Chapter 15
After the midday meal on Saturday, I returned to my bedchamber to find that a letter had been slid under my door. The seal—bronze-colored wax imprinted with a version of the Toolkeepers’ crossed-hammer sigil—told me that it was from my father.
I’d found no such correspondence among my things, upon waking with no memory, which meant either that my father had never written to me before or that I had not kept his letters.
I settled at my desk with a tight feeling in my chest and broke the seal. That feeling expanded into a soft pressure as I scanned the familiar handwriting.
My Dearest Amber,
I am writing to you from a carriage, on my way toward the southern reaches of the kingdom, to where I have been called to supervise the construction of a new public bathhouse. Please excuse any stray marks as the result of skittish horses and an uneven road.
I have given Martyn your love, and we are both delighted by your invitation to the Alchemary’s Family Weekend festivities.
We shall endeavor to attend, if at all possible.
While I regret the cause for my recent visit, I welcome any opportunity for your company, and it has been far too long since I last saw your face.
I have, since the day you were born, been able to measure my own worth from the weight of your gaze, and on my return journey, your honey-colored eyes haunted me, as they so often did when you were a child.
I greatly regret the rift between us. And while I cannot strike past mistakes from our history, nor can I return memories I was never privy to, I can offer you this memory from your childhood, which I have always treasured:
When you were but five or six years of age, there came a rainy morning when you were forbidden to go out, and you were quite cross about the circumstance.
To appease you, your mother gave you a scrap of parchment and a chunk of charcoal and told you to draw whatever suited your fancy.
I returned for the midday meal expecting to find your parchment covered in flowers, rabbits, and perhaps a vial or two from your mother’s apothecary shop.
Instead you had spent the entire morning painstakingly translating the verbiage from an old public-notice flyer into your mother’s native tongue, though you hardly knew how to write a word of it.
She said you’d run into the front of the shop at least a hundred times to demand instructions on how to form the letters, even as you insisted on writing them all yourself.
I knew then that nothing could stop you from whatever you set your mind to.
And that you had more serious, ambitious ideas than most other children.
I see that same passion and determination in you now, and though our views on the ethical use of alchemy instead of labor are quite divergent, I know that you have only good intentions.
And while I believe the Alchemary should not exist as an institution, I am grateful to both the academy and to the world that you can be counted upon to measure their worth, as you have always been the measure of mine.
Love always,
Your father, Cornelius Fallbrook
Tears filled my eyes as I reread his words for the third time.
I had only the faintest memory of the morning he’d recounted, but the fact that it had remained with him meant more to me than I was truly willing to admit.
So I tucked his letter into my mother’s small wooden chest, alongside her ring, and I turned my attention to my studies.
Hours later, I looked up to find candlelight flickering across the curved stone walls of my small bedchamber from three different angles, casting overlapping shadows. I stared at them, watching the meaningless silhouettes jitter.
My window was closed against the cold night air, but I could hear the soothing crash of waves against the cliffside below, and, given my exhaustion, the rhythmic sound threatened to lull me to sleep.
With a sigh, I forced my attention back to the sheets of parchment on the desk in front of me.
Two of my candles sat on the desk, at opposing top corners.
The third cast its weaker light from the bedside table on my right.
They were more than capable of illuminating my work and could not be blamed for my lack of attention.
In fact, the third candle almost seemed a waste of resources, considering how often my mother and I had shared a single candle placed at the center of the table when I was a child.
For the third time in the past hour, I read through my notes from class, slowly and painstakingly, comparing the symbols and concepts to one of the Fundamentals-year texts I’d “borrowed” from the library.
Slowly—so slowly—I was unraveling the knot of facts and theories tangled in my mind like the various balls of yarn my mother had used for knitting most evenings.
I’d never thought of her yarn as a knot before, because she’d always been able to gradually, neatly unwind it. My ball of academic yarn, however…
I felt like I’d plunged my metaphorical knitting needle deep into the ball and plucked out random loops, all of which were too tangled with the rest of the material to come free. To give me more than a rudimentary glimpse of how they were coiled and what they meant.
