Chapter 20 #2
My sigh seemed to empty not just my lungs, but my very soul.
“And relearning the basic terms and concepts doesn’t bring me up to the level of skill needed to pass a Mastery-year examination.
Or to survive the first trial. And in case it’s entirely slipped your mind, that’s only a couple of weeks away. ”
“It has not slipped my mind. I just think that you need a break.”
“What I need is a miracle. I can’t keep studying night and day at the expense of my health. That’s terribly inefficient. Especially given that I’ve already learned all of this, have I not?”
“Most assuredly,” he said with a gesture at the sheets of parchment I’d scribbled all over. At the textbooks opened and stacked upon one another in inscrutable layers of information. “Better than anyone I’ve ever known. They know that.”
They, presumably, were the leadership of the Alchemary.
“That’s why they’ve kept you. That’s why they’re letting you move into Des’s lab. That’s why they’re making Pryce pay for the window, when—”
“They’re making him pay? I thought that was his family’s idea?”
“I don’t believe that for a second,” Wilder said. “My guess is that the Bluehelm suggested it, so she could keep you both. They want the Wishart money, but they need the Fallbrook brain.”
Something twisted deep inside me at his words. At the mention of a brain that felt more like lost legend than like a part of my own body.
“Well, to that point, so do I. And my time would be much better spent looking for a way to unlock the knowledge I already have. To find a cure for amnesia, rather than trying to relearn all of alchemy.”
“And I promised to help…” he said as my point sank in.
“Indeed you did. Have you come up with anything? Any potential…elixir of memory?”
Wilder hesitated, just long enough for me to see the truth.
“You have! And you weren’t going to tell me?”
“I found something potentially helpful, and I was going to tell you,” he insisted. “In fact, I was going to ask you to help me with it in the lab the other night, but then…”
“Pryce,” I said.
He nodded. “Pryce fucking Wishart.”
“Did you know about this father? Or…maybe his mother?”
“Do you mean the Crown’s personal alchemist?
It’s his father. And yes, we all found out during Fundamentals year, when the Wisharts showed up for Family Weekend.
But my point is that you don’t work in the student lab anymore, and I’m not welcome in Desmond’s, so telling you what I’d found suddenly seemed a bit… complicated.”
“What did you find?”
“There’s a tonic on record in the library—just one—intended to help firm up memory in old age.”
“That’s not really my issue, Wilder.”
“It’s a starting place. There’s also an elixir I was playing around with a while back, when I was having trouble memorizing about four million vocabulary words for Intro.”
“I assume that’s a hyperbolic estimate?”
He shrugged. “Who could say? I’m no better with numbers than I am with vocabulary words.”
I rolled my eyes. “So, a tonic for dementia of advanced age, and an elixir intended to help students memorize new facts?”
“To be clear, I never perfected that elixir,” Wilder said. “But with a little luck, some trial and error, and a good succedaneum for winter cherry, which isn’t growing yet, I should be able to come up with some sort of boost for your brain, at the very least.”
Not exactly a key to the lock on my memory dungeon, but surely it would be better than nothing.
“I’ll work on it tonight. Ironically,” he said, “we’d be much closer to the solution if you hadn’t lost your memory in the first place.” When I could only frown, he chuckled. “The Philosopher’s Stone. If you’d actually created it, it could no doubt cure you now.”
I scowled at him. “That may be the least helpful thing you’ve ever said.”
“I assure you it is not.” Wilder’s gaze shifted downward, lingering on my thigh just long enough to make me squirm in my chair before it settled on my journal, which sat on the edge of my desk. “Has nothing in there sparked a memory?”
“No.” I bent to grab the journal. “I can’t read it. Though the writing looks familiar,” I mused, flipping through the pages, oddly comforted by the whisper of dry parchment beneath my fingers.
Wilder frowned at the page I stopped on. “What is that?”
“You don’t recognize it either?” Past Amber presumably understood what she was writing, but why would she have written in a language her best friend couldn’t read?
He shook his head. “It doesn’t look like a language, precisely. Some of those marks look more like symbols, but that isn’t alchemical notation.”
“This part isn’t. But now that I’ve spent weeks studying alchemical terms, I can recognize the few that are written here. Everything else, though…” I could only shrug.
