Chapter 40
“That’s it,” I whispered as I gazed at the framed portrait. “That’s the ring.” I stared in awe at the stone I held up to the painting, comparing it to the one Queen Avalona wore on her right hand as it caressed her pregnant belly.
“Do you think Lord Calyx gave it to her?” Yoslyn blinked against the glare of light reflected in the ring.
“How could he have?” Wilder asked, his feet shuffling on white marble as he stepped closer to examine the portrait.
“He came from famously modest means, and that’s a huge stone.
Emperor Eldon funded the Alchemary, but I can’t imagine Lord Calyx found room in the budget for a ring made to seduce the emperor’s wife from her marriage. ”
“We don’t know that was the purpose of the ring,” Yoslyn pointed out. “And—”
“He made it,” I said.
“Lord Calyx was not a jeweler,” Wilder said. “And again, I don’t think he had the means to—”
“He made it,” I insisted. “ ‘Beautiful, but inert. Multifaceted, like alchemy itself. Both precious and worthless at the same time. A token bestowed but not treasured.’ ” I turned to find them both staring at me as if I’d elapsed into a foreign tongue.
“He must have thought so, since this is the only portrait of her wearing it.”
“What are you talking about?” Yoslyn asked softly.
“I read about it just today, in a bound collection of Lord Calyx’s notes. This gem was a failed attempt to create the Philosopher’s Stone. This inert but beautiful jewel is the result of his inability to combine spirit with mind and body.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Yoslyn said. “We don’t even know that the Philosopher’s Stone actually is a stone. Right?”
I nodded. “We don’t know what its true form will be, but this form is an alchemist’s failure.
Yet it is beautiful, so he gave it to his beloved, and as far as we know, she only wore it once.
‘Bestowed but not treasured.’ At some point, it was returned to him, and he used it in this puzzle.
” I opened the box and rearranged the pieces again so that they could see. “What does this look like to you?”
Yoslyn gasped as understanding dawned.
“It’s the symbol of the Philosopher’s Stone,” Wilder whispered. “Just missing the triangle.”
He was correct, on both counts. For whatever reason, Lord Calyx had hidden in the Conservatory—a building he’d designed himself—three of the four shapes necessary to form the symbol for the Philosopher’s Stone.
“We must have overlooked a compartment,” Yoslyn said.
“I don’t think we have.” I’d been mulling it over since we’d left my bedchamber. “I think we’re looking for a triangle hidden in plain sight. An indication of where these pieces are supposed to be placed.”
“For what purpose?” Wilder mused.
“You think they open something?” Yoslyn asked. “Another compartment?”
I shrugged. “Only Lord Calyx knows what this puzzle is about.” Though the truth was that I had a theory.
Considering that the puzzle had taken the shape of the Philosopher’s Stone, and that he’d worked on it for years, there seemed at least some chance that he’d hidden his formula— imperfect though it was—in this very building.
There was even some chance—albeit a much smaller one—that he had gone back to his magnum opus and actually finished it.
The Philosopher’s Stone—or a formula that would get me close—might be the only thing in the world that could restore my memories. And even if it didn’t, finding the Stone would be…
Well, it would be an enormous accomplishment: the completion of the Alchemary’s original mandate and the culmination of one hundred fifty years of effort by the greatest alchemical minds in the world.
Finding the stone, or a valid path to creating it, wouldn’t just keep me enrolled, regardless of my rank in the White Trial.
It would render me a legend in the field.
It would lead to job offers, and grants, and my name in the history books.
It might lead to statues and paintings of me, on these very grounds.
And yet, while Yoslyn’s eyes were alight with the thrill of a fresh mystery, Wilder seemed…quiet. More solemnly determined than I’d ever seen him.
“So, you think we’re looking for a triangle we’ve already seen somewhere,” he said, sounding oddly thoughtful.
Had he come to the same conclusion? Was he hoping to leverage the Philosopher’s Stone to his own advantage as well? After all, if the board wanted an excuse to get rid of him, he’d given them one at the White Trial by pushing Pryce into the water. By jumping back in himself.
“Yes, but it needs to be small,” I said. “It would have to fit inside the ouroboros, and the frame would have to fit inside it. So, a triangle no bigger than my palm.” I held up my free hand to demonstrate as I tucked the box beneath my right arm.
“There are triangles everywhere around here,” Yoslyn moaned. “There’s literally one on every uniform.”
Our school motto. Mind, Matter, Spirit—the three aspects of human nature, which the Philosopher’s Stone sought to elevate to a higher form.
The Alchemary’s seal was all three words, written in the shape of a triangle, in beautiful, scrolling print.
And it was, in fact, embroidered over the heart of every student wearing a school-issued cloak.
“Well, we’re not looking for a uniform, clearly,” Wilder said. “So, maybe on a plaque? Or painted on a wall? Carved into one of the doors? Or—”
“Oh!” I breathed as the epiphany struck me. Then I spun and raced down the Panacea’s main corridor toward the iconic white marble atrium.
“It’s been here the whole time,” I whispered as Wilder caught up with me, Yoslyn panting at his heels.
“I walked across it every time I entered the building, but I hardly gave it a second thought because Yos is right; there are triangles everywhere. And the stained glass is so stunningly distracting.”
