121. Lily
LILY
“Ineed to see him.” She looked between the adults flanking her bed. “Please. Please. I just need to see him.”
She begged Chant with every fiber of her being. He’d been the first on the scene, having been on the way to the library already, in the rain and the darkness, as the Elumnara dictated, to formally declare the winner.
Lily didn’t feel like she’d won anything. She felt like maybe she’d come really, really close to losing everything.
Eventually she prevailed, and they wheeled her into his room. It was lit with warm, quiet light, and only some of it was man-made. Seb lay unconscious, IVs and Metaphysical equipment coming out of him. Magic ebbed around him. She could see it hovering on his breath. What a miracle he was.
Chant helped her clamber onto the skinny bed, piling her under her own set of blankets. When she curled around Seb, his casts hard and cold and digging into her thigh, he finally stopped shaking.
She had to turn off the part of herself that kept replaying how close they’d come to irreparable disaster.
Seb’s back was broken. Both of them had sustained concussions and lost an alarming amount of blood.
With Windermere’s AEtheric medic, and another rushed up from the City, the wounds would heal quickly—in weeks, not months or years.
The scars would remind them, though. They webbed across Seb’s back, ran in a gruesome line across her forehead.
Erasing scars with magic was a difficult thing, tied to curing the trauma that had caused them.
The fancy medic recommended plastic surgery and wrote her a referral for an expensive one in the City that she wouldn’t bother to call.
More than anything, Lily wanted Seb to wake up. More than anything, she dreaded it, because then she’d have to tell him, recount the facts yet again. Over and over, she practiced in her head, trying to decide what she could spare him.
The facts were this:
After watching Seb hightail it to the library, Gemma followed the bad feeling in her own stomach to campus security. There, she alerted them to a possible fight before running after Sebastian herself.
After Conrad’s beam had gone sideways, killing Braithwhite—or at least hurling him to his death in front of the crowd of spectators that had gathered as AEtheric attacks lit up the library tower and broke windows—Gemma had used her powerful Fraudulent Counsel* to subdue Hawleyhurst and freeze him in place until Chant arrived.
After his magic had thrown out a shield to protect them, Seb had fallen unconscious, and Lily—she didn’t remember this part—had gone slightly insane, screaming for him to wake up. She would not relay this information.
After Chant arrived, sliding neatly down the roof, he’d replaced Gemma’s illegal use of Fraudulent Counsel with his own legitimate one*.
He’d crouched behind Lily, forcing her to let go of Sebastian, and rocked her tightly against his chest while her forehead gash bled freely onto his tuxedo shirt, until help arrived.
Lily had been sedated for the rest of it. She had not seen the sack of Braithwhite’s body, crushed upon the stairs. She had not seen Conrad Hawleyhurst dragged away screaming by security.
She had been awake, listening numbly, as Chant, flanked by Seb’s therapist, told her that Hawleyhurst was having his magic stripped and his name stricken from the Covenant for crimes against the community before being handed over to the authorities.
When Dr. Metcalf had asked her, trying to make eye contact that Lily ignored, if there was anything Lily had wanted to add, she had said only, voice small, “Please don’t let them curse him.”
“Is now a good time, Lily?” Dean Meade, in all her steely glory, stood in the doorway.
Lily glanced at Seb. His eyes were soft and dull, meaning that the latest drugs and spells were working.
This was as good as it was getting. In response, she swept up the game of Tarot that neither of them had touched and moved the muffins her Gran had brought.
Normally mundane individuals weren’t allowed in any actively magical areas of Windermere, but the dean had made an exception for Gran, since Lily’s mother was permanently warded from campus.
This was the second time Dean Meade had stopped by.
The first time, Lily had sent her away, saying that she didn’t want to discuss the Elumnara until Sebastian was awake.
She didn’t want to discuss it ever. She wanted to hurl the Chalice, still stained rusty with her blood—it wouldn’t come out, no matter how hard she scrubbed—into the Hudson.
She and Seb had barely talked since he’d woken up days ago.
Part of their not-talking was the pain. The trade-off for faster healing was that the process was excruciating.
He’d woken up crying, mewling, really—a hoarse sound choked with tears—and it had been awful.
As she, Chant, and Dr. Metcalf had explained what had happened and the subsequent fallout, she’d seen the shock settle on his face. Then he’d retreated into himself.
Dr. Metcalf visited him twice a day. It didn’t seem like much talking happened. There were so many things Lily wanted to ask him, so many things she wanted to say, but she kept her mouth closed and held his hand when he let her.
Dean Meade entered, followed by Chant. He looked exhausted. They pulled up chairs and sat, looking at Lily, in case she wanted to say anything. Seb looked straight ahead, his eyes unfocused.
“How are you both feeling?” Dean Meade asked.
“Fine,” she said. Seb said nothing.
Dean Meade swallowed. “I want to extend my apologies once more that you were subject to such violence in pursuit of the Elumnara. After the events of this year, the trustees have decided that the tradition will not continue.” Lily was both surprised and not surprised at all.
