Page 23 of The Alchemists

As Chant said “partners,” Lily watched her fellow students immediately engage in the silent chaos of picking teams before he was done speaking. Vis and Beaumont started a game of Rochambeau, quite literally behind Allsaires’s back. Lily counted swiftly and sank deeper into her desk.

Eighteen students—an even number. Inevitably, part of her classmates’ urgency was avoiding pairing with her, which she confirmed as she caught several poorly concealed glances. The likelihood of Chant allowing her to work alone seemed near nonexistent. She’d used that tactic several times freshman year with great success, but Chant had already indicated that he wasn’t letting her off easily anytime soon.

Gemma was the most likely to willingly work with her, but she was already frantically trying to get Violet’s attention. Braithwhite, he of “being above sex with lepers,” turned in his seat, scanning the room. Lily’s insides curdled at the thought of spending an entire year working with one of Hawleyhurst’s cronies.

“You can all stop whatever it is you think you’re doing right now.” Chant’s voice, aided by a blanket of spontaneous casting, stilled the room. “Your partners will be chosen for you.” Ignoring the groans that followed his pronouncement, he placed a small, three-legged cauldron on top of his desk. With no evident casting, blue fire flared to life beneath it before subsiding into yellow. Something about it eased Lily into sudden contentment.

Chant moved around the room, passing out slips of lavender paper. “Write your name on both papers. Each of you will come up and add a drop of blood to your paper—” Violet, her distant cousin, raised her hand. They’d never properly met, and Violet had never bothered her, so their non-relationship suited Lily just fine. Without looking at Violet, Chant continued, “Not optional. You will keep one, and the other you will cast into the cauldron. When everyone has made their contribution, the spell will pair you by best fit. Mr. Braithwhite, if you please.”

Lily watched with growing nausea as her classmates went up one by one and used a finger prick, then deposited it in a sharps container held by a glove-wearing Chant. Braithwhite made a show of it being nothing, Gemma gasped theatrically, Vis grinned, Beaumont frowned, and Allsaires’s gaze was bored and unreadable. With each paper dropped into the cauldron, it hissed and steamed, and a facsimile of each student’s name appeared on the board in their own handwriting, which was some masterfully tricky spellwork. When her turn arrived, Lily found herself frozen to her seat.

“Last, but not least.” Chant ushered her up. Braithwhite sniggered.

She knocked her thigh into the desk as she stood, and somehow, despite crushing terror, found herself moving to the front of class. Lily accepted the finger prick with a clammy hand and completed the task with mechanical jerkiness. She was so preoccupied with the awfulness of standing in front of everyone that she barely registered the sting.

Once she was back in her seat, Chant added several jars—each containing a pre-measured substance—to the cauldron, his lips moving with inaudible incantation. With the last addition, sparks—sizzling black, then yellow, white, and red—shot from the cauldron with firework intensity toward the distant ceiling.

Gemma shrieked once more, and Lily hid a snicker as the other girl rocketed upward in her seat, slamming her knee against the desk. On the remaining slip of paper before her, her blood began to move. It twisted itself into a new form, the process mirrored on the blackboard.

Next to Gemma’s and Braithwhite’s names, identical sigils appeared. Lily exhaled. The same thing happened with two different students and a new sigil. Again and again until, with four names remaining, the cauldron paired Vis and Beaumont. They smirked at each other before whipping to look at Allsaires, still partnerless. Time seemed to slow in the classroom as half the heads turned toward her, and half toward Allsaires. She stared, unblinking, at the blackboard as twin symbols, intricate as lace, appeared beside their names.

Several rows ahead of her, Beaumont whispered, “Seven curses.”⁠*

Minor chaos erupted in the room, which Chant attempted to quiet before realizing the futility of the task. He shouted briefly about partners and assignments, students already moving for the door, but Lily heard none of it. As soon as he gave up, she gathered her books in a daze and hurried from the room.

* In Ætheric tradition, the casting of the Seven Curses—now lost to time and the Great Purge of 1802—represents the advent of a cataclysmic magical event.

SEB

The realization that he was going to spend an entire academic year working with Lily Perkins dawned on Seb glacially, then all at once. Seconds contracted, then crushed together, piling one on top of each other like an accordion wheezing out a nasal tune. Tori stared at him, clutching his arm with sharply manicured nails. He sat frozen as Chant tried, and failed, to regain his classroom before giving up.

Turn around, the better part of him ordered. Don’t move, hissed the other.

Dazedly, he stood as Chant dismissed them, shoving the slip of paper into his pocket and pivoting toward the back of the classroom. He registered Lily’s dark aura pushing past him, clipping him in the shoulder and making him drop his books, only after it happened. By the time he finished blinking she had already disappeared.

“You okay?” Asher said from the floor, handing Seb a book, watching him stare numbly down at his things.

“Let’s talk to Chant,” Tori said, her voice pitching frantically. “He’ll understand. There’s no way you can work with that pariah for a whole year. You’ll flunk.”

“No,” Seb said, already moving toward the door, the force of his voice surprising all of them. “No way. I’ve got to…” he was unsure of what it was he needed to do, just knowing it was something. “I’ll see you guys later.” He pushed his books into his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and jogged down the hallway and into the afternoon sun.

Outside, he slowed to a walk, his mind moving so fast that it hissed with static. His feet thought for him, bringing him to the grove. Gradually, his thoughts stilled as he walked between the trees, some of them just saplings, others ancient, with spreading golden canopies and deep-furrowed, rough bark.

He found his tree, sinking against it, letting the bark untuck his shirt and scrape his back as he slid down to sit between his favorite furrow in the roots. They cradled him perfectly. It was one of the things that proved to him, with absolute surety, that this tree was a part of himself, made living, green, and vivid. The tree had grown for him; he had grown the tree.

The effect of last weekend’s loss on the tree hadn’t been as bad as he feared. A few leaves had dropped, and some of them were tarnished to a papery yellow, but it was nothing a decent win wouldn’t reverse. He pulled up his knees and let his head fall into his hands.

It was only as he dipped his fingers into his jacket pocket for the slip of paper that bound him to Lily Perkins that he remembered the weight of his pocket’s other contents, acquired in smoke and flames four nights before. He was astonished that he’d forgotten it, but the whole school year so far had been a whirlwind pushing him off course, or onto a nameless new one. He hooked the ring with the tip of his finger and began to slide it out of his pocket.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

Seb froze, gazing up through the fall of his hair at Conrad. He let the ring drop into the pocket.

“Conrad.” The name felt foreign on his lips, and the fact of it was a poison-tipped dagger in his spleen. His voice sounded like noise underwater. Seb swallowed, collecting himself, his thoughts, his will, his Words. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s all over campus already.” Conrad bit his lip, shook his head.

Seb wondered, momentarily, if it was sincere, and decided it wasn’t. It was easier, he had found, to make Conrad a villain. Easier to believe he’d been playing some long, twisted game than to allow him to have been someone who had ever loved Seb—who had blasphemed that fact as deeply as one possibly could.