Page 29 of The Alchemists

As if on cue, her stomach gurgled audibly.

He’d done better with the dancing than he had any right to for being so long away from it. There was a rumor, a ridiculous one, that he had made a pact with the devil in exchange for peerless talent, and after watching him keep pace with her, she halfway believed it.

“I’m fine, really.”

“I have some stuff in my apartment if you want—just cup noodles and mac and cheese, but⁠—”

The thought of going back to his apartment with Vis and Beaumont terrified her, and her fingers blanched on her backpack. She could imagine the look on their faces easily as Allsaires stepped aside to reveal her—the shock and distaste, scrambling to cover it up with the fake hospitality that seemed to be requisite for the extremely rich, the awkward attempts to search out common ground that didn’t exist.

“It’s okay.”

He frowned at her, and she wasn’t sure if it was because he wasn’t used to being refused or because he didn’t believe her.

“Alright. Well, what dorm are you in? I’ll walk you back at least. It’s late.”

“What are you doing?”

Their frowns matched. The furrow between Allsaires’s eyebrows deepened. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t need to pretend like we’re friends.”

Allsaires stared at her, eyes narrowed, as if she were a riddle he couldn’t quite crack, then shrugged on his coat.

“I’ll see you in class, then.”

She watched him walk away.

* Windermere motto: Scientia poculum nostrum implet —“Knowledge fills our cup.”

SEB

As he walked home through the hushed and lamp-lit gloom of after-hours campus, Seb thought about Lily Perkins, fascinated both by his curiosity and by the glimpse of what he’d seen behind the iron gates of her persona. Never before had he felt so completely that he knew nothing about someone, even as they sat next to each other, conversing over the course of an evening.

He’d ended the conversation realizing that nothing he offered would be accepted, though he didn’t understand why. He could make half-educated guesses, some of which might even be accurate, but even that felt like it would just be scratching the surface.

He wanted to know what her curse was.

Past midnight, on that Thursday at the waning of September, he wanted to know what her curse was nearly as much as he wanted to win the Elumnara. The two things burned with a similar intensity and significance in his chest. The accomplishment of both felt like it held the weight of change, and Seb desperately wanted things to change.

Being trapped by your own persona was still being trapped. He wanted to know what life felt like when you had earned things that came hard. It was why, even as it would be a life he loved, he had told Asher and Tori that he couldn’t play Cantrèa professionally. Cantrèa came easy, even when it wasn’t. He wanted to build a life that no one could say he hadn’t earned. In some ways, he was glad Reg was the firstborn, the inheritor. He had long given up on trying to find the thing that would impress his parents, and now he was desperate to impress himself.

His mind circled back again to Lily and the impenetrable wall behind her warm eyes. He’d never really looked at her before last week, and he was surprised to find that she was nice-looking. Not extraordinary, exactly, but certainly leagues and leagues from leprous. He’d always made himself scarce when Conrad was in one of his moods, so he’d only really ever seen the darkness of her aura out of the corner of his eye.

To know Lily, to really understand anything about her, he thought you would have to understand her curse. He wasn’t going to ask her what it was again, but curses were something of a black hole—knowledge-wise—in the community, and Seb loved knowledge above most else besides Magic. Information about curses was hugely restricted. For anyone to display an undue interest in them raised as many red flags as searching the internet on how to construct a pipe bomb. Chant probably knew something about curses, though, and might not turn Seb over for asking.

What did he really know at all about his lab partner? He knew she was cursed, that her father had been normal, and her mother had been from one of the Great Houses—though not which one—before her spectacular fall from grace. He knew he’d heard her name growing up, especially around younger kids, as something of a cautionary tale. He knew that watching her dance was the closest he’d gotten to seeing who she really was. He knew that somehow, at least some of the time, she was bursting with magic.

He should have made arrangements for them to get together again. Even as he knew when he woke up tomorrow his whole body would be one big soreness, he itched to dance again. He thought about texting her and realized, as he shouldered open the door of the apartment, that he still hadn’t gotten her number.

“Oh good, it lives.”

His roommates sat on the couch, coffee table covered in books and snacks. Tori wore a pissy face to go with her greeting.

Seb frowned at them. “Am I missing something?”

“Try checking your phone?” Asher suggested, taking a sip of his beer, waiting while Seb fished it out of his bag. Notifications covered the screen. He’d put it on silent and tossed it in his duffel when he’d gotten to Studio C, and he’d completely forgotten about it. “We were going to wait for you to do the homework, but we gave up.”

“What homework?”