Archive of Our Own ^beta

My name is Devi. There used to be more to my name, back when I was a young girl in Atur, but it wore itself away over time, like the limestone around a fossil. Now I am like a bared shell or a smooth and rounded stone, living without extraneous things. I am small, and my name is small, and if strangers choose to believe that is all there is to me, so much the better.

I am known by other names. Demon Devi, and Devi the gaelet, and sometimes "the ginger bitch up yon alley." Devi, the girl who will do unspeakable things if you cross her, or Devi Neckbreaker. If strangers choose to believe that my small size has no relation to the power I can wield against them, that is also so much the better.

At one time, in the brief years between my Aturan girlhood and taking up residence in the baker's alley, there were sweeter names. Clever Devi. Witty Devi. Ironwill Devi. Darling Devi -- but that was only the once, and he was very young, and very foolish. So was I.

No, I was never that young.

My Alar held strong against full-fledged arcanists when I was ten, and against Masters of the University when I was seventeen. I have brewed death and life in the same bottle. Both men and women have I bedded, though my heart remained untouched. With deep and secret magics I ended the curse which had haunted twelve generations of my family -- and never told the full tale to another soul. I have called the names of fire and earth and wind and once, deep in sleepwalk, the name of the ocean. I have sliced open the breasts of living birds to watch the workings within. I have stolen books from the great library of the Commonwealth University. I made experiments of alchemy and sympathy on my young and willing cousin until she went mad. I have bent steel and the will of others, broken stone and hearts, and laughed in the face of the iron law and my enemies.

You may have heard of me.

****

Or not.

Let's face it, unless you've found yourself in some very dire straits in the town of Imre, you have no idea who I am. Women rarely achieve fame in this world, and certainly not women who become arcanists. Mostly we are a grudging secret, our existence scarcely acknowledged within the University itself, and hardly known at all in the wider world. And women who break the Arcanum's precious rules? Women who follow the unspoken dictum to prize knowledge above all else? Women who lend money? We might as well not exist.

We don't, I suppose. There is only me.

I entered the Arcanum at sixteen, youthful but not outrageously so. I was expelled at twenty-two for reasons the University preferred not to make public. In the intervening six years I achieved the rank of Re'lar, but was held back from the rank of El'the by a hidebound and over-cautious Master who demanded set years of service at each rank. That I was forced to chafe under this pedant was due entirely to the fact that I was female, and the only specialties considered proper for me were archival or medicine. Paper or blood. After a year of fetching books for nobles' sons who pinched just my cheek if I was lucky, I opted for the blood.

Now I lend money to impoverished fools who lack the breeding to be considered a reasonable credit risk on the right side of the river. Not just any fools; once my admittedly usurious interest rate had put me ahead for some years to come, I began to lend only to those who had something more interesting than silver to repay me with, and at terms practically guaranteed to make them default. Silver is useful, and buys many things. Favors owed by a sympathist with no family or skill at gambling can buy much more.

This could be a tale of how I outwitted one of the more clever, light-pursed fools, and won the right to ride his spirit like a horse for a year and a day. It could be the tale of my Arcanum trial, held in the dark of night in a locked sub-chamber without witnesses or written record, or the tale of the year I spent searching for the words to end my family's curse, and of the morning I danced in the haunted ruins of our ancient estate. It might even be a tale of my childhood innocence, though that would be a very brief tale.

Instead I want to tell you about Eilani.

I am proud of many things I have done, although I walk a lonely and singular road. For my few crimes, I have been punished more harshly than was just, due to my sex. But I was never punished for my greatest crime because no one ever knew, save a madman who was nearly as guilty as me. I am not proud of what we did, which is why I write this tale.

I am no heroine from fireside lays or children's stories. No lutist will ever bring his audience to tears with the well-loved and familiar song of how Devi Cursebreaker sang down the ghosts and danced down the moon. My exploits at the University will never be retold and embroidered, laughed over and admired. I have no legend to tarnish, no myth of myself to make real.

And yet I write this tale, ugly and bald and cruel as it is, for something like that reason. We fade from this earth, as do our works, but sometimes our names live on. It is unlikely that when I die anyone will remember the small girl with the matchless Alar who bested Masters in her second year, and those who expelled me for one count of Vivisection and three counts of Indecent Fraternization with a Senior Arcanist will have taken that secret to their graves by then. But Demon Devi, heartless gaelet and ginger bitch, may haunt this putrid alley for some years. This is not how I would choose to be remembered.

I am Devi Maewet's daughter, arcanist without a guilder, who drove my cousin into madness. I have used alchemy for my own purposes, and lost everything I had, except my iron will. This is a true tale I tell, and not only for myself. I tell it for Eilani, who might otherwise have vanished from the earth with no one to remember.

***

When Eilani came to the University it was winter and I had no time for her. I was in my second year, newly transferred from the Archives to the Medica, and I was learning what it would take to become Re'lar. The set reading alone could have occupied a young student's time for years, but the hours of practicum were even more punishing. Worst of all, we were required to treat a list of ailments and injuries each a certain number of times, regardless of how often such a thing was seen. The students in the Medica were veritable gore-hounds, eagerly haunting the surrounding homes in hope of sniffing out a rare illness. If a patient with marsh flu or a particularly difficult compound fracture arrived, he was likely to be swarmed by ten eager students, each fighting to claim the credit for treating him.

This, on top of three other classes and a personal project in the Archives, would have taken all my time even if I had wanted to shepherd Eilani through admissions and the selection of classes. The truth was that, though I loved my cousin, reminders of home were not welcome, and neither was competition. My father had not taken well to my decision to follow his brother's footsteps instead of marrying someone who could inherit the family business. Eilani, I knew, would have been sent off with true goodwill, as well as with the precious books we had pored over together so often in our childhood. Her father had taught us both, after all.

There was no true competition, of course. Uncle Ewion knew that I was the more skilled, and never begrudged the difference. Eilani herself worshipped me, and I knew it was me she was following as much as her father's wishes. Her own wishes rarely guided her, as she took the most happiness from pleasing others. Young and full of ambition as I was, this was her most exasperating trait.

So I did not meet her after admissions, to commiserate about the high rate and take her for consolatory cider at my favorite pub (her tuition was actually quite low, thanks to her excellent memory, and I was too busy that year to have a favorite pub). I did not welcome her to the women's wing in Mews, so no one warned her that the bed under the best window was empty because the casement leaked. I did not take her to choose classes, so no one told her that arithmetic under Brandeur was not like arithmetic with her father, and that the masters here did not appreciate women who could do calculus in their heads.

We finally met a week later, when she was eating breakfast and I a long-delayed supper (I had been taking two and three shifts a day at the Medica, in hopes of beating the pack to a case of left-handed frostbite now that the snow had fallen). I was carrying two apples and a loaf of barley bread out the door when I caught sight of my cousin, weeping into a bowl of porridge.

She lifted her head when I passed, and the tears cleared like a storm over the ocean. Her eyes were light and beautiful, and her golden hair floated around her head, too fine to be held down to this earth.

"Devi!" she cried.

And then of course I had to put down my apples and my bread, and be kissed and embraced (her hair got all in my mouth, as always), and curse that lucky devil Utrach, who would certainly finish all his treatment requirements this morning when they brought in the beggars who had frozen their fingers and toes during last night's storm.

