As a teenager, I’d worried that my familial affiliation—the Toolkeepers’ disdain for alchemy in general and the Alchemary specifically—would keep me from being admitted. Or that he would forbid me from attending if I did get in.
And yet here I was, a star student, known to the Bluehelm by name.
Anxiety crawled along my spine as I stared at the interior of a building I found both inspiring and intimidating. The conditions the Bluehelm had set, though they were everything I’d wanted five minutes before, suddenly felt cruel and impossible. She was to receive reports every fortnight from each of my professors on my progress, to make sure my scores didn’t drop below the sixty percent mark. If they did, I would not be allowed to undertake the first trial.
The Black Trial.
“Why do you look so glum?” Wilder threw his arm around my shoulders and squeezed, half guiding me past tall pillars and benches built into the wall of the atrium. Past tile-lined recesses in the walls and rectangular leaded glass windows that allowed daylight to paint the white floor with warmer streaks of color.
Something pointed pressed against my hip from beneath his cloak.
“You got exactly what you wanted!” he declared as we stepped over the Alchemary creed—Mind, Matter, Spirit—carved in the shape of a triangle in the center of the floor.
Yes, I had, and that didn’t feel like a novel state of affairs for me. Yet I was no longer certain I could actually capitalize on the opportunity I’d demanded.
“What is poking at me?” I asked, seizing his cloak to pull it back.
Wilder’s brows rose, and before he could voice the ribald jest clearly burning the end of his tongue, I thumped the dark green leather sheath hanging at his hip.
“Since when do you carry a blade?”
“Since I’ve developed need of one,” he said. At my questioning look, he sighed. “Brigands sometimes lurk in shadows, across the bridge. You should not go into Saltstrand alone.”
“Duly noted.”
“We should celebrate,” Wilder declared as he shoved open the heavy mahogany double doors in the center of the front wall of the atrium. “A drink. You probably don’t even remember where to find one around here, so it’ll be your first time. Again.” His eyes sparkled as he grinned down at me, holding the left-hand door open. “Everyoneshould be lucky enough to have their first time twice!”
The innuendo sent a private little thrill to glow with promising warmth in my belly. Fresh questions bloomed like roses on the branching stems of my amnesia, and more than one of those questions felt like it was rooted squarely in the sapphire depths of his gaze.
“Or—and I know this is going to sound absurd,” I warned, “we couldgo to class.”
He laughed, despite my willingness to stomp all over his bacchanalian plans, and as he backed down the front steps ahead of me, he was at eye level with me for a moment. “Our next class doesn’t start until after lunch, and our first class”—he pivoted to peer at the clock tower at the center of a building to the north— “is about to end.”
“Oh.” I followed his gaze to the clock face. I’d officially missed a class I couldn’t even name. As had Wilder, on my behalf.
“If you really can’t remember this place—”
“I cannot.”
“—then why don’t I give you a tour?”
I smiled with a glance around the quadrangle, my gaze skimming the central fountain, several elaborately carved statues, and a handful of tall shrubs trimmed into the shapes of various animals.
“I suspect I can see most of it from this very spot. That’s the Dormitory.” I pointed directly across the length of the quadrangle to the dark stone building on the eastern cliff. “And given thatthat”—I spun to look up at the white marble building we’d just emerged from—“is the Conservatory, then that must be the Seminary,” I said with a glance at the building forming the northern side of the quadrangle on our left, which boasted the clock tower. “Where our classes are.”
“Good guess,” he allowed with a pout.
“Deductive reasoning,” I corrected. “It’s too big to be the Refectory, which means we must take our meals over there.” I shifted my gaze to the building forming the right side of the quadrangle, to the south. It was a single story, easily the smallest and most humble of the main buildings.
“Yes, but what about—”
“The bridge? I can see it from here.” From where we stood, the bridge connecting Alchemary Island to the mainland north of us was, in fact, easily visible, though it would have been blocked by the Seminary from nearly any other angle.
The bridge was a massive, graceful stretch of gray stone, supported by pillars built into the edge of both land masses. It spanned the strait with a single large arch that allowed boats to pass beneath. It would have been a landmark all on its own, were it not overshadowed by the various striking buildings of the Alchemary. The famous Alchemary gate stood at the end of the bridge, defining the campus’s northern border in a functionally artistic display of cast-iron bars, leaves, vines, and flowers.
The bridge was also the only way onto the island, short of taking a boat all the way around the coast to the dock on the southwest side, where uncultivated woodland gradually sloped toward a rocky shoreline.
I couldn’t remember ever seeing that shore, but I’d certainly heard about it as a child.
