Chapter 32 #2
“Lord Calyx, the father of alchemy?” Yoslyn’s green eyes widened.
“The very founder of the Alchemary itself?” Her voice rose into a squeal of excitement, and I shushed her with one finger over her lips.
“That is madness, and almost certainly untrue,” she whispered.
“There have been any number of researchers over the past century and a half who could have done this, long after Calyx was dust in his grave, but I will say, when you theorize, you reach for the very stars.”
I frowned, running one thumb over the snake’s scales. “You don’t believe it?”
“Not one bit,” Yoslyn said, almost gleefully. “And yet…they say he was quite mad by the time he died. Driven over the edge by his own failure.” She reached for the bracelet. “May I?”
I placed the metal snake in her palm, and she held it toward the wall torch, examining it as light flickered off its scales and gleamed in its crimson-jeweled eyes.
She turned it, angling the snake’s head toward the light, and I assumed she was studying the red stones, until suddenly she was gripping its triangular-shaped head between her thumb and forefinger, tugging at its tail with her other hand.
“No, I assure you the little beast is quite rigid,” I said. “It won’t—”
“There’s something in its mouth,” she insisted.
I huffed. “Yes. Its tail. That’s the defining characteristic of the ouroboros.”
She shoved the bracelet so close to my face that I started to back away out of instinct. Then the flicker of the white torch flame shone on something just past the snake’s tiny fangs.
“It’s just the end of the tail,” I said. “Looks like it might be tipped with a jewel, like the eyes.”
“But why bury a jewel where it can’t be seen?”
I shrugged. “The entire bracelet was hidden.”
“Yet intended to be found,” she noted. “Thus the formula for revealing it. Whoever orchestrated this little adventure appears to have been hiding clues in plain sight, waiting for someone observant enough to notice them. To see what’s there.”
She had a point. Whatever had gone wrong for Yoslyn in the Black Trial clearly had nothing to do with deductive reasoning.
I took the bracelet and examined it in the light, letting my attention linger on every detail.
Each individual scale. And finally I realized that one of them was raised just enough that I could wedge my fingernail beneath it.
When I did so, my heart pounding with the fear that I was about to ruin yet another priceless work of historic art, the scale rose a mere fraction of a millimeter and spun ninety degrees.
Which allowed me to spin the one next to it.
And the one next to that. When I’d spun four tiny scales in a row on the snake’s back, the resulting gap loosened the scale pattern just enough to allow flex in the ring.
Gently, I tugged the tail from the snake’s mouth, and indeed, the tip was crowned with a tiny red jewel. And just beyond where that jewel had rested between the metal fangs, I found the end of a minute piece of parchment, rolled up like a scroll.
Yoslyn shuffled her feet with uncontrolled anticipation as I carefully unrolled what was likely a very old document, no longer than the width of my smallest finger. But then her feet went still as a disgruntled sigh slid from her throat. “It’s blank.”
I nodded. “Or…it appears that way.”
“Invisible ink? Like on the bone plaques?”
“That seems likely, given that this paper unrolled into the same shape the plaques were molded into.”
“Do you have any more of the solution that reveals the print?”
I nodded. I had not told her that solution was blood.
Carefully, I replaced the tiny scroll and tucked the snake’s jeweled tail back into its mouth. Then I rotated the scales to hide the seam again and slid the bracelet into my pocket.
“I will let you know what it says,” I told her as I retrieved my satchel from the floor and lifted the strap over my head. “You have my word.”
“…And finally, don’t forget that essays on your personal struggle with the universal forces of entropy are due on Friday,” Professor Robards said.
“And with that—” He frowned at the class, and I followed his gaze to the third row, where Varrah sat at a work surface shared with a classmate, her hand in the air. “Yes, Varrah?”
“I just thought that before we dismiss, we should all congratulate Amber on passing the Black Trial.”
“Yes! Thank you, Varrah!” Professor Robards’s eyes lit up as he turned to me. “Congratulations to our class teaching assistant for making it through the first of her Mastery-year trials! A triumph indeed!”
The class burst into heartfelt applause, which likely had more to do with their own ambitions than with my success—if I’d survived, surely they all could!—and I aimed a smile of thanks at Varrah.
“One down, three to go,” I said as I stood, and the class laughed politely.
Professor Bollinger was writing something on the large framed slate when I arrived for our afternoon class. Wilder gave me a tight smile as I slid into my chair next to his.
I returned the expression with as genuine a smile of my own as I could muster.
I’d managed to avoid this awkward moment that morning in the Ethics and Advancement of Alchemy because Professor Edmiston had sent us all to the library to find sources for an upcoming paper. It had been easy to steer clear of Wilder in the stacks.
But now…
“Are you okay?” he whispered. “I apologize if I startled you the other night.”
“No, I—”
“I hadn’t intended to kiss you, and I regret going back on my word. I just felt, in that moment, that we were having a chemical reaction.” He nudged my knee with his. “Remember? Two reactants introduced into the same space, resulting in a change of energy?”
I recognized my words. I remembered saying them.
