We ride for what seems like hours, until the frantic racing of my mind congeals into a slow dread. When I left Briarsmoor, I was so close to the truth that I could feel it buzzing in my bones. Now it seems that I will never learn it—that I’ll end up like Papa, bled of my time and dying alone in the cold.
At some point, I notice that the steady rattling of the carriage over the road has given way to a slower, bumpier pace—like we’re moving over grass. And then the carriage shudders to a halt. All at once, the doors fly open and light floods in, dazzling me. I scramble into a sitting position, shading my eyes until the figure in the doorway resolves into Liam, standing with one foot propped up on the edge of the carriage. Behind him is what looks like an open field, with no road in sight.
Acidic hatred shoots through me even as the terror roars back. Has he taken me out to the middle of nowhere to kill me?
Liam regards me for a long moment without speaking. Loathing for him throbs through me, pushing at the inside of my skin. I imagine it breaking away from me, an amorphous mass of black smoke, and wrapping itself around Liam’s throat.
But I know if I tried to enact the scene, the sword hanging loosely at Liam’s side would find my heart in seconds.
“Look out here,” Liam says. He steps aside so I can see out the back of the carriage, and points at something. At first, I think he’s showing me his three guards, who are standing at intervals a little away from us—out of hearing range, but well within shooting if I try to run.
Then my gaze travels further. In the direction of Liam’s finger is a wide smudge of gray on the horizon, a series of small dark shapes, some puffing threads of smoke into the sky. A city, one much bigger than Crofton or Laista. I level my gaze at Liam.
“It’s Ambergris,” he says. “A dock city on Hunt’s Bay. Have you been there before?”
I cross my arms over my chest.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Liam says after a moment. “Anyway, there are over a hundred thousand people there. You’ll be able to disappear.” There’s no malice in his voice—it’s low, clear, direct, as if he’s trying to persuade me of something. “Create a new name, a new life.”
Liam reaches down to retrieve something at his feet. He straightens and drops a package on the carriage floor between us—and to my surprise, I see it’s a small but heavy purse of blood-iron. “You cannot stay at Everless,” he says.
“I know,” I spit. The beginnings of furious, confused tears brew in my throat. “But tell me. If you’ve got proof now that I broke into the vault, why not just have me bled? If you hate me so much, why get rid of me this way?”
This seems to take Liam aback, if only for a moment. He blinks, raises one hand to fiddle nervously with the clasp of his cloak.
“I don’t hate you, Jules,” he says, voice uneven. “But don’t you understand? You’re in danger.”
“Because of you!” I nearly scream. “You lied. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. If you’d told the truth about pushing Roan into the fire, we wouldn’t have had to run. You blamed my father and tormented us, even though he’d poured his health into serving your family. It was our home, and you banished us.” My voice is picking up strength as more and more words tumble out. “It’s your fault we ended up the way we did. Your fault he’s dead.”
Liam looks like he’s been slapped, but then something changes in his expression. “Jules,” he says, low and hard. And I think of his notebook, his records of my childhood stories.
“You know something about me, don’t you?” I say, before he can even speak. Even as I make the accusation, a realization starts to dawn, slowly and painfully, inside my heart.
The accident.
“You used to call me a witch,” I whisper, half to myself.
The flames had leaped from the open furnace, toward Roan. They were going to kill him.
Maybe I willed the fire to stop, just like the air in the garden when Roan kissed me. I had stopped time.
“You saw me stop time,” I whisper, needing to form the thought aloud for it to make sense.
It takes him a long time to speak. When he does, it’s soft. “No. More than that. I saw you turn it back. I pushed Roan, and the molten metal from the pot spilled over him—and you grabbed him and pulled him back. But he wasn’t burned.” He casts his eyes to the ground, as if embarrassed. “You saved him. I never meant to hurt him, I swear. But if you’d stayed, if someone else found out what you could do . . .”
My panic gradually ebbs away, leaving nothing but bitterness in my mouth. I should calm the anger in my heart and focus on the mystery of my father’s death, but what Liam’s saying—I stagger under the weight of it.
Papa’s hatred for Everless and the Gerlings ran deeper than sense. Unless he was exaggerating, trying to build a wall of silence between me and the dangerous truth.
Liam cuts into my thoughts. “Your father didn’t trust me. He knew you weren’t safe at Everless.” Liam smiles bitterly. “I can imagine what he told you about me, to keep you away. I saw it on your face when I met you outside the vault. I don’t blame him. I was terrible, then. I would have done anything to find out what I wanted to know. But that night changed me. You changed me.” He looks down. “I’m sorry, Jules. For every piece of suffering I’ve caused you. But I was trying to protect you.”