She told me about arithmetic, and how Brandeur thought she was cheating and made her do six problem sets in front of the class without pen or chalk, and when finally one of the students had stood up for her, Brandeur had sneered horribly and made some comment about the marriageability of women with abacuses for brains. About how Elxa Dal terrified her so that she could hardly do the basic bindings we'd learned as children. About how the older scrivs never helped her find anything in the stacks and she'd been laughed away from applying to the Fishery and her bed was soaked through with snowmelt this morning.

I cursed my uncle, for thinking his delicate daughter could survive in a place like this. And I cursed the place itself, for being the way it was to girls like us.

"Kitten," I said. "Brandeur thinks women are like men except broken. Don't ever let him see you're better than that. Just be better."

She sniffled.

"Elxa Dal may look like a villain from a traveling show but he can't help that," I said. "The scrivs torment everyone, you must just get through it. And the Fishery is only a step above the blacksmith back at home. You don't really want to work there."

"What should I do about my bed?"

I sighed. "Take mine. I'm never there, nowadays."

Eilani slipped her arms around me, laying her golden head on my shoulder. It was a familiar pose of comfort from when we were children, resting after a battle of Alar against her father or making pictures in the fire. It comforted me too, almost against my will.

"Isn't there anyone nice in this whole place?" she asked.

"Nice?" I thought of slender, clever hands resting a little too long on mine, a warm laugh when I came up with an unexpected answer, a certain electricity in the air that had nothing to do with what we were brewing in the lab. Rare books I had mentioned and sweet berry cakes appearing on my work station. A mind deep as the night sky.

"There's one master whose classes you won't mind," I said at last. "But alchemy is a tricky thing, nothing like the chemistry we did at home. You should wait a few terms before you try it."

"Whose classes are those?" she asked.

"The Chancellor's," I answered.

***

They forget, now, that he was Chancellor once. They forget it was alchemy he first shone at, and all its twisted, unexpected ways. They forget everything but a locked door and a series of mad, brilliant acts even I can't take the credit or blame for. Our paths had diverged by then. But once he was the youngest Chancellor in history, and once it was alchemy he taught, even as his studies in naming took him further into the darkness of his own mind.

***

After that first week Eilani found her feet a little. Her classmates in arithmetic learned to not to mind Brandeur, she saw beyond Elxa Dal's threatening appearance to the kind spirit behind, and the scrivs found new students to haze. She drew strength from the other women in Mews as I never had; in those days it seemed to me that if no one took female arcanists seriously, I had better distinguish myself from them as best I could. I'd always disdained girls. The fact that the other women were not preoccupied with ribbons and boys like the girls in my home city had not dawned upon me yet, nor had I realized how much stronger we were together. I would learn.

Eilani was always a little alone, though. We were alike that way.

She made E'lir at the end of her second term. I was persuaded to attend a holiday celebration by the other girls, and we grew light-headed on mead and freedom and the skills of the inn's resident harpist. His dark eyes stirred more than a few of us, which is how, paradoxically, I ended up in bed with a woman for the first time, whispering about the harpist and trading sour-honeyed kisses. No one minded that sort of thing in our wing.

Eilani and I took the long post route home together that summer. We were greeted with the news of my sister's engagement to the squire's youngest son. It was a good match, her beauty and coin to his name, and I could sense my father's pleasure and relief in his sudden goodwill towards me. In return, I refrained from pointing out that this was how things should always have been, that I was red-haired and fey-looking, with no desire to be tied for life to a houseful of children and a counting house. Kierla might not have my head for numbers, but she had a warmth and a womanly presence that I would always be lacking. The baron's youngest nearly ran me over with his horse without noticing, the last time I was home.

When we returned in fall, Eilani and I had great hopes for the coming term. She hoped to find a sponsor in Elxa Dal, who had never sponsored a woman to Re'lar but was the youngest master and might be considered more liberal in his thinking. I was even more ambitious.

I will skip the tedious year of research, the sideways questions I asked of the masters, the missed hours in the Medica and the lost hours of sleep. By the following summer I had gathered the forbidden bindings and read the children's tales I needed to end our family curse, the details of which are too shameful even to write here. When we returned home, I lied about wishing to sleep in the open on a midsummer Felling night, and took my pony to the ruins of our estate. I remember every moment of that long night, and none of it can be written down. I told Eilani that I had done it, when I came home half-dead the next day, and nothing more.

Eilani asked no questions. She brought me cherries and buttermilk and her own seeded braid-loaf, and laid her head on my shoulder. That was her gift.

The next fall Elxa Dal told her, with great regret, that he could not be her sponsor. Her sympathy skills were excellent, but it was not University policy to sponsor female arcanists in areas other than the traditional two. He looked as if he wanted to say more, but did not.

I know, because I was there. I had watched my cousin struggle every day to impress him for six terms. I knew that her soft eyes and wispy golden hair hid an Alar stronger than any of her fellow students, and a mind which could calculate binding stresses and offsets easy as breathing. I told her to ask for a meeting with him, without telling her how a similar meeting had gone for me. I hoped the experience would be harsh, but instructive for her.

When Elxa Dal entered the lecture hall that day, he expected to see just Eilani. He was already wearing a politely apologetic smile, but he jumped when he saw me. No, not jumped -- shrank, as if he'd seen some small scuttling creature in a broom closet corner. After only three years at the University, I already had that effect on most of the masters.

He recovered quickly. "Mistress Eilani," he said formally to my cousin, sitting several rows below me in the hall. Her hands were folded and her hair was almost tamed. I could see from the quick rise of her shoulders that she was nervous, and from the set of them that she was determined to say her piece. I felt a slight twinge of guilt; after all, I had forced things to this point, and she was about to be hurt. But better she see it now, rather than waste more years attempting the impossible and wearing herself away in the process.

"Master Dal," Eilani answered. "I come to request your sponsorship to the rank of Re'lar. I can provide -- "

She had stood in her seat as she spoke, but Elxa Dal waved a hand. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's impossible. I have too many Re'lar students."

We both knew that he had only two, and Eilani turned to look at me, her mouth half-open. I said nothing, only inclined my head back at Elxa Dal.

"Master Dal," she said. "I can wait until your previous students have advanced. Yvant has nearly finished -- "

He shook his head, not even looking at her. "It's impossible," he said again. "I have a number of interested students. You should speak to Master Lorren or Master Arwyl."

"Medicine or archival," Eilani said, her voice going flat.

"Yes, I believe there is more room in those specialties," he said. "Now, if you will excuse me -- "

"Tell her the truth," I said, from the back of the hall.

They both looked at me. I don't have a loud voice, or a high one, but I can pitch it well enough to be heard when I want to. I wanted him to hear every word.

Elxa Dal met my gaze and it took no imagination to see what he was seeing. After the meeting I had with him in the spring term of my first year, when he'd mumbled the same platitudes at me, in my frustration I had bound the soles of his leather shoes to the carpet of his office until he explained the truth. That I wasn't disciplined for it, I think, was due entirely to his embarrassment at being caught flat-footed, as it were.

"Tell her what you told me," I said, a little softer.

He looked back at Eilani, still standing, twisting her hands now. Little wisps of hair had escaped from their braids, and she looked younger than her eighteen years. I hated that, hated how easy it made it for people to dismiss her.

"I cannot sponsor you, Eilani," he said gently. "It's unspoken, but the nearest thing to a University rule that female students can only ascend the ranks through medicine or archival. I told your cousin as much several years ago."

