was going to die her entire life, and if anyone asked whether it was a comfort to know, she would have happily told them to fuck themselves.
Curses had no cure. They were powerful, and immutable, and the only people who could legally inflict them were on the Tribunal.
The person who had cast this curse just so happened to be Lily’s maternal grandfather.
In her darker moments she had to admire the poetic nature of the curse—the fact that it would tie up loose ends, that it would have been so much less cruel to just kill Magnolia, or to make her miscarry.
And so, Lily had been born, her mother already grieving her loss.
Lily pressed her face into her pillow, tears hot against her cheeks as her anger at her mother ebbed away, leaving only anger at the system, at her ever-diminishing returns.
When her mother knocked gently on the doorframe, Lily dissolved the cantrip and used another to unlock the door without getting up.
Her mother sat on the bed, stroking the hair at Lily’s temple and smoothing it behind her ear before tucking a stuffed pig—one of the many companions on the bed—under Lily’s elbow.
“I’m so sorry, honey. I just…I just want you to live. As much as you can.”
“You don’t need to be sorry,” Lily mumbled into the pillow.
“I’m never going to stop being sorry.” Her mother’s voice hitched, and Lily sat up. Her number one goal, in most any conversation, was to keep her mother from crying.
“I’ll go to the bonfire.” She wiped her tears with the back of her hand.
“Don’t do it for me, do it for yourself. Don’t waste the time you have left.”
“What’s so great about the bonfire?”
Her mother laughed. “Nothing. Nothing’s so great about it. It’s just another excuse to get drunk, make out, and waste magic. Which, incidentally, is what makes it great.”
Lily pursed her lips, considering. Daphne and Gemma Greer were probably going.
Daphne was Lily’s acquaintance approaching friendship.
Both of them were outcasts enough, in their own way, to have formed an alliance against solitude.
Gemma would definitely be going; therefore, Daphne was likely to tag along. Lily slid out her phone.
“You know I met your father at the bonfire?” Lily stilled.
It was a rare thing for Magnolia to talk about Lily’s father.
“Well, not at the bonfire, but on bonfire night.” She picked at Lily’s bedspread.
“I went sophomore year with Karston Tellemaus.” Lily knew the name, but not the man.
He was one of the many Magicians who’d brokered their power into making fistfuls of money on Wall Street, almost all of them specialists in vaticination, metapsychosis,* or illusion.
“Karston got drunk and handsy, so I left and went to the Athenian and ended up talking to your father until four in the morning.” The Athenian was the all-night diner on the main arterial, just a few blocks from campus.
Nobody from Windermere would be caught dead there unless it was the dead of night and they were dead drunk.
“You realize that this is literally an advertisement against the bonfire?”
“Oh, my sardonic, so, so clever child.” Her mother sighed and ruffled her hair before getting up. “Don’t stay out too late.”
Lily texted Daphne as her mother closed the door, and Daphne, being the fastest texter Lily knew, responded instantly in the affirmative. With a sigh, Lily checked the time and pulled out her homework—at least she could get something done before the inevitable debacle of the evening.
Work proved elusive. Partly because Lily was too distracted by everything about the day—alchemy and its implications, her mother’s sudden openness—to properly focus, and partly because Daphne texted her a new outfit every three minutes.
It’s going to be dark, she texted back, who cares?
Lily’s lukewarm friendship was rewarded with a sarcastic emoji and, Hopefully Conrad Hawleyhurst.
Lily cringed at that. It was a subtle reminder, albeit unintentional on Daphne’s part, that they weren’t friends, not really.
They were companions of convenience. Were they really friends, Daphne wouldn’t go near Hawleyhurst. If the people who actively wished Lily harm had a team, Hawleyhurst would be their captain and their mascot.
Hawleyhurst was not, by Lily’s estimation, particularly intelligent, but he did possess a fiendish cleverness for bullying.
He was never above wasting a cantrip to lay her out flat on her face in the classroom, on the quad, on the stairs, and had in fact done so a number of times with great relish.
There were plenty of other things too: being shoved into closets that had been magically sealed, getting hit in the back with an enchantment to make her smell like a New York sidewalk in July, and receiving spoofed emails from professors demanding meetings for which she waited too long before realizing the game.
She didn’t really blame Daphne for her attraction to him.
Most people were attracted to him. He had old-money good looks—straight teeth, golden hair and golden skin from summers spent sailing, an athlete’s firm body, Midas’s checkbook.
He had that kind of planetary charisma that possessed its own gravity, and when he was shoulder to shoulder at every turn with Sebastian Allsaires—one light and one dark—they might have been a black hole, so inescapable was their gravitational field.
With a sigh, Lily tagged her favorite outfit. She paused before putting the phone away and then wrote, Does he sign?
No, came the reply, but isn’t that what magic’s for?
Lily was too keyed up now, too filled with an anxious energy to possibly study.
She slid on her headphones and exhaled slowly as the music settled through her.
She breathed with it, finding the rhythm, and then she moved to the center of her room, the old, worn boards creaking under her weight, and she began to dance.
* In addition to the Julian calendar, Magical Society observes a separate Hermetic lunar calendar based on the thirteen full moons that occur annually.
* Vaticination: The art of prediction and divination. From the Latin vaticinationem. Vates, seer.
Metapsychosis: The action of one mind upon another. From the Greek meta, change; en, in; psyche, soul.