Page 109 of The Alchemists

Chant had sent him some readings he thought might be helpful. Some were scholarly articles behind a paywall, and some were facsimiles from illuminated manuscripts. Anything approaching usefulness went into his journal. Most of it seemed like nonsense and superstition, but Seb had begun reading about Ætheric energy and the theoretical physics of it—where it came from, where it went. Those articles were like a door swinging open to reveal a vast landscape. They made him feel small in the most significant way—not unlike the morning he’d woken up to find the yacht in open water with no land for miles.

He needed to finish his application for Oxford. He’d been holding off to discuss options with Lily, but now there was no need. Now the thought of fucking off to England in the fall and living like a Hermetic priest and studying magical energy while renting a leaking room under the eaves somewhere sounded like the only reasonable option. The only other option seemed to be fucking off to the Lake District to become increasingly misanthropic and write shitty poetry like a bad twenty-first-century Wordsworth.

“What is this?”

The last plunge of light cut across the ocean, bathing Lily in mauve, lighting her profile like a flare. Her body was heavy and warm in his arms, soft from wine and sun. They’d snorkeled in the morning and spent all afternoon working on their dance, crashing together in the surf as Tori and Asher circled them like wolves with HD cameras.

Asher finished the verse he’d been singing, fingerpicking in stasis, as he answered, “Just something I’ve been working on.” The shadows turned his long lashes into violet feathers on his cheeks as he looked over at Lily, her expression more alert than it had been in hours. “You like it?”

Lily nodded.

“Here, give me your thoughts on the rough draft. Tori is going to lay down proper vocals at some point.” He connected to the speakers.

Seb glanced at Lily, then settled back to listen. Galloping drums surged forward, followed by woozy synths wrapped in gauze. By the time Asher’s falsetto, unrecognizable with reverb, piped in from another, sweeter dimension, Lily was already suffering a sea change. She sat up, pin-straight, for the full song, her head tipped and alert. When it was over, she turned to Asher and commanded, “Play it again.”

For his part, Seb lost himself in the words, the poetry of it spinning his head, cutting to the quick of everything he felt, had been feeling, for the last week. He’d strike any deal, sign his name to any contract, if only, if only.

Lily turned in his arms. “Are you?”

“Yeah,” he rasped.

“This is it.”

“This is what?” Tori asked, turning down the music.

“Our song. For our dance.”

SEPARATIO

By dividing that which is one into two, each component part shall know its opposite. Only through separation can the chymyst make visible that which must be retained for refinement.

Cornelius Windermere

An Alchemical Treatise, Vol. IV

LILY

Returning to Windermere and the dingy, late-January snow shocked her system. It seemed like all the color had seeped out of the world. She ached for spring; she wished spring would never arrive. For two days after returning, the ground sloshed beneath her feet.

Without the Elumnara to work on, they split their time between dancing and homework. Sebastian spent endless hours in the Cantrèa practice courts, and often Lily watched, sometimes surreptitiously, before they played together after. There was a wild beauty in the way he moved when no one could see him. He moved like each play was every thought he couldn’t speak aloud, like the phrases of dodges and parries were sentences forming a silent confession.

He worked on his application quietly, in the background, when he thought she wasn’t looking, as if admitting a future beyond June were some sort of sacrilege, but night after night he fell asleep with the cursor of his word processor blinking at an invisible essay.

In alchemy they resumed the process of transmuting lead into gold, but she still felt woozy anytime she was near the supply cabinet. The floor there was still scarred, and so was her arm. Her tan made it worse, and even under the Caribbean sun her new skin hadn’t learned freckles yet. Gemma, somehow, had survived her academic hearing. Chant moved her and Braithwhite to a table across the room, and Gemma didn’t so much as glance in Lily’s direction.

Nearly every other Friday, Seb was collected at the end of alchemy by a Portalist who would whisk him away for the regional tournaments at Savarelle and Dunmoody. The use of portalic transplacement was tightly regulated, and the portals themselves fiendishly difficult to create. Not only did they require vast Ætheric power, but they could only be cast in certain locations under incredibly specific circumstances. Even Chant seemed to have no interest in transportive magic, which was saying something. Transplacement left the traveler cranky and jet-lagged. When Seb came back through, he invariably took a four-hour crash nap and then stayed up all night.

While he was gone, Lily read Selene’s letters. She didn’t know why, but something compelled her, even though the Elumnara was in the rearview for them, and seemingly everyone. An inexplicable kinship pulled her to Selene, so much so that sometimes she appeared in Lily’s dreams. She wasn’t sure how Hawleyhurst and his crew were going to solve anything without the letters and clues she and Sebastian had found, but she didn’t dwell on it.

There was something missing. She felt like she was trying to assemble a puzzle without ever having seen the reference, feeling everything along by shape and color, missing the wider context. Selene and Windermere had been together intimately, she knew, from one letter that made her feel like she was trespassing, and she was glad that she was reading in the dark with no one there to see her flush.

They’d loved each other, known each other, likened their relationship to the alchemical wedding, and then…nothing. Somewhere off-page, they’d fallen apart, and Selene Bevoire, the bright assistant to an innovative entrepreneur—a woman with a modicum of independence—had become Selene van Bergen, somebody else’s wife. They couldn’t marry—Selene and Windermere—he had his estranged wife in France, but Lily didn’t understand how they’d shattered into separate histories.

Now, with Seb at Dunmoody and her mom still at work, she was curled in the window seat of the suite, cocooned in the blanket that most reminded her of him, reading Selene’s letters, the sounds of Asher’s musical tinkering muffling under the door.

Cornelius,

With you gone, I can see clearly for the first time in years. It is not jealousy that pulls these words from my chest, but love. We are lost. I have walked widdershins beneath the full moon and demanded of her answers, but she offers none, so I have had no recourse but to seek them in myself.