Page 18 of The Alchemists

Part of Lily wanted to say, “You don’t think I could?” but she didn’t. Lily knew exactly how smart, exactly how capable she was, exactly how willing she’d be to betray any of these people who treated her like she was a curse, not cursed. She could do it, if she had that one secret ingredient she lacked—giving a shit.

For the second time in a week, a bonfire raged at Windermere. This one sat in the middle of the flagstone courtyard that buttressed the college center. Its flames crackled icy white and snow gray, steel blue and dusky lavender. When the logs popped, they shot the scent of cedar and a vaguely frankincense-like tang into the air. Professor Chant stood just outside the elaborate perimeter circle marked in chalk and fortified by spells. Lily could feel the dull pulse of them, and almost, almost see their ambient magic. The temperature had dipped, and Chant wore a coat, open against the heat of the fire. His attention remained fixed on something that looked like a pocket watch but probably wasn’t, his gaze only wavering at the occasional outburst of laughter or shrieking.

The courtyard was filled with students, many of them in sweatpants or pajamas, clutching takeout mugs or expensive thermoses. Lily wasn’t sure if it was the entire student body, but it was close. Above Chant’s head, the Archer’s Moon, the tenth of the thirteen Hermetic moons, neared its apex against a backdrop of velvet night.

Lily checked her phone. Two minutes to go. She contemplated the forethought required of the late Cornelius Windermere to have planned such timing for the Revelation, though perhaps it was just coincidence. When magic was involved, however, coincidence was rarely the safest bet. All of it smacked of some secret significance.

As Professor Chant pocketed the device, silence rippled through the courtyard. A number of students raised phones to record the moment, and the miniature wards that sealed all magical content within technological devices flared in an amorphous constellation. Across the fire, Lily saw Sebastian Allsaires. He was not in pajamas. He stood perfectly still, awake and alert, eyes fixed on the depths of the fire.

From inside his coat, Chant withdrew a scroll tube and gingerly coaxed the parchment from within. He handed it to one of the junior Latin professors, who handled it as though it were a priceless artifact—and probably it was. Chant stepped into the chalk ring, the air around him shimmering as he did so, and began a spell facing the fire. His lips worked quietly; his hands moved with the fluidity of water. Without looking over his shoulder, he held out his hand for the parchment. Lily’s heartbeat caught in her throat as she realized what was about to happen.

Chant cast the scroll into the fire.

The flames blazed a brilliant blue, nearly as dark as the sky surrounding the moon, and golden sparks licked upward, followed by violent plumes of copper smoke. The smoke twisted sinuously through the air, and Lily’s insides twisted along with it. It formed words of snaking cursive, identical to what Lily had seen displayed in glass cases in the library.

A man’s voice, thick with the gravel of age, rang through the courtyard, clattering off the flagstones and brick walls of the college center. Collectively, the assembled students flinched.

“On this year, the three hundredth since the founding of my school, seek the Chalice. My heir will be known and named by whosoever holds the Chalice.”

The courtyard briefly exploded. All around her burbled whispers of “His heir?” and “Is Windermere actually naming his heir?” They were silenced once more by his booming voice:

“From the Æther all is made

Through water, wind, and heat and clay

Find truth in unknown; death in doubt

Still the mind and cast fear out

Be as a channel, still as a stream

Let all that’s mystic flow through me.”

The first words caught Lily off guard because she knew them. As the voice continued, she had to stifle a laugh. The clue, the great riddle to begin the most momentous Elumnara in the school’s history, was something that every assembled student knew by heart. They were the Nursery Words: the schoolyard rhyme that every juvenile Magician was given to use as their first Words of Power until they accrued enough experience and nascent sense of self to find their own.

Lily had never much cared for what she knew of her school’s founder, and less of the near deification that he’d received in the centuries since his death. Now, however, she found herself delighted by the long-gone, cantankerous coot who had precipitated all this pomp, apparently just to fuck with a bunch of twenty-somethings three hundred years after his death.

Around her, shock crystallized into expletives or denial. Phones were lowered; videos scrubbed through for hidden depths. Lily fixed her gaze on Chant and found him impassive. Either he’d known what the parchment had said, or he was very good at taking tricks in Tarot.

The fire flared once more, spitting an image into the night—Windermere’s seal, a chalice overflowing above an open book, flanked by two symbols she felt she’d seen before and almost recognized—then abruptly died. In the falling darkness, Chant closed the spell and stepped over the chalk line, only to be mobbed by students shouting about whether or not the whole thing was a joke, demanding clarification on the terms of the heir, and asking when the real clue would be revealed. Chant cast a cantrip to rekindle the bonfire, and it roared immediately into mundane orange-yellow life. He brought two fingers to his lips.

“This concludes the Revelation of the three-hundredth Elumnara. The field of play is officially open!”

He turned and slipped through the crowd in a mercurial sort of way that only someone wearing an enchantment could and disappeared into the night.

Students began to disperse, most of them muttering their disappointment in four-letter words. Tucked safely in the shadows, Lily stayed. She wasn’t sure why, but something about the fire, the pattern of its flames—for there was a pattern, she realized now—held her attention. Slowly, she approached the blaze. By the time she reached it, only one other student remained.

Across the flames, Sebastian Allsaires stood transfixed and unblinking. His brow was deeply furrowed in concentration, and his face alternately lit white and shadowed black by the shifting of the fire as his lips moved nearly imperceptibly.

She watched as he leaned forward and reached into the flames.

SEB

Seb slicked his sweat-damp hair off his forehead as he closed the locker-room door and checked his watch. It was late—late enough that the dining hall was closed and dinner would have to be scavenged. He’d lost time practicing. Some days Cantrèa was the only thing that kept him from transforming into an incandescent ball of rage, and since the loss was still fresh, his training had a desperate air. He and Adriana were texting more than usual, sending training videos back and forth, goading each other toward greatness. The leaves on his tree were already dulling.

He could grab something at the library’s basement café. A scone wasn’t dinner, but it was good enough, and he could probably swipe some of whatever real food Asher had inevitably made for dinner. He frowned down the hall into the after-hours security lighting as he noticed it—music.

For a moment he stood torn between hunger and curiosity, and curiosity won, as it always did. He followed the music. Shortly, he found himself in the dance wing of the building.