Desmond gave me another nod, but this one was short. Stiff. “For now.”
“What has any of this to do with my beyn?” I finally asked, resisting the urge to stare out at the ocean and let it calm me. “And with the reason you wanted me removed from the Alchemary?”
“That is all to do with the complications I mentioned. It is true that scrivening requires only one ingredient. Beyn. But the production of that beyn comes at a great cost.”
I waited, but for several seconds, he seemed either unwilling or unable to continue.
“A symbol can only be imbued with the power and intent of the element it represents if that intent is anchored—some saybought—with a portion of the human soul.”
“What?” I could not quite understand what he was saying, yet I felt the weight of it—the bitter wrongness—like a spot of rot in a bite of fresh apple.
“A very small portion,” he clarified. “Very, very small. So small that for a long time, the cost to an individual scrivener went unnoticed. Until it began to accumulate. To…change them. Now that they understand the cost, most scriveners are unwilling to pay it. Yet they are equally unwilling to give up the power of a grade-five elixir. So they foist that cost onto someone else.”
“How?” I asked, and it sounded like I was speaking from the end of a long, dark tunnel. Because some vague understanding was tugging at my mind, trying to bridge this new, horrifying concept with…something else. Something hidden in the dark recesses of my memory.
“The beyn necessary to create a scrivening must use some small part of the human body. In the past, scriveners have used a piece of their own hair, a stray eyelash, or fingernail trimmings. Occasionally a drop of blood or saliva. But when the cost became clear…”
“They began taking those parts from other people,” I concluded.
Desmond nodded. “Stealing bits of other souls, to fuel their alchemy. The theory was that if they spread the cost out, no one person would be noticeably affected.” But again he had that look, as if he were leaving something out.
Those scriveners, I understood, weren’t just taking stray eyelashes and fingernail clippings. They were…
But then that vague understanding was suddenly brutally overshadowed with another, more personal one.
“Chaos incarnate,”I swore as the truth crashed brutally over me. “That’s what I was doing, with my beyn.”
“Amber.” Desmond took my hand, trying to comfort me, but the truth shadowed his eyes like clouds rolling over the sun.
“I was stealing my classmates’ souls!”
“Yes,” he conceded. “But only a very, very small portion of them. Nothing that would cause damage. And you did not know. You hadno conceptof the consequences of what you were doing.”
“That makes itworse, not better!” I scrabbled back from him across the wood, heedless of splinters and damage to my frock. “I acted recklessly, with no way of truly understanding what I was—”
“You had no intent to steal any portion of anyone’s soul.” He did not reach for me, but he looked like he wanted to. “You developed your technique independent from the scriveners, and for an entirely different purpose. A separate but eerily parallel procedure, born of your sheer gift for the craft.”
“But you saw what I was doing. And you knew that if they figured it out…”
“They would never have let you go,” he said. “If the scriveners knew that you’d come up with their technique on your own, without their training or permission, they would either have whisked you into their folds—beyond my reach—or—”
His face paled with fear.
“Killed me.”
“They would have considered it the elimination of a threat. But yes. If they could not secure your cooperation and secrecy, they would have done you harm. And I couldn’t let that happen.”
“So, I stole and consumed portions of my classmates’ souls, and instead of telling the Bluehelm, you tried to protect me.”
He only blinked at me.
“Desmond, Iused you, and—”
“Yes,” he finally said. “You used me. As if everything we’d been together meant nothing to you, beyond its scientific potential.” Pain and betrayal were etched into the lines of his forehead, echoing in the crinkles around his eyes. “A potential you didn’t even fully understand. And the most wonderful—the mosthorrible—thing is that you wereright. You did it, Amber.”
The ardent gleam in his eye set a bell tolling in my soul—an alarm ringing from high in a tower.
“What did I do?”
