Page 3 of The Alchemists

Gemma cleared her throat. “Um, transmutation?”

“Care to elaborate?” Chant smiled at her encouragingly.

“Turning something into something else?”

“Perfect, thank you. I was hoping someone would say that.” He turned to the board and drew a circle and a square, linking the two with an arrow. The enchantment on the board kept his cuffs free of chalk.

“Is that right?” Gemma’s normally husky voice came out in a squeak.

“Oh, no,” Chant said with good nature. “Not remotely. But if it had been, I wouldn’t have much to teach you, would I?”

He turned to the class with something of a flourish. Gemma wilted. Tori turned to Seb and raised an eyebrow. Her appetite for theatrics not her own was terrifically low. For his part, Seb was already entranced. Chant could have asked him to dance naked on his desk and Seb would have done it, provided they had adequate privacy.

“Alchemy is the poetry of matter.” Chant wrote that on the board, above his shapes. “But what, exactly, do those pretty words mean? Someone tell me the third fundamental law of the Ætheric arts.”

Seb’s hand shot up. Everything was fair game now.

“Yes, Sebastian.”

“Magic cannot change matter’s essential nature.”

“Yes.” Chant wrote the law on the board in tidy script. Then he underlined it twice. “Thank you, Mr. Allsaires. Magic cannot change matter’s essential nature.” He underlined essential.

Next to him, Tori took a note with a pen she’d enchanted their freshman year. The note appeared simultaneously in Seb and Asher’s notebooks:

Very liberal with the underlining.

Asher scoffed quietly. Seb smiled to himself.

“If magic cannot change something’s essential nature, and if it is the study of transmutation—thank you, Gemma—ergo, alchemy must be the study of that which is commonly held between two things, no matter how disparate they may seem.”

Now Tori scribbled furiously, and none of these notes appeared on Seb’s page. He grinned.

“Alchemy lies in the balance between the Material and Metaphysical arts. It requires matter, yes, but above all it requires unknowability. We have the spells to turn lead into gold; I could teach you that tomorrow—” Chant paused, smirking, as eighteen spines suddenly straightened. “But I won’t, because that isn’t what alchemy is about. Alchemy is about finding the common thread in all of matter, in all of Magic, and in ourselves. How did you get into this class?”

Everyone looked around. Asher frowned at him, Trick question? Seb shrugged incrementally in response.

“You all signed up, yes. You spent the last two weeks shopping classes and wrote an essay and took a test. Entrance into this class is seen as reserved for the best and brightest, but that’s misleading.” Seb’s heart jolted. “Oh, you all may very well be both best and brightest—subjective qualifications—but that’s not why you’re here. You gained admittance due to your capacity for change. The alchemical process is an interior one, and no progress will be gained in this class without interior work; without dissolving our ego and our ideals in the water of unknowability. If each of you doesn’t have new Words of Power by year’s end, I’ll be crossed and cursed.” Chant clapped his hands, breaking the class’s collective trance. “So, let’s begin.”

Three words appeared in Seb’s notebook:

What the fuck.

“What was that?” Tori said on the steps, ninety minutes later. Seb was in a daze, still reeling from the lecture.

“This class is going to be nuts.” Asher raked his hand through the gold-dusted tower of his hair and straightened his waistcoat. It was a lovely Tyrian purple that brought out the tawny warmth of his brown skin beautifully. He slung his blazer—purely for show today—over his angular shoulder in a practiced gesture. Seb had borne witness to much of the practice over the years.

“This class is going to be amazing,” Seb corrected, leading the way down the walk toward their dorm.

Tori fell in step alongside him, her stiletto boots clicking out a brisk tempo on the pavement. “Yes, well, Sebby, not all of us are so blessed as to have spent the summer in Swedish Lapland meditating with a coven of witches.” Her Québécois accent rendered her pronunciation of “blessed” particularly snotty.

“Don’t call me Sebby,” he said, even though she’d called him that before and would call him that again.

The nickname didn’t bother him; it was everything else about her statement. Nothing she’d said was untrue—in fact, all of it was true. The false part was why he’d been there in the first place. Everyone thought he’d gone as some sort of enrichment, an exclusive summer program. That’s what his parents had said, and that’s what he’d offered, airily disinterested in elaborating, if asked.

No one questioned him, and it made him want to scream, but why would they? Young people in the community were constantly doing magical exchanges; they had to in order to keep bloodlines fresh. There simply weren’t enough magical families in any one place to marry together at this point without getting dangerously close to cousins, especially among the Great Houses. After all, that’s how he’d met Tori, on a winter-break exchange in Montreal when she’d still been named André and still played Cantrèa and got blackout drunk nearly every other night.

But he hadn’t been on an exchange this summer.