I knelt on the floor at the center of the atrium, where the mosaic tile spiraled outward from a version of our school’s creed that was just smaller than the palm of my hand. Yoslyn and Wilder knelt on either side of me.
“Mind,” I whispered as I pulled the ouroboros from the box and laid it over the triangle.
It was exactly the right circumference to surround the triangular seal, with only the points touching the inside of the circle.
When nothing happened, I twisted the bracelet, and something clicked.
The ouroboros dropped from my fingers, sinking into the floor in a ring that had formed in the mosaic until it was almost flush with the tile.
“Body…” I placed the small metal frame inside the triangle, and another soft click echoed through the foyer.
Yoslyn squealed and grabbed my arm.
Wilder picked up the box and handed me the ring. He seemed to be holding his breath.
Though I could not imagine it was necessary for the puzzle to work, I slid the ring onto my middle finger. I couldn’t help it. How could I not wear it, now that I knew what it was and who it had belonged to?
With my hand curled into a fist, I pressed the stone directly into the space inside the square frame, and it sank into the tile with another click.
Then…
Nothing.
“Turn it,” Yoslyn whispered, as if someone might overhear us.
I twisted my fist, unconvinced that would do anything, considering that the stone was perfectly round, but then I heard another click…followed by a deep groaning rumble.
The tile beneath us began to tremble, and Yoslyn squealed again as she retreated toward the benches built into the atrium wall.
I grabbed the bracelet and the frame and scrambled back, just as the floor began to fracture at its center, right where we’d been standing.
Only it wasn’t truly fracturing. It was shifting, the marble stones sinking in a pattern. …
Stairs.
The stone tiles around the central symbol were settling into the ground, each a little deeper than the last, to form a narrow spiral staircase leading below the floor of the atrium.
“Stars alight!” Yoslyn exclaimed, grabbing my arm.
Wilder held out the open box, and I dropped all three pieces inside. I took the box from him and he grinned at me, excitement gleaming in his eyes, but there was something else there, too.
He looked oddly…relieved.
A strange feeling rushed over me, foreboding and eerie, and it flushed the excitement entirely from my form.
“Wait.” I reached for Wilder’s arm, but he was already in motion, and my fingertips hardly grazed the sleeve of his tunic.
“No time,” he insisted, already three steps down. “Everyone in the building will have heard. They’ll be on the way to claim our discovery.”
Panic spiked my pulse, and I rushed down the steps after him, into the dark, my gaze trained on his silhouette.
But I’d gone only six or seven steps, my head still protruding above the floor of the foyer, when I heard a sharp crack, then the crash of clay shattering.
A hissing echoed up the steps toward me.
Startled, I retreated two steps toward the foyer, my heart thudding in my throat, my fingers scrabbling at the tile floor, now at the height of my shoulders, as I fled from what sounded like a snake about to strike.
From the dark stairwell below, Wilder gasped.
The hissing faded, and he coughed as he stumbled up the steps toward me, reaching for the edge of the floor.
On the edge of my vision, Yoslyn backed away again, one hand covering her mouth, her eyes wide in horror. Shouting echoed from behind her, from the depths of the Panacea wing.
Wilder was right. They had heard.
“Am-ber.” Wilder croaked the broken syllables of my name between wet, hacking coughs, and as he turned to me, crawling slowly up the steps, his face pale, lips stained with blood, light fell beyond him to reveal the shattered remains of two small clay pots—and a thin white cloud bubbling up from the contents that had spilled from them to combine on the stairs.
“Go!” Wilder coughed again.
Instead, I rushed down several treads and grabbed his arm, my pulse racing in my ears. I pulled as hard as I could to tug him to his feet, but he was too heavy.
“Yos—” I shouted over my shoulder, but a fit of coughing swallowed her name as I pulled on Wilder’s arm, terrified to see him struggling to lift himself. To watch his arm shake beneath the weight of his torso.
“Yoslyn!” I tried again. “Help!”
But she only backed away from the recessed stairwell, eyes still wide and panicked.
Wilder coughed yet again, spraying my sleeve with blood, and Yoslyn screamed. She turned and raced in the direction of the Panacea wing, toward the forms thundering toward us, footsteps heavy on the marble tiles.
Sobbing, I sank onto the second step and tried to pull Wilder up with me.
To get his head above the creeping white cloud of whatever noxious fume the broken pots had released.
I pulled as hard as I could, but I’d only tugged him over one tread by the time blurry forms knelt on the edge of my tear-fogged vision, distorted arms reaching for us.
Someone lifted me, and the movement triggered my own fit of coughing. I tasted blood, and my vision darkened.
When it cleared, I lay on my back in the atrium, on the cold marble tile. Someone knelt above me, shouting orders, and though I could not draw his face into focus, I recognized Dr. Winhoof’s voice.
I turned my head, ignoring the ministrations of a woman with one finger pressed to my pulse, and saw Wilder several feet away, being tended by two more Panacea staff members.
He blinked at me slowly. Blood trickled from his mouth, but his lips turned upward in a grin I would never, for the rest of my days, forget.
Then his eyes lost focus. His chest stopped rising.
I screamed, despite the hands tending me—I screamed until the entire world went dark.