The Alchemical Child

Chapter Seven

Professor Jansen finished the seminar a little before eleven, so the hallway was blissfully quiet when Sage hurried out with her satchel in tow. She walked straight for the stairs, but her classmates came fast behind her and they all descended from the tower together.

"Where are you going, Sage?" Aliana asked, her lofty voice bouncing up into the rafters.

"The library," Sage mumbled.

"You're not going to Met Lab after lunch?" Lawrence called from further back. Sage bristled at the question. He knew she wasn't taking Metallurgy and had held it against her since finding out at the beginning of term.

The Alchemical Arts had a wide area of study, but like all disciplines, there were subjects that were considered by Scholars to be more valuable than others. Metallurgy was one of them, and all Magister Students either took it as one of their two classes or audited it alongside their usual studies.

Sage had hated Metallurgy from her very first year. The laboratories were always hot and humid, and the scent of iron lingered in the air as if it was blood bubbling away in the forges rather than various molten mixtures of the Six Metals. Silver, mercury, copper, iron, tin, and lead. Sage could rattle off their properties and experimental measures from memory, and preferred to keep it that way. No matter the instruction, the metals invariably compounded into dull husks—never into gold. It was crude and unsophisticated alchemy, and while Sage struggled to find any good quality metals for her workshop, the University let theirs melt away at the hands of Students like Lawrence.

"She doesn't take Met Lab," Thomas corrected him, and Sage could hear the smirk sharpening his words.

"Oh, that's right," Lawrence said. "I heard you fainted during your exams last year. Bet you're missing the heat now that the snow's coming."

"Shut up, Laurie," Aliana said, aiming a pencil over her shoulder at him. Sage wondered if it was one of hers that she had dropped earlier and cringed. She hadn't budgeted to buy any more stationery until January.

"Whatever," Lawrence grinned. "I'll see you two in the labs."

They had reached the main staircase now, and Sage dodged around a velvet curtain towards the library. Her grip on the grimoire relaxed as her classmate's voices faded into the general chatter of Students leaving their classes. A stream of white coats surged past while a vision of black robes swirled through Sage's head. As she stepped into the Alchemical Library, she kept her eyes away from the crystal window and the hawthorn tree.

The librarian was lent against the front desk, though Sage doubted he saw her slip between the swell of Students heading out for lunch. But she couldn't resist peeking at him again when she reached the stacks. He was reading a book she didn't recognise and studiously ignoring a group of first-years gaggled around the returns box.

Heading into the stacks, her feet followed a well-worn path to Mechanics. She picked up the first book she found on clockwork, absently searching for a chapter about folding angles that she could use for Hermes' wing. But the letter she had caged in the back of her mind was fighting its way forwards, and soon she was standing before the shelf where she had found the Faustus grimoire.

She didn't know what she had been hoping to discover, or whether she had been hoping for anything at all. If Valerie had gone to the trouble of hiding a letter for her in a book she couldn't be certain her sister would read, then Sage doubted she would leave any evidence behind. She didn't even know why her sister had chosen the grimoire, let alone how she had gotten into the University.

Yet as she stood puzzling, her thoughts drifted to another person. The only person who Sage was certain had also held the book within his hands, had turned so that Sage couldn't see between his body and a cabinet. Who hadn't, she realised now, even asked for her name when she had loaned out the grimoire. Almost as if he had been waiting for her.