I nodded. “But you’re misrepresenting your intentions. You aren’t trying to help us. You’reusingus.”
“Well, you’d certainly know all about that,” Lennox snapped, glaring at me from across the table.
“So, what else do we know?” Keryth set her right hand on his shoulder. “What do we have to work with?”
“Theme,” Lennox said.
She rewarded him with a smile. “Yes. Purification and rebirth.”
“And color,” Wilder said. “Alchemy is about colors as much as it’s about anything. This is theWhiteTrial.”
“Yes,” Yoslyn said. “A theme and a color. White. Purification and rebirth.” She glanced around the table. “So…what could that mean?”
“Transmutation. Rebirth into something new,” Gavin spoke up. “This is a Transmutation trial, where the Black Trial was Panacea. They’re testing us in each of the three disciplines.”
“But there are four trials,” Lennox pointed out.
“Of course,” Gavin conceded. “But the fourth trial could be something entirely different. Like a final exam that covers the entire course, while smaller exams cover specific portions of class.”
“Maybe…” Keryth seemed unconvinced.
I leaned back in my chair, listening as the discussion took hold, individual contributions running wild like piglets in a pen.
Cressa continued to doodle, as if she could not care less about the discussion. Had she overheard something in the Bluehelm’s office? If so, why not share her intelligence?
Because thiswasa competition, after all?
“So, what could we possibly be asked to do to prove our alchemy skills, considering a theme of purification and—or—rebirth?” Keryth seemed to be asking herself as much as she was asking us.
But no one had an answer.
Not one they were willing to share with their competitors, anyway.
Light, rapid footsteps echoed up the tower stairs, and I tensed as they stopped at my landing. A fist tapped softly on my bedchamber door, and I looked up as it opened, though I had yet to reply.
“What does it say?” Yoslyn stepped inside, and with her came a whiff of the incense usually kept burning in her room. Her green eyes shone wide and eager in the daylight streaming from my open window, her hands clutching great fistfuls of her own cloak, which contrasted the stiff blue cuffs of her sleeves. “The miniature scroll?”
I ignored the breach of etiquette because only a good friend would rush uninvited into someone else’s private chamber, and in what I could remember of my adult life, no one other than the Gregory brothers had even tried.
A warm sensation flowed over my skin, like bathwater heated over the fire, at the realization that Yoslyn musttrulyconsider herself my friend.
“It’s a riddle.” I held the scroll up carefully between my thumb and forefinger as she closed the door and leaned against it. “But it makes no sense.”
Yoslyn grinned. “That’s the entire point of a riddle, is it not? Reckoning sense from the nonsensical? Let me see!”
I handed her the scroll, and she carefully unrolled it against her palm. But she could only squint at the print. “It’s too small. I see four lines, but I can’t distinguish the letters.”
“I used a magnification lens in the lab. Here.” I handed her a sheet of parchment where I’d written the riddle, and she returned the scroll, which I carefully rerolled and returned to the gullet of the metal snake.
Yoslyn read from the parchment, backlit by the window, and the rhythmic crash of waves far below seemed to accompany her words like music played behind lyrics.
“ ‘My sun, never again shall she rise. Beautiful, but frail. Now the moon shines. When the ouroboros bit off its tail.’ ”
She frowned and repeated the four phrases, and finally, she looked up at me, eyes narrowed. “What in the name of entropy does it mean?”
“I’ve been working on that.” I laid one hand over another sheet of parchment on my desk where I’d scribbled my own thoughts, both meandering and analytical. “But I want to know your initial impressions, before I share my own, to avoid bias.”
The left side of Yoslyn’s mouth quirked up. “Then we’re approaching this like science?”