“But maybe that was the ale talking,” he conceded.
I exhaled slowly and lowered my voice to as soft a whisper as I could manage. “I’m sorry if my reaction worried you,” I said. “I’m just…I’ve only had flashes of memory, and I don’t know whether I can trust them, and—”
“What have you remembered?” Something in the sharp slant of his gaze set me on edge.
He must have noticed, because his expression changed, like fluid poured from a short, wide beaker into a tall, narrow vial. The same contents suddenly seemed to take on a different shape—a more amenable form.
“Nothing, really. Just flashes,” I repeated. “They’re…addled. Disorienting and…not possible, frankly. It’s like my mind is gifting me with shards from a mosaic but placing them in the wrong locations, so the image doesn’t make sense.”
His brows furrowed deeply over eyes that seemed a darker shade of blue than usual. “What images?”
“You, sometimes. And sometimes…” I shrugged.
“Des.”
I nodded. Wilder was the only one I’d ever heard use that nickname, and the fraternal relationship it implied felt at odds with the suddenly shuttered nature of his expression.
I was a bit relieved when Professor Bollinger’s chalk screeched against the slate, and he apologized as he turned to begin his lecture.
On Friday after the evening meal, as had become my habit, I crossed the quadrangle not toward the Dormitory or toward the Seminary, as many of my classmates did, but toward the Conservatory.
I climbed the spiral stairs, staring up at the stained glass panels, noting how the dim glow of the waning moon painted dully colorful scenes on the smooth, curved plaster walls above my head.
The royal wedding. The royal nursery. Queen Avalona’s funeral. All of it both beautiful and tragic.
Desmond was in his office, working by candlelight with half a dozen thick tomes spread open on his desk and a half-used journal balanced on his knee for note-taking.
He stood the moment he saw me and set his journal on one of the open texts. “Hello. What are you working on this evening?”
I rounded my primary work surface and ducked into the supply closet, where I hung my satchel on its usual nail. When I reemerged, I found him standing at my preferred workstation, waiting for my reply.
“Tonight, I begin preparations for the White Trial.”
“Rebirth,” he said.
I nodded. “Which could, naturally, mean just about anything.”
A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth, but it was gone in an instant. “I cannot tell you what to expect at the White Trial, but I do want to share one other bit of…conjecture regarding the Black Trial.”
Pressure mounted within my chest, and I fought the yawn that would force my lungs to expand for fear of appearing bored or tired. “Please tell me they haven’t decided to expel me after all, for helping Yoslyn?”
“It’s not to do with you, actually.”
“Oh?” I folded my arms over my chest and watched him from across the table. And this time, Desmond’s smile was wide, and true, and full of a bitter sort of joy.
“Pryce Wishart, as it happens, should not have passed the Black Trial at all.”
I frowned. “How so?” He’d beaten me to an antidote and had suffered little ill effect from the poison.
“Upon further examination of his official observer’s notes, it has been discovered that his formula was flawed. What Wishart concocted in that arena should not have saved his life.”
Questions swirled among the cacophony of my thoughts. “Well then, how—?”
“The prevailing theory is that he’d ingested something else, recently, that prevented the metal toxin from entirely affecting him and perhaps bolstered the effects of a flawed antidote.”
“The board thinks he cheated? That he took an antidote in advance? Or that—”
Suddenly the meaning of Desmond’s bittersweet smile settled into place.
“Wilder,” I said. “It was Wilder’s concoction.”
Desmond nodded. “The prevailing theory is that whichever unnamed miscreant slipped something into Pryce Wishart’s morning tea dyed every inch of his flesh blue—and saved his miserable, unworthy life in the process.”
When Desmond was well absorbed in his own work, weighing out an endless series of ingredients bound for the athanor, I angled my body away from him and used a clean scalpel to prick the tip of one finger.
Carefully, hidden by my satchel, which I’d propped up on my own workstation, I smeared a drop of blood across the tiny little scroll, which I held open at the top with the handle of the scalpel and the bottom with a small pair of laboratory tweezers.
I would have preferred to perform the task alone in the storage closet, but I knew from experience that if I was gone from his sight for too long, some odd instinct led Desmond to call out for me.
This tendency had grown more noticeable in the days since I’d shared his bed, and I’d consciously decided not to study the impulse.
In fact, I was pretending not to have noticed it, as I pretended not to notice when he snuck into his office every few days to hypocritically avail himself of whatever elixir Wilder was selling him.
By the time I had pressed a cloth to my finger to stop the blood welling from the small cut, words had appeared on the tiny scroll.
Unfortunately, they were too small to be clearly read.
Swallowing a sigh of frustration, I took the scrap of parchment into the supply closet, where I pulled a glass magnification lens from its drawer.
The light was dim in the closet, but there were no prying eyes, so I held the scroll carefully in my palm, angled toward light spilling in from the doorway, and fitted the clear glass lens over it.
From beneath the convex disk of glass, the words appeared just large enough to read.
My sun, never again shall she rise.
Beautiful, but frail.
Now the moon shines.
When the ouroboros bit off its tail.