"You can't make an exception for her?" I asked, still with the fierce pitch in my voice. I knew what the answer was, but I needed him to say it.

He shook his head. "Not even for the most promising young woman. And you are very promising, Eilani. I'm sorry. I am happy to continue teaching you sympathy, but Master Lorren or Master Arwyl must have official charge of you."

There was a silence as his word sunk in. "Thank you," Eilani said, in a small voice. "I'm -- I'm glad to know the truth."

Elxa Dal bowed twice, a kind and respectful bow to her, a short and ironic bow to me. He paused for a moment, as if deciding whether to say more, but in the end he turned away from us. I imagined he still felt the binding of shoe leather to carpet as he left the hall.

Eilani stood a while longer, her head bowed. I felt the guilty twinge return, waiting for her to question me, to accuse me. There were easier ways to have learned this lesson than to have sat through that tense scene just now.

When she looked at me at last, though, there was no trace of rancor on her face, or tears even. Just the same clear light that always shone in her eyes.

"I think I'm ready for alchemy now," she said.

***

How can I explain alchemy to someone who hasn't performed it themselves? Someone whose way of thinking is not steeped in the learning of the Arcanum, who has not broken their mind in many pieces and held strange things together by will alone? The first and last lesson of alchemy is always that it is not chemistry. The same reagents, mixed in the same way, do not always produce the same alchemical result. Sometimes alchemy's effects appear long after application. Sometimes they appear before. It's not like the science of sympathy or sygaldry. You must know the numbers, but be willing to accept that sometimes even simple arithmetic will not make sense in alchemy.

It was perfect for him. It was perfect for me. Our coming together was like alchemy in a way, two reagents whose combination had startling effects beyond the expected result, lingering long past the time when we thought they might have ended. Even today there are things that make me think of him; the crook of a clever child's smile, a pair of dusty slippers left at a doorstep, a fat volume with slips of parchment tucked into it on a merchant's counter. I told you I had never gone to bed with anyone who touched my heart, but this was a lie. Lying is one of the things I do very well.

She never took to alchemy as we did, but our alchemy touched her. I think it still must.

***

I remember the day I brought Eilani to Elodin's class. As Chancellor he could be choosy in his students, and I didn't yet have the pull with him to simply place her on the rolls. That would come later. When I was in my fourth year and she in her third, I still had to wait until his earlier lecture was finished, and then approach him with my heart in my throat. His eyes brightened when he saw me, lit by the spark which had been slowly building between us for several years, then dimmed when he saw her behind me.

"Master Elodin," I said in a firm voice. "This is my cousin. She would like to join your class."

He flicked his gaze to Eilani, and studied her for a long moment. I knew what that gaze felt like, how you could feel burned to a cinder or warmed from within, depending on how he was feeling. Eilani didn't look like she wanted to sink into the floor, which was a good sign.

"How's her sympathy?" he asked me, clipped and curt like he was inspecting a horse for sale.

"Elxa Dal would have sponsored her if she'd been a boy," I said.

"Mathematics?"

"Better than me."

"Truthfully?" He gave me a sidelong glance, one eyebrow quirked.

I smiled. "As good. We had the same teacher."

"Chemistry?"

"Alchemy isn't chemistry."

"Damn it, she needs to know an acid from a salt," he said impatiently.

"Simple chemistry," I said. "She learns fast."

"Who will be your sponsor?" he asked Eilani, finally addressing her as a person.

She looked at me before answering. "Lorren, I suppose."

"Hmph. Too squeamish for the Medica?"

This was the truth, but I didn't want her to admit it. "She can bear the silence and the tedium of the Archives better than I could."

"I imagine she can also bear Lorren better than you could."

I just nodded, hiding my smile. If he was making jokes at my expense instead of hers, that was also a good sign.

"Well, Devi's cousin," he said at last. "What makes you want to study alchemy?"

Eilani looked at me again. There was no right answer to this question, and I nodded back at her.

"Devi says it's tricky," Eilani said hesitantly. "She said alchemy bends or breaks the rules of the natural world."

"You like rule-breaking?" Elodin demanded.

"I like tricky things," Eilani said. She half-closed her eyes, and her voice became dreamy. "I have strange dreams sometimes, where I am following an underground stream that becomes seven streams, and seven times seven. Eventually the water flows up to the sky. In my mind I know if I can only taste this water I will understand all things, all rivers, but I know, too, that if I touch the stream I'll be pulled under, or worse. It might just dry up, like a well in drought. I think alchemy might be like that."

As she spoke, Elodin's gaze became more intense, until I felt a tug of envy. He smiled at me often, but nothing I said had ever made him stare at me like that.

But all he said was, "She'll do well enough." Eilani smiled her eldritch smile, squeezing my hand before she went to take a seat in the hall, so light-footed she was almost skipping. The place was beginning to fill up again with the next class's students, and Elodin bent to rearrange a sheaf of parchment on the lectern. He glanced at her once more before he turned to me.

"She might even make a Namer," he said in a low voice.

***

If I cannot describe alchemy without years of theory and study in your head, still less can I describe naming. And yet, it's easier to understand. If you've had dreams like Eilani, if you've been a sweet-eater or pod-smoker, if you've ever been so feverish and ill that the whole world seems to be in your head at once for the taking, you know. Elodin told me once that naming was the first of the arcanist's arts, from before cities of stone were raised, before we even lived in straw huts and farmed wild goats. The first tribespeople sitting around their winter fires understood naming, before there was such a thing as language. Language confuses us, even. A child with no language but cries and grunts understands more of naming than a Re'lar who brings years of study to the task.

Our sleeping minds can encompass it. So can our mind when addled by drink or drug or fever. Anger helps. So does lust. Once when making love in the middle of a thunderstorm I reached out my hand and -- but that is not the tale I am telling here. This is a confession, not a romance.

But your ordinary Arcanum student who undertakes naming is at a loss. The tools she has learned, memorization and concentration and herb lore and stress tables, only get in her way. Elodin told me once, in our year of secret naming studies, that the best namer amongst his classmates had been a farmer's son, so slow and unlearned that no one could understand how he paid his tuition. This boy, who'd been thrown out of nearly every class and denied even the rank of E'lir for three years, found naming to be curiously easy. While Elodin and the others struggled for their first name, trying every arcanist's trick to relax the mind and suppress their natural wits, this dull boy gathered names to him like pigeons on a stone statue. By the end of the term he had a ring for every finger, and he was honestly confused at the difficulties his classmates had.

"What happened to him?" I asked. I was probably only half-listening, because Elodin liked to tell me these stories in between bouts in bed, running his fingers over my back and arms and neck until every hair stood on end and I was desperate for more. I missed out on a lot of things that way, but I think now that he distracted me on purpose, confessing the details of his life while ensuring they were never fully heard.

"He went back to the farm eventually," Elodin said. "He probably builds fences and shears sheep and mucks horse shit."

"Maybe he knows the name of horse shit," I murmured, and what happened next ended the reminiscing for that afternoon.

My cousin was no farmer's child, nor was she stupid, but I think there was something kindred between her and that slow-witted boy. Animals loved her, and so did children. She could be so still you almost forgot she was there. Wind seemed to dance constantly in her golden hair, and she dreamt of subterranean streams and friendly fires and rolling hills. I think she had a secret, inner eye that was open to all the world, as sensitive and delicate as the hairs in a rabbit's ear. It was that sensitivity we used, and it's why we lost her.

