Page 5 of The Alchemists

Tori smiled. “Nine it is.”

Asher sighed as he shook the cramp from his hand.

A face caught Seb’s eye on the edge of the crowd, vanishing nearly immediately and taking his good mood with it—Conrad.

* In rare and specific instances, there are pockets of magical individuals who—for reasons of cultural or historical significance—have been sanctioned by the International Tribunal of Magicians to operate outside the boundaries of the Covenant that binds most of Magical Society.

LILY

Lily biked home slowly, savoring the mild warmth of the equinox, her mind still in the alchemy theater. The class gave her a delicious, dangerous thrill that no other class at Windermere had so far, not even Practical Applications of Aegistics, which involved getting to hurl spells at her classmates. Alchemy felt real, closer to the essence of Magic itself than anything Lily had encountered, and it terrified her.

She’d always felt distant from Magic, though she had it in spades. It had always felt like it wasn’t really hers to wield. She was constantly worried that it might wise up and disappear from her at any instant, recognizing her as the imposter she was. Better not to get attached. She’d put in for alchemy on a whim, not thinking she’d be accepted, and now she was worried she might fall in love with Magic after all, far, far too late.

A large, cynical part of her tried to blame it on Professor Chant—on his enthusiastic soliloquizing, his easy laugh, and his bright eyes—but she’d scrambled to keep up with his diagrams and tables, his Ætheric Laws of Transitive Substance, and now she had four pages of jumbled notes and two hundred pages of reading to try and make sense of before next Wednesday.

Chant’s drama seemed primarily due to unbridled passion. Collegiate-level teaching positions were almost nonexistent in magical society, and acquiring one was a cutthroat business by all accounts. Chant had a PhD in Symbolic History from Oxford’s Ætheric program and had been inducted into the Guild of Alchemical Sciences in Prague. As for his fashion—well, she couldn’t fault anyone for wanting to look the part, especially when they did it in such well-fitted trousers and custom brogues.

She swung her leg over her bike, balancing on one pedal as she coasted into the weedy driveway of the Queen Anne, where she lived with her mother and grandmother. Already the oak in front shed leaves onto the strip of grass between the house and the drive. Lily kicked a spray of early golden foliage into the air as she hauled her bike up the steps of the covered porch.

Her family used the first floor and Lily’s bedroom on the second, while they rented out the remaining rooms, which had been converted to small apartments on the second and third floor. There were four other people who lived in the Victorian on Fountain Avenue—a couple rented the remainder of the second floor, and two girls who were juniors at the Catholic college in town rented the sprawling attic. Lily always knew when the girls had been partying because they came in through the kitchen and went up the narrow staircase in order to avoid Lily’s grandmother.

Gran had lived with Lily and her mother for Lily’s entire life. She’d lost her only child and gained a granddaughter in one fell swoop, and she hadn’t been about to let Lily’s mother fend for herself. Sometimes Lily imagined that May. Her mother had been nearly across the finish line at Windermere, and she’d thrown it all away—or lost everything, depending on one’s perspective.

The best way to keep magic a secret was, naturally, with magic. The Tribunal was never worried about overly talkative Magicians because the only way any Magician could talk about magic with an outsider required both the courage and stupidity to remove the Ætheric mark through self-mutilation. The Tribunal thought no one was that stupid, or that stubborn, and they were almost completely right.

Her own parents had disinherited her, siding with the Tribunal, and how could they not? Windermere had expelled her, and she’d been left with nothing except her youth, nine fingers, and a colicky baby that she didn’t know how to care for.

Gran had told her about the woman her mother used to be—vibrant, in love, defiant, and full of Magic. It was nearly impossible to conjure that vision when Lily was confronted daily with the reality of her mother as she knew her. It was hard to see someone who had risked—and lost—everything for love in her mother’s faraway eyes, her bone structure so delicate it might shatter, her blonde hair shocked white just shy of forty.

At least there had been Gran. She’d taken them in; first in her little stone cottage on the outskirts of town, and then when Lily was older, here to this house—in a better school district, with easy access to the train station, and though no one said it, close to Windermere. Gran knew everything about the magical world. Once her mother had removed her mark, she could tell anyone—and because the Tribunal had stricken her from the Covenant and stripped her magic, they didn’t care.

Magnolia Bellarius could have run stark naked through the streets screaming about magic, but she was a twenty-two-year-old single mother and college dropout, and no one was going to believe her. It seemed the worst sort of punishment, Lily often thought, to have stayed here, raising her child in the long shadow of the world that had thrown her out on her ass.

“How was your last first class of the year?” Gran called from the sitting room.

Lily stashed her bike in the foyer and joined her, sinking onto the striped loveseat and kicking off her canvas high-tops.

“Fine.”

Lily’s mother appeared in the doorway, one thin hand on the doorframe, the absence of her middle finger fully visible. It was hard to cast an invocation without all of your digits. “All that money spent on education and all you can say is ‘fine’?” She exchanged a glance with Gran. “Teenagers,” she sighed in a joking-not-joking sort of way.

“Did you ever take alchemy?” Lily said, steering the nascent conversation away from her age.

“No, didn’t make it in.” She joined Lily on the loveseat, picking up her feet and draping them across her lap, giving them a squeeze. “I was never as fierce a student as you are.” She gave a wistful half-smile.

Lily kept her face carefully blank. Her mother had been a fierce student. Last year, Lily had looked up the records. This was just one of her mother’s many coping mechanisms, pretending she hadn’t had a future in magic, and Lily couldn’t begrudge her.

“He said we’ll all have new Words by the end of the year.”

Now it was her mother’s turn to keep her face blank at the mention of June.

“Are you going to the bonfire tonight?” she said instead.

Lily startled, before remembering that the equinox bonfire was an old, old tradition. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

“What on earth are you going to do instead?” Gran said.

“Two hundred pages of reading for alchemy, plus I have a reading response due Monday for Psych & Illusion, plus aegistics homework, plus seventy-five pages for Arcana and Ætheric Theory.”