It hurt to do it, like wrenching out some part of myself and leaving it behind. And then, almost at once and very abruptly, it didn’t. The pain was blocked, and all I felt was hunger.
We reached Will. I threw his arm over my shoulder. On the other side, my father did the same. Together we rushed him down the stairs and out of the inn, into the treacherous night.
21
I did not know how long we had until Valentin dealt with Dominic and came after us. We kept moving, as quickly as we could force Will’s collapsing body to go. We turned down one side street, then another, but keeping a general direction toward the dock.
“Which ship, Will?” I hissed into his ear.
He coughed and shook his head.
“Don’t be stupid, Will,” I said. “We have to go. Your only hope is getting on that ship with me and the Stone.”
“I know,” he gasped, when the coughing slowed. “But the ship won’t leave until sunup.”
“It’s nearly sunup now,” said my father. He pointed eastward, and sure enough there was a faint lightening of the blanket of night where the coastline met the water.
Will stopped moving his legs and folded his face into one of his shoulders, coughing. It was amazing, how he had managed to make even as blunt a truth as his body’s final collapse into death a tool that served his own ends. He didn’t want to answer me, and I could hardly make him until he was done. He looked at me, wary and assessing.
“You still don’t believe I’ll heal you?” It was infuriating. To be this close to having the Stone and have something as feeble and broken as Will still standing in the way. For a blinding moment I could not see anything so very terrible about Martin’s case of implements. I should have let him carve out Will’s eye, if he could have pulled the location of the Stone with it.
“The Ariadne,” he said. From the cowed look in his eyes, I wondered if he had discerned the direction of my thoughts. “It’s a merchant ship, just stopping in Normandy on its way east. It’s docked on the far north side of the port.”
“If you’re lying again, Will, so help me—”
“No,” he gasped. “What choice do I have now but to trust you, Bee? I am putting my life in your hands.”
“Then you are lucky Thea is more worthy of trust than you,” spat my father.
We ran, dragging Will between us as best we could. My desire for the Stone grew, like a hum building in my mind until I could hear nothing else. I was almost there. Just a few more moments, and the Stone would belong to me.
Or would I belong to the Stone?
The thought came from far away. It was a nagging voice I did not want to hear. Easy enough to ignore. Easy enough to turn my mind away from the warning, dire though it was.
Too easy. And anyway, it was too late now. What choice did I have? I had to heal Dominic, heal my mother, even heal Will. I had promised him, hadn’t I? The rest of it—the power, the future it would give me, the legend I would become—that was why I longed for it, perhaps, but not why I chose it. Not the only reason.
The Ariadne was a merchant brig. I made out its many masts in the faintly growing pre-morning light. Sailors climbed in the rigging, unfurling the sails. A few figures moved on the dock beside it.
“The captain’s name?” I asked Will.
“James Pyne,” he said.
I pulled Will forward, but my father didn’t fall into step beside me.
“Wait, Thea,” said Vellacott. “Are you … are you sure you want to do this?”
“Of course I am sure,” I snapped.
“I’m not,” said my father. “I’m afraid for you.”
My father’s voice was like the nagging one in the back of my mind—irritating. I pushed it back.
“It’s too late for that now.”
This time when I pulled, my father came. We hurried down the dock, where a few uniformless sailors worked on the rigging. On deck I saw a man in a blue coat and crimson waistcoat. The lapels he wore marked him as some kind of officer.
“That’s him,” muttered Will.
“Captain Pyne,” I called to the officer. “May we come aboard?”
The officer looked at me, then at Will.
“Your health hasn’t improved since we spoke last, Mr. Percy,” he called down. “Are you quite certain you still wish to make the voyage?”
Will broke into coughing again, so I spoke for him.
“He is certain,” I said. “He left an item in your keeping. Is it on board?”
“It is, miss,” he said, then glanced at my father. “Though Mr. Percy only booked passage for two.”
