Chapter 39
Yoslyn sat alone at a small table in the student library on the first floor of the Seminary, tapping a lead stylus against a sheet of parchment, and for a moment, I felt bad for having skipped our study session.
Especially since Wilder clearly hadn’t shown up either.
But I was as relieved by his absence as I was by her presence, despite the fact that half an hour earlier, I’d wanted nothing more than to be alone.
“I think I found another secret compartment,” I whispered as I slid into the chair across from her, flinching when it skidded on the stone floor and several gazes snapped toward us.
She blinked at me. “Why are you cross with Wilder?”
“I…” I frowned, thrown by the change of subject. “Pardon?” I whispered, leaning over the table toward her.
“That man jumped into an underwater labyrinth to try to save you, and he’s been walking around here for a week like there’s nothing but clouds beneath his feet, until you both failed to show up for our study session.
” She narrowed green eyes at me. “Then, half an hour ago, he came in here looking like someone had ripped his heart out and devoured it right in front of him.”
Yoslyn nodded subtly to my left, brown ringlets falling over her shoulder, and I turned to see Wilder sitting alone in a chair across the room, angled away from us, the corner of a textbook visible on his lap.
“There’s only one person on this island with the power to make Wilder Gregory look like that,” she said. “And you do have a history of leaving your classmates in tears. So don’t try to tell me you didn’t just carve open his chest and leave him bleeding.”
I leaned back in my chair, and the wood creaked conspicuously. “It’s…complicated, Yos.”
“I’m not certain it is.”
“I didn’t need him to save me,” I whispered, well aware that we weren’t supposed to talk about the White Trial in public. Specifically, near the underclassmen.
“And he didn’t. But he was willing to. Demonstrably willing.
He was further willing to land a blow atop the skull of the pig gizzard of a boy who’s been bullying you for weeks now.
For the second time. And you’re cross with him because of it?
For caring about you and being willing to act on it?
” Her perplexed frown practically begged me to explain.
I swallowed a groan and leaned forward again. “The problem isn’t that he cares,” I insisted softly. “It’s that he doesn’t believe in me.”
Yoslyn slammed her textbook shut with a sharp thunk that made me cringe. “That is categorically false. He does believe in you. He just also knows that Pryce Wishart’s moral decay could very well have killed you, and he wasn’t going to let that happen.”
My hands tightened around the arms of my chair. “Even if it cast me in the role of the helpless damsel, in front of the entire Alchemary board?”
Yoslyn nodded. “Even if it vexed you so badly that you’d never speak to him again.
He’d rather have you alive than happy.” She reached across the table and poked my arm with one finger.
“What was it you said about love? That it’s madness and angst?
That it’s insatiable and covetous, equal parts adoration and vexation? ”
I swallowed a groan. “Actually, I said that about passion.”
She laughed softly. “I believe my point stands.”
For a moment, I could only stare at her, struggling against uncooperative lungs for a deep breath. Then I twisted to sneak another glance at Wilder, who was definitely not actually reading a textbook.
I lowered my voice even further as I turned back to Yoslyn. “You think he loves me.”
She rolled her eyes. “I do, but only because that is patently obvious. I also don’t think it’s fair to hold that against him.”
I sighed again. “I will take that under advisement.”
“Good.” She leaned back in her seat, arms crossed over the front of her gray frock, blue cuffs standing out stiffly. “Then let’s revisit what you just said. You think you found another hidden compartment? Where?”
“In the research library. There was a hidden panel in the center of the table, and evidently I set it on fire and bled all over it at some point over the summer.”
“What?” She shot forward again in her seat. “I never heard a word about that.…But then, most students go home for the summer, and it’s not as if the staff would broadcast the fact that the one who didn’t turned out to be an arsonist.”
I arched one skeptical brow. “I’m not—”
“What was in it?”
“I haven’t the faintest. It was empty. I think Past Amber—”
“Past Amber?”
“The me I was before I lost my memory. I think Past Amber found that compartment first, and she took whatever was in it.”
“Which means that Now Amber—you—must have it.”
“Or…I hid it.”
Yoslyn’s brows rose, her green eyes shining in the light from the candle at the center of the table. “You left yourself a secret?”
“I left myself nothing but secrets.”
She leaned over the table, eyes wide and eager. “Okay, then, let’s go search your bedchamber.”
“I searched the whole room, from top to bottom, when I woke up with no memory and was trying to figure out who I am and what I was studying. Whatever was in that compartment is not in my room.”
Yoslyn arched one eyebrow at me, pointedly. “Well then, we really have no choice but to call in reinforcements.”
“Reinforcements?”
“Someone who knew you well, when you were Past Amber. Someone who might know where you used to hide things. Someone you might even have told about the compartment, when you found it.” She nodded to my left again, and this time I did not turn to look at Wilder.
“Letting him in on this little mystery might be a good way to show him that you’re no longer cross.
That it was, in fact, unreasonable of you to have been angry with him in the first place. ”
I groaned and lay my head on the table, my cheek pressed into the cool surface. Then I sucked in a deep breath, grabbed my satchel, and headed toward Wilder’s chair, motioning over my shoulder for Yoslyn to join me.
“You two have been opening secret compartments all over campus for weeks, and you’re just now telling me about it?” Wilder sat in my green chair, where the ocean breeze from the open window had given his blond waves an adorably tousled look.
“It was mostly her.” Yoslyn had reclined on my bed, her arms folded behind her head against the simple wooden headboard.
“And it wasn’t all over campus; it was just in the Conservatory.
And to be fair, it was really only two puzzles, until today.