But more on that later. For now, know that naming is the oldest and subtlest of arts, something everyone and almost no one can do. It's like music, which I have no ear for. It's like love, which can happen in an instant and for no reason at all except the color of someone's hair or the lilt of someone's voice. I've learned that I have no ear for that either. You understand naming best when you try least. I think that describes many things.

***

Eilani took well to alchemy. Lorren sponsored her to Re'lar in spring, simply because she'd been there long enough. He was a favorite among the women for not taking his role as gatekeeper to the upper ranks very seriously; he seemed to have accepted that nearly every female student would ask for his sponsorship, and in return he would have plenty of willing scrivs. What they actually chose to focus their studies on did not interest him.

I, of course, continued to toil under the finicky tutelage of Arwyl, who had promoted me to Re'lar the previous year after frankly heroic efforts on my part to complete the practicum hours, but seemed determined to keep me there for years to come. I put my head down and plowed through his set curriculum as best as I could, but without the same burning drive as in my first four years. Now that I was Re'lar I had access to more knowledge than before, and my studies in sympathy and alchemy were deepened. Since I wasn't willing to be bored to death in the Archives, I wouldn't be an El'the for years. I had to find other ways to amuse myself.

That's when Elodin suggested he teach us naming.

I should explain. First, there was already a Master Namer. Xuan was old, and took very few students. Most terms he taught nothing at all. He could be found at almost any hour of the day dozing in a certain tavern, a cup of mulled wine at his elbow. If you spoke to him on campus, his dim blue eyes seemed to see straight through you. Like the farmer's son in Elodin's story, he wore a ring on every finger, but they seemed calcified in his very flesh, his knuckles too bony to ever remove them. Students wondered aloud if he even remembered the hundred and one names he was supposed to know. So Master Xuan could not teach me.

Second, he offered to teach both Eilani and I, and nominally we were his students. But the situation as it occurred was very different.

As I have said, this is not a romance. I am not a court poet to set into verse the details of our courtship, such as it was. Nor am I one of those anonymous writers of yellow-covered pamphlets that the male University students are so fond of passing amongst themselves. Further, what happened between Elodin and I was neither romance nor bawdy story. We were like stars whose orbits brought us together, our paths foreordained. And like stars, eventually that momentum carried us away from each other.

We had been, shall we say, aware of each other for some years. I say aware not in the ordinary meaning, as of course he knew his own student. There was just a heightened something in the air between us always, whether I was answering a question in a lecture hall full of students, or we were heatedly debating a point of theory while a flask boiled over in the lab. If he was in a room, I knew he was there. I think it was the same with him. The flame was so low, at first, that it seemed we would never reach the boiling point, but then he asked to give me private naming lessons.

Including Eilani seemed mere formality, cover. After she had joined his alchemy class, she asked me with wide eyes why I hadn't had Elodin sponsor me, instead of suffering in the Medica. At the time I told her that the Chancellor could least of all risk breaking this accepted rule, and she seemed satisfied. It was the truth, but not all of it. In reality, I think we both felt this affinity between us was heading somewhere forbidden, and that such a break in precedent as sponsoring a female student in alchemy would have drawn too much attention to it. At least that was a convenient excuse for him.

So when he approached us both after lecture one day to discuss a private seminar, I thought he must be trying to manufacture a smokescreen. We had already had one passionate encounter in the lab, unsatisfyingly incomplete but with the promise of much more. He'd slung an arm over my shoulders in congratulation for an experiment gone well, and when I gave him a surprised glance it was as if someone had finally turned up the flame beneath us. The heat flooded us both. He'd put a finger under my chin, tipped my head up, and kissed me firmly. Time constraints and the threat of being discovered stopped us from going much further, and so I imagined he was inventing a reason for us to meet more often. Honestly, I didn't even think he intended for there to be a seminar.

Eilani's eyes lit up, though. "Naming?" she asked, a real thrill in her voice. "I've wanted to study it for so long, but Master Xuan hardly ever teaches."

Elodin smiled, a special smile I had come to realize (and accept) was for my cousin only. Given our recent encounter in the lab, I could afford to be generous. "I thought as much," he told her. "Devi told me many students wish to learn naming but rarely have the opportunity." (This was a reference to a nasty little limerick about Xuan's laziness and fondness for mulled wine I'd recited for him once. We had both laughed.)

"Can you really teach us without the Master Namer?" she asked. "I didn't know it was allowed."

He was prideful, in those days. Perhaps he still is, but then it was the tender, cocky pride of a precocious young man, easily touched. I loved his pride, almost as much as I loved pricking it. When teased he could be like a wet cat.

"I'm the Chancellor," he said stiffly, followed by a twinkling smile to let her know it was all right. "And besides, masters can teach private seminars in anything they like."

"Also, we're not to tell anyone else," I added.

Elodin turned to look at me, slouched down in my lecture hall seat. I grew warm all over, but held his gaze. There's not going to be any seminar, I thought, and wondered when we would be alone next.

"Better not," he agreed, and turned back to Eilani. "Private seminars out of our specialties are allowed, but even Chancellors have to make allowances for the pride of old men like Master Xuan."

Eilani smiled, delighted. She loved secrets, even if she could rarely keep them.

She kept this one. To my surprise, we did meet for a lesson that week, and the following week as well. Elodin had us perform outrageous exercises in secret, recite poetry backwards, and stay up all night during a hailstorm to count every stone. These lessons were easy for her, even fun. For me, exhausted by double shifts in the Medica and preoccupied by other things, they were infuriating at first. Later, they felt like the one good and pure thing in my life.

Elodin and I also found time to meet, privately. This meeting was satisfyingly complete. We met again. Our meetings fell into something like a routine, between morning practicum and Elxa Dal's lectures and supper in the Mews. He began to speak more than a few words during and after. I shared a little of myself with him. The meetings grew longer, languorous, prolonged. Sometimes he talked about alchemy as well, and at some point our private meetings merged with the naming lessons in my mind. Instead of being bored and frustrated, I could see that this was another aspect of my lover, a whimsical and light-hearted way of viewing the world that was a stark contrast to the Elodin I saw in the lab or the bed chamber. When teaching or performing alchemy, he was pure cerebral energy. With me, he could be so intense it was almost frightening. I think now that those were the first glimmers of the madness that eventually consumed him, though at the time I mistook it for only passion. But in naming lessons, especially with Eilani, he was gentle and fey and kind, unexpectedly funny and rarely out of patience. It was the naming, and it was also her.

But that was not the side of him that I saw most often.

I have said this was a confession. So I must here confess that it was I who first unearthed the sticky-covered book from a forgotten shelf in the archives, purely because it seemed to be bound in a skin I'd never seen. I later learned it was infant's skin, but by then I had gone far enough not to be shocked by such a small thing. I am the one who deciphered the alchemical recipes, a process that involved three separate steps of translation, and I used a restorative powder Eilani had given me to bring to life the faded illustrations. If it were not for me, that thing would still be moldering on Sub-Two, its secrets growing more harmless and invisible by the year.

If it were not for me, everything would be different.

I was so curious in those days, though. Every day brought me new knowledge from a hundred sources but still I was so greedy for more that I would read six strange books a week, gathered from all corners of the Archives. I learned obsolete Cealdish court rituals, methods of farming extinct animals, and alchemies so old I hadn't heard of half the ingredients. Bestiaries, lyric poetry, and royal histories all found their way to my carrel. I felt starved for knowledge and thought, even while drowning in the enormous ocean of words that makes up the Archives.