“We’ll pay whatever is necessary,” I said. “But we need to come aboard right away.”
“I can have the gangplank lowered in a moment—”
But there was no knowing how long that would take. I looked about anxiously. In the distance I saw several blurred figures running. It could be them.
“Please— We must be quick—”
“There’s a ladder,” said my father. He pointed to a rope ladder hanging a few yards away.
We were at the rope ladder before the captain could protest. I went first, throwing off Will’s clinging arm. The captain offered me his hand at the top. I took it and looked backward. The running figures were closer now. They might have seen us. Will was struggling up the ladder, my father behind him.
“There are some men after us, Captain,” I said. “I hope you will not allow them aboard.”
He reached down to seize Will by the arm and haul him up. “Of course not, miss,” said the captain.
I squinted at the figures. There were two of them, the right sizes for Martin and Valentin. One was limping.
“They have weapons,” I said.
“So do we.” The captain patted his sidearm. “No one boards my ship without permission. Your berth is there—the first cabin past the quarter deck. Make yourself comfortable, and do not fear. We sail at sunup.”
The captain helped my father over the rail and pulled up the rope ladder.
“And … the item?” I asked.
“In your cabin,” he said.
I crossed the main deck to a higher one, past which was the door to which the captain had pointed. Will staggered after me. I entered the cabin before he caught up and shut the door behind me.
The cabin was snug but clean. The gleaming, paneled walls were bolstered by beams almost low enough to hit my head when I walked upright under them. There was no furniture but a neatly made bed built into the wall, under the porthole window. On the bed lay a handkerchief, folded over a small burden.
I did not need to uncover it to be certain of what lay there. I felt its call. My hands and legs trembled with the effort of not running to it and pressing it to me. I took a step toward it. Then I stopped.
The door creaked open, and Will stumbled into the cabin. He leaned with one arm just above his head, bracing his sagging body against the ceiling beam. He stared from the handkerchief on the bed to me, still standing two paces away.
What are you waiting for? For a strange moment, I didn’t know if it was Will’s voice I heard or the Stone’s.
“I don’t know what will happen,” I said, finally giving voice to the fear I had pushed aside. “When I join with it.”
“Yes you do, Bee,” said Will. “You know you will complete the work of every alchemist since this mad, magic chase began all those years ago. You will have more power than anyone in history. You will—” He coughed and gasped. “You will have everything we dreamed of.”
My arm lifted, unbidden, but I didn’t step forward.
“Bee,” Will said. His voice was a ragged ruin of its former self, but it wasn’t only the hacking coughs strangling it now. Desperation choked him. “I would have done anything for this—to be you. For it to choose me. Why—why—”
He broke off into coughing again, so hard he couldn’t stand upright. He dropped to his knees. I looked from him to the covered Stone.
“You sound like her,” I said.
&
nbsp; He looked up at me, his face a grim mask of death. A viscous, bloody bubble clung to the edge of his lip. His eyes met mine. He knew who I meant.
“It chose you over her,” he whispered. “Over me. It chose you over every other alchemist who ever came near it.”
I walked to the bed and drew back the handkerchief. The Stone was different than when I had last held it. It was a dark red now, the light in it smoldering rather than blazing. My finger brushed its surface, and hot joy sparked from my hand to my heart.
It chose me. It was mine. All I had to do was take it. No need to bind myself to Will, no need to offer it to Valentin afterward. If it could really, truly be mine …
I hadn’t allowed myself to hope that far. And yet what other hope did I have? I had hoped that perhaps Father could make a place for me, but he couldn’t. I had hoped Will and I could make one together, but we wouldn’t. Mother was right. There was no place in the world for me. But with the Stone, I could change that. I would not need to change myself to suit the world. I would change the world to suit me.
I took it.