To protect me. Is it possible? In all the chaos of new information, I can’t say one way or another whether his words are yet another lie, or the purest form of truth I’ve ever known. There’s something in his hand, which he gingerly puts down on the ground between us. I hesitate, but when I realize it’s Papa’s wandering handwriting that covers the paper, I snatch it up. But the world around me seems to slow when I realize that it’s a letter for Liam.
“It’s true that I came looking for you”—he stops as I shoot him a dangerous look—“but only to help.” Liam’s voice is so quiet he seems to be speaking half to himself. He stares into my face, his jaw working. “After you left, I wrote to you to make sure you were safe, sending the courier to every village around, but I suspect you never got the letters. Finally, after my disastrous visit, that’s when he told me you were dead.” His smile and his voice is weak—tired. “I suppose he wanted me to stop looking. When you came to Everless again, I thought that the best way to keep you safe would be to get you to leave the estate—leave Everless forever—by making you miserable there.” His voice strengthens some. “I am not your enemy, Jules,” he says—slowly, choosing his words carefully. “But you do have enemies. Many.”
I desperately want to clap my hands over my ears and block out what he’s saying, but I can’t. I have the urge to strike him, but I don’t. Something deep in me knows that Liam is not lying now. Maybe it’s his face, wiped clean of its usual sneer, or his hands, hanging at his sides, his posture open and vulnerable.
“Roan didn’t remember what happened in Pehr’s workshop. Because of you, it didn’t even happen for him to remember,” he said. “But what you did today was different. My brother is foolish, not stupid. That’s one more person who will know.”
“Roan would never . . .” But I stop, thinking of the fear in his voice, the hollowness of his words.
“You were always like that—so trusting,” Liam says. He sits down on the lip of the carriage, swinging his legs up and leaning against the wall, so he’s sitting across the doorway. Some part of me registers that he is blocking the exit, but my urge to flee has dissipated. I feel rooted to the spot, starving for the truth.
I swallow. He kept me away on purpose. He knows who I am. What I am.
The dreams of the statue.
“Am I . . .” It doesn’t make any sense. It can’t. And yet I have no other way to see it. “You think I’m connected to the Sorceress somehow?” I ask him.
Liam doesn’t react for a moment. Then, to my shock, he grins, a wide, earnest smile breaking across his face like sun through storm clouds. It only lasts a moment, but smiling, he looks like Roan. No—he looks like someone all his own.
And then he is shaking his head. “Not exactly,” he says. “But maybe.”
Confusion and frustration war within me. “I don’t understand. You said—”
“When I went away to study,” he cuts in, “I couldn’t stop thinking about your stories of the snake and the fox, and of what I’d seen in the forge. The moment where you . . .” Turned back time. He doesn’t say it. Instead he just clears his throat. “It got me obsessed with the history of blood time. I spent several years studying the old myths,” he goes on. “Not just at the academy—I went all over Sempera, I found every book and scholar and ancient story I could, but eventually, I had to let it go. My teachers thought I was chasing fairy tales, wasting my talent. People started to talk.”
Even as the truth he’s sharing transfixes me, his lack of humility—and the rehearsed sound of his speech—still makes me want to roll my eyes. I suppress the urge.
“But even as I turned my focus to my other studies,” he goes on, “I kept thinking about the Sorceress and the Alchemist, and the stories people tell about them. There were mixed accounts—impressions of the Sorceress herself that contradicted what I had been raised to believe. You know the standard version, I suppose.”
I dig deep for the tales read to the servant children in those early mornings at the Everless library, so many years ago. “They say the Alchemist stole the Sorceress’s immortality, binding it to metal, so they could get free of the evil lord. Later, he claimed to know how to give it back, but it was just a trick—a ploy to steal the Sorceress’s heart.”
“And the twelve stones . . .” Liam prompts.
“He told the Sorceress that she had only to swallow twelve stones. But the Sorceress didn’t trust him. She killed him by making him swallow the stones, after which he drowned.” I almost feel silly reciting the tale, but there’s a deadly urgency in Liam’s face that dispels any feeling that this is a game.
“Yes. But where the accounts differ,” he says, “is that most of them present the Alchemist as a thief, a trickster, a liar who spurned the Sorceress and died with her heart. But. What other accounts say is that the Sorceress and the Alchemist are both still around, her chasing him for her heart back. I wondered—if the Alchemist had survived, how?”
I stare at him, helplessly confused. “Magic?”
“The twelve stones. There is one theory of the stones that I just couldn’t let go of. The theory that each stone represents—”
“A life,” I say, a vague memory stirring in me.
“Exactly. Twelve.” Liam leans forward a little. “What if the Alchemist didn’t lie about his claim? He had found a way to give the Sorceress her immortality back—just in a different way? To be born, live a normal life, die . . . But then be born again, the same soul in a new body, with all the wisdom of his previous lives.”
