“He’s done absolutely everything he can for me,” I confirmed, stung by my own unintentional double entendre. “I…um. I need to get ready. I’ll see you at the Conservatory, okay?”
Wilder frowned. “No, that is not okay. I don’t understand why you’re angry with me, and I can’t let that stand, when either of us could die today. Youmustforgive me, for whatever I’ve done.”
“I’m not angry.” I settled onto my desk chair and stared up at him. “I was a bit piqued, but with no real cause, I must admit, so…it isyouwho must forgiveme.”
His smile burst forth like the sun breaching the horizon. “Then consider the matter settled. Meet me in the Refectory in half an hour, and I will have food and tea waiting. We can go over theories and strategy.”
In fact, we could. Though most of our cohort would not. The competition for a permanent position at the Alchemary was fierce, and most of our classmates would never give up their edge by working with a competitor. Not even for a friend or lover. But Wilder was not selfish.
He was also not particularly helpful, a fact he confirmed half an hour later, over porridge and tea, when his theories all amounted to guesswork and an alchemical instinct I could not understand. He had written none of it down, and his explanations leapt from point to point in no logical order I could discern.
He would likely be the only Mastery student in the history of the Alchemary to carry precisely zero notes into the trial.
At the entrance to the Conservatory, a small queue had formed made up entirely of my Mastery-year cohort. My pulse raced as Wilder and I came to a stop at the end of the line. Anticipation buzzed around our peers like flies on a ripe corpse, and my head pounded so fiercely I worried the top of my skull might erupt from the pressure.
“It’s going to be fine,” Wilder whispered, squeezing my hand.
And it would be. For him.
His grades might have historically hovered just above the median, and the Alchemary research board might have had no respect for his work, but Wilder’s skill—undocumented though it was—would easily get him past this first hurdle. In fact, I suspected he was better prepared than any of our classmates, by virtue of time spent in the laboratory alone. To say nothing of how many of those hours had been spent experimenting with medicinal elixirs.
“For those of you just arriving,” a voice called, and I leaned out of the line to see one of the attendants Desmond had mentioned addressing us from her position to the left of the door. It was his colleague with wide-set eyes and the severe blond bun. “Mastery students will be admitted promptly at ten in the morning. The trial will be explained, then it will convene, and it will continue until all students have either passed or been rendered unable to compete. That is expected to take no more than two hours.”
Yoslyn Savva shuddered, directly ahead of me in the queue.
“What time is it?” Cressa Baxter asked from two spaces ahead of me. Keryth and Lennox were at the very front of the line, with Pryce’s still-blue head right behind them.
“Quarter till.” Yoslyn pointed behind us, at the Seminary clock tower.
A couple more students fell in behind Wilder, and as we waited, nerves simmering, feet shuffling, a cluster of staff and faculty members arrived. Desmond was among them.
They gave their names to the attendants and were admitted into the building one at a time, and as their number trailed down the steps, forming a line parallel to ours but longer, I could practically feel Desmond’s gaze on the back of my head.
As his line shortened, he stepped even with me briefly, and when he turned to offer a devastatingly formal nod both to me and to Wilder, it took every fiber of self-control I possessed to keep from reaching out. To keep my fingers from trailing down the sleeve of his staff cape to curl between his.
It seemed ruthlessly unfair that I could not touch him now.
Two hours ago I’d woken in his bed, then stormed out. But the instinct remained.
The line moved again, and he stepped ahead of me. Maybe he could feel my gaze now. But he did not turn.
The Alchemary amphitheater was at the very back of the Conservatory, accessible only by walking through the entire Panacea wing and past the infirmary. We marched the length of the building like ducklings following their mother, a role played by the researcher with the blond bun.
At the end of the main hall of the Panacea wing, she opened a tall, thick set of double doors and led us into a huge chamber like nothing I’d never seen.
I was certain of that, even with more than two years of my life missing.
We entered the space at the top row of seating tiers, in an aisle that led down past six flights of bench seating into a venue that had been dug deep into the ground beneath the Conservatory. Most of the benches were already occupied by staff researchers and faculty, as well as alumni who’d been invited to observe the trial.
The centerpiece of the amphitheater was a stone-floored circular chamber, set up with twelve workstations and a substantial supply cupboard. Those I had expected, based on the very concept of the trial.
But I hadnotexpected the glass wall surrounding the entire center chamber.
At least ten feet high, it was comprised of the largest individual panes of glass I’d ever seen, each half as tall as I was, affixed to the others with thin lead frames. The effect was like a transparent honeycomb. Spectators would be able to observe the trial without being affected by anything that transpired inside the arena itself.
Though I could not imagine that the Black Trial—the administration of individual doses of poison—presented much threat to the spectators.
My hands clenched around the strap of my satchel as I followed Yoslyn down the broad, steep steps, watching my own feet to make sure I didn’t trip and send all of my classmates careening to the gallery.
