Page 138 of The Alchemists

“I—oh. And what’s your last name, then?”

Lily had been staring at the floor, but now she looked up, fixing her grandfather with a granite stare.

“Perkins,” she said, not looking at Seb’s mother. “My last name is Perkins.”

Seb watched his mother’s heart stop. He watched his father’s rage swallow him whole.

His mother turned to Lily, speaking to her without looking at her. “Excuse me, dear, do you mind if⁠—”

“I mind,” Seb said.

His father had no space left in him for faux niceties. He looked at Seb, his golden-brown eyes furious. “Don’t you dare speak. What on earth do you think you’re doing?” Then, to Bellarius, “Hawthorn, I apologize for the spectacle, I have no idea what’s possessed him⁠—”

Lily cut in then, cold and furiously calm. Her face betrayed nothing, and her voice was the scales of justice, impersonal and bottomed out with steel.

“I think a more pressing question, actually, is what exactly would possess a member of the Tribunal, head of a Great House, to force a tournament member out of pre-match preparation after the locker room had been sealed? The timing is just terribly suspicious, what with the same student suddenly experiencing catastrophic equipment failure immediately after. I’d hate to have to bring it up to the Cantrèa Association. I don’t think the security footage would do you any favors either.”

Somehow, the air in their corner of the lobby deadened even more.

Lily looked straight at Bellarius. “I just don’t think House Bellarius could take another scandal, don’t you agree, Grandfather?”

Seb’s breath caught in his throat. Lily’s eyes narrowed. Hawthorn Bellarius froze.

“I didn’t think so. Come on, Sebastian. We’re finished here.”

She took his hand and led him away.

LILY

As they collapsed messily in the suite and drank Seb’s victory wine, as she biked home in the mild night, as she showered, as she clambered into bed with her various stuffed animals, she kept thinking about The Tempest. She’d read it on the yacht in the Caribbean because Seb insisted that it was important to form her own opinions about literature (and also, she suspected, because Percy Shelley had loved The Tempest and Sebastian Allsaires loved Percy Shelley), and now she couldn’t stop thinking about Ariel’s song, the same one engraved on Shelley’s tombstone after his death by drowning:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Seb had been drowning. In life, metaphorically: weighed down by the weight of his own expectations and trauma, and a really awful family. In his bout against Danielson, literally: she’d seen him sinking into the quagmire, almost up to his knees, stripped of magic.

But instead of drowning he’d suffered a sea change, become something rich and strange. Well, “suffer” was a strong word. It hadn’t looked particularly unpleasant, though she knew that wasn’t how Shakespeare had meant it.

He’d looked like a saint in ecstasy. It seemed like more of an apotheosis, really, a becoming. She’d seen the magic spilling out of his pores. She couldn’t see magic the way he seemed to be able to, so the fact that she’d seen it at all was itself significant. Before her eyes, he’d become what everyone seemed to think he already was—untouchable.

That night the jealousy, the unfairness of it all, washed over her in rocking, green waves. There he was—finally stepping into himself, the version of him that she’d seen privately, that had been steeped in precious nakedness. And here she was, counting the days. It was hard to be invested in self-improvement when the days you had left were sinking into double digits.

Some nights, when the darkness and the depression were too much for her, she let herself think about it—the act of dying. How it would happen, how it would feel. Would she slump suddenly to the floor, a puppet with its strings cut free? Would the curse poison her, burning her from the inside out? Would it hurt? How much?

When she was at her deepest in the black pit of wondering, she would contemplate suicide. Not right then, but something planned for the day before, maybe. What was one more day compared to agency in her own end? Would she trade one day for perfect knowledge? Some nights, when she was younger, she thought she might.

To break herself out of the spiral, she grabbed her laptop and pulled up Van Bergen’s letters. It felt wrong to read them in bed and not in her tower room, but she had been avoiding it lately, getting a prickling sensation like ants on her skin every time she was there.

She should wait for Seb, wait for the tournament, but why? She needed a spell to decipher the letters? Well, she had magic in spades; Sebastian wasn’t the only one. Her magic might be secret, stolen, a blunt object, but it would get the job done. She brushed away the pang of guilt at not waiting. Seb had the tournament, a direct line to Magic itself. He had a long future filled with fortune ahead of him, assuming sports cars and cancer didn’t fuck it up. This—this Elumnara could be hers. He’d offered it before, as if it was his to give.