Yoslyn’s arm stiffened in my grasp, but I only hugged her tighter and kept moving forward, to assure her that I was curious, not angry.
“I truly want to know. Do you know what I was working on?”
She shook her head. “No one in the cohort knew. Wilder, maybe. But no one else.”
“Then why would you think—”
“Because it’s all you did. Other than eat, sleep, and a couple of visits to the Dusty Beaker—just a couple, in two years—all you did was research. So unless you woke up with a head wound or a festering fever, there’s simply nothing else that could account for what’s happened to you.”
As badly as I hated to consider her theory, I could not deny that it made sense.
“Why do our classmates hate me?”
Yoslyn huffed over my change of subject. “They don’t—”
I stopped walking again and turned to frown at her.
She shrugged, dragging my arm up with the motion. “You weren’tcruel. Nottruly. But it’s possible their views diverge from mine on that matter.”
“And your view?”
“You did not intentionally cause pain, that I know of. But neither did you go out of your way to avoid causing it. And when painwasfelt, you capitalized on what you called a resource, insisting that it was in the name of science. Of alchemy.”
“What, in the name of all discord, does that mean?” And how had I never heard this from Wilder? “What did I do?”
Another shrug. “The incident that ruffled the most feathers was when you allowed Adria and Pryce to labor under a misunderstanding that led them to cease their relationship.”
“Led them to…?”
Yoslyn sighed, displaying her reluctance to rehash what was, to her, old news. “You contrived a scenario that made itappearas if Pryce might prefer your company to Adria’s. And you encouraged her to believe that was the case. According to Pryce’s telling of it, anyway.”
Pryce’s angry countenance flashed to the forefront of my memory.You are reaping what you’ve already sown—it’s not my fault you don’t remember the original sin.
Guilt crashed over me like waves against the cliffside. “Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. You seemed, at the time, to be comforting her. You even lent her your handkerchief for her tears. But I was with her, when she came upon you and Pryce at the back of the library, and…” Yoslyn sighed. “Pryce certainly contributed to the dissolution of his own relationship. But you…Well, you appeared to be entropy incarnate that day.” She glanced at my exposed cleavage. “In that very dress, come to think of it.”
“Why onearthwould I have done such a thing?” In addition to being cruel, driving a wedge between two lovers was indirect oppositionto alchemy’s goal of fighting chaos and imposing order upon the natural world.
No wonder this dress had been shoved to the back of my wardrobe.
Yoslyn’s silence spoke volumes. “Adria never forgave you,” she finally said. “Neither did Pryce.”
In fact, Pryce considered his assault upon my dignity to be a seed I’d sewn, and Adria had not said one word to me in the past six weeks.
A cold gust brought with it the hoot of a distant owl, and I glanced toward town again as I shivered, eager for a warm respite, but reluctant to quit the most informative conversation I’d had in weeks. “What could that debacle possibly have to do with my research?”
“I honestly could not say.” Yoslyn shifted from one foot to the other in the middle of the dirt road, trying to stay warm. “All I know is that when Adria left, you asked for your handkerchief back, then you sat there in the library and took notes, as if you’d just concluded a lab experiment.”
I’d come across no such notes among the sheets of loose parchment in Past Amber’s collection. But it was the handkerchief that stood out in Yoslyn’s story, for no reason I could understand, except that it struck a harmonic chord with a newly formed memory.
When my father had visited, upon hearing of my strange ailment, he’d wiped his damp eyes with a handkerchief of his own, which had fallen onto the bench unnoticed as he left.
I’d kept that handkerchief, with no real thought of calling after him to return it. And I could not say why—either then or now—that impulse had struck me.
“What format were the notes in, do you happen to recall?” I asked. “On parchment?”
Yoslyn frowned. “No, in a journal. I remember that you set an inkwell on the table, and you were takingtruenotes, as if you were in a lab setting, rather than light notation with a lead stylus, like most people would utilize for quick reminders.”