I held it out in my palm. A thrill traveled up my arm and through my body, waking every part as it went. My spine lengthened, my vision sharpened. The Stone’s power was threading through me, claiming everything as it went. It traveled into my chest, up my spine to the base of my skull. The Stone’s movement through me was bliss. I didn’t want it to stop. I didn’t want anything else. I could have let it drag me down into the sea of pleasure it offered. I could have drowned there. I lifted my hand to bring it to my chest. The cabin pitched, and I held my hand out to brace myself. We had set sail. I lifted the Stone again.
My father’s cry called me back almost to myself.
“Don’t, Thea— Drop the Stone! Your mother wouldn’t want you to take this risk for her sake!”
He had thrown open the door. He walked toward me, holding out his hands in supplication. He was looking at me as he had in Dominic’s prison-room, as though he felt for me. It was pity, yes, but not the kind I could not bear, which seemed a mere half-step from contempt. He looked at me as if he truly wanted something better for me than this. And once more, I believed he did.
Perhaps he was even right about my mother. Perhaps if she were truly here, she would look at me that way as well. A wave of longing rushed through me, pushing back the Stone’s advance. Longing, not for the Stone, but for my mother.
Your mother would have sacrificed you a thousand times to have what is in your grasp.
The Stone pushed its way into my mind again, but this time I resisted.
You don’t know what she would have done, I told it. You don’t know her.
I knew her well before the end.
I lowered my hand. Fear pulled at me. I didn’t want to think about what it meant, but I did want to drop the Stone.
Power surged through me, flowing downward. Will had thrown himself at my feet and wrapped his arms around my legs. The Stone was reaching through me, working on him. Light spilled through my fingers onto Will.
His coughs quickened, then turned into gasps. The hollow, rattling sound of his breath deepened into deep, full gulps of air. It was healing him. We were healing him. The power was like an extension of myself, knitting Will’s broken places, cleansing his organs of illness. I hadn’t chosen this. I didn’t have the power for it. And yet I was doing it.
The Stone was not fused with me. I still felt the distance I had set between us—but somehow it was using me, pouring through me. I knew why. It wanted to show me what we could do, together.
Will fell back. He let go of my feet. Slowly, he rose. He stepped back from me and brought his hands to his chest.
The Stone hadn’t cleaned him. He was still covered in his own dying blood. But even so he was beautiful again. His stained shirt hung open, showing his once again perfectly formed chest and shoulders. He patted himself down, a slow smile forming on his full, glowing face. I stared, too. I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t simply that he was beautiful, muscular and glowing, like a Greek statue come to life in a cramped ship’s berth. It was that I had made him that way, when moments ago he had been nearly a corpse, and not a pretty one. Many dismissed the mythical claims about the Philosopher’s Stone. They said those powers couldn’t be bestowed by anything in nature. And they were right. This was magic. Magic that could be mine. For a moment, my guard fell, and the Stone threaded its way further into me.
Will looked up at me, and warmth filled his shining blue eyes.
“Bee,” he said. “You truly are a goddess.”
I took a shaky breath and tried to speak. I couldn’t. My father, who had sunk back into the paneled walls on the cabin, stepped forward. His eyes were wide. His mouth was open. He looked as awestruck as Will, but as though he had seen a monster rather than a miracle.
“Thea…” My father took another step toward me. “Is it still you?”
It took me a moment to understand the question. I didn’t answer. I wasn’t quite sure.
“Are you blind?” Will asked. “She is more herself than she has ever been!”
Will turned to me. “Bee, you see it now, don’t you?” he asked. “You can have everything you want, everything you’ve ever wanted. Think of the power, the prestige … You’ll be the greatest alchemist of all time. And I will be … whatever you want me to be. Your servant, your lover—whatever you want!”
And he would be, too. Faithful, or at least obedient. Just as my mother had said. Or was it the Stone that had said it? My memory blurred.
“Everything I want,” I murmured.
