Chapter 42
“Why would I have brought those things here in the first place?”
Instead of answering, Desmond only held my gaze, waiting for me to draw the obvious conclusion.
I sat straighter as it sank in. As embarrassment and a strangely intimate fascination warred within me.
“We were embroiled in an affair, were we not?” I finally said, and the verdict felt somehow familiar and yet wholly startling.
As if I’d known the truth all along, deep down, yet could still hardly believe it.
Desmond scowled, crossing his arms over his chest. “We were not.”
“We most certainly were!” I was convinced of the truth now that I’d discovered it. “That’s why my ‘instinct’ was to kiss you in the laboratory that day. That is why you felt entitled to walk into my room without knocking, and why you refused to discuss my relationship with Wilder, and—”
“You had no relationship with Wilder beyond friendship,” he snapped, eyes flashing copper in the light from the fireplace. Arms crossing over his chest. “Not before the night you lost your memory, anyway. And as I’ve said, I would very much like to know what changed that night.”
My eyes narrowed as I studied his face. “I was not in a relationship with Wilder, and yet he loved me?”
Desmond nodded solemnly.
“I assume that was a source of tension for all three of us?”
“For Wilder, certainly. And increasingly for me, though I will admit I was not terribly concerned until I discovered that he’d spent the night in your bed.”
“And for me? I felt the tension?”
Desmond shrugged his left shoulder. “You had alchemy, and you had me, and you had Wilder, and you seemed cognizant of little else in the world. I’m not certain you truly realized that the nature of his affection for you had changed.”
Could I possibly have been that oblivious? “You insist you and I were not having an affair, yet I have had flashes of very intimate…moments.” I stared at the food growing cold on the table in front of me, avoiding his gaze. “With you. From before I lost my memory.”
“I am not denying that we were often in bed together,” he said, and my gaze snapped back up.
“I simply reject the characterization of that state as an affair.” Desmond leaned forward, piercing me with an almost righteous stare from across the table.
“Amber, you and I had been embroiled in an emotional and psychological entanglement since virtually the day you arrived at the Alchemary, at the beginning of my Mastery year. We were a couple. You and I. Not you and Wilder.”
The thudding of my heart in my ears threatened to drown out his next words.
“I’ve spent almost three months waiting for you to remember on your own.” He leaned back in his chair, his jaw stiff for a moment before he continued. “Hoping you would, because I’d convinced myself that if you did remember, then our relationship must have held some value for you.”
“We were in a relationship,” I said, as if I were auditioning the words. Trying on the concept like a new frock. “For almost two years. Despite the fact that relationships are frowned upon for staff members of the Alchemary. Yet you’re not sure it actually meant anything to me?”
“I was sure, for quite a while. But then that night—the night you lost your memory—you did something that destroyed my faith in…in us.”
“Did that something have anything to do with Wilder?”
His face paled, but he did not look away. “No. For the last time, I don’t know what happened with Wilder. And for the record, relationships are not entirely unheard of for staff members, but they are certainly…discouraged.”
“And between a staff member and a student?”
“Highly discouraged,” he admitted, picking a bit of crust from the hunk of bread on his plate. “But the administration looked the other way, because—” His mouth snapped shut.
“Because what?”
“Because you were so close.” He leaned over the table again, his voice fervent, each word coming faster than the last. “Because you were so inconceivably brilliant, and driven, and…You were like Wilder, with his tremendous instinct for alchemy, but with a disciplined and analytical mind like—”
“Yours.”
“Yes,” Desmond admitted, not the least bit embarrassed by my glimpse of his ego.
“You were the perfect combination of his type of alchemy and mine. Yet you were entirely your own beast. And a beast you certainly were. You were a light shining brightly in the dark and endless cave that the craft of alchemy can so often feel like. We’ve only managed to light one small corner of it, all of us—the greatest minds in our field—over the past century and a half.
But then you came along, and you lit a candle in some other corner, and we could all see you from across the yawning, inky gulf.
Everyone was watching you, Amber. We were hoping that your little candle flame would flare and light up the whole world.
