77. Lily
LILY
Returning to Windermere and the dingy, late-January snow shocked her system. It seemed like all the color had seeped out of the world. She ached for spring; she wished spring would never arrive. For two days after returning, the ground sloshed beneath her feet.
Without the Elumnara to work on, they split their time between dancing and homework.
Sebastian spent endless hours in the Cantrèa practice courts, and often Lily watched, sometimes surreptitiously, before they played together after.
There was a wild beauty in the way he moved when no one could see him.
He moved like each play was every thought he couldn’t speak aloud, like the phrases of dodges and parries were sentences forming a silent confession.
He worked on his application quietly, in the background, when he thought she wasn’t looking, as if admitting a future beyond June were some sort of sacrilege, but night after night he fell asleep with the cursor of his word processor blinking at an invisible essay.
In alchemy they resumed the process of transmuting lead into gold, but she still felt woozy anytime she was near the supply cabinet.
The floor there was still scarred, and so was her arm.
Her tan made it worse, and even under the Caribbean sun her new skin hadn’t learned freckles yet.
Gemma, somehow, had survived her academic hearing.
Chant moved her and Braithwhite to a table across the room, and Gemma didn’t so much as glance in Lily’s direction.
Nearly every other Friday, Seb was collected at the end of alchemy by a Portalist who would whisk him away for the regional tournaments at Savarelle and Dunmoody.
The use of portalic transplacement was tightly regulated, and the portals themselves fiendishly difficult to create.
Not only did they require vast AEtheric power, but they could only be cast in certain locations under incredibly specific circumstances.
Even Chant seemed to have no interest in transportive magic, which was saying something.
Transplacement left the traveler cranky and jet-lagged.
When Seb came back through, he invariably took a four-hour crash nap and then stayed up all night.
While he was gone, Lily read Selene’s letters.
She didn’t know why, but something compelled her, even though the Elumnara was in the rearview for them, and seemingly everyone.
An inexplicable kinship pulled her to Selene, so much so that sometimes she appeared in Lily’s dreams. She wasn’t sure how Hawleyhurst and his crew were going to solve anything without the letters and clues she and Sebastian had found, but she didn’t dwell on it.
There was something missing. She felt like she was trying to assemble a puzzle without ever having seen the reference, feeling everything along by shape and color, missing the wider context.
Selene and Windermere had been together intimately, she knew, from one letter that made her feel like she was trespassing, and she was glad that she was reading in the dark with no one there to see her flush.
They’d loved each other, known each other, likened their relationship to the alchemical wedding, and then…
nothing. Somewhere off-page, they’d fallen apart, and Selene Bevoire, the bright assistant to an innovative entrepreneur—a woman with a modicum of independence—had become Selene van Bergen, somebody else’s wife.
They couldn’t marry—Selene and Windermere—he had his estranged wife in France, but Lily didn’t understand how they’d shattered into separate histories.
Now, with Seb at Dunmoody and her mom still at work, she was curled in the window seat of the suite, cocooned in the blanket that most reminded her of him, reading Selene’s letters, the sounds of Asher’s musical tinkering muffling under the door.
Cornelius,
With you gone, I can see clearly for the first time in years. It is not jealousy that pulls these words from my chest, but love. We are lost. I have walked widdershins beneath the full moon and demanded of her answers, but she offers none, so I have had no recourse but to seek them in myself.
All we have wrought are tricks of vapor—they hold no substance. You told me we would create the world, but all we have done is gilded over tarnish. Underneath the shine is but tin, the gold flimsy as a rose’s petal. I trusted you, handed over myself and my virtue to your keeping, but all is a ruin.
With your absence, I see what I must do to salvage what little of myself is worth saving.
Yours,
Selene
Lily sat upright. This was it—the breaking point.
Windermere had gone to France around that time to attend to matters with his wife.
She checked the date—it was less than a year before their last known correspondence.
Her email pinged, and the new message raised goosebumps on her skin.
The archivist of the Huguenot Museum had finally written back after Lily’s last message in November.
At the same moment, the door flew open and Tori whirled in, tossing her bag on the couch.
She narrowed her eyes at Lily. “What’s wrong with you? You look weirder than usual.”
“Coincidences.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“I know.” If that was the case, maybe Tori’s timing wasn’t a coincidence either. “In which case, want to visit the Huguenot archives with me?”
Tori grimaced, then sighed. “Why the hell not?”
Lily didn’t want to admit that driving a sports car made her feel powerful, but when she slipped into the driver’s seat, leather hugging around her and the engine shuddering the whole car and all her bones, she did.
She now understood Seb’s wild grin that first time he’d had her in the car.
She tossed Tori a Molotov cocktail smile of her own.
She gunned the throttle, and Tori rolled her eyes.
“I’m sorry for being so cryptic in my email, but I thought this was too exciting not to share in person.” The archivist, a Mr. Freer with wilted blond hair, licked his thumb and paged through a printout. Tori leaned against a shelf and folded her arms across her chest with a mighty sigh.
“It’s fine,” Lily said, leaning close enough to see that Mr. Freer needed better shampoo.
“And where’s that fine young scholar, Sebastian?” Mr. Freer’s watery blue eyes smiled.
Tori turned her dismay into a cough.
“He’s at a—” Lily faltered. She’d been about to say Cantrèa, stopped only by Tori’s glare and the sudden burning along her finger. “Debate tournament.”
“Ah, wonderful. In any case, look what I found here—records for the Van Bergen family.”
He pushed over a thick book with typewriter-printed pages. Lily followed his finger down the page, and Tori, curious in spite of herself, leaned over Lily’s shoulder.
“Selene Bevoire married Karl van Bergen in March 1706, and it looks like they got started on a family right away. Jean van Bergen, who eventually bought the Windermere vineyard, was born in November.”