“What alchemical symbols?” Wilder scooted to the edge of the chair, and I tilted the journal so he could clearly see. Past Amber had written so much she’d run out of room and been forced to leave one final note running vertically along the narrow outer margin of the left-hand page.
The only part of that note I could read was the two alchemical symbols, which had been enclosed in a circle. A perfect carefully drawn circle, with no overlapping ends, rather than a hastily scribbled oval to emphasize a specific point.
“Cinis.” Wilder ran one finger over a symbol like a three-tined pitchfork facing to the right, with a short handle extending from the left.
Only, in the one I’d drawn, the outer tines were rounded, curving in toward the center like a demon’s trident, in my signature notation.
Any time I wrote the symbol, it appeared exactly like that on the page, my fingers forming those curves automatically.
“Cinis,” I agreed. “Or ash.” And what I’d relearned about ash spilled from my mouth as fast as the words blossomed in my head.
“The word means dust, generally, and can mean anything from fireplace soot to incinerated human remains, but in alchemy it refers to the end product of the calcination stage: what is left after the prima material has been purified by fire. Symbolically, in the field of Apotheosis, ash is the incorruptible glorified human body that has survived the purifying ordeal.”
“I understand that.” Yet Wilder’s soft smile looked distinctly impressed. “And I’m pretty sure you just quoted a textbook passage verbatim.”
“I did.”
“How many times have you read it?” His gaze scanned the texts open on my desk, evidently looking for the one I’d quoted.
“Once.” I sighed. “I don’t have time to read most of this more than once.”
His eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “Amber.” His voice was so soft it almost seemed to be coming from within my own head. “Most people can’t read something once and remember it word for word.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “The genius is not gone.”
I looked up and found tiny versions of myself reflected in his eyes. “So, I could do that before?”
“I honestly don’t know,” he said. “We didn’t talk about… alchemy.”
“Then what did we talk about?” I regretted the question as soon as I’d asked it, suddenly certain that Wilder and I must have spent more time in bed than in the lab.
Which might have been the only time we had together, if he’d spent nights in the student laboratory while I’d been set up in Desmond’s space.
“Air,” I said, feeling suddenly compelled to change the subject by a discomfort I could not explain.
Wilder blinked. “What?”
I tapped the other alchemical symbol circled in the margin, an upward-pointing equilateral triangle bisected by a horizontal line roughly half of the way down.
“In alchemy, air represents heat and moisture, in the form of water vapor, which is condensed from it. Because of that, the air symbol can also represent blood, which is a life-giving force.”
“Ash and blood,” Wilder said. “Any idea why you wrote those? Or circled them?”
“None.”
A grin tugged at one corner of his mouth, his eyes flashing playfully in the light of the lantern.
“Maybe you were talking about bodies. The glorified human form…” He stroked one finger slowly over the symbol for ash.
“Hot and wet…” That same finger slid over the bisected triangle representing air.
Or blood. “I think you made dirty notations when you got bored in the lab.”
I arched one brow at him. “Without more context, I could just as easily have been talking about murder. About spilling blood from the human form, then burning the corpse.”
He scowled. “Why do you always ruin my fantasies?”
Laughter bubbled up from my throat; he’d been giving me that look since we were children. “Every girl needs a lighthearted diversion.”
“Tears,” he said, snatching the journal from me so he could snap it closed.
“Pardon?”
“Tears are warm and wet. Maybe you were writing about making someone cry.”
I rolled my eyes again. “Why would I have made someone cry?”
Wilder gave me a strange, sad look. “Maybe it’s better that you don’t remember everything.”
Gazes followed us as Wilder and I stepped into the quadrangle, each burdened with an armload of my personal notes and supplies. He had practically dared me to stop wasting time and move into Desmond’s lab, and when he’d offered to help carry my things, I’d realized I was out of excuses.
“What are they saying?” I whispered as we crossed the long axis of the lawn, headed straight toward the towering Conservatory. “What is the gossip?”
“About you? There’s no gossip,” he said.
I gave him a look. “I know you were at the Dusty Beaker last night.” I’d overheard Yoslyn and Keryth as they’d walked down the stairs past my open door that morning, talking about how fetching he’d looked.
How a couple of pints turned the younger Gregory brother into a charming and gallant libertine.
