Chapter 45
“Beautiful, wasn’t she? Avalona, I mean.”
I spun, startled, and the light from my candle flickered over Cressa Baxter’s face. My gaze raked over her features, assessing. Comparing. The same light brown skin and gray-ringed eyes. The same pouf of dark, red-tinged ringlets.
“My sister was renowned, in her day, as the most beautiful woman in the world. Few remember that she was also quite an intellect, and a very tender soul.”
“Your sister?”
Her laughter held a bitter, sour note. “That bit, like so much else, has been lost to history. Still, sibling rivalry is an age-old story. One your Gregory brothers certainly understand,” she said, tossing a glance through the open door into the dark, eerily quiet corridor.
“You’re…Iris? The first Bluehelm?” I blinked at her, frowning as I struggled to draw a coherent conclusion. “How…?”
“I am Iris, the only Bluehelm,” she said, and though I knew that voice, its cadence—its odd gravitas—was entirely unfamiliar.
“I have run the Alchemary under various names, wearing various faces, for a century and a half. But I always eventually come back to this one.” She ran her fingers down her own smooth cheek in an eerily graceful motion.
“When there’s no one left to remember it. ”
“But you’re a student.” Clearly that wasn’t true, but when comprehension would not come, my thoughts defaulted to what I knew. What I’d thought I knew, at least.
Cressa—Iris—looked coldly amused. “Every few decades I’m forced to operate by proxy while I rise through the ranks as a student, then as a researcher. Otherwise, people would notice that the Bluehelm never dies.”
“You were never her assistant,” I whispered.
This time she laughed, a sound like the ringing of a cold, hollow bell. “I am her…puppeteer. Though I was acting on my own behalf when I brought you to the Alchemary.”
“You? I brought myself here,” I insisted, though the truth was that I had no memory of the occasion. “After being recruited as a child.”
“By a woman with pale skin and a single eyebrow, like a caterpillar crawling across her forehead?”
I sucked in a sharp breath.
She nodded at my recognition. “I came to your quaint mud puddle of a village a decade ago, wearing a different face, answering to a different name, and I set you on this path, Amber Fallbrook. It was I who recognized our Wilder’s childhood instinct for alchemy, and I was thrilled to find you and our Desmond waiting in the wings, overshadowed by his zeal, yet harboring infinite potential. ”
She made a casual gesture over shoulder, and suddenly Desmond stumbled into the room, as if he’d been shoved.
He clutched one arm to his chest and his nose was bleeding, yet he stood straight, his jaw clenched, restrained power emanating from him with every tightly composed movement. I understood, then, that he’d fought to defend us both, rather than to injure his brother.
Wilder stepped into the stone chamber after him, golden flesh gleaming in the light of my candle, his gilded features utterly flawless, yet devastatingly expressionless.
Iris gave another wave of her hand, and he suddenly froze. I could not even be certain he was breathing.
“Amber.” Relief swam in Desmond’s voice as his gaze traveled my form.
“She’s fine,” Iris snapped. “But maintain your distance, or I shall reinstate the battle of the Gregory brothers, though I admit I have no more appetite for sibling rivalry.”
I forced my attention back to her. “You’re saying you brought us here? All three of us?”
“Not by force or coercion, if that’s what you’re implying.
I simply presented you with an opportunity.
I recognized what the three of you represented, even as children.
Spirit…” She gestured at Wilder. “Matter.” She shifted that open-handed motion toward Desmond.
“And mind,” she said, pointing directly at my chest. “A triangle resists pressure by equally distributing force from one corner into the other two, and I knew that if you learned to rely upon each other as alchemists, you could do monumental things here. Unfortunately,” she added, her expression souring as her gaze shifted between us, “I underestimated the damage that sentiment—and unchecked lust—would play in this hot-blooded little triad.”
“What have you done to Wilder?” Desmond demanded. “You’ve infected him, or—”
“There is no infection,” I breathed. “There never was. She did this on purpose.”
“There is a contagion, but it is not of my doing,” Iris said, a brief twitch of her brow hinting at true irritation.
“My aurums, as they have come to be called, are entirely within my control and intentionally created. I have not yet discovered the source of the others.” Those who’d fallen ill suddenly, presumably, and with a less-saturated golden skin tone.
“Or the manner of the contagion’s spread. ”
“Every serum has an unintended effect,” Desmond snapped. “What was the intended effect?”
