Chapter 33 #2
I ignored the breach of etiquette because only a good friend would rush uninvited into someone else’s private chamber, and in what I could remember of my adult life, no one other than the Gregory brothers had even tried.
A warm sensation flowed over my skin, like bathwater heated over the fire, at the realization that Yoslyn must truly consider herself my friend.
“It’s a riddle.” I held the scroll up carefully between my thumb and forefinger as she closed the door and leaned against it. “But it makes no sense.”
Yoslyn grinned. “That’s the entire point of a riddle, is it not? Reckoning sense from the nonsensical? Let me see!”
I handed her the scroll, and she carefully unrolled it against her palm. But she could only squint at the print. “It’s too small. I see four lines, but I can’t distinguish the letters.”
“I used a magnification lens in the lab. Here.” I handed her a sheet of parchment where I’d written the riddle, and she returned the scroll, which I carefully rerolled and returned to the gullet of the metal snake.
Yoslyn read from the parchment, backlit by the window, and the rhythmic crash of waves far below seemed to accompany her words like music played behind lyrics.
“ ‘My sun, never again shall she rise. Beautiful, but frail. Now the moon shines. When the ouroboros bit off its tail.’ ”
She frowned and repeated the four phrases, and finally, she looked up at me, eyes narrowed. “What in the name of entropy does it mean?”
“I’ve been working on that.” I laid one hand over another sheet of parchment on my desk where I’d scribbled my own thoughts, both meandering and analytical. “But I want to know your initial impressions, before I share my own, to avoid bias.”
The left side of Yoslyn’s mouth quirked up. “Then we’re approaching this like science?”
“Like alchemy,” I confirmed.
She sank into the green armchair to the left of the window and closed her eyes, mouthing the words of the riddle silently. Then her eyes popped open. “He was in love. With a woman. A beautiful woman, who was frail. And yet…he calls her his sun, which is odd, because—”
“In alchemy, the sun is a masculine figure.”
“Exactly. The fiery spirit. The divine spark of man. Nobility and incorruptibility. It’s associated with kingly imagery. Although… it’s also associated with gold—the most perfect of all metals. The very goal of inorganic transfiguration. The stated goal of the Alchemary itself—by its founder.”
“Lord Calyx,” I said.
Yoslyn sat straighter. “You still think he left the bracelet. And that he wrote the riddle.”
I nodded.
“You think that Lord Calyx was so in love with this woman that he associated her with the very state of human perfection that alchemy seeks to achieve.”
I nodded again. “Metaphorically, at least.”
Yoslyn leaned back in the chair, brows scrunched together. “But Lord Calyx was famously unwedded. He established the very archetype of the scholar-bachelor. He wrote that ‘alchemy cannot be perfected if alchemists are distracted by material comforts or intimate companionships.’ ”
“Actually…” I spun toward my desk and snatched an open text, which I handed to her. “I found the origin of that theory, and the quote is attributed not to Lord Calyx but to Iris. The first Bluehelm.”
“Calyx’s protégé.” Yoslyn scanned the text.
“I remember that she ran the original Seminary, teaching while he pursued the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone.
” She looked up. “Though I’ll admit I did not remember her originating this theory.
But…surely, even if the words were hers, they were inspired by her mentor.
Lord Calyx was practically a recluse, especially by the end, and—”
“But what about the beginning?” I sat at my desk chair, putting us at eye level, and I found myself entirely unable to hide my excitement.
Not even to avoid biasing her conclusions.
“By the time he wrote this riddle, his love—whoever she was—was clearly dead. He calls her the sun, despite the masculine imagery, because he found her powerful. Incorruptible and unassailable. Beautiful. Fiery and likely passionate. The golden ideal.”
Yoslyn frowned. “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”
“That’s what you’re meant to do with a riddle. Extrapolation and interpretation are the only way to solve it.”
“Indeed, but even if you’re right. If Lord Calyx—before he was the original scholar-bachelor who famously failed in his mandate from the crown—was in love with a fiery, golden ideal of a woman, who was she?
There’s no mention of a courtship in any of the histories of his life and work.
He isn’t even associated with a woman, in any text I’ve ever studied, except for Iris.
His protégé. About whom we know virtually nothing, except that she can’t have been his tragic lost love because she outlived him and famously went on to run the Alchemary for who knows how long. ”
“That is almost accurate,” I conceded, and Yoslyn’s brow arched at me. “He is associated with one other woman, in the histories.”
“No, he—”
I snatched the text from her, my movement sharper than I’d intended, and I flipped carefully through the pages to a place I’d marked with a scrap of my own rough parchment.
On the right-hand page was a very old, very sparsely detailed sketch of five people, their faces just nose- and mouth-shaped smudges, their sizes indicating distance and position to form a familiar ceremonial tableau.
“The royal wedding,” Yoslyn said.
“Yes. This is the officiant.” I tapped the vaguely male figure in the center, who was turned away from the reader.
“The emperor.” I tapped Emperor Eldon, standing to the officiant’s left, facing him.