His gregarious reputation clearly had not suffered from his association with me, and I could not decide whether I was relieved by that or vexed by it.
“I was, yes. But you were not the topic on people’s tongues there, like you are here.”
“So there is gossip.”
“Not really,” he insisted. “What they’re saying is surprisingly accurate, so I’d have to classify it more as conversation. Pryce told everyone about your memory. And about the window. Though he does not seem to have disclosed his own part in what happened to it.”
“Of course he didn’t.”
“To be fair, he’s hardly had the chance, considering that he has himself, just this very afternoon, become an irresistible topic of conversation.”
“Has he?”
“If you’ll glance subtly to your left—subtly”—Wilder elbowed me when my head swiveled too sharply as I resettled the tall stack of notes tucked beneath my arm—“you might notice that young Pryce Wishart is wearing a hat today. And if you were to squint across the quadrangle, and perhaps shield your face from the setting sun, you would further notice that the hair peeking beneath the brim of that hat is a robust shade of cobalt.”
“What?” I did squint, and indeed, I found Pryce standing in the shade of the Seminary’s front facade, all alone.
Quite apart, in fact, from several of our classmates.
As I watched, he tugged at the brim of a hat, and as he pulled it lower on his forehead, it rose on the back of his scalp.
Where his hair was, in fact, a bright and vibrant shade of blue.
“In addition…” Wilder continued as we paused in our journey across the quadrangle, “if you were to move close enough to see his face and hands, you might notice that they, too, are now a particular shade of blue. As are his eyebrows. And his eyelashes. And his nasal hair. If you were to come up with a reason for him to remove his clothes—though I do not recommend such an adventure—you would further notice that there is not currently, nor will there be for the foreseeable future, a single hair or inch of flesh on that boy’s body that is not some variation of the color blue. ”
I blinked at Pryce, then glanced away when he caught me looking, but not before I noticed two young women giggling from a few feet away while they stared at him.
“Oh my.” I grabbed Wilder’s arm with my free hand and tugged him toward the Conservatory, and I only let go when I noticed him struggling with the box he held. “Has he caught some contagion? My father said there’s an illness that casts the flesh a strange shade of—”
Wilder’s laughter caught me entirely off guard, but it took me only a second to understand.
“You…?” I couldn’t resist a glance back at Pryce. “You dyed him?”
“I know. It’s petty and amateur. But it was also disappointingly easy, and I assure you, it’s only the visible portion of his requital.”
I stopped cold in the grass, a sick feeling churning in my stomach. “What else did you do?” I hissed.
He nudged me forward with his elbow. “I simply let the punishment fit the original offense.”
“Meaning what, Wilder?” I demanded as we slowly navigated the stone pathway.
“I made sure he will not be able to demand the ‘favor’ he tried to extort from you from anyone else. For the foreseeable future.”
A dark sort of satisfaction crept up from the pit of my stomach. “Pryce is…?”
“Not feeling particularly virile,” Wilder confirmed as we approached the Conservatory.
“He cannot…perform?” I whispered, eyes wide.
“Or assault. Though he may not have perceived that bit yet. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Pryce Wishart’s bedchamber…” He frowned, looking suddenly ill. “That is not a sentence I ever thought to utter.”
“You rendered him impotent, for what he did to me?”
Wilder shrugged, the box bobbing in his grip.
“I am simply using alchemy to slow the forces of chaos and make the world a better place, one violent clod at a time. Though, to be clear, I dyed him blue in revenge for having smashed my vials. And for generally being a squandering of organic material. Human detritus.” Another shrug.
“And because I had a new elixir in need of a test subject.”
“Why would you have an elixir that tints the human form? Or that renders impotence?”
Wilder winked at me. “Because I don’t always get it right on the first attempt. Trial and error is an inefficient yet vastly entertaining process, and sometimes the mistakes prove more profitable than what I intended to invent.”
“Wilder Gregory.” I turned on the second step toward the Conservatory’s front portico so I could look at him at eye level. “Has anyone ever told you that you are quite the charming calamity?”
“You said something very similar to me once.” He gave me a cheeky wink. “Only the word you used was ‘disaster.’ And you were not smiling when you said it.”
“Well, I am smiling now.”