“Lord Calyx hurt you,” I whispered as the unspoken truth began to seep from between her disgruntled words.
Iris scowled. “Hegroundme, like ashes in a mortar. He boiled me, like a solution suspended over flame. He distilled from me what was useful and discarded the rest. Transformation does not come easily, child, and it requires an alchemist willing to destroy base matter in order to create something greater.Thatis your Philosopher’s Stone,” she spat, lips twisted into a bitter scowl. “It is not an alchemical solution, mixed from ingredients; it is an alchemicalprocess, hard fought for.”
She was not entirely wrong. But neither was she entirely right.
“In that sense, he succeeded,” she continued, while Desmond wiped blood from his nose onto his sleeve. “But in every other sense—in any sense Eldon could monetize—the search for the Stone was an utter failure, and Calyx was humiliated by the time he gave it up and pursued—”
“The Elixir of Life.” I hardly heard the words, even as I said them. Even as my gaze settled onto the vial still cradled in her palm. “He did it,” I said, and suddenly I understood her wrath. “And that isn’t what you want. Becauseyou’ve already taken it.”
That was the only way a classmate of mine could possibly share a face with the first Bluehelm of this very institution. “Calyx gave you the Elixir of Life?”
“Headministeredit to me.” The words sounded hollow and cold as she turned to stare up at the center portrait. “Yet he intended it forher. He wanted to be with Avalona forever. Long after Eldon, the sovereign fool, was rotting in his grave.”
“But she died before he could complete the formula,” Desmond concluded.
Iris huffed. “Yet he gave her many other things along the way. The ring.” Her gaze dropped to Avalona’s hand, then shifted toward the portrait of mother and infant son. “And the child.”
Surprise drew my gaze to Desmond’s. Emperor Eldon’s doomed son was sired by Lord Calyx?
Iris aimed a toxic glance at Desmond. “Life is messy when two men love the same woman, would you not agree?”
Desmond only blinked at her, refusing to be baited. Or to look at Wilder, who still stood in eerily frozen golden perfection on the edge of the spill of my candlelight.
“It was certainly messy for Eldon. Naturally, he could not let the child live, and in the end, that was all it took to dull the shine of the golden queen. Mydarlingsister.”
I glanced at Desmond, who gestured subtly for me to step back, away from Iris.
“Eldon buried her with her bastard, not a week after that portrait was finished. He tried to have it burned, but I snuck it out of the palace, at Calyx’s request.”
“You?” I asked, and Iris nodded. “Because you loved her?”
She snorted. “Because I lovedhim. Because I was fool enough to believe that once he’d mourned her, he wouldsee me.”
“Youtold Eldon?” Desmond said, and though he phrased it as a question, his words carried the cold stone weight of utter fact. “About the baby. About Lord Calyx.”
Iris nodded again. “I did not anticipate that he might kill them. I believed he would share my grief for an unrequited love and cast them out in shame. But Ishouldhave known. Eldon was a monster. He only let Calyx live because he needed a master alchemist. To make…this.” Her hand suddenly clenched around the vial. “And I wanted that, too. I was a gifted alchemist in my own right, but I was not like Calyx.No onewas like Calyx. So I made him an offer.”
“You would run the Alchemary, while he made the Elixir,” I guessed. A woman like Iris could not have been exiled to the Seminary or relegated to teaching. She had chosen her own path. And she’d set the father of alchemy down his.
Iris nodded. “I took on all of it. The entire institution. I freed up all of his time to build this.…” She extended her left hand to take in the entire Conservatory building. “And to make this.” She lifted her right hand, still holding the vial. “Two doses. It took years, and by the end, we’d grown dear to each other. We were going to take the Elixir together. We would have eternity to perfect our craft. To lead the world into a new era of science and discovery.”
“So then, where is he?” Desmond asked. And when Iris remained silent, I understood.
“He refused to drink,” I said, my grip tightening on the candle holder. “Didn’t he?”
“Oh, no. He drank from his vial, as I drank from mine,” she spat. “But while my dose made my entire body tingle, restoring me to the very bloom and vitality of youth, his left him writhing on the floor in mortal anguish.”
I exhaled, horrified by the truth. “He took his own life.”
She nodded, gaze cold and hard with the memory. “He said, as he lay wracked with unfathomable pain, losing control of his failing body, that he would rather be with Avalona in death than with me in life.”
I met Desmond’s shocked gaze.
“Hecondemnedme to eternity,” Iris continued, gray eyes flashing with fury, brows drawn low with the memory. “Instead of perfecting alchemy with me, he sentenced me to do it on my own. To haul the world, kicking and screaming in protest, toward a progress it does not want and cannot understand. Toward a glorious future that no one is willing to pay for. A fragile advancement that must be secured and defended in brutal ways.”
By the scriveners, certainly. But I knew better than to reveal my knowledge of that dangerous elite.
She sighed, her hand finally falling limp at her side. “I did not know this second vial existed until this very moment. I could not be sure he’d actually made a dose for himself. That he’d ever truly considered taking it.”