“How are you alive?” I managed as the reality of it all finally crashed over me.
Iris ignored both questions as her gaze slid over my shoulder.
Her eyes widened and she glided past me as if she were not the least bit concerned to have me at her back.
She snatched the vial from the shrine, rumpling the dead queen’s delicate gown, then held it up to the light of my candle.
Iris scowled and wiped the dust from the vial onto the front of her skirt, and I could see through the clean glass that the solution inside…
“That is not the Philosopher’s Stone,” I said. It was an alchemical solution, certainly, but the coppery color was not right, and there was no metallic sheen.
“Of course it isn’t.” Iris tossed a disappointed look my way, as if I were a candle flickering at the end of its wick.
“Calyx spent more than a decade trying to make such a thing before concluding that it is utter fantasy. Which I told him from the start. And what good would it do, even if it were real? If you could turn any base metal into gold, then gold would lose its rarity, and thus its worth. I said as much to you more than a year ago, and I made it clear that as a researcher, you will be expected to set aside childish indulgences”—her gaze flicked toward Desmond—“and stop wasting resources on—”
“That is not the point of the Philosopher’s Stone,” I snapped, ignoring the fierce lowering of her brows in my direction. “The Stone advances whatever it is applied to—not just base metal—toward its most perfect state. Whether that be—”
Desmond’s brows rose. Pointedly, and in warning.
“Well, we don’t really know what that would be,” I finished.
“You have his look.” Iris stalked closer to me, her gaze caught on my face.
“So full of determination and wonder, just like Calyx. So much potential, hampered by so much fancy. I had that look, once. He said I was interminable drive beholden to endless trivial emotion, and he said it all with a straight face, as if he did not fit that very definition. As if obsession with my sister—his and Eldon’s—had not already broken an emperor, and crippled this institution, and sent the entire empire careening toward both war and financial ruin. ”
She tilted her head, looking oddly, honestly curious.
“Have you yet noticed that when men feel something, it is lofty, noble, and important? It is worthy of dedicating statues and sonnets to. Of founding entire kingdoms upon. But when women feel it, it is a flighty and frivolous distraction from what really matters.”
“I…” But Iris didn’t seem truly interested in my answer.
Her teeth gnashed together. “We both finally understood, in the end, though. Whether it is noble or frivolous, all sentiment is a distraction.”
“Lord Calyx hurt you,” I whispered as the unspoken truth began to seep from between her disgruntled words.
Iris scowled. “He ground me, like ashes in a mortar. He boiled me, like a solution suspended over flame. He distilled from me what was useful and discarded the rest. Transformation does not come easily, child, and it requires an alchemist willing to destroy base matter in order to create something greater. That is your Philosopher’s Stone,” she spat, lips twisted into a bitter scowl.
“It is not an alchemical solution, mixed from ingredients; it is an alchemical process, hard fought for.”
She was not entirely wrong. But neither was she entirely right.
“In that sense, he succeeded,” she continued, while Desmond wiped blood from his nose onto his sleeve. “But in every other sense—in any sense Eldon could monetize—the search for the Stone was an utter failure, and Calyx was humiliated by the time he gave it up and pursued—”
“The Elixir of Life.” I hardly heard the words, even as I said them. Even as my gaze settled onto the vial still cradled in her palm. “He did it,” I said, and suddenly I understood her wrath. “And that isn’t what you want. Because you’ve already taken it.”
That was the only way a classmate of mine could possibly share a face with the first Bluehelm of this very institution. “Calyx gave you the Elixir of Life?”
“He administered it to me.” The words sounded hollow and cold as she turned to stare up at the center portrait. “Yet he intended it for her. He wanted to be with Avalona forever. Long after Eldon, the sovereign fool, was rotting in his grave.”
“But she died before he could complete the formula,” Desmond concluded.
Iris huffed. “Yet he gave her many other things along the way. The ring.” Her gaze dropped to Avalona’s hand, then shifted toward the portrait of mother and infant son. “And the child.”
Surprise drew my gaze to Desmond’s. Emperor Eldon’s doomed son was sired by Lord Calyx?
Iris aimed a toxic glance at Desmond. “Life is messy when two men love the same woman, would you not agree?”
Desmond only blinked at her, refusing to be baited. Or to look at Wilder, who still stood in eerily frozen golden perfection on the edge of the spill of my candlelight.