And it could have. You were so close that no one—not even the Bluehelm—was willing to interfere with your methods. They gave you whatever you wanted.”
My heart pounded as a strange pressure built deep in my chest. “And I wanted you?”
He nodded, and in the golden flicker of the fire, I saw just the hint of a flush in his cheeks. “I thought you did, in any case. And no one was very worried about that, because you were still—” Again, his mouth snapped shut.
I did not like this habit of aborting his sentences. Of cutting me off from his thoughts.
“I was still what?”
“Young.” But he had that look again, as if he were only telling me part of the truth.
“You were still young, and no one considered me more than a fleeting fancy for you.” His jaw clenched.
“A diversion you would outgrow. As most serious alchemists eventually put aside such diversions, in order to focus on the work.”
“They thought you were humoring me,” I said. “Enduring a childish crush while you encouraged my alchemical pursuits.” It wasn’t a question. I could see the truth of my conclusion burning in his eyes.
“They were wrong,” he said. “They didn’t understand that I would have razed the whole world for you. For us. I would have left the Alchemary with you to start our own laboratory. Or academy. Or whatever you wanted. And by the end, I was ready to do just that.”
“By the end.” I mulled those words over, searching for their true meaning. “By the time you realized I was a danger to the Alchemary.” He’d said that several times, yet he’d always refused to elaborate.
“And it to you. You had a terrifyingly clear understanding of the alchemical process—of its potential—and the Alchemary was designed to exploit students like you. Not that there’s ever been a student like you.
And that’s exactly what the Bluehelm would have done, if you’d finished your project.
She would have fed your ambition and corrupted your purpose, and—”
“You can’t possibly know that—”
“I do know!” he roared from across the table, shooting to his feet so abruptly that his chair skidded backward. “That’s what happens to everyone here. It’s part of the process.”
I stared up at him, stunned by the outburst. Desmond did not get upset without cause. “What process?” I asked.
“I just mean…” He sat again, visibly composing himself. Shielding more of his thoughts from me. More of the truth. “It happens to all of us.”
“It didn’t happen to you.”
“Of course it did. You are what pulled me back from that. And that’s exactly what they don’t want.
If a relationship is important to you, it could come to mean more than alchemy.
More than the Alchemary. And they can’t have that.
They would eventually have pulled us apart.
I think…” He frowned, anger dripping from every word. “I think maybe they already have.”
“You think the Bluehelm is responsible for my amnesia?”
“Not intentionally,” he admitted. “That doesn’t benefit her. I think memory loss is an unintended side effect of whatever they did to you. Whatever they gave you.”
Every elixir has an unintended side effect.
He’d warned me of that more than once.
“I’ve often thought back to the day your hand was cut by the stained glass, when I saw something in your blood.
At the time, I attributed it to Wilder’s elixir, but…
” He hesitated, as if carefully weighing his next words.
“The Alchemary has ways of getting what they want out of their alchemists, and of repressing any part that isn’t valued. ”
A chill washed over me. “You think that that night, the Bluehelm gave me something, and it backfired.”
He nodded. “I don’t know what else could have done this to you. I don’t know where you went when you left, or what happened. And that has plagued me ever since.”
“What happened that night, Desmond? Tell me what you do know of the night I lost my memory. I left those things here?” I gestured at the crate full of material.
“No, they were already here. You did not come to my apartment that night. The last I saw of you was when you gathered your things and stomped out of the lab, your face flaming with anger.”
“Why was I angry?”
“Because we’d fought.”
“About what?”
Pain churned behind his eyes for so long that I did not think he was going to answer.
“The night before that—two nights before you woke up with my brother and without your memory—I told you I loved you.”
The ache in my chest threatened to swallow me whole. “And…what?” My voice held almost no volume. “I didn’t believe you?”
Desmond held my gaze, pain churning behind his eyes. “You didn’t believe in love.”
I could not speak. I could only inhale the rich scents of my untouched meal, my fingernails digging into the woodgrain of the table while I tried to make sense of his bewildering statement. While I waited for him to explain.