Now, of course, that I am cut off from that source, I pity that girl for whom six books a week was not enough. Because there was so much pain ahead of her that she could not see coming, I allow her that one frivolity, to take for granted the peerless gift of all those books.

So my first confession is this: I brought a book of frankly black arts to my alchemy master and sometime lover, knowing that instead of burning it and hauling me up on the horns for attempted malfeasance, he would read my translated notes, study the restored plates, and in all likelihood, do exactly what he did. It was irresistible to him. He was Elodin, youngest Chancellor, cleverest master, and fraying ever so slightly around the edges.

"Do you really think it could be done?" he asked me hoarsely, some days later. We had been in his chambers for an hour already, but I realized that his mind had been entirely elsewhere. I might have been hurt, if I had been that kind of girl. If it had been anything but the book.

He probably expected me to say something modest, defer to his wisdom and experience. Or perhaps not. He knew me well, with the small part of his thoughts that he spared for me. And Elodin did not ask stupid questions.

"I wouldn't have brought it to you if I didn't think it could be tried," I said truthfully.

"But should it be tried?" he asked the room. Not me.

I let him answer that question on his own. My opinions didn't matter in this case. I had brought him the book because I needed ingredients I couldn't get as a Re'lar, equipment I had yet to try, and a steady second Alar for the bindings. And, maybe, because I was afraid to try it on my own. Maybe I wanted someone else to share the responsibility.

He didn't come to any kind of decision that day, instead pulling the bedclothes up and devoting his full attention to me at last. Not the next day either, or the next, until we had finished an afternoon's lessons with Eilani in the nearby pine wood. She had called a tree's name for a second time and was recovering, drowsy but warm on a winter's afternoon wrapped in a wool blanket we always brought for times such as these.

Elodin and I were sharing a flask of hot cider when he spoke, as if no time had passed between his last question and today.

"Of course it should be tried," he said. "Knowledge is a pure force. Intentions shape it. If we intend well, the results will be for good."

There was a saying in alchemy, good intentions and bad work are worse than bad intentions, but I didn't quote it at him. We always did good work.

"We can get all the ingredients but one," he mused. Then he looked at me. "I think you know what I mean."

"What do you mean?" Eilani's sleepy voice drifted over to us.

"Nothing, kitten," I said. "Rest more. Eat a clove bun."

"Is it to do with that book Devi's been restoring?" she asked. She was sitting up now, looking far too wide awake.

I would have lied, but that was not Elodin's way. "It is," he said. "Though it's better not to talk of it here."

"You're going to try something out of that book," she said, and now she looked like nothing so much as a child asking to stay up past its bedtime. It made me want to soothe her back to sleep, and I glared at Elodin slightly.

He never saw her as the child I did, though. "I think we will," he said slowly. "And I think it would be better if you were not involved, Eilani."

"Because I'm young?" she asked.

"Because of the way your mind works," he said. "I think working alchemy of this sort would not be good for you."

"Let me see," she said. Elodin reached into his rucksack to pull out the book. I was surprised for a moment, but of course he couldn't leave it lying around his chambers for a servant to find.

Eilani looked very solemn as she opened the book to the marked place. I thought she grimaced when her small, white hands touched the sticky binding, and I hoped she never asked what it was made from. It seemed to take an age for her to read the two pages, though in reality it was probably no more than a handful of heartbeats. She was a quick study.

"You need an ingredient," she said when she looked up at last. "I think I can be that ingredient."

"No," we said together, our hearts so in tune with each other that I nearly grasped his hand as we spoke.

"I trust you," she said simply, her face open and clear as water.

Elodin and I looked at each other, and nothing more was said that day.

It was a long spring of gathering equipment and ingredients, of binding things with sympathy and boiling them together with alchemy, then binding them again. I tried to forget Eilani's terrible offer, and I hope he did too. In truth, I don't think it ever really left his mind.

When we came back from the summer holiday, you understand, I think he was already half-mad. I don't say this excuses what happened. I don't know where his studies took him that opened that dark door in his mind, and I certainly don't blame myself entirely. But I can't help thinking that brooding on what we were trying to do didn't help, and that I brought him that book at the worst possible time, when his fragile mind was already at some kind of tipping point. I don't believe I could have stopped his fall, but I might have delayed it a little, if I had been clear-eyed.

At least I might have saved her.

But I was young, and I still mistook that blank, animal intensity in the bed chamber for furious passion, and I still delighted in being taken seriously by the youngest Chancellor in University history. That such a person not only failed to discipline me for what was certainly a crime by Arcanum standards should have warned me, let alone that he was willing to follow me into this dangerous place. But who knows madness when it wears our smiling lover's face? And besides, Elodin was doing everything I wanted him to.

We had long discussions about the ingredient, as we had taken to calling it. Methods of procurement. Methods of preservation. A certain infamous Count's name came up more than once, more in jest or exaggeration than serious planning. Neither of us mentioned Eilani.

Finally one of us suggested an experiment of a lower order. We neither of us wanted to waste the painstakingly prepared supplies, especially when a transference of ingredient might throw the whole thing out of balance, but we couldn't come to an agreement on that subject. So a lower order it was.

I decided on a dove. They were plentiful on the University roofs, reasonably easy to catch, and their anatomy had been well-detailed in books. They were less disgusting than rats, and had less personality than cats. Noble reasons, I'm sure.

In the end I paid an Imre urchin to bring me three doves, and Elodin took Eilani out alone for an afternoon of calling stones' names. It galled me that I had only Named in off-guard moments, anger or passion or sleepwalk, but I undoubtedly had talents elsewhere. I would have liked him with me for this first step, if only to display my skill with the surgeon's knife, but one person could slip into the Medica's hallways more easily than two, especially when one of them is a University Chancellor. I wonder sometimes how different things might have been if we'd both been discovered in that disused operation theater, but in the end, they probably would have been about the same.

I took my time pinning out the first bird. I had a steady hand, but one errant wing-twitch and I could sever the fibers I was hoping to study. I would have liked to sedate the creature, if only to make my work easier, but there had been a run on the medicine stores recently and drugs were more carefully counted. I couldn't be seen in the kind of place that sold sedatives, and neither could Elodin. So the bird had to suffer.

At the time, I think I still wrapped the whole thing in a gauzy haze of generous self-justification. This was knowledge for the common good, no matter what kind of book I'd found it in. If we could only unlock this secret, much of the world's suffering would be alleviated. Life would, in fact, be changed forever. We were undertaking a great thing.

Now of course I know that it was the glory of Devi I was seeking, as much or more than an end to the world's pain. I don't think it so unworthy a goal, mind. I am just more honest about it.

Whatever my intentions on that blustery fall day, the combined screeching of three doves was more than I'd anticipated, and it brought someone to my door. Boena, Arwyl's newest giller, poked her head in curiously, just as I made the third incision. I scarcely had time to see the straining ligaments and blue-grey lungs before she had me by the shoulder.

"What are you do?" she demanded in her thick Cealdish accent. She'd come here only the previous term, with excellent credentials from a medica in her hometown, and her grasp of the language was still tenuous.

"The bird injured himself," I said, the practiced lie smooth and quick. "I was going to stitch it back up."

"With cut?" she asked, miming the movement of a scalpel, her face dark and angry. She was a tall, heavy woman, and she towered over me.

"The cut wasn't clean," I said. "I had to widen it."

