Chapter 41
“She’s waking up.”
Yoslyn’s voice haunted me like a ghost, hovering just on the edge of comprehension, but it took me a couple of heartbeats to make sense of the words.
I was the one waking up. And she was there. Wherever there was.
“Amber. Open your eyes.”
Desmond. And surely that was his hand, warm on my arm. My cold, cold arm. All of me was cold, in fact. Utterly freezing.
“Amber.” His voice was sharp. Demanding.
My eyes opened—just a crack to let in the flicker of my candle. And I knew it was my candle by the clear, bright quality of the light, from the coating Past Amber had dipped her wicks in.
I blinked, and my eyes opened wider. My vision narrowed on the thin wooden planks lining the ceiling of my bedchamber. On the stacked-stone walls.
Shadows shifted, and Yoslyn’s face appeared over mine. “Thank all that is good in the universe,” she whispered. “She’s awake.”
A hand took mine from the opposite side of the bed, fingers warm and strong. “Amber.” Desmond’s voice was softer now. “Amber, look at me. How do you feel?”
I turned my head, and my neck crackled, as if I hadn’t moved it in ages. Desmond’s face came into focus, first his silhouette, broad but hunched, then his features, and I wondered if my eyes were out of practice, too.
“What happened?” My voice creaked like an old wooden chair. I tried to push myself upright, but the world spun.
Desmond helped me sit up slowly while Yoslyn fluffed my pillow, and when he leaned back to get a better look at me, I noticed that his eyes were red. “What do you remember?” he asked.
“I…” I shook my head.
A ring. A portrait. A staircase descending into the floor. Then…
“Wilder!” I sat up straight, and the room spun again.
“Get her some water,” Desmond ordered as he pressed gently on my shoulders, forcing me to recline against the pillow.
I had no strength to resist. “You’ll have to go slow,” he said.
“You’ve been unconscious for most of a day, and you spent the first several hours breathing viable air through a medical air bladder.
We’ll get you some food shortly, but first… ”
Yoslyn pressed a wooden cup of water into my hand, and I sipped from it. The water burned my throat, and Desmond tensed when I coughed. But then I sipped again without incident, and the tension in his form eased.
“Where’s Wilder?” I asked as I handed the cup back to Yoslyn.
She made a wounded sound deep in her throat, but it was Desmond’s face that told the story: the pained crease at the corners of his eyes and the firm, defensive press of his lips together, before he even opened his mouth.
“He didn’t make it.”
The room swam around me.
“From what we’ve been able to ascertain, based on what we found and what Yoslyn told us, you three uncovered a staircase hidden in the floor of the Conservatory foyer.
Wilder rushed down first—naturally—and stumbled into a trap.
He broke two clay jars, the contents of which combined to form a poisonous gas.
Fortunately, that gas is heavier than air, so it hasn’t risen above the staircase, which spared Yoslyn entirely. But Wilder…”
“Didn’t make it,” I finished, my voice brittle. Fragile.
Desmond swallowed, and his steady gaze was a seawall holding back the tide of grief. “You were on the verge yourself, for a few hours. But then you made a sudden recovery.”
“From the viable air?”
He shook his head. “That was all they could think to give you, but it can’t account for your recuperation.” He exhaled, his gaze holding mine. “There’s been a lot concerning you that no one can seem to account for lately.”
“Where is he?” I demanded softly. I couldn’t process the rest of it. The unanswered questions and Yoslyn’s curious, heartbroken expression. “Where is Wilder now?”
“I…” Desmond frowned. “In the morgue, I assume. They’ve isolated his body, in case any of the natural postmortem processes were to release any of that gas from his lungs.”
A sob burst free from my chest. “This is my fault. It’s all—”
“No.” Desmond flinched, as if the word tasted bitter. “Wilder rushed down the stairs, into the unknown. He’s always been reckless, and it was bound to catch up to him eventually.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” he insisted. “It brings me no pleasure to say. In fact, I would give anything for the opportunity to have been there. For the chance to have seized his cloak and knocked some sense into the back of his skull. I wish he were here to scold, and I swear to the stars that this time I’d make him hear me.
But I do mean it. My brother made his typically impulsive choice, and this time, for perhaps the first time in his life, his instinct failed him. ”
I closed my eyes, and Wilder’s face flashed across the dark expanse of my vision. Not his usual grin, but the way he’d looked right before he’d rushed down the stairs.
