Chapter 30 #2
“I have no idea,” I admitted, staring past the end of the bridge at a sparse scattering of cottages and long stretches of farmland.
Sheep bleated in the night, and I found the sound oddly comforting.
It reminded me of Innswood and my childhood, despite the addition of the salt-tinged air.
Farmland reminded me of a time when my parents had lived together, I’d had many friends, and I’d known exactly who I was.
“You don’t know how you lost your memory?” Yoslyn asked, and I shook my head as we stepped off the end of the bridge onto firmly packed dirt, squinting at the dark road as I tried to avoid falling into a hole in the ground or tripping over a rock. “I bet it had to do with your—”
Her mouth snapped shut.
I stopped, pulling her to a graceless halt alongside me. “My what? My research?”
The quarter-moon rode low in the sky, doing little to light her features, yet I could see regret written into every line of her expression.
“It doesn’t matter. Truly. I’m forever stuffing my foot into my mouth, and I’m eager to wash away the taste of my own toes with a good, stiff ale. Let’s—” She tried to tug me toward town, her long curls bobbing with the motion, but I held my ground.
“Are we friends, Yoslyn?”
“The very best of,” she confirmed. “I owe you my life.”
“You owe me nothing.” I let go of her arm and tugged my shawl tighter. “I did nothing any decent person wouldn’t have done.”
“That isn’t true.” Her eyes widened, displaying her gratitude with an exuberance that made me distinctly uncomfortable. “You could have died, sharing your antidote with me, and no one else—”
“No one else saw you collapse. Any of our classmates would have—”
“No,” she insisted. “They would not have. I can’t swear that I would have done that for a classmate, at the risk of my own life.
And six weeks ago, neither would you. You would have said that of the two of us, you had more to contribute to the world through alchemy, and risking your life wouldn’t be fair to alchemy in general, to the Alchemary specifically, or to the world itself. ”
A cold current churned through my veins, drawing gooseflesh across my arms. “That is both callous and categorically arrogant.”
Yoslyn nodded solemnly. “It’s likely also true. And yet you saved me, with no regard for your own life. Which is why, as far as I’m concerned, we are the very best of friends, from this point forward.”
“I don’t want your camaraderie out of any sense of obligation,” I said, careful to moderate my tone so she heard no insult in the statement.
“That’s not what I’m offering.” Yoslyn shifted to fully face me from inches away, her dimly lit expression fierce and determined. “I’m saying that in my judgment, anyone who would make such a sacrifice must be a good person, and thus worthy of staunch friendship.”
I blinked at her in the dark, hoping she couldn’t see the sudden shine of tears in my eyes. “Very well, then. Friends.” I took her arm again, and we moved forward together, boots crunching on dirt and stray rocks.
Ahead, flickering lamplight and boisterous conversation leaked from a low-ceilinged, wood-paneled establishment that could only be the Dusty Beaker, though I could not yet read the sign attached to the front wall, gently swaying from two short lengths of chain.
“Tell me, then, friend, why you believe my research is responsible for my amnesia.”
Yoslyn’s arm stiffened in my grasp, but I only hugged her tighter and kept moving forward, to assure her that I was curious, not angry.
“I truly want to know. Do you know what I was working on?”
She shook her head. “No one in the cohort knew. Wilder, maybe. But no one else.”
“Then why would you think—”
“Because it’s all you did. Other than eat, sleep, and a couple of visits to the Dusty Beaker—just a couple, in two years—all you did was research. So unless you woke up with a head wound or a festering fever, there’s simply nothing else that could account for what’s happened to you.”
As badly as I hated to consider her theory, I could not deny that it made sense.
“Why do our classmates hate me?”
Yoslyn huffed over my change of subject. “They don’t—”
I stopped walking again and turned to frown at her.
She shrugged, dragging my arm up with the motion. “You weren’t cruel. Not truly. But it’s possible their views diverge from mine on that matter.”
“And your view?”
“You did not intentionally cause pain, that I know of. But neither did you go out of your way to avoid causing it. And when pain was felt, you capitalized on what you called a resource, insisting that it was in the name of science. Of alchemy.”