“And Lord Calyx.” To his emperor’s left, where he had been drawn slightly smaller to indicate that he stood back a distance from the royal couple.
“And—” I tapped the maid standing on the far right, next to the bride, at the same distance as Calyx.
“You think he was in love with the queen’s witness?”
“No, I think the queen’s witness was Iris.”
“How do you—?”
“There’s a portrait of Iris in a book about Alchemary history in the research library.
It’s much more detailed than this, but she’s wearing a hooded robe with this same distinctive shape, which is also shown in the stained glass wedding image.
History has largely forgotten who she was, but in her day, people would have recognized that hooded cape as the uniform of an alchemist. In the stained glass version, you can see that Lord Calyx has one, too, but his hood is folded back.
When this was drawn, people would likely have recognized her. ”
“Even so,” Yoslyn said, “Iris could not have been Calyx’s golden woman.”
“But Iris is not the only woman in this image.”
Yoslyn squinted at the drawing, as if she might have missed a hidden sixth figure. “Yes, she is. Other than”—her gaze snapped up to meet mine—“Queen Avalona. No…” She shook her head slowly. “Avalona was—”
“Noble and unassailable. Incorruptible, by all accounts. Beautiful and frail. The golden ideal. We don’t know what her personality was like, but she clearly captured the emperor’s undying devotion, so my assumption leans toward ‘fiery and passionate.’ And she certainly suffered a tragic, early death. ”
“You think that Lord Calyx, the father of alchemy, was in love with the queen? With the wife of his best friend and sovereign?”
I let the power of her own words sink in.
“I think that love may be warm and sweet, but passion is madness and angst. It is push and pull. It’s an insatiable, covetous craving, equal parts adoration and vexation.
I think it is a powerful force that can drive a man to obsession and grief.
Be he the ruler of an entire kingdom or just a simple laboratory alchemist.”
Yoslyn smiled. “You sound like you know whereof you speak.”
I blinked, startled not just by her words but by the deeply assessing nature of her gaze. As if she could see through flesh and bone into my very thoughts. “Do I?”
She nodded. “You sound as if you’ve fought and died in the same trenches you describe.”
My throat felt suddenly tight. “I’m afraid I would not remember, if I had.”
Finally, Yoslyn’s expression relaxed into its standard half smile, and some of the tension eased deep in my belly. “Well, anyway,” she said, “I’m starting to see why the first Bluehelm decided that personal relationships were, in fact, antithetical to the practice of alchemy.”
I could only shrug. “Maybe that’s why Lord Calyx failed to create the Philosopher’s Stone—because he was distracted by matters of the heart.”
Was that why I had also failed?
“So then, what about the last two lines? They make no sense, even if we’ve uncovered the meaning of the first two. And I am not convinced we have.”
“Because of the tense?” I asked.
Yoslyn nodded. “ ‘Now the moon shines’ sounds like it’s still happening. But ‘bit’ is clearly in the past, so the ouroboros biting off its tail—whatever that means—has already happened. How can the two of those be related, if one’s still happening, and the other is not?”
“That, I don’t yet understand,” I admitted. “But we know that the ouroboros is a symbol of the cyclical nature of life and death. Of birth and rebirth.”
“As are the seasons, cycling year after year. And the sun, rising and setting every day. But if ‘she’ will rise no more, then she has passed on. Which we’ve already surmised. The ouroboros biting off its tail seems to be a repetition of the same theme—an end to the cycle of life.”
“Or to one life. Avalona’s.”
Yoslyn scowled at the parchment where I’d written the riddle. “But no individual’s life is cyclical. It’s humanity in general that observes the cycle of life and death, not any one person.”
“So…maybe the ouroboros isn’t the repetition of a theme. Symbols in alchemy often have more than one meaning or interpretation. Maybe in this instance the ouroboros represents not a cycle but infinity. A life that does not end.”
Yoslyn shook her head. “But Avalona’s life did end.”
I nodded, my thoughts spinning. “But it wasn’t supposed to. Or Lord Calyx didn’t want it to. Maybe Emperor Eldon didn’t want it to. The ouroboros biting off its own tail would sever the loop and end the cycle. That could mean the end to a life that was supposed to last forever.”
Yoslyn looked up from the text. “How can one life last forever?” Then her eyes widened, and I saw the moment she came to the same conclusion I had. “The Elixir of Life.”
I stood from my chair so quickly that my head spun.
“That was my very thought. What if Lord Calyx wasn’t only working on the Philosopher’s Stone?
Or, what if he gave up on that?” His notes certainly seemed to hint that he considered it, eventually, to be an impossible endeavor.
“What if he was actually working on the Elixir of Life?”
Yoslyn stood, practically buzzing with the potential of our hypothetical. “To keep his true love alive forever?”
“And, presumably, to keep himself alive with her.” I sucked in a deep breath as my gaze wandered toward the wedding image still visible in the book open on my desk.
“Emperor Eldon immortalized his love for his bride in books, and statues, and buildings bearing their names. In songs, and in plays, and in legend. But Lord Calyx…Yoslyn, I think the father of alchemy tried to immortalize Avalona herself.”