Relieved. As if somehow, even though he’d had no idea Yoslyn and I had even found a puzzle, he’d already been desperate for the solution and afraid he’d fail to find it.
But that made no sense. And now I would never know the reason. I would never again get to…
“Tell her the rest.” Yoslyn sank onto the edge of my bed, her hands clutched in her lap.
I turned to Desmond, my stomach twisting, though there couldn’t be anything for it to reject, considering how long it had been since I’d eaten.
“What’s happened?” I demanded softly. “What more could there possibly be?”
He sighed, regret flashing in brief lines across his forehead. “You’ve been expelled.”
Numb, I nodded.
I’d dreaded those very words for weeks, since the moment I’d decided to stay, despite the odds stacked against me. Despite the dense fog that my memory had become. And now that I’d heard them, they meant…less than nothing.
What was the point of staying, of rising to the highest possible ranks of alchemy, when those already there—the very top of their craft—used it to kill and manipulate, but could not save a life?
When the very father of the art had confessed his own inadequacy, failed to save his true love, and used his talent to set up a series of puzzles that had killed my best friend in the world—a man who’d loved me, for no reason I could understand.
Why in all the universe would I want to be an alchemist now?
“How is she?” a familiar voice asked, and I looked up to find Keryth peering at me from the doorway, her face half shrouded in shadow from the dark landing.
Her pinched expression was equal parts concern and curiosity, and I got the distinct impression that she already knew about my expulsion.
That it was only the fact that I was no longer her competition that allowed her to feel any concern at all.
“Get out,” I croaked at her. “Drown in a sea of your own false tears, for all I care, but do it out of my sight.”
Yoslyn gaped at me. Keryth huffed, standing straight and stiff, and clearly mortally insulted. From behind her, I heard a chorus of gasps, from which I understood that several of our female classmates loitered on the landing.
“I’m no longer a student?” I said as footsteps clomped softly down the narrow spiral stairs.
Desmond nodded.
“Then get me out of here. Please, please, get me out of here.”
He stood and crossed my room in two long strides, a soldier relieved to have orders.
“Pack her things,” he commanded Yoslyn as he slammed my door shut.
Then he turned back to me. “Your father has been summoned. It will take a couple of days for him to receive the correspondence, and a couple more, at best, to come retrieve you. You will stay with me until then. They cannot deny me that now.”
For the rest of the day, I drifted in and out of sleep in Desmond’s bed, and every time I woke, I remembered Wilder’s death with a fresh pain like a blade plunged straight into my gut.
Each waking wound cast me into a paroxysm of grief—and guilt-fueled weeping, leaving me curled into a limp form in the center of the wool mattress.
Desmond offered me tea to calm my tears, but the third time, when I was inconsolable, he climbed into the bed and lay behind me, holding me close with one hand around my waist, his head sharing my pillow.
As I drifted into a teary sleep, I could swear I felt him shaking at my back. Silently sobbing. And I realized with no small amount of shame that I had thoughtlessly let him care for me while he was still mired in his own grief.
I’d lost far more than a friend, in Wilder. But Desmond had lost his brother.
When I next woke, the sun had set. Desmond’s chest was still pressed against my back, his breathing as steady and calming as the ocean waves outside my own bedchamber window.
I rolled onto my back, and though he shifted a bit, he did not rouse, and I wondered at his unconscious comfort. At the fact that he was not startled awake by my presence.
I turned carefully to face him and found myself captivated by his sleeping expression. By the relaxed cast of his features, which were so often sternly set in his waking moments. In his sleep, he seemed like another person.
Or…maybe he was only vexed in my presence.
I should have been grateful that he’d found peace, however temporary, in rest. Yet something tugged painfully at my bruised heart while I watched him.
As I ran one finger gently down the bridge of his nose, then over the generous bow of his lips, it finally occurred to me that in his sleep, he looked uncannily like Wilder, who’d rarely, in his entire life, worn a frown.
Fresh tears slid down my face as I stretched forward to press my mouth against his, beset by an irrepressible urge.
Desmond’s eyes flew open. “Amber?” he whispered, and I burst into sobs.
His eyes widened, his forehead crinkling in a helpless expression. Then he kissed me. Quickly and desperately, as if he could think of no other solution and yet understood that this was not it.
Surprised, I gasped, stealing the breath straight from his throat.