17. Lily
LILY
The sunset speared through the leaded glass windows, carving a sharp path across her book, illuminating the words “The process of Solutio is often depicted as a drowning.” She felt like she was drowning now, or at least getting swept away in a current she had no hope of fighting against. Was she supposed to let it subsume her, or was she supposed to keep kicking, trying to keep her head above water?
She shut the book, pressing her cheek against the cool glass, and looked down onto the library roof and the wide granite steps, the lawn beyond shaded by an ancient, spreading sycamore.
One of the squat roof-spout gargoyles, the one she called Ned, looked particularly grim today.
His face was twisted up in either mockery or shock—she wasn’t sure which.
This incomprehensible room was her favorite of many hiding places on campus.
Growing up so close to Windermere, she’d spent hours by herself after AEtheric Study School lessons on the weekends, discovering the hidden world beneath and behind Windermere’s brick and ivory facade.
Mostly it was occupied by dust and mice, but sometimes it disgorged treasures.
This room was unequivocally the best treasure the school had given her.
The room’s intended purpose remained oblique to her, even after all these years.
It sat alone on the hidden fifth floor of the Gothic library’s square central tower, reachable by only one of the narrow, echoing spiral stairs tucked inside the tower’s spires.
Magic and a padlocked iron gate guarded the room against intrepid students.
Even at twelve, the wards had put up as much resistance against her power as a cobweb strung across a doorframe.
The padlock, however, had taken a trip powered by furious uphill bicycling on Ashmont Avenue to the locksmith’s, where she’d procured a pick set with a guilty face.
Afterward, she’d practiced for weeks with whatever she could get her hands on.
When she’d finally shouldered open the ironclad door, she stumbled into a sanctuary of dust and sunbeams. The room was empty, untouched, with soaring Gothic windows on three sides, each composed of three elaborate panes forming a pointed arch.
In one corner, the remains of a cane-seated chair had expired, and in another, a rusted iron chandelier slumped in neglect.
It was perfect. The next day she’d snuck into one of the library’s supply closets and stolen a broom, dustpan, and trash bags.
Several days later she’d liberated a cheap floor lamp from one of the dorm basements.
After that, turning the echoing room into a personal sanctuary had become one of Lily’s leading preoccupations.
It was aided chiefly by yard sales and Windermere’s “curb week,” where students too rich and too lazy to store their belongings for the summer placed them instead in the common rooms for anyone to claim.
Her two biggest feats had been the addition of the couch and her own set of wards.
The transference spell for the couch had taken her weeks to prepare with the aid of a fourth-year collegiate textbook and had left her seeing prismatic rainbows for days.
Her wards had taken months. They didn’t prevent anyone from entering the way she had, but instead they shrouded her belongings, making the room appear as it had when she’d first found it.
She was leaning hard into aegistics as her magical major; walls of all sorts had become second nature to her.
She set her book face down on the flat-pack end table to mark her spot and began pacing, catching her own reflection in the bank of cheap mirrors she’d scavenged from various curb weeks.
Music hummed softly from her speaker, and she wanted to kick it.
Lily was used to her life not being something that she had any meaningful control over, but never had it been so offensively obvious.
She felt like a pawn that Fate was suddenly shuttling around a chessboard, hurtling in the direction of Allsaires’s black knight.
It was too much to feel like rote coincidence, but her strong pragmatic streak refused to believe anything else.
And then there was the fact that the very first time he’d actually spoken to her, he hadn’t been horrible at all, and she was left to either lean into a stubborn notion that was a bit much, even for her, or to reframe him as someone who might also be human beneath his wealth, and looks, and talent.
He had been such an easy figure to pin her bitterness over Magic, of their society, on.
He was supposed to be the perfect symbol for everything that was wrong with Magic, stuck three hundred years in the past, as it was.
Lily shoved her hands into her pockets, and they mashed against a crumpled piece of paper. She pulled it out, finding her hasty sketch of the symbols the bonfire had spat out at the Revelation.
