“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.
28
As I watch Liam go, a single thought crystallizes in my mind.