“Well, to that point, so do I. And my time would be much better spent looking for a way to unlock the knowledge I already have. To find a cure for amnesia, rather than trying to relearn all of alchemy.”
“And I promised to help…” he said as my point sank in.
“Indeed you did. Have you come up with anything? Any potential…elixir of memory?”
Wilder hesitated, just long enough for me to see the truth.
“Youhave! And you weren’t going to tell me?”
“I found somethingpotentiallyhelpful, and Iwasgoing to tell you,” he insisted. “In fact, I was going to ask you to help me with it in the lab the other night, but then…”
“Pryce,” I said.
He nodded. “Pryce fucking Wishart.”
“Did you know about this father? Or…maybe his mother?”
“Do you mean the Crown’s personal alchemist? It’s his father. And yes, we all found out during Fundamentals year, when the Wisharts showed up for Family Weekend. But my point is that you don’t work in the student lab anymore, and I’m not welcome in Desmond’s, so telling you what I’d found suddenly seemed a bit…complicated.”
“What did you find?”
“There’s a tonic on record in the library—just one—intended to help firm up memory in old age.”
“That’s not really my issue, Wilder.”
“It’s a starting place. There’s also an elixir I was playing around with a while back, when I was having trouble memorizing about four million vocabulary words for Intro.”
“I assume that’s a hyperbolic estimate?”
He shrugged. “Who could say? I’m no better with numbers than I am with vocabulary words.”
I rolled my eyes. “So, a tonic for dementia of advanced age, and an elixir intended to help students memorize new facts?”
“To be clear, I never perfected that elixir,” Wilder said. “But with a little luck, some trial and error, and a good succedaneum for winter cherry, which isn’t growing yet, I should be able to come up with some sort of boost for your brain, at the very least.”
Notexactlya key to the lock on my memory dungeon, but surely it would be better than nothing.
“I’ll work on it tonight. Ironically,” he said, “we’d be much closer to the solution if you hadn’t lost your memory in the first place.” When I could only frown, he chuckled. “The Philosopher’s Stone. If you’d actually created it, it could no doubt cure you now.”
I scowled at him. “That may be the least helpful thing you’ve ever said.”
“I assure you it is not.” Wilder’s gaze shifted downward, lingering on my thigh just long enough to make me squirm in my chair before it settled on my journal, which sat on the edge of my desk. “Has nothing in there sparked a memory?”
“No.” I bent to grab the journal. “I can’t read it. Though the writing looks familiar,” I mused, flipping through the pages, oddly comforted by the whisper of dry parchment beneath my fingers.
Wilder frowned at the page I stopped on. “What is that?”
“You don’t recognize it either?” Past Amber presumably understood what she was writing, but why would she have written in a language her best friend couldn’t read?
He shook his head. “It doesn’t look like a language, precisely. Some of those marks look more like symbols, but that isn’t alchemical notation.”
“This part isn’t. But now that I’ve spent weeks studying alchemical terms, I can recognize the few thatarewritten here. Everything else, though…” I could only shrug.
“What alchemical symbols?” Wilder scooted to the edge of the chair, and I tilted the journal so he could clearly see. Past Amber had written so much she’d run out of room and been forced to leave one final note running vertically along the narrow outer margin of the left-hand page.
The only part of that note I could read was the two alchemical symbols, which had been enclosed in a circle. Aperfectcarefully drawn circle, with no overlapping ends, rather than a hastily scribbled oval to emphasize a specific point.
“Cinis.” Wilder ran one finger over a symbol like a three-tined pitchfork facing to the right, with a short handle extending from the left.