With a frustrated sigh, I closed the textbook and snatched my journal from the corner of my desk. Tonight, I could understand little more of the borrowed text than of my own encoded writing, so why not dig at that ball of yarn instead?
At least that might break up the monotony.
This time, instead of focusing on all of the writing I couldn’t understand—the vast majority of what was on the pages—I focused on what few alchemical symbols I could recognize.
Iron. Copper. Salt. Gold. And the squared circle: the alchemical symbol for the Philosopher’s Stone.
A circle inside a square, inside a triangle, inside another circle, each of them touching at various sides and points.
Curious, I opened the textbook again, searched the appendix, then flipped to the pages concerning the meaning of the symbol. The combining of water, earth, and fire, of mind, matter, and spirit. The importance of balance and stability.
I read the words over and over, tracing the shapes with my gaze, then with my finger, reciting the meaning, well aware that two weeks before, all of it had held an intimate and presumably clear meaning for me.
I understood the words. I even understood the concepts. But trying to figure out how they all fit together made me feel like I was flailing in a pit of those academic yarn balls, being poked with fifty knitting needles at once every time I tried to move.
Several polite taps echoed against the door to my chamber, then it creaked open as I turned.
Wilder smiled at me in the flickering glow of my candle, and my heart leapt at the sight of him.
“Come in!” I rose to tug him inside, his hands strong and warm in my grip, and both the dirt beneath his fingernails and the scents of earth and freshly cut vegetation told me he’d spent the afternoon behind the Refectory, in the small forest where he often harvested his own ingredients.
He glanced at the parchment spread across my desk. Voice teasing, his eyes sparking with good humor, he asked, “You do know what they say about girls who spend the entire weekend studying, don’t you?”
“They survive their Mastery-year trials and go on to live long, successful lives?”
He snorted. “Precisely. I am certainly not thinking of a different and much less socially stimulating answer to my own question.”
“Socially…stimulating?”
He shrugged, one brow arched. “I care not if you hide yourself from the entire student body, so long as you don’t hide your student body from me.
” His hands gripped my waist, and warmth glowed low in my belly.
I leaned into his form and indulged a long breath dragged in through the linen draped over his chest. His scent washed over me—fresh earth and sweetened tea—and for a moment I clung to him, my fingers tangled in his tunic, low at his waist, and in the thicker material of his cloak.
My heart thudded almost painfully. There was something.…
A memory? No, more of a feeling. An impression that defied words.
I chased after it, inhaling again, deeply. My grip on his clothing tightened, and a primal sound ground up from his throat. He buried his face in the loose braid above my ear, and I clung to him, trying to draw a mental image from this ghost of a sentiment. Trying to identify it. To define it.
At last, I let him go with a sigh. Embarrassment burned beneath my skin.
“I do apologize. That was entirely inappropriate—”
“Nonsense.” He reached out and tucked a strand of loose hair behind my ear. “It was…What did you call it? A chemical reaction? This is us, setting up that experiment, anew.”
“Exothermic as hell,” I murmured.
“Indeed.” His pupils flared. “Though I suppose we should close the door.”
I grinned. “Scandalous, Mr. Gregory.”
His smile widened. “One can only hope, Ms. Fallbrook.”
Wilder pushed the door closed, then crossed the room with several purposeful steps and sank onto the edge of the green armchair. The change in his bearing—the almost formal way he sat and the way his gaze kept returning to the door—sat heavy on my heart.
“You’re not coming tonight, are you?” I asked.
We’d made plans to study in the student lab that evening. Well, plans for me to study—to get caught up on lab techniques and common practices—while he furthered his illicit black-market business.
“I’m still coming,” he assured me. “But I’m going to be late. I have to make a delivery across the bridge, in Saltstrand.”
“What kind of delivery?”
His grin faded into a soft but unyielding look. “The kind you’re better off not knowing about.”
“I already know what you do in the lab after hours,” I pointed out, quite reasonably, in my own opinion. And while he nodded, there was something unspoken in his smile that made me feel naive.
