Apple blossoms. Which smelled of Will.
I shook the thought of him from my head. I wouldn’t go back to Normandy, then. I’d go to Paris, to join the revolutionaries—
Just as Will and I had talked of doing.
But I knew I couldn’t leave, even if I had anywhere to go that wasn’t poisoned. Not while Will was still in England with the Stone.
Find it. Find it! What are you waiting for?
I did not argue with her. I wanted nothing but to obey. My pulse sped up, and my breath came fast and shallow. How could I stand here, doing nothing, while the Stone was lost to me? It needed me. When I let myself, I felt it calling me. And I did not know how to answer its call. I did not know how to find Will. I did not know what he might be doing to the Stone.
Something twisted inside me, and I gasped.
A shock followed, thrilling down every limb, every nerve. A wave of fury, revulsion, and pain. I gripped the sill and closed my eyes. I couldn’t breathe.
There was something strange about the pain. I felt it, but as though it were someone else’s. Someone else who was dying.
No. Someone else whom I wanted to kill.
I saw him, somehow. Will lay on the ground, gasping, clutching his nearly stopped heart. The Stone was beside him, pulsing with our rage. It spoke.
Not him. Never him.
The vision faded. The pain went with it, but not the rage.
Will had tried to finish the Stone. He had tried to fuse it to himself.
My Stone.
My heart thundered dangerously, blood crashing in my ears. My knuckles tightened on the sill, but I imagined them as fists, smashing into Will again and again.
We rejected him. The Stone didn’t want him any more than I did. It wanted me. Under my fury, a grim satisfaction welled.
The Stone had nearly killed Will for trying to make it his. It wouldn’t have Will. It didn’t want him. It wanted me.
I started to breathe again. And then I started to think.
The Stone was mine. It had chosen me, and it needed me to become complete. Will could do nothing with it. He knew that now. That meant he would come for me. All I had to do was wait.
I sat back down at the table and my mind went blank. When my father came up from the kitchen with another tea tray, I came back to myself, unsure how long I had been gone. I tried to ignore Vellacott’s worried glances. He asked if I was well, and I nodded without conviction. I was not, and would not be until I had the Stone again.
“Sugar?” asked my father, then shook his head. “Oh, I forgot, you don’t take sugar. I’ll remember next time—”
“No,” I said quietly. “I like sugar. It was Mother who didn’t.”
“Ah.” My father set down the cup he had held out to me, carefully added a lump of sugar, and made a long production of stirring it. When he finally handed it back to me, his eyes glinted with moisture. I sipped my tea and hoped he would manage not to cry. In the two weeks since I had returned to Oxford with him, he had seemed on the verge of some emotional display more than once. I did not think I could bear anything like that without breaking down myself.
“Thea,” he began, then stopped and smiled slightly. “Or perhaps I should call you Theosebeia, since it would make me less likely to repeat it quite as often? It might lessen the danger of making you hate your own name.”
I didn’t understand him at first, then realized he was referring to my rather harsh words at the Graf’s house in London. I frowned and tried to make out whether he was attempting a joke or a reprimand.
“Theosebeia.” This time he sounded distant, as though he weren’t saying my name at all, but invoking a long-past memory. He shook his head. “I still remember how she laughed at me when I said it would be a fine name for a child.”
He smiled past me, and I had a sudden feeling that if I looked over my shoulder my mother might be there.
“You said it would be a fine name?”
“You might well look incredulous!” he said with a small laugh. “I couldn’t believe it, either, when you told me your name. Evidently she didn’t want me to have the slightest hand in your upbringing, and yet she chose a name I had loved and she had scorned. I thought on it constantly, when you fled Oxford. It seemed as though it meant something.”
“Meant something? What?”
“I couldn’t puzzle it out.” He looked at me with a hopeful air, as though I might know.
But I couldn’t puzzle it out, either. My mother had never said anything about my father that indicated any lingering tender feelings, as he evidently hoped. I considered whether she might have been hiding them from me, but found it unlikely. My mother’s affections didn’t linger once she had moved past them. They simply expired.
“She must have liked the name more than she let on. Or else—” Anger bubbled up in me for a moment. “Perhaps she simply didn’t bother to think of a better one.”
“Ah.” Vellacott raised his eyebrows. “But it is a very fine name for an alchemist, you must admit that.”
“It’s a fine name for an alchemist’s pupil, I suppose,” I said. “As far as I know, Theosebeia never did much alchemy of her own. In any event, I am not an alchemist any longer.”
I regretted the words as soon as I said them. I clamped my mouth shut to keep any more such pronouncements from coming out. The low-burning despair in me flared up, as though I had cursed myself. Not an alchemist? Only if I failed to get the Stone back. And I could not fail.
But my father saw none of that. He nodded, agreeing with the curse I had
