11. Lily
LILY
The chapel fell silent as the dean of the college took the dais. If Lily were going to grow old, she imagined that she’d like to be something like Dr. Miranda Meade. Her very presence commanded respect. She was a tall woman with powerful shoulders and a bob of shimmering silver and steel.
“Welcome, all. I am honored to have command of Windermere at this auspicious time, on this auspicious occasion.” She attempted something like a benevolent smile at the assembled student body and faculty, but she did not have a face meant for smiling.
“As you all know, this year Windermere celebrates its three-hundredth anniversary.”
Lily knew what was coming; they all did, but unlike the rest of them, she didn’t care.
From her position in the loft, she scoured the many heads below her.
Beneath a stained-glass mural celebrating the discovery of man’s affinity with AEther, she spied Professor Chant, safely back in tweed.
Gemma sat with her fellow Cert-Years near the middle, and Daphne with her, though she was a sophomore.
Freshmen were prohibited from participation in the Elumnara, lest it distract from their sapling study habits.
Gemma’s hands moved fluidly as she translated for her sister.
And there, front row center, was Allsaires, flanked on either side by his roommates.
“Our tercentennial, in addition to cementing Windermere’s continued prestige and prominence in the community, heralds, as you all know, a particularly exciting year for our favorite campus-wide tradition.” At this, roughly eight hundred heads craned to look at a very still one in the front row.
“This year, our annual game of academics and intellectual agility, our search for hidden answers, has both a twist to its rules and its prize.”
Lily stifled a laugh as the girl next to her leaned so far over the railing to look at the back of Allsaires’s head that she nearly pitched over. Every year there was a scavenger hunt, no holds barred, whose winnings could only appeal to those who already had everything—prestige.
The game was meant to test students’ mental acuity, mettle, and usually their command of Latin.
Students only sometimes got seriously injured, usually from slipping off the slate tiles on the old observatory roof and into the rose bushes below.
Only a handful of students had ever died, and the last had been nearly fifty years ago.
Maria Cushing had been struck by lightning on top of the library during a thunderstorm.
Dr. Meade brushed imaginary dust off her spotless black dress and straightened the purple velvet scarf that draped around her neck. She cleared her throat. Her charcoal-gray silk over-robe shone.
“This year, of course, you all play for that mythical Golden Fleece—the Windermere Chalice, hidden somewhere here on campus by our venerated founder.” A current of excitement zinged through the crowd.
“The first clue, provided by Windermere himself, will be available for all to see tonight, as the Archer’s Moon reaches its apex.
Further clues will be meted out on the following two Hermetic moons. Beyond that, only the Founder knows.
“You may, of course, cooperate with your fellow students, but as always, the prize must be claimed by a single individual.” Here, Lily’s neighbor leaned nearly to her death once more.
“As always, the rules are few, but the penalty for breaking them steep. Violence against any member of the Windermere community is prohibited, as is psychological manipulation through AEtheric means. That is all. This year’s faculty advisor for the Elumnara is our newest staff member—Professor Caeden Chant.
He will preside over all matters of rules and regulations, as well as all ceremonial aspects of the games, including tonight’s Revelation.
I will now cede the podium to him to field any questions you may have. ”
Chant rose smoothly and stood behind the pulpit, nodding graciously at Dean Meade before speaking, “I open the floor to you.” He offered the assembly one of his inscrutable smiles. Lily folded her arms on the banister, rested her cheek on her forearm, and went to sleep.
“Did people ever talk about this year’s Elumnara while you were in school?” Lily leaned against the counter, drowning her tea in honey.
Her mother looked over, one eyebrow raised, and set down her magazine.
Even though they grew slimmer each year, her mother maintained a subscription to her favorite cooking publication.
She was as slow to pick up on technology as she was reluctant about magic.
Lily was pretty sure the two were linked somehow, but she couldn’t begin to explain why.
“The…what’s it, tricentennial?”
“Tercentennial.”
“Not at all. Twenty years in the future is a long way to imagine, especially for college kids.” If she was thinking about her own inability to imagine twenty years forward, she didn’t show it. “People talked more about the one before it, two-fifty.”
Lily stopped stirring her tea. “Was it different?”
“Every fifty years is a little different, but the hundreds are the big ones. But mostly people were talking about it because of the death.”
“Maria Cushing?”
Her mother nodded, then picked up her kitchen shears and clipped out a recipe. Lily twitched. “They say the Elumnara is cursed. Every fifty years a student dies.”
Lily dribbled tea back into her mug, partly because it was too hot and partly because it was hard to scoff properly with a mouthful of scalding water. “That can’t possibly be true.”
Magnolia shrugged. “Check the archives. You’re not thinking of competing this year, are you?”
“Of course not,” Lily huffed. How many curses does she think I could possibly activate in one year? “I don’t have any friends to betray.”
Inevitably, the Elumnara involved an element of treachery.
Teams formed, sometimes large ones, dividing up research tasks and sharing information.
Usually, the teams began to splinter around winter break into smaller ones that grew ever more secretive.
Spring semester involved paranoia from all corners, until eventually someone claimed the prize, that someone, of course, usually being Sebastian Allsaires.
He’d won the last two years, and it was a record that no one had held previously, and one no one expected to be broken.
The question on everyone’s mind, of course, was, can he do it again?
What could be more resplendent than a trifecta three years running, in his final year, on the three-hundredth anniversary of Windermere’s founding?
The symmetry! She wouldn’t be surprised if this year’s hunt was somehow thrown in his favor, just for the optics.
