I frowned for the moment it took me to understand. “The rooms are offset. They climb the tower just like the stairs do.”
“They’re each offset by half, vertically, following the curve of the tower staircase,” Desmond confirmed. “One dormitory room on every landing, half of those with a stunning view of the ocean. But the towers are only for Mastery-year students.”
“How many of us are there?”
“Twelve, to start,” he said. “Six women in this tower, and six men in the tower on the other side of the Dormitory. The wings that connect the towers house the Fundamentals-year students on the first floor, and the Proficiency-year students on the second floor.”
“Fascinating.” I stared up the staircase at what I could see of the landing above mine. “But more whimsical than efficient. What floor am I on? Er…what half floor?”
“Yours is the fifth room up. That one is the highest in the tower,” he added, pointing at the upper landing.
Which meant the footsteps that had passed my door belonged to whoever occupied that room. Though I could have sworn I’d heard more than one set of feet…
“Are you ready?” Desmond asked.
I nodded and followed him down the dark, quiet spiral staircase, counting the four doors below mine as we went.
On the ground floor, the stairs deposited us into a round stone-tiled foyer. To my left, a gracefully pointed gothic archway opened into a long corridor lined with closed doors, which could only be the Fundamentals-year dormitory rooms. Torches were mounted on the wall between them, flickering with that same warm reddish- yellow light.
A second, identical archway led from the round foyer into a shorter door-lined corridor running perpendicular to the first, and I surmised that the Mastery towers stood at the corners of a U-shaped building, connecting the long center wing to the shorter wings on each end.
On my right, opposite the longer corridor, stood a single richly carved door echoing the shape of the gothic arches. Desmond opened that door and led me out of the dormitory onto its broad side lawn, which sloped gently up until it dropped into nothing over the cliff. Into the ocean below.
“An island…” I murmured as a memory surfaced—not of being here, but of hearing about this place. “The Alchemary is on an island.”
“Indeed.”
Directly ahead, the glittering ocean stretched into infinity, and on my right, the women’s residential tower rose toward the sky. At my back lay the rest of Alchemary Island: a campus—and a life—I could not remember.
I stared out at the ocean, letting the cool, salt-scented breeze lift the ends of my hair. But Desmond turned as if the view meant nothing to him and marched away from the cliff. I followed him along the short wing of the building, and when we rounded it, I discovered that as I’d guessed from inside, the Dormitory, a masterpiece of dark stone and gothic arches, was shaped like a rectangle missing one long side, with a tower shooting up from each corner. Its central wing, perched on the very edge of the cliff, was twice as long as the two side wings, and the windows were constructed of multiple panes of clear glass, joined by lead seams.
The Dormitory was extraordinary: symmetrical and grand, yet with a warm and quite solid feel, thanks to the sheer volume of stonework and the three-tiered fountain at the center of an interior courtyard that opened directly onto the rest of the campus.
It was a marvel of design and construction, and given that I’d been raised by a master stonemason, it should have been indelibly imprinted upon my memory from the moment I’d first seen it. Yet I could not remember ever laying eyes on the building before that morning.
With a sigh, I turned from the Dormitory courtyard to face a long, neatly manicured quadrangle and the rest of the campus. “Let’s go,” I said.
And with that, I set off down the lawn, leaving Desmond to follow.
“And you’re certain you didn’t hit your head?” Dr. Winhoof asked for the second time as he ran his hands over my scalp and through my hair, destroying my braids. His touch was professional and thorough, but not what one might describe as tender.
He pressed too hard again, forcing my head forward, and I turned sideways on the table, dislodging his touch. My fingers began winding strands of hair back into my braids as I glared out at the room—a cold space full of hard surfaces, stocked with aggressively sharp and pointy medical…tools.
This place and its equipment felt entirely unfamiliar and disconcerting. The marble slab examination table leached ice into my bones through the thick material of my dress, and the unyielding attention of three different men—Wilder had rejoined us—made me feel like a lab specimen in a jar.
“I have not hit my head that I can recall,” I said. “But, to reiterate, the problem is that I cannot recall much of anything.”
“But there’s no swelling?” Desmond said from one side of the table. “No obvious…depression?”
The only pain in my head was from the frustration of their interrogation. That, and the glare of half a dozen lanterns against the white marble walls.
“I’mfine!” I snapped. “I can’t detect any physical ailment or injury,” I clarified. “I know who I am and where I’m from, and while I don’t know how old I am, precisely, I know when I was born and I’m perfectly capable of doing the math, and given that this is evidently the first day of my third year at the Alchemary—”
“You turned twenty-two three months ago,” Wilder confirmed from the wooden stool across the room where he had perched after telling our instructors to expect our absences today. “Though you refused to indulge a celebration.”
I frowned at him, momentarily distracted from the problem at hand. We’d always celebrated my birthday with a simple fruit-filled flat cake and, as we’d gotten older, a few sips of whatever ale or wine we could procure. “Why wouldn’t I want a celebration?”
“You were busy.” His gaze flicked toward Desmond, and I couldn’t interpret the unspoken communication. “Studying.”