“If there’s anything we can do to make the remainder of your school year easier, we’re at your service. ”
Lily almost laughed. She and Seb had already been exempted from deadlines on all schoolwork. The last quarter of their year was a joke.
When neither of them responded, Dean Meade pressed on.
“Lily, it’s time I offer you my official congratulations as the winner of the three hundredth Elumnara.
Beyond the prestige, there are many legal matters to attend to regarding confirming and cementing your status as Cornelius Windermere’s heir. ”
Lily blinked. “Sorry?”
Seb’s blank face momentarily became slightly less blank.
Dean Meade looked confused and glanced at Chant as she spoke, “Was there not—”
Chant cut in. “Lily, was there anything with the Chalice when you found it?”
In the intervening days between the darkness in the catacombs and everything that had happened after, Lily had completely forgotten that she’d taken two things from the marble sarcophagus.
“I’ll be right back.”
Chant made to help her as she pushed herself to her feet and limped out of the room, returning with the adventuring backpack.
Its nylon was stained brown with blood, and the fabric crunched horribly as Lily unzipped it and fished out the wooden box.
She tipped its contents gently onto the bed next to Seb’s legs, and even he couldn’t feign disinterest.
Multiple items disgorged themselves: several sheaves of folded paper bound with ribbon, a faded journal, a silver locket with a bit of hair poking out, and a small scroll tube. She opened the tube, and a rolled piece of parchment, sealed in wax bearing Windermere’s crest, fell out.
She looked at the wax seal and then at Chant. He accepted it when she offered and ran his hand over the seal. It dislodged itself from the parchment without blemishing either. Her hands shook as she accepted it, rolling it open so Seb could also see Windermere’s awful but now familiar cursive.
They read it together, Lily in shock, and Seb out of the corner of his eye:
July 16, 1737
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 following, all holdings in my estate shall pass to my heir, the last magical bloodline of my biological son, Jean van Bergen.
In accordance with augury and the Hermetic Calendar, these terms shall be completed three hundred years hence, in the form of an Elumnara meant to prove the worthiness of the heir.
Only an individual from the bloodline of both myself and Selene van Bergen, in possession of adequate magical ability, will be able to open the tomb beneath the Windermere Library.
The opening of the room and retrieval of the Chalice shall prove confirmation of their identity.
Further confirmation may be obtained through blood magic.
Nothing shall stand in the way of my heir’s entitlement once these terms are confirmed.
The will was signed in blood, stamped, and notarized.
Lily stared at it, reading it over and over again.
She almost laughed because the joke was so delicious.
Lily was nobody’s heir; her grandparents had made sure of that.
Even if she was by some ridiculous error, Cornelius Windermere was entrusting his estate to someone with two months to live.
“Lily?” Seb was looking at her. He took the parchment from her very carefully.
She looked back at him, but his expression was unreadable. She turned to the adults.
“This is a mistake. My father was mundane. Jean van Bergen was a Magician. He attended Windermere.”
Chant held up his hand, silencing Dean Meade. “I believe you’ll find answers in the rest of your belongings.”
Your belongings. He said it as if these priceless antiques of their school’s founder were rightfully hers. She glanced at the papers, the journal, the locket somehow still bright after three hundred years. Three hundred years.
“I understand your shock, Lily. This is a lot to process. A bloodline spell is very simple. We can do it now, if you like. Professor Chant has brought the necessary preparations.”
Lily swallowed. Part of her wanted to get it over with, have the truth. Rip it off like a bandage. But part of her wanted to bask in the possibilities of this error for just a little longer.
“Sure, fine.”
Dean Meade sighed in relief, and Chant withdrew a small ebony case. It held three stoppered vials inside its velvet lining. One was filled with silver powder, the second held a golden liquid, and the third was empty.
“Can you open that locket, Lily?” Chant asked.
Inside was a small braid of hair. Lily had assumed it must be Selene’s, but as she withdrew it, feeling a bit gross, she realized that it was two people’s hair braided together.
Some of it was reddish brown, much like her own, and some of it was a faded blond, almost gray.
She handed it to Chant, and, using tweezers, he carefully withdrew one hair of each, dropping them into the vial.
“One of yours as well.” His voice was apologetic.
As Chant added her strand of hair, it wasn’t lost on anyone in the room how closely it matched the darker one already in the vial. He added the other contents and stoppered it. The elements hissed and fizzed as they collided.
Chant began to cast. Luminous threads of AEther spun out from his fingers, whispering through the air, and wrapped in a slowly rotating sphere around the vial before dissolving into smoke. When the air around the glass cleared, the vial’s contents had coagulated into a blood-bright liquid.
* Fraudulent Counsel is a powerful Metapsychosis spell named for those who used their intellect to manipulate others in Dante’s Inferno, including Ulysses/Odysseus and Diomedes. (Canto XXVI, Circle VIII, Pouch VIII)
* Fraudulent Counsel falls under the Thought Transference branch of Metapsychosis.
Due to the power and sensitive nature of Metapsychosis magic, it is the most strictly regulated branch of AEtheric magic.
Many of the spells in this branch of magic require additional authorization to perform at will, which a Certification Year student would not have been cleared for.