Terrible knowledge gathers in me, taking form.
“Shedding lives, over and over, like a—”
“Like a snake,” I say, finishing his sentence.
“But she forced it back on him.” Liam talks faster, his face flushed with cold or excitement. “But if that were true, if the Alchemist has twelve lives, why have we heard so little of him since?”
“So what are you saying? That the whole myth is a lie?” Memories of Briarsmoor rush back at me again. Ezra Morse, my birth father, who spoke of the Sorceress with anger. Who seemed to be obsessed with time.
“More that it’s incomplete,” Liam says. “What if the Alchemist doesn’t want to be found? What if he knew the Sorceress would kill him, if she found him?”
I nod slowly, thinking of the Queen, icily cold—indeed, heartless—and older than anyone in all of Sempera.
He clears his throat. “Look. I know what it’s like to do things that others judge harshly.” At this, his eyes gleam and I know he is trying to say something very big, something important, but I don’t know if I’m ready to hear it. He runs a hand through his hair. “What if the Alchemist was just misunderstood—if he wanted to stay hidden? That might explain why we haven’t heard from him in centuries. But it still doesn’t explain one thing.”
“Which is?” The sun is beginning to set and a chill is seeping into my bones. I shiver.
“You, Jules. It doesn’t explain you.” He puts his hands on my shoulders and I instinctively tense, only to feel surprised by the warmth of his touch.
In spite of everything, he beams. “The stories you used to tell . . . I wrote them down as best I could, when I realized what they meant.” Liam looks at me meaningfully. “For years, I couldn’t piece it together and I had given it up. Until one day, in a class about mathematics and philosophy, a professor was lecturing about the elegance and simplicity of the laws of math and logic. He said, The shortest distance between two objects is always a straight line.”
A long silence stretches between us.
“I had spent so much time trying to find a connection between you and the Alchemist. Don’t you see how elegantly simple the real answer is?”
I take a deep breath. “Was my father the Alchemist?”
Even as I say it, something in me whispers: no. And then Liam laughs breathlessly.
“You are the Alchemist, Jules,” he says.
I must look like a fish that’s just been caught, my mouth gaping open. What he’s saying makes no sense at all. And at the same time, his words spear through me with the precision of truth, of memory, of history. My bones sing in answer to my own name. “But . . . my father,” I say, scrabbling for purchase with my words.
“Jules,” Liam says, his voice strangely gentle. “Lesser magicians can meddle with time, slow it down or speed it up, but only the Alchemist can stop it entirely. And there are other things, sources, I wish I had time to show you. . . .” He takes a breath. “About your father . . . there are people who carry on knowledge of the Alchemist—your past lives, your things, scraps of your memory—like they’re protecting you. Maybe he was one of them. But only you are the Alchemist.” He smiles again, and I feel like I’m floating out of my body, witnessing this conversation from above.
“But—” I manage, then falter. There are a thousand reasons this is impossible, and I seize upon the first one I can think of. “I don’t remember anything about . . . past lives.”
Liam’s eyes search mine, as though he’s looking for something already inside of me. As I stare back into his dark eyes, I think of the dreams. The stories.
The book.
“Snake and Fox,” I say aloud slowly. My mind has filled with a kind of fog, and it’s hiding from me the enormity of what Liam is telling me. I know if it cleared, terror would overtake me; so for now I’m grateful for the calm. “I’m the snake,” I say. “And the fox . . .”
Liam’s eyes dart to the sides, like someone might hear us. “Who steals time in Sempera?”
“Your family,” I say, without thinking or hesitating.
Liam’s eyes turn to steel before they soften again. “Yes, but we are not the only ones.”
“The Queen.” My words are soft, with wonder or fear—I can’t tell. It’s the same thought I had after leaving Briarsmoor. The Queen is the Sorceress.
Liam nods. “She’s been stealing the time of everyone in Sempera for centuries.”
“And the Sorceress wants me.” Not Ina, me. She was looking for me. In Briarsmoor. But . . . “Why?”
“You have her heart. Jules, if she gets hold of you, she’ll kill you. And if she kills you, she’ll have her power back, and then . . .” The Alchemist stole the Sorceress’s heart. “You contain her power. With your blood mixing with hers through all those lives . . .” After a pause, he continues. “Maybe no one knows how much power is in your heart, Jules. Not even the Queen.”
My breath vanishes from my lungs. My huge, dark suspicion wasn’t wrong. That’s why Papa didn’t want the Queen to get near me.
Liam looks away. In the gathering twilight, he suddenly looks very tired, the small lines at the corners of his eyes deepening. “So go,” he whispers. “And don’t come back to Everless, not ever.”
And then, before I can fully register everything that has happened, he has turned and is striding away across the field.