I nodded. “They seemed of a very fine quality.”
He picked at splinter in the tabletop, and when he met my gaze again, his held the odd weight of a bittersweet memory. “I bought them from a shop in Saltstrand, when we’d been together for a year. You loved them. We spent quite a lot of time in them. And then, two nights before you lost your memory, I made a declaration I’ve since come to regret.”
“You said you loved me.”
He nodded. “Andyousaid that love was a delusional state—a sort of hysteria—induced by a collection of micro metals produced by the human body. You saidideaswere the most powerful thing in the world. That everything else was just alchemy, and that if people are really just giant petri dishes—walking solutions of metals in various imperceptible quantities—then they could be manipulated by ideas.”
“I said people could be manipulated?”
“You said some peopleshouldbe manipulated.”
A sick dread twisted in my gut.
“And I saw then that the Alchemary was already changing you. You weren’t yet a staff member—you hadn’t even started your Mastery year—but it had sunk its claws into you like a hungry cat, and I knew it would not let go.”
That dread swelled to fill me like smoke in a closed room, and my throat burned from the acrid bite of it. “I had let myself be corrupted.”
“No.” He seized my hand, and my gaze with it. “You werescared, because you loved me, too, and that made you feel out of control. You couldn’t explain it. And you’d convinced yourself that if you felt something you couldn’t explain with alchemy, then you had failed as an alchemist. You werenotcorrupted. Not yet. But I could see, in that moment, the angle the Alchemary would use—the angle it was already using—to change you. To turn you into what it needed, at the expense of whatyouneeded. Of who you were. So I tried to make you see what was happening. What you were becoming. But you misunderstood. You thought I was doubting your theory, and you felt compelled to prove you were right.”
“How?”
His exhalation seemed to entirely deflate him. “I didn’t understand what you intended until I came into our lab the next night. You were working, completely embroiled in what you were doing, your hair in total disarray, braids unraveling at your temples, your lip pinned between your teeth. I had come to try to put things right between us. But then I saw that you had boiled my sheets.”
“I…What?” An ache blossomed deep in my chest. “Why?” But I knew. On some level, be it memory or scientific instinct, I understood before he even answered.
“You wanted to distill everything we’d shared the night before, to prove that what we felt for each other was nothing more than a series of alchemical reactions taking place in our bodies. As if we were ourselves merely components thrown into a human beaker and placed over a psychological heat source. That’s how you described passion. Lust.”
The storm broke inside me. “I’msosorry.” I reached across the table for him, palm up, but he did not take my hand.
He waved my apology off, eyes only half focused, still caught up in the memory, so I tucked my hand back into my lap.
“I thought emotion was worthless?”
“On the contrary,” Desmond said. “You thought it was invaluable—as an alchemical accelerant, of sorts, for your beyn. Your theory was in direct opposition to everything the Alchemary teaches. Alchemists are instructed to eschew all strong emotion because it distracts from science. That theory goes all the way back to Lord Calyx’s teachings, late in his life.”
Late in life. After he’d been heartbroken by the loss of his only love? After Iris had written about the same theory?
“The Alchemary has based its most foundational theories on the idea that the less emotion an alchemist indulges, the closer they are to a higher form. Butyou…You decided, halfway through your Proficiency year, that everything you’d ever been taught was wrong. You thought we should beharnessingemotion, not suppressing it. You wanted to utilize it. So you started…triggering it, for lack of a better term. Inducing emotions of all kinds in your classmates. Joy, pain, rage—”
“Envy,” I finished as Pryce’s and Adria’s faces flashed behind my eyes. I leaned forward with my elbows on the table, my head cradled in my hands. “No wonder my cohort hated me.” I stood, suddenly seized by the need to move, and paced across his room toward the bed.
“That is putting it mildly.” Desmond’s gaze followed me as I paced toward him again. “They had no idea what you were doing or why. They only knew that you were cruel. That usually when something bad happened to them, you were there.”
I snatched a cube of cheese from my plate and chewed it absently as anxiety buzzed beneath my skin. “But did I not also make good things happen?” Even if only for my own benefit?
“Sometimes. But people are less likely to notice that, because—”
“They aren’t looking for someone to blame for their happiness.” I bit into another cube as I sank back into my chair. “So…I induced strong emotions, presumably through unethical means?”
He nodded. “And then you would soak them up. You’d offer your handkerchief or steal a piece of clothing. Anything that had been cried on, or bled on, or sweated into at the height of some great emotion. Then you would distill that excretion, in whatever form it took, and use it in your formula for beyn. You harnessed human emotion, when the rest of the alchemical world considers sentiment nothing more than a distraction from what matters.”
“But I used people. I used our relationship. I usedyou.” I stared into his eyes, desperate for some sign that he didn’t hate me. “No wonder you wanted me gone from the Alchemary.”
“No, that’s…” He looked heartbroken as he leaned toward me, over the table. “That isn’t the reason. Yes, I was hurt. But I would not have tried to remove you from your life’s work over my own bruised feelings.” Desmond sighed again, a somber weight settling into his expression. “Amber, there’s something else I have to tell you.” Yet for a moment, he only held my gaze, as if trying to measure what he saw there. How much I was ready to hear. Then he exhaled again, long and steady. And he stood. “Do you feel up to a walk?”
“You said I shouldn’t leave the apartment.”
“I did.” He circled the table and offered me his hand, and his next words were very quiet. “But I share walls with two other staff members, and we cannot risk being overheard.” Then he conjured up a smile, as if with a sudden thought. “Have you been to the southern dock?”