Boena looked down at the operating table. "Why hold it down? With -- uulip?" She pointed to the pins.

I shrugged. "To keep it still."

Boena gave me a long, steady stare. "To make still, you use drug. Not uulip. Animal makes more pain this way, more fear."

I shrugged again. "I was trying to hurry. And I didn't think the Medica of the University would spare any sedatives for an injured bird."

She was already taking the pins out of the bird's wing, cradling it carefully in her big, calloused hands. She brought it close to her face and cooed at it in Cealdish. Droplets of blood clotted with feathers fell onto her surgical robes.

"Bring to me next time," Boena told me. "At home, care for many bird. This one, I prablych." She mimed sewing.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sure you'll do a much better job than I would."

I gave her my sweetest smile, and the whole thing might have passed if she hadn't spied the cage with two more doves beneath the operating table.

"What these be?" she cried, clutching the injured dove closer to her breast.

I looked down and, damn my fair skin, felt my face go red. It's the worst part of lying. I stooped quickly and picked up the cage.

"Family," I said, still feeling the heat in my cheeks. I was having a hard time meeting her eyes, so I fumbled with the clasp of the door and moved towards the room's one small window. "I didn't want to -- leave them alone."

To my relief, the window was one that opened, and I was just about to swing it wide and free the birds when I felt Boena's heavy hand on my shoulder again.

"I take them too," she said in my ear. She reached for the cage, and I had no choice but to hand it to her. She brought the cage close to her face and studied the birds while I yanked the window shut again. The hinges were rusty and it grated as I pulled it towards me.

"You are -- bird lover?" Boena asked me. "Animal lover?"

"Oh, yes," I said.

She nodded. "This is good. For Medica student, very good. Too little heart here, I think." She made a face, then nodded intently at me. I could see the intelligence in her eyes, behind the absurdly bad Aturan.

"I agree," I said. No trace of irony there.

"And woman student should be together, I think. Like one, yes? Many them, few us. Better together."

That I could agree with truthfully, and did.

"Take birds now," Boena said, looking down at the one she still held close. "You visit in -- one moon? Better, then."

I nodded again. "A month."

"Month," she said, carefully. "One month."

"Thank you," I said, and slipped out behind her as quickly as I could.

I did not visit her in a month. I didn't want her to remember my face; few as we women students were, it was possible that a visiting giller from a foreign country might forget one small, reddish-blonde girl. I didn't want her to think about what I'd been doing with that scalpel, or look closer at the feathers of the uninjured birds. All I could hope was that she would not notice the forbidden sygaldry carved into their flesh, or that she would not recognize it if she did. I did not want to be there to answer any questions she might have.

The next batch of doves, I studied in Elodin's chambers. I told him he owed me that much. This time I gleaned the knowledge I needed about the living works of a bird, and adjusted our recipe accordingly.

We made the first trial in deep winter of my fifth year. I had drawn an early admissions slot, so had plenty of time afterwards, and most of the other students went home for winter holidays. The alchemy lab was deserted on the morning we smuggled in a fresh cage of doves, caught by a willing urchin in exchange for a handful of drabs, and began to assemble the prepared ingredients which had been hidden in various places around the lab.

I won't say the smuggling and the hiding wasn't part of the appeal. Neither will I say that we didn't celebrate success on one of the gillers' workstations, heedless of the papers which had been stacked for grading and the vials of undoubtedly dangerous alchemical reagents. There was a moment, with elation in my veins and Elodin beneath me, that will probably be the last thing I think of as I lie, alone and unmourned, on my deathbed in seventy years. But we paid too high a price for it.

The dove was dead. I strangled it with my own hands. Then we brought it to life. It was the greatest miracle ever witnessed, and only two of us saw it.

I will not say how we did it, of course. This is not a manual for self-destruction. But I won't tell you not to try it yourself. We found one way, but there must be others. That sticky-skinned book is long since ash, but not even the Archives have every book in the world. Knowledge is shaped by our intentions, and it's there for the taking if you want it badly enough.

The thing was, we couldn't stop there. I'm not sure anyone could, but certainly not me, with that hunger for glory burning me up inside, or Elodin, slipping further each day into a world without morals or reason. We were the worst combination of talent and desire, me wanting to take my accomplishments and shove them in the face of every man who'd brushed me off as a sweet little girl, he wanting to push the boundaries for the sheer hell of it. Tehlu forgive us both.

***

I am not a religious person. I was raised in the faith, but yawned my way through sermons by the time I was seven, and openly mocked them by ten. I don't see the world as governed by beings who judge us, and I don't live my life in anticipation of punishment or reward at its end. The meditative state of naming is the closest thing to spiritual I get, and I haven't named in years.

And yet. I am confessing here. I ignore the world's rules most of the time, but certain things have the power to move me. I must have some sort of moral code, though it is often averred by those who deal with me in business that I have no such thing. I have felt shame; I live with it every day.

Where does this moral code spring from? The teachings of my parents? I considered my father a fool in how he handled his business, too soft to turn a profit from those spineless farmers he lent money to, too timid to chase the bigger fish in the cities. My mother died when I was born. Did those sermons reach me somehow? Or is it someone else's eyes I am borrowing when I look at myself and feel this guilt?

This is my own confession to myself. To lie would be foolish, and a waste of good ink. Let us say, then, that Eilani was my conscience if I ever had one. What does it mean to destroy one's own conscience? Does it end all feelings of shame forever, or does it ensure that all one can ever feel is shame?

I would like to ask Elodin some of these questions. I don't think he has the answers, but it was always good to talk with him. Especially in the old days, when the spark between us was only a low-banked fire, enough to warm your feet by, not enough to burn you.

***

I don't think either of us told Eilani of our success with the doves, but she knew. That intense elation was probably written on our faces, obvious to someone so sensitive and familiar with us both. She knew our other secret too, I think, but honestly the only reason everyone didn't know was that student-master relationships were so very rare and forbidden, it was almost taboo to even imagine such a thing was happening. Not that there wasn't some likely talk, somewhere, but no one would have really believed it of Elodin. Easier to believe we were raising the dead, even, than acting as men and women do everywhere, from the meanest cowshed to the loftiest tower. That's how the University works, a little out of step with the rest of the world.

It was a naming class in spring when she spoke again. The three of us were lying in the grass on a hill above Imre, trying to see clouds with our eyes closed. That was the kind of thing Elodin was likely to have us doing nowadays, absurd mental stretches that bored me and delighted Eilani. I was half-asleep, actually, when she took us both by the hand. She was lying between us on the blanket, a natural place for her. Eilani was always like a wild creature who came in close only rarely, and was welcomed all the more for it. The closeness reminded me of our childhood, the innocence that seemed suddenly precious now that I was farther away from it. Her childishness no longer exasperated me. Eilani was growing into a woman, and those eldritch features hid a mind as sharp as any, despite her hesitance to use it fully. If she wanted to remain childlike a while longer, I, deep in adult concerns, no longer minded.

I don't know what Elodin took away from those golden afternoons, whispering naming secrets while lying warm and intimate with a young girl, his lover drowsing just beyond. I'd like to think it was something pure and good, something that lasted. Something like Eilani.

She took us both by the hand, as I said. I couldn't see Elodin on the other side of her, but I knew.

"I'm ready to be your ingredient," she said softly.

She said ingredient. I heard sacrifice.