Lily counted. Depending on the dates, two vastly different possibilities presented themselves. The wedding date was barely a month after the last letter. She pulled out her phone, taking a photo of the page and enlarging it.
Bevoire, Selene m. Van Bergen, Karl – March 27, 1706
Van Bergen, Jean b. November 15, 1706 (d. 1773)
Her stomach flip-flopped. She was too anxious to do math, but it had to be, it had to be.
“No other children?”
“Unfortunately not. Ms. van Bergen died only a few years later. We only have a few letters from her husband as reference, but it seems she had a mental breakdown and sadly committed suicide.”
Lily froze, her body rejecting what she’d just heard.
“What?”
“Incredibly tragic, I know.” Freer’s thin face was guileless. “I can send you copies of the letters.”
“Please.” Lily tried to get her limbs to work. Instead, her mind was filled with staticky dismay. She couldn’t shake the conviction that Selene had betrayed her. She’d thought they were alike, but Lily just wanted to live; Selene had chosen to die.
“Lily?” Tori asked, her face knitted with concern. “Anything else you needed?” She hooked her gently by the elbow.
“N-no. Thanks.”
“Oh, but there is one more thing I found fascinating—Jean van Bergen—he was a member of your school’s first graduating class. Did you know that?”
“Windermere?” Tori stopped mid-stride.
“Yes, yes, the very one. College was very different then. Students started higher education much earlier.”
Lily’s mind fritzed out from entirely too much input. Tori took one look at her and yanked her out the door, shouting thanks over her shoulder.
“Are you okay?” Tori said once they were outside, the cold slapping sense into Lily’s face.
“I—yes. No, I mean…I need paper, I need to write this out.”
She fumbled out the keys and flung them, unintentionally, at Tori’s face. Tori caught them in a reverse one-handed grip, so automatic that it startled both of them.
“Old habits.” Tori shrugged.
“Can you drive?”
Tori grinned savagely. “Of course.”
Seb had told Lily never to let Tori drive his car, and on the way back she found out why. Tori had a single speed—F1. As she white-knuckled the door, Lily realized she wasn’t even sure if Tori had a license. She certainly didn’t drive as though she’d passed a road test.
Lily tried to keep a firm grip on the dates and theories roiling through her brain as she assured herself that this was not possibly how she died—but flop-sweat anxiety overruled all.
“Jesus fuck, Tori!” she exhaled as Tori cut the engine, before sprinting into Millay Tower and throwing herself into the elevator.
She hurled herself onto the floor, grabbing her tatty spiral notebook, and flipped to a blank page, scribbling everything she could remember, thumbing open her phone with sweaty hands.
Tori observed her for a few amused moments before pouring herself a Scotch and settling on the couch to watch Lily unspool before her eyes.
“How can I help?” she asked, pulling off her boots.
“Just let me talk at you,” Lily said, without looking up.
“Shoot.”
“Jean van Bergen was a Magician.”
“Seems so.”
“April, May, June…” Lily muttered the months under her breath, counting on her fingers. “There’s no way.” She shook her head.
“No way what?”
“Jean van Bergen couldn’t be Karl van Bergen’s son. He was Windermere’s.”
“You think?”
“I’m certain. Read this.”
She hunted for the printout of the letter she’d found and handed it over, watching Tori’s face as she skimmed.
“Well. C’est brutale.”
“She knew she was pregnant, right?”
“I don’t get it, though—Windermere was rich. Why not just let him set her up, and—”
Lily jumped in. “Think of the times. Even if Magicians weren’t, everyone else was ultra-religious—Huguenots?
Selene at least believed in God. A child out of wedlock would have ruined them both.
And she says it in her letter.” Lily took it back, scanning.
“‘I trusted you, handed over myself and my virtue to your keeping, but all is a ruin.’ She’s basically saying she put her belief in Windermere, and instead of being her salvation, like she thought, he was her fall. ”
“Marrying Van Bergen was like her penance. Trying to find her way back into Eden.”
“Or at least absolution,” Lily agreed.
“And then she killed herself?”
Lily shuddered. “It doesn’t make sense.” But she wasn’t sure if she just didn’t want to believe it. “It just doesn’t.” She wanted to be sure.
A brick-shaking knell resounded across campus, coinciding with Sebastian staggering in the door. Tori shrieked and flecked drops of Scotch on the carpet.
“What’s happening?” A golden medal shaped like an oak leaf dangled from his hand as his enormous bags jammed him in the hallway.
“No idea what that bell was, but—” A secondary boom cut Lily off, and all three of them jumped.
Asher opened his door in disgust, glaring between them.
“It’s not us!” Lily said, her nerves jangling.
“Oh, fuck,” Tori said, getting it just a second before Lily did. She sat up straight and grabbed Lily’s notebook.
“It’s a clue,” Lily gasped, abandoning Seb and his bags, diving for her phone.
Cornelius Windermere’s voice boomed through the suite, and all four of them jumped again before Asher, and much more slowly, Seb, jammed themselves onto the couch with Lily and Tori.
“I, Cornelius Windermere, certify this as my last true will and testament. The discovery of this will shall supersede any directives from previous documents.
Upon the confirmation of the terms, all holdings in my estate shall pass to my heir.”
They sat in silence as the final word echoed on and on, minds whirring. Finally, Sebastian turned to her, his face pale with the exhaustion of tournaments and portals, but beneath the fatigue, she saw dull fury.
“What did you do? I thought we were done with this.”
“She didn’t do anything,” Tori said, her quick defense surprising Lily.
“I was just reading the letters, I found out—” She trailed off as Seb pushed himself up from the couch and moved stiffly to his room. “Do you really not want to know what I found?” She couldn’t keep the hurt out of her voice.
The clunk of his heavy door shutting behind him was answer enough.