Page 149 of The Alchemists

“For going alone.”

“Well, I’m sorry too, then.” She’d frowned at him, the same frown that he loved so well now. “For not being there when you needed me.”

All this time she’d insisted that she was only helping him, that this was his quest, his prize to earn. He smiled privately at how wrong she’d been.

It had been her story all along.

LILY

There were meetings, lots of them. She somnambulated through them all, wishing she were anywhere else. There were bank accounts, trusts—for her—all with a lot of money in them, all belonging to Windermere’s Heir. She looked in the mirror and tried to understand this identity, but she could only catch glimmers. Legally, her last name was still Perkins, even though, when she went through all the papers and traced the line down from the other side of the Hudson, her father should have been a Windermere.

She read Selene’s diary, and her heart clenched even as she exhaled. Selene hadn’t killed herself, at least not how it seemed. The years of alchemy, unprotected, had left her with mercury poisoning, a mind full of fog, her nerves on fire. When she had died beneath the apple blossoms, as they floated like pink snow into what would later be named Orchard Lake, the vial of poison clutched in her fist hadn’t been death but relief at last. Lily couldn’t begrudge her that.

Windermere had been with her, had brewed the draught himself. He’d held her hand until her last breath, until her body was cold and stiff, and his shock turned to grief. They’d reconciled after years of silence in the months before her death. Reading Windermere’s own journal entries stole her breath away. She ached for this man, her grandfather separated by six generations, as she read his anticipation, his hope on one page, only for crushing sorrow to follow on the next.

Selene had made him promise that their son would have a place in his school once it was finished, and he had agreed without hesitation. But, knowing his mother’s old enmity against Windermere and her early death on the man’s property, he had gone to learn magic unwillingly. When, after a drunken dinner, Windermere had confessed the truth of his parentage, Jean van Bergen had flown into a rage, denouncing Windermere and Magic forever, claiming that both had killed his mother.

He married a mundane woman and never told her about Magic, ensuring that Windermere’s bloodline would be diluted into nothingness, at least until a young Magnolia Bellarius had fallen in love with a normal man who wasn’t so normal after all.

Cornelius Windermere had died old and alone, his heart giving out as he sat on the banks of his small lake. He’d outlived his lover and his daughter and was left only with a son he couldn’t claim, who hated him.

She read all of this, and then Seb read it all. She loaned the papers and journals to Chant. He asked if she’d consider donating them to the school’s archives to illuminate the true history. She didn’t know what to do and settled on doing nothing. They could decide when she was dead.

When Seb asked her why, she couldn’t quite explain.

“He kept all of this private,” she said, as she watched him ache down the hallway on a walker. “I don’t know if the world deserves it.”

SEB

Two weeks after he’d been thrown out a window, Seb went outdoors for the first time. Spring had fully arrived; all of campus blushed in shades of white and pink. When Lily pulled up to the health center, a breeze flung petals into her hair.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked as she helped him trade the wheelchair for crutches, then finagled him into the front seat. She swung his keys around her finger and caught them.

“Yes,” he grimaced, for the eighteenth time that week.

The physical pain had dulled into a constant ache. In a few weeks he could even get back to dance if he wanted. Without magic, his injuries would have taken a year, or more, to heal. With magic, with his Magic, the thread that pulsed inside him with every beat of his heart, the internal damage would vanish without a trace in less than a month. It wasn’t the physical pain that tied his lungs into knots, that kept him staring and staring up at the health center ceiling every night, that woke him up in a cold sweat, drenching his blankets.

Lily pulled slickly onto the arterial, the car obeying her every whim. He could tell she’d been driving it back and forth to campus, and he was glad for it. When they hit the main road, she headed south.

“I’ll wait out here,” she said, wrestling his crutches out of the back seat and handing them over.

He didn’t ask her to come in. When he looked back at her, as he crutched up the walk to the station, she was leaning coolly against the car, brighter than the bright day.

Conrad looked awful. The fluorescent light stole the sun from his skin, turning him sallow. His hair was shaggy and greasy; there were deep bags under his eyes. It was his eyes themselves that were the most changed. Their normally flame-blue spark was extinguished, and they were a flat gray. All the vitality and power that had drawn Seb was gone.

He looked up as Seb entered, his face moving through a complicated dance before settling once more on blankness. He was unrestrained, and Seb paused, his shoulder propping open the door, before he remembered that Conrad had no magic, nothing but his voice to fire against him.

The room’s only window surveyed an empty parking lot. There were a number of Magicians in the local government, which was why Conrad was being held in relative comfort in a station rather than jail. The details given over to law enforcement were doctored, but no less powerful. Seb looked out the window as a car used the lot to correct a wrong turn before dragging his eyes to meet Conrad’s.

“Come to gloat?” Impossibly, there was still a challenge in his voice.

Seb leaned forward on his crutches, letting the door click closed, and gazed steadily at him.

“Do you really think so little of me?”

Conrad didn’t answer. Seb used one of his crutches to pull out the free chair at the table and sank into it. He didn’t try to mask his exhaustion.

“Why are you here, then?”