Chapter 20
Monday was unseasonably warm for a fall day, and the heat only contributed to my stuffy feeling of frustration and discontent. And while the rhythmic whooshing of waves outside my window was peaceful, it also threatened to lull me to sleep.
After yet another night of low-burning candles and insufficient sleep, followed by two classes of my own and one of Professor Robard’s, my brain felt like a swollen, overheated mass throbbing behind my skull.
My thoughts churned with a maelstrom of facts, theories, and data.
I would have given my left arm for another cup of tea, and the alertness it would surely bring, but I could not waste any more time going up and down the stairs.
Every day I understood more of my craft, yet felt less capable of using it. Less capable, even, of rising from my bed to face the day. I could not remember ever being more tired or less focused. Though, considering my circumstances, that really wasn’t saying much.
Distracted as I was by exhaustion, my attention caught again on the metal ouroboros lying on my desk.
Afternoon sunlight beaming from the open shutters caught its scales and glittered in its red eyes.
As a hawk soared past the window, its shadow made the snake appear to be blinking as it worked to swallow its own tail.
To continue the cycle of life, or learning, or the seasons, or anything else that could be said to begin the same way it ended.
I picked up the bracelet and studied it for the hundredth time in the past twenty-four hours.
I had no idea why it had been hidden in the Conservatory wall, or who had been meant to find it.
But the idea that someone there had secrets—beautiful, possibly symbolic secrets—made the cold, harsh Conservatory building feel more like a mystery than like the giant marble mausoleum it resembled.
With a sigh, I dropped the bracelet into the wooden chest, under my father’s letter, where it encircled my mother’s rose-cut ring, then pushed my chair back from the desk, careful to avoid the edge of an uneven stone that had caught the chair leg twice the night before.
Desperate for a cross breeze, even if it fluttered my loose sheets of parchment, I rose and opened the door into the dark stairwell.
“Oh!” I jumped back from the unexpected face, practically glowing on the shadowy landing. “I didn’t hear any footsteps.”
Wilder laughed, lowering the fist he’d raised to knock on my door. “Buried in work?” he guessed with a glance at my desk. “All you do is study.”
“Well, you rarely study, so I suppose, together, we achieve some sort of balance.”
“I suppose.” He crossed his arms over the front of his tunic, one brow arched expectantly. “May I come in?”
“Only if you’ve come to help.”
“Actually, I’ve come to introduce you to the concept of daylight.” Yet he stepped inside anyway. “They say the sun’s rays have a medicinal effect on both the human body and spirit.”
I blinked up at him. “You’re here to save me from the gloom of my own dormitory chamber?” Despite the fresh breeze being pulled in from the glittering ocean view, now that the door was open.
Grinning, he stepped close and gently tapped the side of my skull, just above one of my braids. “And of this equally glum and much more mysterious chamber.”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to my desk.
“What I’ve learned—what I’ve relearned—today is that the sun can also have an effect on certain kinds of compounds and suspensions.
It’s something about the heat, or maybe specifically the light itself, though that’s evidently quite difficult to replicate with open flame or direct heat in a laboratory setting, and—”
Wilder groaned as he glanced over my shoulder at the sheets of parchment I’d been studying. “You know, you used to spend time in places other than your own bedchamber. Not that this is an entirely unpleasant location, under the right circumstances.” His gaze wandered toward my neatly made bed.
If only I could remember those circumstances…I thought, indulging the sudden warmth deep in my chest. “Where did I spend time before?”
“The library and the laboratory, mostly.”
And the truth was that I would have loved to be in the library at that very moment, with a large selection of texts legitimately at my disposal, instead of merely the few I’d managed to sneak out of the building the week before. But I could not abide the stares. The whispers.
It wasn’t only that they made me uncomfortable; they made it impossible for me to concentrate.
“Which laboratory?” I asked.
“Desmond’s, mostly.” Wilder’s expression soured, as if the admission left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. “So, why aren’t you there now?”
“I’ll go tonight. I’m just…trying to study. While I still have daylight.”
Wilder leaned against the front of my desk. “You’re avoiding him.”
“I am,” I admitted. “I mean no offense to you, as he is your blood relation, or to my own memory of Desmond from childhood, but…he’s not entirely pleasant to be around.”
