Chapter 31
I followed Yoslyn from the cold, dark dirt road into the warm, crowded tavern, and at first, I could only stand in the doorway, letting the voices and the flickering light wash over me.
Listening to the cordial cacophony, as the clink of tin ale mugs rose through the buzz of overlapping conversations.
My mouth watered at the scents of brown bread and mutton stew, and I noted that several people were dipping crusts into half-full bowls. But everyone had a mug of ale.
“They’re all from the Alchemary!” I said directly into Yoslyn’s ear.
She nodded. “The locals won’t set foot in here after dark unless they work here.
We tend to suck up all the air. The whole town’s like this,” she half shouted, evidently unconcerned with being heard.
“Every house in the village becomes an inn during Family Weekend, graduation, accreditation testing, and any trials week, and they can charge whatever they want, because the demand for lodging is greater than the supply.”
Trials week. This week. That’s how so many alumni had been in the audience. I looked around, studying ale-flushed faces. Were they in the crowd as well?
“Half our professors live on this side of the bridge,” Yoslyn added.
Business was clearly booming, yet the harried staff of the Beaker didn’t seem entirely enamored of their patrons. I could not blame them.
The front room was crowded, and though I recognized many underclassmen, I couldn’t find a single member of the Mastery-year cohort.
“Through that door!” Yoslyn shouted.
I followed her pointing finger toward a private room, just past the long plain-board table where a dozen or so professors and staff researchers sat on simple wooden stools with their tankards.
“Staff and faculty usually gather in there, but after each trial, they relinquish the space for the Mastery-year celebration. Come on!”
Yoslyn pulled me through the crowd, and I muttered apologies as my shoulders and elbows collided with no fewer than three patrons.
“Amber!” Wilder called from the doorway to the private room.
Desmond’s head swiveled my way from the staff table, and I gave him a nod as I was swallowed by his brother’s ale-scented embrace.
Wilder tugged me into the small, warm room, and Yoslyn followed.
“That’s everyone!” Wilder declared, practically shoving me onto an empty stool. His eyes were glazed with drink, his smile sweet but sloppy.
Despite his gregarious greeting, no one else seemed to care that Yoslyn and I had joined the group, and I accepted their indifference as the lesser of two evils, considering the animosity I’d been expecting.
My classmates were too drunk to be angry.
Except maybe Pryce, who sat on a stool in the corner, gulping morosely from a dented metal mug.
A headcount revealed nine Mastery students including Yoslyn and me. Out of twelve. No, out of eleven, since Kornell had washed out. “There are still two in the infirmary?” I whispered to Wilder as he pushed a mug of ale into my grip.
His smile faded. “Just Adria,” he said. “Petyr didn’t make it.”
A pall fell over me, like a cloth pulled over a corpse. But before I could demand to know how everyone could feel so celebratory, knowing that a classmate had died, Wilder turned to the room and lifted his mug. “To Petyr!” he shouted.
“To Petyr!” the chorus echoed, and everyone took a drink. Including me. And that’s when I understood that this gathering was as much a memorial as a celebration.
And that it would not be the last.
Would they toast to me, if I’d died in that glass arena?
Yoslyn took a mug from a tray in the center of the table and raised it in my direction, her eyes alight with the glow of the bone-and-candle chandelier, as well as the triumph of survival. Then she veered across the room, presumably to take advantage of the drunken goodwill of our classmates.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come.” Wilder leaned in to be heard over the crowd.
“I had no plans to,” I admitted. “You can thank Yoslyn for dragging me from the Dormitory tower.”
“I certainly shall.” His gaze held mine. “You were amazing in there today.”
“I most assuredly was not. I accomplished the bare minimum required to pass—to survive. Literally the bare minimum. And I very nearly didn’t, truth be told.”
“But you did. And Yoslyn can attest that it was far more than the bare minimum. How did you know you’d have enough for her as well?”
I had no answer for him. None at all.
“You didn’t.” His smile faded. He seemed suddenly, blisteringly sober. “Amber, you could have—”
“I’m fine.”
“Yes, but you could have…” He cleared his throat and set his mug on an unoccupied stool, unbothered when it wobbled on the weathered wood.
Then he placed his hands deliberately on my knees and boldly parted them so he could step closer, his body warm between my thighs. Straining the material of my skirt.
