Chapter 13
As the sun rose on Saturday morning, five days since I’d woken up with amnesia, I finally stepped for the first time into the third-floor lab devoted to use by Mastery-year students. As I had hoped, the space was almost entirely abandoned.
Almost.
Wilder Gregory rushed from table to table like a man gone mad. Like a man possessed by the spirit of alchemy and at home in its demanding embrace.
He looked wild, and driven, and passionate. It was mesmerizing.
For some time, I only watched him, delaying the announcement of my presence, as curious about when he would notice me as I was about what, exactly, he was doing.
And as I stood in the doorway, leaning against the thick wooden frame, a calm descended over me despite the early hour.
Despite the constant, grinding anxiety of my own ignorance and the weight of my secret.
I felt at home here, though I could not remember ever having utilized an alchemical laboratory.
It was the sounds. The gentle bubbling of half a dozen liquids. The soft sputter of flames and the clinking of glass against glass. Each noise felt familiar and made sense, like the crackle of the fire in my childhood hearth.
It was the sights as well. Tables, and stools, and copper piping. Parchment, bound notebooks, and charcoal pencils. The furnaces, one bricked into each of three corners of the room, and a fourth towering like a castle turret toward the ceiling.
Athanor.
The name of the specialty furnace bloomed from the dark recesses of my mind, unbidden. I could not remember learning it, yet I knew it, just as I knew that it was kept burning at a constant, low temperature, in order to…
But then came the limit of the imageless memory: one fact liberated from the prison of my mind, while countless others remained bound in chains, behind locked doors.
Yet even with no memory of ever having done so, I suddenly felt like I could easily step into the room, slide onto a stool at an empty table, and know in exactly what order I would pull my notes from my satchel and begin setting up my supplies.
I knew how I would lay out my writing utensils, arrange my pipettes, and organize my thoughts into orderly lists of tasks, testable theories, and goals.
The mental skit had the feel of a ritual I’d performed a thousand times.
Though my understanding was that each student had been assigned a single lab table, and presumably a specific, requisite number of supplies, Wilder had projects in progress at three different stations.
Powdered substances sat on scales. Brightly tinted liquids bubbled in bulbous beakers suspended above flames of varying heights and colors.
Two different alembics dripped distillations into vials suspended by thin iron and copper frames.
Hourglasses of various sizes stood on all three tables, positioned next to specific tasks.
As I watched, Wilder spun from one table to the next, where he bent to peer into a small hourglass on its level. Then he seized a glass pipette and used it to add several drops of oil to a flame burning beneath a distinctive bulbous, flat-bottomed vial filled with a simmering scarlet fluid.
Awe filled me as I stared around the room.
This was a student space, yet its supplies were of the finest quality.
The glass was thinner, smoother, and clearer than I remember ever seeing in my mother’s apothecary shop in Innswood.
A cabinet across the back of the room held row after row of beakers and vials.
Scales and burners. Alembics, retorts, and receivers.
Mortars, pestles, and crucibles. And a substantial array of hourglasses in every conceivable size, their sand ranging in color across the rainbow, and presumably ranging in texture as well.
Wilder hummed as he worked, grinning faintly when a color pleased him or the level of a flame looked just right. I couldn’t help but smile as well. He looked so practiced and efficient. So comfortable in the lab, doing a dozen things at once, and…
He turned to grab a scale sitting at the end of one of his tables, and his eyes finally found me.
“Great writhing caduceus!” he swore softly, free hand clutching at his chest. “You startled me, Amber. What the hell are you doing, haunting the lab like a ghost?”
I laughed. “If I am a ghost, then you are possessed.” I gestured at the chaotic, if fascinating, display spread out before me.
“We are quite a pair,” he agreed with a contented nod. “Come in and close the door.”
I pulled the door shut behind me, sparing a moment to look through the gorgeous stained glass panel set into its center, at eye level. Blues, and reds, and greens, each brighter than the next, all of them thin, crystal clear, and stunning.
“When you said to meet you here at dawn, I assumed you’d be running late.
” I had never in my life known Wilder to get out of bed unprompted.
