His grip on the beakers finally loosened. “I wouldalsobe interested in the answer to that question.”
“You would—” Aggravation burned along my veins. “Could you possibly, just this once, give me a straight answer? Or tell me what you know, at least?”
He sighed. “To my knowledge, the two of you were nothing more than good friends on the night before your memory vanished, six weeks ago. At the point when I last saw you, anyway. But I could not say what happened—what might have changed—after you left my lab that night.” His gaze narrowed on me, and I felt the weight of his attention like a vest made of iron, pressing me toward the earth. “Have you not asked him to clarify that point?”
“Of course I have.”
His brows arched expectantly. “And?”
“And…that led to nothing more than a few salacious implications and some alchemy metaphors…which…I now realize served to distract me from the original question.”
Amusement broke through his scowl. “No doubt that was the intent.”
“No doubt.”
“Regardless, it does not matter,” Desmond declared, slamming his journal shut. He fixed me with a pointed look and cleared his throat, as if some further declaration were forthcoming.
“It matters to me,” I insisted.
“I assure you it does not. What matters is the Black Trial, and the fact that it is in less than one day.”
I could not argue with his point. And yet, I felt argumentative. “Believe it or not, it has not slipped my mind that I could be expelled from the Alchemary tomorrow.” Or wind up in a coffin, being shipped back to Innswood. “That’s precisely why I’ve already spent half of the day—a Sunday, no less—in the lab.” I hadn’t even broken my fast, beyond the tea I’d made in a beaker over a flame, and hunger had no doubt contributed to my quarrelsome temperament.
“I assume you understand what the trial entails?” he continued. “That’s why you’ve been focused on poisons?”
I nodded. “I can’t be sure what kind we’ll be given, so I’ve spent the morning creating half a dozen of the most likely poisons, based on the obvious criteria.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “The poison must be ultimately and somewhat efficiently fatal. But it must be slow acting enough to allow students to identify it and concoct an antidote. And that antidote must be concoctable using only common alchemical ingredients that students have had regular access to and experience with.”
“Logically sound conclusions.” Desmond’s eyes lit with a soft flame I’d come to recognize as mild approval.
“Thank you. Working backward from the possible antidotes that could be formulated, eliminating poisons that work too quickly or too slowly, or that are not fatal, I came up with these.” I gestured at the six beakers lined up at the front of my primary work surface. They were of various dull shades of green, brown, and a watery yellow, any of which would appear almost entirely colorless at the concentration of just a few drops.
The poisons were wholly unsatisfying to concoct, given that they lacked the bright colors of most alchemical potions and elixirs. I’d come to recognize and count on—tothrillat—the transition of a decoction from one vivid color to the next as the ingredients went through various stages of calcination, dissolution, putrefaction, congelation, sublimation, etc.
But like life itself, alchemy was really only beautiful when it was resisting entropy. Fighting the uphill battle toward order and progress. Poisons introduced disorder and chaos.
Desmond peered at the labels I’d carefully printed, nodding as he went down the row. Approving of my deductive reasoning and, presumably, my creation of the poisons themselves.
“Of course, I’m not going to ingest them.”
One of my classmates—a young man named Kornell—had tried that two weeks ago, in his own trial preparation. Wilder had told me the story in great, dramatic detail I’d have been tempted to assume was largely hyperbole had I not later heard a similar version from Yoslyn. In the student laboratory, Kornell had undertaken a test run at an antidote to the poison he believed we’d be ingesting.
No one seemed sure what he’d concocted and ingested—he’d maintained secrecy, loathe to give up his “advantage”—so our classmates could only watch as he broke out in coin-size dark splotches, which rapidly calcified, rendering them hard as stone. One of these patches grew over his eye, blinding him, while others robbed his fingers of mobility, which led him to drop his antidote, which shattered on the floor. He’d sobbed as he’d collapsed next to it, seizing, his teeth snapping uncontrollably. The theory circulating among our classmates was that those dark calcifications had also formed beneath his flesh, on parts of him not visible, and had done damage that could not be readily understood.
He’d lingered for a week in the infirmary, puzzling the staff and terrifying his classmates—missing the festival entirely—before they’d finally found an effective treatment and returned him to his studies.
I, for one, had learned from Kornell’s mistake.
“Instead, I shall apply the antidotes—the formulation and production of which is my afternoon’s work—to drops of the poison in a glass dish, working on the theory that if the antidote is effective outside of the human body, it will likely be effective inside as well.”
“That is not a guarantee, of course,” Desmond said.
“Of course not. Concoctions and elixirs occasionally react in baffling and unexpected ways when ingested,” I acknowledged. “But I cannot succeed in the trial if I do not live toattendthe trial.”
His left brow rose, revealing more amusement than I suspected he’d intended. “Indeed.” He nodded. “Carry on.”
He pivoted to return to his own work, his thoughts shielded by his typical inscrutable expression.
“Wait!” I called, and Desmond turned, eyeing me expectantly. “I won’t ask you to tell me what the poison will be, specifically. That would be cheating, and I am not a cheater. But can’t you at least tell me if it isoneof these?” I gestured again to the row of beakers.