Her mother’s words thudded in her skull—"You’re not thinking of competing this year, are you?”—and her insides squirmed as she shouldered her backpack and followed the spiral stairs five flights down to the archives.
Allsaires was waiting for her outside the studio the next evening, even though she’d arrived early so she could warm up alone.
He peeled himself off the wall and gave her a sheepish quarter-smile that seemed incongruous with his white joggers, which were somehow not only not ridiculous on him, but flattering.
She let herself envision how they might look sprayed with her vomit.
“Hi,” he said, then fidgeted as she didn’t return the greeting and keyed in the code. “I tried to get your number from Gemma, but she uh. She wasn’t in.”
Lily paused, hand hovering over the keypad.
From the flush creeping up his gold-dusted skin, she could tell that Gemma had very clearly been in.
Somewhat incredulously, she imagined the pride-swallowing that must have occurred for him to seek out his rebuffed, drunken hookup in order to get the number of the least-sought-out girl in school.
How does he even know that Gemma would have my number?
“How did you know Gemma would have my number?”
He picked up his gym bag and squeezed past her as she held the door. “You’re friends with Daphne, right?”
It wasn’t an answer; it was a sidelong, non-lie-question, the kind she was used to giving people who were too nosy for their own good, usually teachers.
A very cold thought burrowed its way out of her chest and toward her extremities—she’d assumed that to Sebastian Allsaires, she was invisible; an inconsequential astral body not even big enough to pick up on sonar.
She’d assumed that this whole time she’d been the only one watching, but what if he’d been watching right back?
“Thanks again for doing this,” he said, bottom lip trapped between his teeth. “You didn’t have to.”
She wondered then, not for the first time, why she had, and felt again that invisible hand against her back, shoving her forward.
Her mind grasped for words as she jerked her head in something approximating a nod and came up empty-handed.
She was unpracticed in the way of discourse with her peers.
At regular school, it had been because she was afraid, deathly so, of her mother’s mistakes.
At Study School, and at Windermere, it was because everyone knew a single fact about her, and that one fact was enough.
Even Daphne and Gemma talked around her more than to her.
While Allsaires watched, she set up her speaker, but her fingers stumbled as she looked for a playlist, suddenly self-conscious in a way that was as foreign to her as Lapland, where he’d supposedly spent the summer. Anxiety lodged in her throat, she turned to him.
“What do you want to listen to?”
“Anything’s fine,” he said carelessly, then, taking in her frozen form, “Really. Asher’s always in charge of the music.”
It was strange to hear him use Vis’s first name, as if he were someone that Lily knew. She put on music that she liked to warm up to, with an urgent, syncopated beat that she could feel in her blood.
Immediately, she found herself at another impasse, unsure if she should lead him through some sort of warmup or if that would be insulting to one of the best athletes on campus.
After a still moment, she began to work through her body.
In the mirror Allsaires began to follow her, mostly averting his eyes, but glancing at her now and again.
He had a focused intensity that ignited a tripping sensation in her stomach, the same kind she felt right before she went onstage.
It was gravity tipping upward and releasing her for just one second. Only, unlike in dance, it didn’t stop.
They warmed up in silence, with only the music to break the heavy atmosphere. As Lily straightened, finishing and moving from the barre, he spoke,
“We have homework due tomorrow.”
She paused, the wooden rail suddenly slick under her hand.
“I did most of it already.” It was another non-lie. She had looked at the images, contemplated, formed answers, but had not gone so far as to truly ignore Chant’s orders and write anything down.
“Me too.” His face betrayed nothing. “But I don’t want to fail class, and if we’re supposed to work together, then…
” She watched him trail off, waiting for him to qualify the statement with something about how he would bear it like a gentleman, or whatever it was that rich young men who thought benevolently of themselves would say in this situation.
He caught her gaze. In his hazel eyes there was something fierce and burning. He looked the way he had in the bonfire’s flames—sure and ready. They held no hesitation.
“Then we’re supposed to work together.”
The current dragged her forward.