” She frowned. “Though evidently Amber was doing this long before even she knew about it.”
“Am I to assume,” I said, “based on your reaction, that I did not tell you about the first one, this past summer?”
“You did not,” Wilder confirmed. “You stayed here for the break, but I went to Innswood, and I’d only been back on campus for a single day when you lost your memory, so I like to think you would have told me. If you hadn’t forgotten yourself.”
I let him labor under that delusion, despite the fact that I’d clearly been keeping coded secrets from him in my journal. “So… do you know of any place I might have hidden something I’d found?”
Wilder laughed. “I wish I knew where you hid your secrets. I do not. But…maybe you do.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to ask you.”
He shrugged. “Desmond says you often act on memories you can’t consciously recall. That you’ll put away equipment in the very same drawer you put it in before you lost your memory, almost as if you remember storing it there.”
I scowled up at him. “Do the two of you frequently discuss me when I am not present?”
Instead of answering my question, Wilder pulled his blade from its sheath and commenced his habit of winding the handle in and around his fingers as he thought aloud.
“I’m assuming that’s what made you pursue these puzzles in the first place: Some latent memory of having found one over the summer made the first one feel familiar and interesting.
Or it showed you where to look. Or…how to look. ”
“I did find myself a bit preoccupied with it,” I admitted.
“Okay…” Wilder leaned forward, pinning me with direct eye contact. “So, what did you find in the two latest compartments, and where did you hide those little treasures? Because it’s entirely possible you hid them in the same place as—”
“No,” I interrupted, twisting to retrieve the wooden box from the far corner of my desk. “I found a bracelet, and then Yos and I found this tiny little frame, and I put them in this box that used to be my mother’s.”
“I remember that box. Your mother kept dried herbs in it, right?”
“Yes. But there was nothing in the box when I opened it save for my journal, which I still can’t read, and my mother’s ring.”
Wilder sheathed his blade and lifted the metal ouroboros and the square frame from the box.
“Wow…” He examined them, turning them over and holding them up to daylight streaming in through the open shutters.
“These are beautiful. A bracelet, and…you think this one’s a frame?
For what? The world’s smallest portrait?
Can anyone even paint something this small? ”
Yoslyn shrugged. “Lord Calyx wrote in print too small to read without a magnification lens. Maybe he also painted?”
“There’s no record of that,” I said. “But then, there was no record of these compartments, either.”
Wilder set the snake and the frame on my desk. “May I see the box? You are a clever girl, as was your mother. Maybe there’s a false bottom?”
“I don’t think so.” Yet I handed him the box.
Wilder went entirely still as he stared down into it. “Where did you get this?”
His voice sounded oddly hollow as he took my mother’s ring from the box. He held it between his thumb and forefinger, and light reflected from a dozen different facets of the large stone, illuminating my bedchamber with bright white reflections.
“I told you. It was in the box. It belonged to my—”
“This is not your mother’s ring, Amber.” He turned it, and Yoslyn gasped as the reflections shifted and flickered all over room. “She was buried with the only ring I ever saw her wear.”
“The one my father gave her.” She was buried with it.
Could he be right? Was that why I had no memory of her wearing such a large stone?
“So then, where did I get this one? Do you think this was in the table compartment?” My heart began to thump almost painfully. “Do you think Lord Calyx hid it in the research library, one hundred fifty years ago?”
Yoslyn made a strange, awed sound as she rose from the bed and came closer, staring at the ring.
“Amber,” Wilder said, and he was looking directly at me now, rather than at the brilliant stone. “This is Queen Avalona’s ring.”
“No,” Yoslyn said. “Her ring is famously green, and it’s an oval cut. It’s on display in the palace historical—”
“Not that one.” Wilder handed me the ring and stood to pace between my bed and the chair.
“There’s a portrait of Avalona in the Panacea wing.
In it, she’s heavy with child and smiling radiantly.
Her hand is on her belly, and she’s wearing this ring.
Dr. Winhoof has a theory that it was given to her by—” He shook his head.
“That doesn’t matter. The point is that as far as I know, that’s the only time she was ever pictured wearing it, and no one’s entirely sure where it came from or what happened to it, since that portrait is from after Eldon gave her the emerald. ”
I held the ring up to the light again and was nearly blinded by the reflection.
And suddenly one of my new memories slid into place with an almost audible click of my mental gears. “This is the ring from the stained glass tableau.”
“What?” Wilder frowned.
Yoslyn’s hand slapped over the O her mouth had formed. “It certainly is! The light through her ring in the spiraling Conservatory ceiling showed us where to find the tiny frame. And that ring is clear. Not green.”
His frown deepened. “I never noticed.”
“It’s the same one,” I insisted. “It has to be. If you’re sure this ring is the one in that other portrait?”
“It’s pretty hard to mistake,” he said. “That stone is huge, and clear, but I don’t think it’s a diamond. And…well, you can come see for yourself. That painting is in the main corridor of the Panacea.”
I glanced at Yoslyn, and she nodded.
“Let’s go.” I set the bracelet and frame back into the box, along with the ring, but before I could close the box, I found my attention strangely captured by the shape the three objects had formed.
The frame was entirely encircled by the bracelet: a square inside a circle. When I’d set the ring down, it had fallen half into the frame, and I now realized something I’d overlooked before, distracted as I was by its luster.
The stone was a perfect circle.
My hand trembling, I picked it up again by the band and placed it stone-surface-down inside the frame. It was a perfect fit.
A circle inside a square, inside a circle.
All that was missing was the triangle.