“I understand that. But if I am right…” His forehead crinkled, his lips pressed thin. “If this place is as much a danger to you as it was to your mother—”
“I amnotmy mother.”
“And I thank the cosmos for that every day. It would break my heart if—”
“Don’t,”I repeated, sharper this time. “You don’t get to talk about her. You gave up that right.”
“Amber. My dear.” He exhaled slowly. “I didn’t leave because I stopped loving her. Ineverstopped loving her. Love was not our issue.”
“I know. It was just the wrong kind of love.”
He nodded. “She was my best friend. We were confused for a while about the nature of our relationship, but I won’t be sorry for that, even if we both got hurt, because we gotyouout of it.”
“I know.”
And the truth was that as angry as I was about the dissolution of their marriage, even a decade later, I would not begrudge him Martyn. And I would not deny Martyn my father.
It was not Martyn’s fault that my father left us. That his love for my mother was of the wrong sort to support marriage. I wasn’t so much angryatmy father as I was angryformy mother.
“But that doesn’t change anything,” I continued. “She’s mine now. Whatever is left of her. Not yours.”
He nodded slowly, and I chose not to see the pain in his eyes.
“If that’s the way you want it.”
“It isn’t an issue of what I want. That’s how itis.”
We sat in silence for several minutes, sipping lukewarm tea. Picking at the currant bread on the bench between us.
Finally, he sighed. “Desmond says the trials—”
“I’ll befine.”
“Amber—” His voice broke on the second syllable, fracturing my name into a thousand shards. A thousand pinpricks of pain. “I can’t lose you, too.” He lifted a cloth to his eyes and swiped brusquely at them, as if the goal were to eradicate his tear ducts, rather than simply to absorb the moisture. “Iwon’t.”
“No,” I assured him. “You won’t.”
“You don’t have to do it.”
“Of course not.” I stared straight ahead, letting the students still milling about in the courtyard blur as my unblinking eyes went dry. “If I haven’t recovered my memory or relearned enough alchemy to give myself a fighting chance, I won’t do it.”
But it wouldn’t come to that.
“Promise me.”
“Father…”
“If you want me to leave you here—if you want me to give my word to Martyn that you are safe, and I didn’t just abandon you to the wolves that devoured your mother whole—you will promise me.”
“Fine. But that’s the last time you are allowed to wield either my affection for Martyn or my mother’s memory like a weapon.”
My father nodded, smiling tenuously. “That seems a fair exchange. Your word for my…laying down of emotional arms.”
“In that case, you have my word,” I lied.
My father swiped at his eyes one last time. Then he pocketed his handkerchief and broke off another hunk of Martyn’s currant bread. “Did you know that Toolkeepers laid every stone on this campus?” he said, plainly trying to change the subject to something less emotionally volatile. He’d raised his voice, more than willing to educate Alchemary students on the illustrious history of his profession. “One hundred fifty years ago, when we were all unified under one guild, but led by the—”
“Stonemasons,” I finished. I’d heard the story at least a hundred times, but he never tired of telling it.