“Good, I don’t want you worrying about that nonsense this year or putting yourself in danger. These kids will be out for blood.”
Part of Lily wanted to say, “You don’t think I could?
” but she didn’t. Lily knew exactly how smart, exactly how capable she was, exactly how willing she’d be to betray any of these people who treated her like she was a curse, not cursed.
She could do it, if she had that one secret ingredient she lacked—giving a shit.
For the second time in a week, a bonfire raged at Windermere.
This one sat in the middle of the flagstone courtyard that buttressed the college center.
Its flames crackled icy white and snow gray, steel blue and dusky lavender.
When the logs popped, they shot the scent of cedar and a vaguely frankincense-like tang into the air.
Professor Chant stood just outside the elaborate perimeter circle marked in chalk and fortified by spells.
Lily could feel the dull pulse of them, and almost, almost see their ambient magic.
The temperature had dipped, and Chant wore a coat, open against the heat of the fire.
His attention remained fixed on something that looked like a pocket watch but probably wasn’t, his gaze only wavering at the occasional outburst of laughter or shrieking.
The courtyard was filled with students, many of them in sweatpants or pajamas, clutching takeout mugs or expensive thermoses.
Lily wasn’t sure if it was the entire student body, but it was close.
Above Chant’s head, the Archer’s Moon, the tenth of the thirteen Hermetic moons, neared its apex against a backdrop of velvet night.
Lily checked her phone. Two minutes to go.
She contemplated the forethought required of the late Cornelius Windermere to have planned such timing for the Revelation, though perhaps it was just coincidence.
When magic was involved, however, coincidence was rarely the safest bet.
All of it smacked of some secret significance.
As Professor Chant pocketed the device, silence rippled through the courtyard.
A number of students raised phones to record the moment, and the miniature wards that sealed all magical content within technological devices flared in an amorphous constellation.
Across the fire, Lily saw Sebastian Allsaires.
He was not in pajamas. He stood perfectly still, awake and alert, eyes fixed on the depths of the fire.
From inside his coat, Chant withdrew a scroll tube and gingerly coaxed the parchment from within.
He handed it to one of the junior Latin professors, who handled it as though it were a priceless artifact—and probably it was.
Chant stepped into the chalk ring, the air around him shimmering as he did so, and began a spell facing the fire.
His lips worked quietly; his hands moved with the fluidity of water.
Without looking over his shoulder, he held out his hand for the parchment.
Lily’s heartbeat caught in her throat as she realized what was about to happen.
Chant cast the scroll into the fire.
The flames blazed a brilliant blue, nearly as dark as the sky surrounding the moon, and golden sparks licked upward, followed by violent plumes of copper smoke.
The smoke twisted sinuously through the air, and Lily’s insides twisted along with it.
It formed words of snaking cursive, identical to what Lily had seen displayed in glass cases in the library.
A man’s voice, thick with the gravel of age, rang through the courtyard, clattering off the flagstones and brick walls of the college center. Collectively, the assembled students flinched.
“On this year, the three hundredth since the founding of my school, seek the Chalice. My heir will be known and named by whosoever holds the Chalice.”
The courtyard briefly exploded. All around her burbled whispers of “His heir?” and “Is Windermere actually naming his heir?” They were silenced once more by his booming voice:
“From the AEther all is made
Through water, wind, and heat and clay
Find truth in unknown; death in doubt
Still the mind and cast fear out
Be as a channel, still as a stream
Let all that’s mystic flow through me.”
The first words caught Lily off guard because she knew them.
As the voice continued, she had to stifle a laugh.
The clue, the great riddle to begin the most momentous Elumnara in the school’s history, was something that every assembled student knew by heart.
They were the Nursery Words: the schoolyard rhyme that every juvenile Magician was given to use as their first Words of Power until they accrued enough experience and nascent sense of self to find their own.
Lily had never much cared for what she knew of her school’s founder, and less of the near deification that he’d received in the centuries since his death.
Now, however, she found herself delighted by the long-gone, cantankerous coot who had precipitated all this pomp, apparently just to fuck with a bunch of twenty-somethings three hundred years after his death.
Around her, shock crystallized into expletives or denial. Phones were lowered; videos scrubbed through for hidden depths. Lily fixed her gaze on Chant and found him impassive. Either he’d known what the parchment had said, or he was very good at taking tricks in Tarot.
The fire flared once more, spitting an image into the night—Windermere’s seal, a chalice overflowing above an open book, flanked by two symbols she felt she’d seen before and almost recognized—then abruptly died.
In the falling darkness, Chant closed the spell and stepped over the chalk line, only to be mobbed by students shouting about whether or not the whole thing was a joke, demanding clarification on the terms of the heir, and asking when the real clue would be revealed.
Chant cast a cantrip to rekindle the bonfire, and it roared immediately into mundane orange-yellow life. He brought two fingers to his lips.
“This concludes the Revelation of the three-hundredth Elumnara. The field of play is officially open!”
He turned and slipped through the crowd in a mercurial sort of way that only someone wearing an enchantment could and disappeared into the night.
Students began to disperse, most of them muttering their disappointment in four-letter words.
Tucked safely in the shadows, Lily stayed.
She wasn’t sure why, but something about the fire, the pattern of its flames—for there was a pattern, she realized now—held her attention.
Slowly, she approached the blaze. By the time she reached it, only one other student remained.
Across the flames, Sebastian Allsaires stood transfixed and unblinking. His brow was deeply furrowed in concentration, and his face alternately lit white and shadowed black by the shifting of the fire as his lips moved nearly imperceptibly.
She watched as he leaned forward and reached into the flames.