There were many possible answers. Elodin and I had been having this argument for almost a year, and we could make each other's arguments. Grave-digging is illegal. Paying off the local executioner takes more clout than a University Chancellor has. Arwyl would never agree. Round and round, until half our kisses were merely to shut the other one up.

And here was a willing body, lying between us. I watched her softly rising chest, then raised my eyes to meet Elodin's. He had been doing the same thing. It did not take much to imagine my cousin's small body, slender as my own, as made up of the component parts that facilitate life. Lungs for breath. Heart and veins for blood. Supple muscles and light bones for support. Pale skin, downed with gold, to cover and protect it all.

I had these thoughts, and I know Elodin did too. May we be forgiven. But by whom? Eilani was my conscience, and it was Eilani who asked me to think of her as an ingredient, part of an alchemical recipe for life. Is that not excuse enough?

But Eilani never really understood alchemy. She was a Namer, and a sympathist. She named herself ingredient, and she bound us three together forever. I still don't think she truly knew what she was doing.

The plan was made without much discussion. Not that day, but over the next weeks, as we prepared new batches of the tedious alchemical components. I don't think anyone ever voiced what, exactly, we were going to do. Elodin found me one day making a large batch of the primary reagent, and silently joined me. Later I found him etching sygaldry on a new set of vials. Eilani told me she had traded a week's worth of shifts at the Archive, and would be free for a certain period of days. No one knew how long we would really need. We did not talk about it.

It pains me to recall, but I did not spend that last night in Mews. I should have been there with her. I'm certain she was frightened, lying in her too-big bed alone, imagining the cold breath of death. She was always a little afraid of the dark. Though she was nearly twenty, she had yet to take a lover, even amongst the other young women. When I think of her on that night, I imagine her utterly alone.

I, of course, spent the night in Elodin's chambers. We didn't know it then, but it was to be nearly our last time together. Does anyone know when it's the last time? Would it make things better if we knew? On this night, the keyed-up anxiety we both felt made his mask of sanity slip just a bit, and I caught my first glimpse into the unbound chaos behind. As our passion built, he muttered strange words, things I barely recognized as forbidden bindings mixed with scraps of a language I had never heard. His eyes darkened, and I finally saw that what I had called passion to myself was something far more menacing. I said something, I think, or stroked his brow, and his hands moved from my shoulders to my throat. The sudden fear I felt, combined with my pained breathing and his relentless stare, moved me inexplicably to the heights of ecstasy, and I would have woken the entire wing if he hadn't covered my mouth with his. Then he tightened his grip.

I said this was not a romance.

Let us skip, lightly, through a breakfast no one was hungry for, past the bruises on my neck I covered awkwardly with a borrowed scarf, to the morning when I killed my cousin.

Can a person kill with love? I would like to think I did so. There was no malice in my heart when I gave her the vial to drink that would steal the breath from her sweet lips and still the beat of her heart. But then I think I was too preoccupied with the pounding of my own heart, the many alchemical balances to correct, the bindings that must be held, to do more than squeeze her hand or brush her cheek. I think I smiled at her. I don't remember. There is no one to ask.

The moments between life and death are long and terrible. Watching her breathing slow, her jaw slacken, I could swear mountains grew and fell to dust. We were alert to every sound, the possible presence of an intruder, and I thought I heard her heart long after it stopped. Elodin was the one who finally reached for her slim wrist, and gave me a slow nod.

The moments between death and life were swift and furious, filled with burning sympathy and hurried alchemical work. Fear and nerves brought us into a heightened state of harmony, and our earlier practice had made perfect. No more than a handful of minutes after the pulse had died in Eilani's veins it quickened again, revived by a draught from the same vial that had snuffed out her life.

Relief was like wildfire in my veins, and I clung to Elodin for a long while, just watching the breath move in her chest again. The roses had come back to her cheeks, and the sight brought me to tears. I could feel him shaking too, his cold hands tight on my shoulders.

Eventually we realized the long while had become a longer while, and still she slept. Wordless, as if we might be overheard, I slipped from his arms and went to my cousin's side. I placed my hand over her mouth, gently, and felt her warm breath. Her eyelids twitched faintly. She looked like a child who had fallen asleep by the hearth, dreaming of holiday sweets.

Reluctantly, I put my hand on her shoulder and shook her. It took three shakes, each harder than the last, but eventually her clear eyes opened.

"Eilani?" I asked.

Her only reply was a soundless scream.

I moved to cradle her, instinctively, but she fought me. I was not strong enough to hold her, and Elodin reached in to take her by the elbows, pinning her back against his chest.

"It's me," I said, my voice trembling. "It's your cousin Devi. You're all right now. I'm sorry. It's all right."

Her eyes were huge and full of panic, trapped as she was. There was no shred of recognition in them.

"Eilani, you're all right," I babbled. "I promise. You had a -- a bad dream. Everything is all right." I reached in to touch her and she actually hissed at me, like a wild thing.

I looked up at Elodin, feeling helpless and beginning to panic myself. He was the Chancellor, a skilled arcanist. Surely he would know what to do.

But he was only looking at her strangely, his head cocked to one side. He regarded her struggles almost as a cat might watch a mouse caught under its paw, bored and curious, but not yet hungry.

That look sent the first real thrill of fear through me. What had I done, and who had I done it with?

"Elodin," I said, very low. "We have to help her."

He shook his head, and the look of detachment faded somewhat, though his eyes were still narrowed. He bent his head to whisper in her ear, and I caught some of the phrases from the previous night. I was beginning to shake again, and this time not with relief.

To my surprise, Eilani actually began to relax. Her head drooped forward, and within moments, it seemed she had fallen back asleep. Elodin laid her back down tenderly, and passed his hand over his eyes.

"She'll sleep now," he said, his eyes still covered. "Fetch a University porter and tell him she was overcome with fumes. Don't let them take her to the Medica, of course. You must care for her in Mews."

"Of course," I said. "Elodin?"

There were many questions in that single word, but he answered none of them. Instead he dropped his hand and gave me a long look. Some of the strangeness was still there in his eyes, and I could not stop shaking.

"You should go to the Medica yourself, when you can," he said. "Get someone else to watch over her, and tell them you have binder's chills. It's something like that, at least."

"Are you all right?" I managed to ask, through clenched teeth.

Elodin gave a half laugh, bitter and wild, and stepped forward to kiss my forehead. That was all the answer I got.

I fetched the porter, and then I tucked Eilani up in her bed. Mola, a second-year I'd taken somewhat under my wing in the Medica, was reading in the common area, and I asked her to watch over my cousin. Fumes, I said, with no explanation. She nodded. Everyone in the University knew what fumes could do.

In the Medica I gave a similarly brief explanation, and let them treat me for binder's chills. It stopped the shaking, at least, even if my mind still felt like an autumn windstorm had blown through it, leaving debris and destruction in its wake. I rested on a narrow cot for an hour, then forced myself back home.

Mola and Eilani were playing a game of spinner's tricks with a long string when I came into the dorm. The yellowing string stretched over all four of their hands and they plucked at it deftly, singing the chants every child in the Commonwealth knows. Eilani looked up and gave me a smile when I came in, but didn't miss a beat.

I could have dropped dead with sheer relief. Instead, I marshaled a cool, calm face and picked up someone's leftover apple from the table. It was mushy, but I hadn't eaten in hours. I sat at the table, the better to enjoy it.