“What, in the name of all discord, does that mean?” And how had I never heard this from Wilder? “What did I do?”
Another shrug. “The incident that ruffled the most feathers was when you allowed Adria and Pryce to labor under a misunderstanding that led them to cease their relationship.”
“Led them to…?”
Yoslyn sighed, displaying her reluctance to rehash what was, to her, old news. “You contrived a scenario that made it appear as if Pryce might prefer your company to Adria’s. And you encouraged her to believe that was the case. According to Pryce’s telling of it, anyway.”
Pryce’s angry countenance flashed to the forefront of my memory. You are reaping what you’ve already sown—it’s not my fault you don’t remember the original sin.
Guilt crashed over me like waves against the cliffside. “Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. You seemed, at the time, to be comforting her.
You even lent her your handkerchief for her tears.
But I was with her, when she came upon you and Pryce at the back of the library, and…
” Yoslyn sighed. “Pryce certainly contributed to the dissolution of his own relationship. But you…Well, you appeared to be entropy incarnate that day.” She glanced at my exposed cleavage.
“In that very dress, come to think of it.”
“Why on earth would I have done such a thing?” In addition to being cruel, driving a wedge between two lovers was in direct opposition to alchemy’s goal of fighting chaos and imposing order upon the natural world.
No wonder this dress had been shoved to the back of my wardrobe.
Yoslyn’s silence spoke volumes. “Adria never forgave you,” she finally said. “Neither did Pryce.”
In fact, Pryce considered his assault upon my dignity to be a seed I’d sewn, and Adria had not said one word to me in the past six weeks.
A cold gust brought with it the hoot of a distant owl, and I glanced toward town again as I shivered, eager for a warm respite, but reluctant to quit the most informative conversation I’d had in weeks. “What could that debacle possibly have to do with my research?”
“I honestly could not say.” Yoslyn shifted from one foot to the other in the middle of the dirt road, trying to stay warm. “All I know is that when Adria left, you asked for your handkerchief back, then you sat there in the library and took notes, as if you’d just concluded a lab experiment.”
I’d come across no such notes among the sheets of loose parchment in Past Amber’s collection. But it was the handkerchief that stood out in Yoslyn’s story, for no reason I could understand, except that it struck a harmonic chord with a newly formed memory.
When my father had visited, upon hearing of my strange ailment, he’d wiped his damp eyes with a handkerchief of his own, which had fallen onto the bench unnoticed as he left.
I’d kept that handkerchief, with no real thought of calling after him to return it. And I could not say why—either then or now—that impulse had struck me.
“What format were the notes in, do you happen to recall?” I asked. “On parchment?”
Yoslyn frowned. “No, in a journal. I remember that you set an inkwell on the table, and you were taking true notes, as if you were in a lab setting, rather than light notation with a lead stylus, like most people would utilize for quick reminders.”
I was running an experiment. I had no memory of that incident, or of the others that had clearly led my cohort to distrust me, yet I knew that.
And not just because I recognized my own documentation methods.
I felt the truth of it, in the same way I’d known where to find supplies in Desmond’s laboratory.
“I’m sorry if this has upset you,” Yoslyn said, squinting at my expression in the dark.
“Don’t be. I dragged the information from you, and unsettling though it is, I needed to hear it.”
“You’re not that person anymore,” she insisted. “If you were, I wouldn’t be here.”
Uncertain I was worthy of her assumption, given that regaining my memories might turn me back into Past Amber, I started us both down the road again in lieu of a response.
“They don’t want me in there,” I whispered as we came to a stop in front of the Dusty Beaker. And for the first time, I understood why.
Yoslyn huffed. “They don’t want me in there either.
Not anymore. But that doesn’t mean we should cower in our bedchambers or bury our heads in our notes.
We deserve a night off as much the rest of them do.
We survived!” She spun toward me and took my hands, her exuberant expression lit by the flickering glow from the tavern window. “Let’s celebrate!”