In fact, both his mother and his brother used to complain that he would keep the hours of an owl, if he were allowed, and that if they forced him awake during the morning, he would drag his feet about the house like a spirit wrested from its own grave.
I saw no sign of that indolence as Wilder rushed across the room and back, grabbing supplies and mixing chemicals with hardly a glance at the notes lying scattered across all three tables, in places perilously close to open flame.
“In fact, I was late,” he admitted, setting three flat-bottomed bulbous vials on the edge of a table. “But that was six hours ago. I’ve since more than made up for it.”
“You’ve been here all night?”
“Of course not! I didn’t start until eleven, and even then I got decidedly little real work done, because Keryth and Lennox were hunkered over their clumsy little grade-one tincture, trying to discover why it had congealed like milk left on the table overnight.
I finally had to run them out of the lab myself. ”
“And how did you do that?”
“I ‘accidentally’ vented a suspension with an aroma not unlike the excrement of a cat who has consumed the aforementioned curdled milk.” He laughed as he turned back to the storage cabinet for a third alembic. “They couldn’t clean their supplies and flee fast enough.”
“Wow,” I breathed as I set my satchel on an empty stool. “You make alchemy sound so glamorous.”
“It is glamorous.” He set the alembic down and seized my waist, pulling me close so that his words brushed warm and damp against my earlobe.
“It is vital, and thrilling, and stimulating,” he whispered, and sparks trailed up and down my spine.
“And even when it doesn’t progress like you hoped, it’s still the second-most fun one could ever have in a laboratory setting. ”
“Second most?” I pushed him back but couldn’t resist a grin at the shine in his blue eyes.
I took an exaggerated look about the room.
“I feel the inexplicable need to scrub every surface in the room, in case you’ve had the most fun there, with some girl whose name I’m suddenly grateful to have forgotten. ”
Wilder laughed, one hand splayed over his heart. “Tonight, my passion has been only for alchemy. You have my word.”
A little thrill of satisfaction settled into my gut, flaring into the soft warmth of a banked coal.
“Thank you,” I said as he lurched toward the table on his right just as the final grains of a bright blue powder drained through the top half of a small hourglass.
“For helping me. I was up half the night studying, as I have been all week, and while everything I read makes sense—it settles into place quickly and logically—the sheer volume of what I have yet to cover feels insurmountable.”
“Oh, I assure you, it’s…mountable.”
“Surmountable,” I corrected.
Wilder only grinned as he removed a small flame from beneath a suspended flat-bottomed vial full of a murky brown liquid.
“And regarding practical application…well, I’ve managed none of that so far. There are only four weeks left until the first trial, and I haven’t managed to produce a single elixir.” I yawned into my own closed fist. “I don’t suppose you’ve started any tea? The stronger the better?”
“Um…no.” Wilder left the vial to cool while he began counting out weights onto one half of the scale he’d just set up.
“But you’re welcome to boil some water over that flame, if you’ve brought some tea leaves.
If not, Yoslyn keeps a pouch of loose leaves in the cabinet under her table, and she won’t notice if you pinch a few. ”
“What makes you think she wouldn’t notice?”
He shrugged. “She’s never noticed when I borrowed a pinch of her powdered cinnabar.
” He set the vial on the scale, having accounted for the weight of the vessel first by placing an identical empty vial on the other side; then he took note on a sheet of parchment of how far the scale dipped.
“Life would be very difficult for me around here if our classmates actually kept track of their supplies.…”
After another moment he set his quill down and met my gaze. “Okay! I guess we should get your lab station set up.”
“Yes. And in that vein, I have two questions. First, which of these is mine, and second, why do you appear to have three?”
“This one is mine.” He laid one hand on the center of the three occupied tables. “That one is yours,” he added with a gesture to the table on his left. “I’ve been borrowing it at night, considering that it’s thus far been unoccupied.”
“I see. And that one?” I said with a glance at the far table, where two different solutions sat cooling over extinguished open-flame burners.
“Lennox’s station.”
“And should I assume he’s ignorant of this arrangement?”
“I think we should both assume that Lennox’s ignorance knows no limits. Thus the congealed tincture.”