“Not everything, Thea,” said my father. “I thought that, too, once. That’s the man I was when you met me. I cared for nothing but alchemy. You saw what it made me. How I treated you. It wasn’t until you were gone that I saw everything I had been blind to when all I could see was the Stone.”
“You blame the Stone for that?” I asked.
“No!” he cried. “I blame myself, as you will blame yourself if you allow the Stone to change you!”
But it did not sound so terrible, to be changed. After all, what was I without it? Without alchemy? Just a clever girl with nowhere to apply her talents. Beyond that I did not know. And at this moment, I did not care to learn.
“It isn’t just for me.” I said it only because I needed some response, but it reminded me of what I had almost forgotten.
Will was partly right. I did want the power and fame the Stone offered me. Perhaps I wanted them most of all.
But they were not all I wanted. It took an effort to recall this.
We will heal them, I said to the Stone. My mother and Dominic.
I had to know for certain. I felt the Stone hesitate.
You tempt me with power. With Will. Why do you not tempt me with that? We can heal them, can’t we?
The Stone did not respond at first. We were too close, now, for it to lie to me. He was sick. They are not sick.
“Yes, they are,” I insisted, aloud. “Their minds are sick.”
They are not sick. They are mine.
“So let them go,” I said.
I felt its absolute refusal. I pushed back against it, but it was unbending. It would not yield. The effort exhausted me. My mind pulled back. Dominic and my mother seemed so far away. I remembered that I cared what became of them, but not why. Did it matter, what became of lesser people?
Lesser people? That wasn’t what I thought of them. It did matter. I tried to tell myself so, but my thoughts tangled. I was upset. Best not to think about it. Set them aside, grieve after I made the decision.
The decision …
What decision?
“Thea?” My father was before me, holding me by both shoulders. He looked up into my eyes. He was searching for something. His eyes darkened. He hadn’t found it.
My father jerked away and stared up, like he saw something.
The sound of musket fire rang out from the deck.
Will shrank back and huddled against the wall o
f the cabin. His face crumpled from confidence to horror in half a moment.
“They came,” he cried. “They followed.”
My father opened the door and climbed up to the deck. I followed him. Just outside, he threw out his arm to hold me back.
A privateer ship had come up beside the Ariadne. Small pools of smoke hung in the air over each ship. Another shot fired, and another small pool appeared. I could just make out the dark blue uniforms of the Germans. The Ariadne’s crew had taken shelter here and there on the deck. The captain was not very far from us, crouched behind a bulkhead and reloading his sidearm. He saw us.
“Get back in the cabin!” he shouted. “They’re trying to come aboard!”
A shot burned past me, so close I could feel its heat. Behind me, Will screamed. I turned to see him falling backward through the doorway, blood blossoming on his newly perfect shoulder. He’d been hit.
I looked over to the privateer. It was a smaller vessel, but full of well-armed sailors, judging from the clouds of gun smoke. Through the smoke, three grappling hooks flew across the water and caught in the rigging of the Ariadne. Three men holding the attached ropes climbed onto the guardrails of the privateer. Martin swung first, but a musket shot grazed his arm. He fell into the water between the ships with a scream.
My father pulled me down to my knees and turned so his body was between mine and the direction of the musket fire. “Give it to them, Thea,” said my father. “Give Valentin the Stone. Let him heal Dominic if it can be done.”
I shook my head.
That small denial was all the assent the Stone needed. It moved. The crawling fingers of its power thrust forward.
Blinding light filled my mind, my sight. My hand, holding the Stone, glowed red. I dropped to my knees, my arms thrown wide.
We were fusing. The bliss that had been promised before was gone. All I felt was a total powerlessness. The light cut through the fog in my mind like the crack of a gunshot through the rumble of the sea. I saw it all.
I saw what it meant to join with the Stone, now that it was too late.
It was a transfer of ownership of myself. My mind was pushed aside, watching from far away. I tried to move my eyes to my father, tried to force my lips to beg for his help. I failed.
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