“I could have lost you,” he said, and I caught my breath as his hands found my waist. “Losing any member of our cohort is bad enough. Losing Petyr is…awful. But I can’t lose you.
Amber, I don’t care whose life is in danger.
I don’t care if it’s the Bluehelm herself, or an entire carriage full of mewling kittens and chubby babies. Don’t you ever do that again.”
He kissed me. Gently. Softly. Slowly, as if he had all the time left in eternity to explore this connection.
As if he had every right to do so.
As if this were expected, and no one at all should be shocked, least of all me.
“We’re not supposed to be back here,” I whisper as his lips trail down my throat toward the expanse of skin exposed above my bodice.
My head falls back, and I revel in the heat of his mouth as my gaze finds the bone-and-candle chandelier.
It’s unlit, and the empty tavern back room swims in darkness.
I hardly hear the din of voices from out front. I hardly smell the stew, or the bread, or the ale. All I can see—all I can hear, and taste, and smell—is him.
“Wait,” I moan, my thighs clenching around his hips as the stool rocks beneath me. “Don’t stop. Just…wait.”
His lips disappear from my throat, and I sit up as he looks down at me. In the light spilling into the dark room through the cracked open door, I see his coppery-brown eyes, his irises dilated with lust, his lips damp and slightly parted.…
I shoved Wilder back, and his blue eyes widened.
“Amber? Are you okay?”
No one else noticed. They were all lost in their own drunken revelry.
I didn’t know how to answer. Panicked, I slid from the stool and rushed into the crowded front room, around the professors’ table and into the kitchen.
A rough voice shouted for me to get out, but I kept pushing forward, past a large pot bubbling over a fire and a sweaty woman scrubbing metal ale mugs in a wooden tub full of cloudy water.
I burst through the door into the cold, quiet alley, and only once I stood there with the wood-paneled wall at my back, shivering even as I welcomed the frigid air against my overheated face, did I realize I still held my mug, and that some of its contents had sloshed over the side to run down my hand.
I lifted the mug and drained the ale in several long gulps.
“Amber?”
My eyes fell closed at the sound of Desmond’s voice. His footsteps echoed toward me from the open kitchen door.
The tin mug hung from two of my fingers, its bottom edge scraping the wall at my back with every deep breath I took.
I did not open my eyes until he stood in front of me, so close I could feel his warmth.
“You’re shivering.”
“It’s cold,” I whispered. Though truth be told, I hadn’t noticed.
“What’s wrong?”
I sidestepped him and started down the alley without answering, and he didn’t try to stop me. But then, just before I stepped out of reach, Desmond’s left hand captured my free one. He didn’t pull me back. Neither did he let me go.
My mug clattered to the ground, tin ringing against roughly paved stone.
“You survived,” he whispered. “Against all odds, you made the antidote, and you survived, and you saved another student. What could possibly be wrong?”
So much was wrong. And I felt all of it, deeply. But there was no way to put a single bit of it into words without sounding like an ungrateful wench.
“You gave me the answer,” I finally said, turning slowly to face him. “I’m sorry if that sounds ungracious, and it’s certainly not the only source of my current mood. But…I didn’t save Yoslyn. You saved us both, by underlining the relevant parts in my research.”
“No—”
“Yes,” I insisted. “I would never have figured out the antidote—the formula—in time without that, and if anyone finds out—”
“Amber. You saved yourself. You did that research. You took those notes. You came up with those antidotes, six months ago. Today, amnesia was the only thing locking you out of work you have every right to understand and to utilize. You should be able to access your own skills, memory, and research, just as the other students can. All I did was point you in the direction of work you’d already done. ”
I blinked up at him, studying the way shadow sharpened his cheekbones. Deepened the copper flecks in his eyes. “You showed me exactly what to do.”
He nodded, accepting my accusation in a manner that almost felt gracious.
“I showed you what to do with your own research. With your theories and formulas. And if you hadn’t figured out what the toxin was on your own, you never even would have seen the lines I left in the notes.
The before version of you doesn’t get credit for that. This version does.”
It wasn’t his words that convinced me. That loosened the vicious grip my rib cage had claimed over my lungs, and my heart, and my soul. It was the conviction echoing in his voice. Glowing behind his eyes.