Page 6 of The Alchemists

“You want to spend your last year of class doing homework instead of making memories?”

All three of them froze at her mother’s misstep.

“Memories for who?” Lily offered coldly.

After a long beat of silence, she pulled her feet off her mother’s lap and pounded up the stairs to her room in a very teenager-y way. She slammed the door and locked it, throwing a dampening cantrip at it for extra effect. Her mother couldn’t do magic anymore, but she could still feel it, and the cantrip—a nothing, throwaway spell—was a deliberate slap in her face.

Lily was only a sophomore, with three more years at Windermere after that—if she weren’t going to die in June. That was the curse. For breaking the most fundamental law of the magical world, the Tribunal had cursed Magnolia Bellarius. Killing her mundane lover, stripping her of magic, shunning her—those weren’t punishment enough, apparently. The curse was simple cruelty, making an example, using their power to crush because they could.

So, Lily’s pregnant mother had been cursed, and passed it along for her unborn daughter to inherit.

The curse went like this:

You will lose that which you hold most precious in the year of the Chalice at the rise of the full Wanderer’s Moon.⁠*

It was dreadfully simple: Lily was what her mother held most precious; therefore, Lily was what her mother would lose. This was the year of the Chalice—Windermere’s Chalice, whatever that meant—and the full Wanderer’s Moon rose at midnight on midsummer’s eve. She’d known exactly when she was going to die her entire life, and if anyone asked whether it was a comfort to know, she would have happily told them to fuck themselves.

Curses had no cure. They were powerful, and immutable, and the only people who could legally inflict them were on the Tribunal. The person who had cast this curse just so happened to be Lily’s maternal grandfather. In her darker moments she had to admire the poetic nature of the curse—the fact that it would tie up loose ends, that it would have been so much less cruel to just kill Magnolia, or to make her miscarry.

And so, Lily had been born, her mother already grieving her loss. Lily pressed her face into her pillow, tears hot against her cheeks as her anger at her mother ebbed away, leaving only anger at the system, at her ever-diminishing returns. When her mother knocked gently on the doorframe, Lily dissolved the cantrip and used another to unlock the door without getting up. Her mother sat on the bed, stroking the hair at Lily’s temple and smoothing it behind her ear before tucking a stuffed pig—one of the many companions on the bed—under Lily’s elbow.

“I’m so sorry, honey. I just…I just want you to live. As much as you can.”

“You don’t need to be sorry,” Lily mumbled into the pillow.

“I’m never going to stop being sorry.” Her mother’s voice hitched, and Lily sat up. Her number one goal, in most any conversation, was to keep her mother from crying.

“I’ll go to the bonfire.” She wiped her tears with the back of her hand.

“Don’t do it for me, do it for yourself. Don’t waste the time you have left.”

“What’s so great about the bonfire?”

Her mother laughed. “Nothing. Nothing’s so great about it. It’s just another excuse to get drunk, make out, and waste magic. Which, incidentally, is what makes it great.”

Lily pursed her lips, considering. Daphne and Gemma Greer were probably going. Daphne was Lily’s acquaintance approaching friendship. Both of them were outcasts enough, in their own way, to have formed an alliance against solitude. Gemma would definitely be going; therefore, Daphne was likely to tag along. Lily slid out her phone.

“You know I met your father at the bonfire?” Lily stilled. It was a rare thing for Magnolia to talk about Lily’s father. “Well, not at the bonfire, but on bonfire night.” She picked at Lily’s bedspread. “I went sophomore year with Karston Tellemaus.” Lily knew the name, but not the man. He was one of the many Magicians who’d brokered their power into making fistfuls of money on Wall Street, almost all of them specialists in vaticination, metapsychosis,⁠* or illusion. “Karston got drunk and handsy, so I left and went to the Athenian and ended up talking to your father until four in the morning.” The Athenian was the all-night diner on the main arterial, just a few blocks from campus. Nobody from Windermere would be caught dead there unless it was the dead of night and they were dead drunk.

“You realize that this is literally an advertisement against the bonfire?”

“Oh, my sardonic, so, so clever child.” Her mother sighed and ruffled her hair before getting up. “Don’t stay out too late.”

Lily texted Daphne as her mother closed the door, and Daphne, being the fastest texter Lily knew, responded instantly in the affirmative. With a sigh, Lily checked the time and pulled out her homework—at least she could get something done before the inevitable debacle of the evening.

Work proved elusive. Partly because Lily was too distracted by everything about the day—alchemy and its implications, her mother’s sudden openness—to properly focus, and partly because Daphne texted her a new outfit every three minutes.

It’s going to be dark, she texted back, who cares?

Lily’s lukewarm friendship was rewarded with a sarcastic emoji and, Hopefully Conrad Hawleyhurst.

Lily cringed at that. It was a subtle reminder, albeit unintentional on Daphne’s part, that they weren’t friends, not really. They were companions of convenience. Were they really friends, Daphne wouldn’t go near Hawleyhurst. If the people who actively wished Lily harm had a team, Hawleyhurst would be their captain and their mascot.

Hawleyhurst was not, by Lily’s estimation, particularly intelligent, but he did possess a fiendish cleverness for bullying. He was never above wasting a cantrip to lay her out flat on her face in the classroom, on the quad, on the stairs, and had in fact done so a number of times with great relish. There were plenty of other things too: being shoved into closets that had been magically sealed, getting hit in the back with an enchantment to make her smell like a New York sidewalk in July, and receiving spoofed emails from professors demanding meetings for which she waited too long before realizing the game.

She didn’t really blame Daphne for her attraction to him. Most people were attracted to him. He had old-money good looks—straight teeth, golden hair and golden skin from summers spent sailing, an athlete’s firm body, Midas’s checkbook. He had that kind of planetary charisma that possessed its own gravity, and when he was shoulder to shoulder at every turn with Sebastian Allsaires—one light and one dark—they might have been a black hole, so inescapable was their gravitational field.

With a sigh, Lily tagged her favorite outfit. She paused before putting the phone away and then wrote, Does he sign?