Wilder laughed, eyes shining with delight. “I’ve been saying that for years, yet everyone around here acts as if Desmond Gregory’s name is synonymous with the term ‘erudition.’ ”
“Is it not, though? I’ve heard his Mastery-year exam and trial scores were quite high.” Keryth and Adria, another girl from our cohort, had said as much in the Refectory, at the midday meal, though they’d had no idea I was listening.
Wilder’s blue eyes narrowed on me. “That is entirely beside the point. Scholarship and discipline are not the same as natural aptitude and cleverness—as genius, dare I say it?”
I rolled my eyes at him fondly. “I sense no hesitation in your willingness to say that.”
Wilder paced the length of my narrow room.
“Desmond is good at processing other people’s ideas and extrapolating from them.
Confirming, recording, and explaining them.
Combining them in semi-novel fashion, in order to ‘push boundaries’ and extend the application of known theories.
But at the end of the day, he is a noted scholar, not an innovator. ”
“Not a genius,” I said, amusement lifting one corner of my mouth as I watched him pace.
“Exactly!” Wilder did not note my jest at his expense.
“But everyone else seems oblivious to that distinction, and their misguided adoration has given him quite a high estimation of himself. And yet he marches across campus as if he does not know that women—and a few of the men—stare at him all day and no doubt contemplate his countenance when they are alone in bed at night.” He huffed.
“If a man is attractive, that man knows he is attractive, and I cannot deny that my brother is, based on his resemblance to me alone.”
I snorted, but Wilder hardly noticed.
“And yet Desmond seems entirely unaware.” He sank into my armchair, and finally his attention returned to me. His eyes narrowed. “Why are you watching me like I’m a buffoon dancing at court in a patchwork jerkin?”
My laughter broke free beneath the strain of that mental image.
“Apologies. It’s just that I’ve never seen anyone openly lusting after your brother on campus, though he has been afforded his own laboratory suite and seems to have earned his colleagues’ deference.
Is it possible you’re viewing him through a skewed lens?
” My brows arched. “Because you’re envious? ”
Wilder huffed. “Of course I’m envious. His contributions to alchemy are valued, while mine are disparaged.”
“Indeed.” I gave him a solemn, sympathetic nod. “Though my hesitance to avail myself of his lab space has more to do with the fact that he’s still trying to have me removed from the Alchemary.”
“Well, if you’re hoping to use the lab while he’s not there, you’re out of luck.
He works late.” Wilder pulled at the end of my coat, which was draped over the arm of his chair.
“Ow.” He jerked his hand back and shook it, flinging a drop of blood across the room.
“What…?” He lifted the hem of my robe, angling it into the light from my candle, and frowned when that light glared off something stuck in the fabric.
“Glass.” I carefully plucked the large shard of leaded glass from where it had evidently become embedded during my confrontation with the window in the student lab. The shard was half the length of my thumb and about a quarter as wide.
I set it on the edge of my desk, where it practically glowed in the flickering lamplight, reminding me all over again of the artwork I’d destroyed.
“Come.” Wilder took my hand as he stood, trying to tug me toward the open door and the world that lay beyond the Dormitory. “Let’s get you some air.”
“I cannot.” I pulled my hand from his grip and sank into my desk chair again.
“Our first exam is on Wednesday, and if I don’t pass, I’ll be expelled.
” That knowledge had sat at the back of my mind for nearly a month, but it felt more like a weight on my chest now, slowly pressing the air from my lungs.
He rolled his eyes. “You’re going to pass.”
The dismissive tone of his voice lit a fire in my gut.
“You don’t know that!” I snapped. “You can’t possibly!
I am not the girl I was a month ago.” I lowered my voice, trying not to notice the hurt in his eyes.
“The ‘genius’ is gone, Wilder. I count myself lucky that reading about a concept seems to unlock whatever understanding I once had. But it’s a base-level understanding, and it doesn’t tumble the next obstacle from my path.
I have to read the next thing to relearn it, and then the next, and I don’t have any understanding of how much I’ve forgotten.
Of how much I still have to relearn. I can’t remember what it is that I don’t know, and while I read pretty quickly, there are only so many hours in the day. And the night.”