Instead you had spent the entire morning painstakingly translating the verbiage from an old public-notice flyer into your mother’s native tongue, though you hardly knew how to write a word of it. She said you’d run into the front of the shop at least a hundred times to demand instructions on how to form the letters, even as you insisted on writing them all yourself.
I knew then that nothing could stop you from whatever you set your mind to. And that you had more serious, ambitious ideas than most other children. I see that same passion and determination in you now, and though our views on the ethical use of alchemy instead of labor are quite divergent, I know that you have only good intentions. And while I believe the Alchemary should not exist as an institution, I am grateful to both the academy and to the world that you can be counted upon to measure their worth, as you have always been the measure of mine.
Love always,
Your father, Cornelius Fallbrook
Tears filled my eyes as I reread his words for the third time. I had only the faintest memory of the morning he’d recounted, but the fact that it had remained with him meant more to me than I was truly willing to admit. So I tucked his letter into my mother’s small wooden chest, alongside her ring, and I turned my attention to my studies.
Hours later, I looked up to find candlelight flickering across the curved stone walls of my small bedchamber from three different angles, casting overlapping shadows. I stared at them, watching the meaningless silhouettes jitter.
My window was closed against the cold night air, but I could hear the soothing crash of waves against the cliffside below, and, given my exhaustion, the rhythmic sound threatened to lull me to sleep.
With a sigh, I forced my attention back to the sheets of parchment on the desk in front of me.
Two of my candles sat on the desk, at opposing top corners. The third cast its weaker light from the bedside table on my right. They were more than capable of illuminating my work and could not be blamed for my lack of attention. In fact, the third candle almost seemed a waste of resources, considering how often my mother and I had shared a single candle placed at the center of the table when I was a child.
For the third time in the past hour, I read through my notes from class, slowly and painstakingly, comparing the symbols and concepts to one of the Fundamentals-year texts I’d “borrowed” from the library.
Slowly—soslowly—I was unraveling the knot of facts and theories tangled in my mind like the various balls of yarn my mother had used for knitting most evenings. I’d never thought of her yarn as a knot before, because she’d always been able to gradually, neatly unwind it. My ball of academic yarn, however…
I felt like I’d plunged my metaphorical knitting needle deep into the ball and plucked out random loops, all of which were too tangled with the rest of the material to come free. To give me more than a rudimentary glimpse of how they were coiled and what they meant.
With a frustrated sigh, I closed the textbook and snatched my journal from the corner of my desk. Tonight, I could understand little more of the borrowed text than of my own encoded writing, so why not dig at that ball of yarn instead?
At least that might break up the monotony.
This time, instead of focusing on all of the writing I couldn’t understand—the vast majority of what was on the pages—I focused on what few alchemical symbols Icouldrecognize.
Iron. Copper. Salt. Gold. And the squared circle: the alchemical symbol for the Philosopher’s Stone.
A circle inside a square, inside a triangle, inside another circle, each of them touching at various sides and points.
Curious, I opened the textbook again, searched the appendix, then flipped to the pages concerning the meaning of the symbol. The combining of water, earth, and fire, of mind, matter, and spirit. The importance of balance and stability.
I read the words over and over, tracing the shapes with my gaze, then with my finger, reciting the meaning, well aware that two weeks before, all of it had held an intimate and presumably clear meaning for me.
I understood the words. I even understood the concepts. But trying to figure out how they all fit together made me feel like I was flailing in a pit of those academic yarn balls, being poked with fifty knitting needles at once every time I tried to move.
Several polite taps echoed against the door to my chamber, then it creaked open as I turned.
Wilder smiled at me in the flickering glow of my candle, and my heart leapt at the sight of him.
“Come in!” I rose to tug him inside, his hands strong and warm in my grip, and both the dirt beneath his fingernails and the scents of earth and freshly cut vegetation told me he’d spent the afternoon behind the Refectory, in the small forest where he often harvested his own ingredients.
He glanced at the parchment spread across my desk. Voice teasing, his eyes sparking with good humor, he asked, “You do know what they say about girls who spend the entire weekend studying, don’t you?”
“They survive their Mastery-year trials and go on to live long, successful lives?”
He snorted. “Precisely. I am certainly not thinking of a different and much less socially stimulating answer to my own question.”
“Socially…stimulating?”
He shrugged, one brow arched. “I care not if you hide yourself from the entire student body, so long as you don’t hideyourstudent body fromme.” His hands gripped my waist, and warmth glowed low in my belly. I leaned into his form and indulged a long breath dragged in through the linen draped over his chest. His scent washed over me—fresh earth and sweetened tea—and for a moment I clung to him, my fingers tangled in his tunic, low at his waist, and in the thicker material of his cloak.
My heart thudded almost painfully. There wassomething.…
A memory? No, more of a feeling. An impression that defied words.
