Oliver can create gold itself from any metal, and Father can create gold from water.
Oliver isn’t quite there yet, but he will be.
Today or in a decade, it doesn’t change that this task before him now, wine into water, is menial.
That’s probably a relief for him, since that migraine has his lashes almost shut over his eyes. He’s quick about the task, lazy almost.
He lifts the glass chalice from the trolley before Mikhail has even spotted his own.
Crimson liquid sloshes against the glass, and in the silent anticipation from the audience of seniors, the wine pales.
And pales.
And pales.
Until it’s as clear as the stream I visit.
Face blank, Oliver sets down the chalice—and doesn’t so much as smile as the applause rips through the seniors.
Master Wealdwine marks the parchment on the clipboard. An obvious tick, but even that doesn’t change Oliver’s sour mood.
He takes a step back and waits for Mikhail to finish, but he is only just now holding his chalice.
The applause settles, scattered and faint, before the renewed silence returns—thick with that tense anticipation.
Mikhail is a fallen gentry, an elite whose family line once stood with the power of the aristos. But then they went and started breeding with lesser, lesser bloodlines, lesser prints, the weaker of our kind—and their power waned.
There is a reason aristos stick together.
Mikhail is the only other alchemist student in all of Bluestone, in all of Europe—and he’s rubbish.
I doubt he can manage anything to do with the metals yet, lead or gold or iron, and forget diamonds, that’s out of the question.
Because he’s up there on the podium, struggling to turn wine into water.
‘Child’s play,’ my father would call it.
Oliver used do this backwards.
Water into wine out in the gardens, when all the families were together.
I, of course, wasn’t included when the others snuck off. We were all only twelve or thirteen, and they would go drink alchemised booze deep in the hedges.
Started with wine, finished with hard liquor.
I only remember because I was excluded—and I remember the stink of them when they would come back from the gardens.
It always annoyed me that none of the adults said anything about it, but of course they knew. It’s hard not to when all the kids stink of liquor, can hardly stand up straight, and are falling into each other with laughter.
My mouth puckers, sour, and I will Mikhail to fail just that bit harder.
How can he, this washed-out gentry, have such a power,alchemyof all prints, while I have nothing?
Even if he’s bad at it, it’s better than deadblood.
Oh.
My mouth turns down with a frown.