Perhaps I didn’t know all of what he did in the lab after hours.
Perhaps his illicit side business could work to my advantage.
“Will you…Will you make an elixir for me? Will you give it a shot, at least? Or perhaps work with me to create what I need?”
Wilder’s left brow arched, giving him an intrigued look that I found inexplicably alluring.
He leaned forward and took my hand. “Whatever can I do for you, Amber?” he asked as he tugged me closer.
The low pitch of his voice tugged sensitive threads deep within me. Was it possible that obvious and true interest in a woman’s needs and ideas could make an already fetching man even more appealing? Was anyone at the Alchemary studying that phenomenon?
“Wilder, I must recover my memory. Desmond insists that I’m in danger here, and my father believes that danger comes from some specific, unknown source.
From an individual. And that the threat may not have passed.
I remain unconvinced by either of those theories, yet I cannot dismiss them.
And even if they prove baseless…I need my life back.
I need to remember what I’ve learned, and what I’ve accomplished, and how I’ve changed, and how my relationships have evolved.
” I squeezed his hand. “You seem to have a treatment for every deficit. Concentration. Confidence. Tolerance. A man’s ability to…
perform. Can you help me overcome the deficit of my memory? ”
“With alchemy?” He seemed both interested in and skeptical of the possibility.
“That is generally the focus around here.”
“Indeed. But…there is quite a bit of trial and error in my approach.”
“I am aware.”
“And that takes time.”
“Which is unfortunate. But that time will pass regardless. I may as well be making layered use of it, don’t you think?”
He nodded slowly. “But Amber, I have no one to test developing versions of your memory elixir on, other than you. No one else has your symptoms. And I’m concerned that one of the aforementioned errors in the process could make things worse. That you could become ill or injured.”
I frowned, searching his gaze. “If you had someone else, you would risk injuring them in the testing phase?”
“I don’t relish the thought,” he admitted. “But if the alternative was to risk injuring you? I would not hesitate.”
A complicated mixture of emotion exploded within me. An affectionate warmth, tinged with a thread of horror.
“But we don’t have that option,” he continued, gently squeezing my hand. “And I’m not convinced that the possibility of recovering your memory is worth the risk of an adverse result.”
I pulled my hand from his grip. “I appreciate your caution. But that is my decision to make.” And he showed no such caution when he tested his elixirs on himself. “Will you help me?”
Wilder scrubbed his hands over his face, blond hair falling over his fingers with the frustrated gesture. Finally he looked up at me. “Of course. But only because I’m afraid that if I don’t, you’ll try it on your own, despite the fact that you’ve recovered very little of your skill in the lab.”
“How well you know me,” I murmured.
He rose and laid his hand on my shoulder. “You go ahead. Set up your station and get started with the Fundamentals-year exercises. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“What if someone else comes in?”
Wilder looked amused and a little sad; yet again, his expression left me feeling naive, as if I were missing something that should have been patently obvious. “No one else will be studying, Amber. It’s Saturday night. Our entire cohort will be at the Dusty Beaker within the hour.”
“Have I been there?” I asked as a now-familiar discomfort anchored me to the stone floor, like weights sewn into my skirt. “At the Beaker?”
An alehouse just past the bridge in Saltstrand, I had gathered from overheard conversations. A place where students hung out on the weekends. Professors, reportedly, withdrew to a room in the back, where they could unwind out of sight of their pupils.
Wilder’s smile loosened. “You were never a regular, but you’ve certainly been there. Everyone’s been there.” His brows dipped as he studied me. “Would you rather meet me there tonight? There’s no edict declaring that you must study every night.”
I laughed, but the sound felt bitter, even to my own ears. “Alas, I have no time to waste with ale and revelry. Though I will be brewing some of Yoslyn’s tea tonight. And I took extra pastries from the Refectory at the noon meal, just for this occasion.”
“That sounds nice,” he said as he headed toward the door, and he genuinely seemed to mean it. “Try not to blow yourself up before I get there.”