Page 25 of The Alchemists

It wasn’t an answer; it was a sidelong, non-lie-question, the kind she was used to giving people who were too nosy for their own good, usually teachers. A very cold thought burrowed its way out of her chest and toward her extremities—she’d assumed that to Sebastian Allsaires, she was invisible; an inconsequential astral body not even big enough to pick up on sonar. She’d assumed that this whole time she’d been the only one watching, but what if he’d been watching right back?

“Thanks again for doing this,” he said, bottom lip trapped between his teeth. “You didn’t have to.”

She wondered then, not for the first time, why she had, and felt again that invisible hand against her back, shoving her forward. Her mind grasped for words as she jerked her head in something approximating a nod and came up empty-handed. She was unpracticed in the way of discourse with her peers. At regular school, it had been because she was afraid, deathly so, of her mother’s mistakes. At Study School, and at Windermere, it was because everyone knew a single fact about her, and that one fact was enough. Even Daphne and Gemma talked around her more than to her.

While Allsaires watched, she set up her speaker, but her fingers stumbled as she looked for a playlist, suddenly self-conscious in a way that was as foreign to her as Lapland, where he’d supposedly spent the summer. Anxiety lodged in her throat, she turned to him.

“What do you want to listen to?”

“Anything’s fine,” he said carelessly, then, taking in her frozen form, “Really. Asher’s always in charge of the music.”

It was strange to hear him use Vis’s first name, as if he were someone that Lily knew. She put on music that she liked to warm up to, with an urgent, syncopated beat that she could feel in her blood.

Immediately, she found herself at another impasse, unsure if she should lead him through some sort of warmup or if that would be insulting to one of the best athletes on campus. After a still moment, she began to work through her body. In the mirror Allsaires began to follow her, mostly averting his eyes, but glancing at her now and again. He had a focused intensity that ignited a tripping sensation in her stomach, the same kind she felt right before she went onstage. It was gravity tipping upward and releasing her for just one second. Only, unlike in dance, it didn’t stop.

They warmed up in silence, with only the music to break the heavy atmosphere. As Lily straightened, finishing and moving from the barre, he spoke,

“We have homework due tomorrow.”

She paused, the wooden rail suddenly slick under her hand.

“I did most of it already.” It was another non-lie. She had looked at the images, contemplated, formed answers, but had not gone so far as to truly ignore Chant’s orders and write anything down.

“Me too.” His face betrayed nothing. “But I don’t want to fail class, and if we’re supposed to work together, then…” She watched him trail off, waiting for him to qualify the statement with something about how he would bear it like a gentleman, or whatever it was that rich young men who thought benevolently of themselves would say in this situation.

He caught her gaze. In his hazel eyes there was something fierce and burning. He looked the way he had in the bonfire’s flames—sure and ready. They held no hesitation.

“Then we’re supposed to work together.”

The current dragged her forward.

SEB

In his four previous years at Windermere, Seb had never been to this part of the library. They’d crossed the grand vestibule with its spiraling black and white patterned floor and left the main building through a glass hallway running alongside a courtyard he had never noticed. Beyond that was a very old, low-ceilinged set of stacks lined with wooden study carrels bearing ancient graffiti in their gummy surfaces. The stacks held folios and obscure arcana, all with crumbling spines and without call numbers. It felt like a place to be forgotten.

He’d promptly gotten lost in an attempt to find the café. He thought he knew Windermere better than pretty much anyone—he had to have, to win the Elumnara twice—but here was Lily Perkins, with her hard-syllabled, non-magical surname, leading him into parts unknown.

As he waited in line for his coffee and scone, he wished he’d brought a change of clothes. Relearning how to dance was much harder than he’d imagined it would be—slippery and seeming to want to stay just out of his reach or throw him off balance—and it only made him hungry to reclaim mastery. Those pursuits, the ones that exacted toil and blood in exchange for reward, were the only ones worth chasing.

He considered Lily: her grace in the studio; her curse aura fading with her disregard for gravity and other rules of physics; her presence in a Cert-Year class with a minuscule acceptance rate; and suspected that this might be something on which they agreed.

She hadn’t told him he’d done well, and he hadn’t expected her to. He would have been disappointed if she had, because he’d have known it wasn’t genuine. Beneath her curt demeanor, he could already see, lay only the truth, and the truth was not an easy thing to give away. Still, he was pleased with himself, having done at least as well as he’d anticipated. He was a long way off from her fluidity and his old comfort. Just like anything that looked like magic, dance spoke its own language, and he realized he could no longer put pattern to its alphabet, much less form words—but he could see the shape of the work it would take for him to attain fluency, and it called to him like a siren from the sea.

He returned to their table in the empty stacks, feeling that strange host-like guilt at bearing nothing for her, even though he had offered to put whatever she wanted on his meal plan. Lily barely looked up as he slid into the chair next to her, but her shoulders jerked as he scooted it closer so that he could see the textbook more easily.

“Sorry,” he said, unsure of what he was apologizing for, only feeling that he should.

Lily flipped her notebook to a clean page as Seb found the first set of illustrations to decode and pulled a sheet of alchemical symbols toward him. He’d already looked at most of their assignment in case he either got stood up or Lily proved to be useless.

“Solutio,” she said, almost immediately, before he had even properly looked.

He tipped the book slightly toward him, taking in two crown-wearing men, one of them drowning in a river, and one standing on a bank in the foreground, holding a scepter and a dove.

“Drowning of the king?”

She nodded. “Must be, and he’s the ego rebirthed from the process.” She tapped the scepter-wielding king.

“With the dove, you think that’s signaling that the next process is Sublimatio?”