"Sixteen for silver, twenty for gold, hold onto your boys be they ever so bold," the girls sang, and dropped the string in a tangle. They giggled together, and Mola rose to join me at the table.

"She's all right now," she said in a low voice. "She was a bit queer when she woke up, and didn't know what had happened or how she got home. I told her it was fumes in the lab, and that settled her some."

"Thanks," I said sincerely. "I don't expect there will be any long-lasting damage. She's -- delicate."

"Like a wisp of straw, that one," Mola said, nodding. "The both of you. Strong wind would blow you away."

She was wrong about me, but I was afraid she might be all too right about Eilani. My cousin was playing with the string by herself now, a childish and simple look of delight on her face that I didn't care for at all. I finished the apple deliberately, then laid the core on the table and went to Eilani's bedside.

"Hello, kitten," I said. She jerked her chin up at my voice, seeming startled, then relaxed a little.

"Hello, cat," she said. That wasn't the way it went -- she usually meowed back at me -- but I was so relieved to hear her speaking I couldn't complain.

"Feeling all right?"

"Better now," Eilani said. "Before..."

"Do you -- remember what happened?" I asked carefully. Mola was still in the room, folding bed linens now.

"Mola said fumes," Eilani said, wrinkling her nose. "They're bad for your head."

"Yes," I said. I looked over my shoulder, then lowered my voice. "Do you remember anything else? Did you -- go somewhere?"

Eilani stared at me for a long moment, her eyes widening. Then she began to cry.

"I don't like questions," she said, and hid beneath the blanket.

***

What I did next was wrong. I think I knew it even then. Of course I should have gone to the masters and confessed the whole thing. Or I could have tried to get Arwyl to help me in secret, or someone else at the Medica. And Tehlu knows I should have at least met with Elodin, so we could have worked together to figure out where we went astray with Eilani and how to bring her back to us again.

I did none of those things.

I took my shifts in the Medica as usual, and attended lectures. I kept Eilani out of class by letting it be known she was still suffering ill effects from a laboratory mishap, the details of which I left carefully vague. I brought her meals in Mews, and juggled apples to make her smile. Some days she seemed almost clear-minded again and asked for her books, and I thought perhaps the storm had passed. Then she would look at me like a stranger, and cry if anyone came too close, and sing songs to her fingers and hair, and it was all I could do to keep anyone from finding out. I pretended to the other girls that it was some kind of childish game. I doubt they believed me.

And Elodin? We kept away from each other. He didn't remark on Eilani's absence from his classes, and I didn't spend extra hours in the alchemy lab anymore. He didn't ask how she was. I didn't tell him how bad things really were. I think I wanted to believe the lie I told myself too desperately, that she was suffering from some kind of brief illness instead of being pulled inexorably down by a dark, clammy tide. Telling anyone would have made it too real.

We did meet privately just the once, and we did not discuss Eilani. If I had been disturbed by the chaos in his eyes and the cruel strength in his hands the last time, now I was terrified. The fact that my pleasure did not diminish, that it even increased, terrified me all the more. I had played rough games before, and Elodin was not my first, but I knew danger when I saw it, especially in myself. When I left that night, I knew I would not be returning. I fairly fled.

Who do you turn to, when those closest to you are losing themselves in madness? When you don't know if it's you that's driving them to it, or you who will be next?

It's easy to say that I should have spoken to someone, if you don't know the University. Students are fined or whipped for tiny indiscretions, the severity of their punishments heavily dependent on the individual masters' favor. I had made close connections with none of them except Elodin, and some, like Brandeur, disliked me outright. I'd insulted Lorren, fought with Elxa Dal, and been rankly insubordinant to Arwyl, who tolerated it in private but would probably hold it against me in a tribunal. Worse, I was a woman. They couldn't whip me, but there were other, more terrible things they could do. I could be suspended. I could be demoted to E'lir. I could be sent away, back to play the spinster in my father's house. And nothing guaranteed they would be able to help Eilani. For all I knew, they'd just stick in her Haven along with the other cracked students, the ones whose minds had gone completely. She'd never survive a season in that place.

I finished the term in a haze of blind hope, praying that things would return to normal each morning. They never did.

My silence was wrong, cowardly, even, but back then I still had things to lose.

***

You can imagine what the summer holidays were like, when we returned home. Eilani was intermittently her old lucid self, but more and more often she became that wide-eyed waif. She had a fondness for children's rhymes and games, and often sang to my sister's two small children. Sometimes she went whole days without speaking, and sometimes she burst into tears at the slightest question. Remembering anything seemed to cause her physical pain, and her days were lived from moment to moment.

Her father, of course, was intensely concerned. They were well-off enough that her time at the University was more of a genteel education, a pastime furthering her natural talents, than a training for a skilled profession. Female arcanists rarely work for a living. Therefore, it was no great matter for her to miss a few terms, or not to return to University at all. Uncle Ewion had been through the training himself, and he had seen minds break. He wanted to keep his gentle girl at home before the damage was irreparable.

For my part, I was wild to get her back to the University. Time away had brought things into sharp clarity, and I had to admit Eilani was not going to recover on her own. Perhaps Elodin could come up with something to restore her mind. She hadn't cracked in the usual fashion, through overwork or stretching her mind too much. On the contrary, her skill at naming and sympathy showed what a supple and resilient mind she had. It was alchemy gone awry, I was sure of it. And who better to cure her than the Master Alchemist? Provided he was still sane, I told myself bitterly.

In the end, I prevailed. I got lucky and Eilani had a string of good days, when she could remember the names of things on the table and people in the house, and she didn't have any of her wailing nightmares. She was still childlike enough that her fondness for rhyming gaming was considered sweet. Most important, she wanted to be wherever I was. And I was returning to University.

I felt like a kidnapper when we were settled in the post carriage with all our luggage. Eilani was precious to her father, and I was taking her back into danger. I wasn't at all sure that Elodin could help her, even at his best. And now... I shivered to recall our parting in spring. He had a stranger's eyes, and he called me by something that was not my name. I could only hope that a summer's rest would have restored him.

My hopes were dashed on our very first day back. As I hauled an old trunk through the courtyard, I heard laughter from one of the smaller quadrangles. Eilani slipped away into the crowd, and I had no choice but to follow her.

When we finally pushed through the press to see the object of laughter, my heart sank. Elodin stood half-naked, holding an old badly-strung harp and singing something in those nonsense phrases again. I could still pick out scraps of strong bindings, deep magic, enough that any student should have feared the power in his voice. Instead, they laughed.

I stood there for a terrible moment, undecided as to whether I should fetch a blanket to cover him or a master to make sure he didn't accidentally cast some terrible binding over the idiot, laughing crowd. It was a moment too long, because he saw me.

"Ah," he said, strumming the harp grandly. "A fair lady."

The crowd laughed. Asses.

He crossed the few steps to stand before me. He dwarfed me as always, so all I could see was that stupid harp. I looked determinedly up.

"My lady, there is death in your kiss."

I opened my mouth to tell him to shut up, but he bent swiftly and kissed me. It was only a brief instant, and then I twisted backwards, out of his grasp, and slapped him.

That was our last kiss.

Forgetting Eilani, I turned and ran into the crowd. There was a certain broom cupboard in Mains which had done its duty for me in the past as a hiding place, and I spent a good hour in there before I remembered that Elodin and I had once hidden ourselves there as well. That was early days, when stolen kisses in a closet were all the thrill either of us needed.

I trudged back to the now-empty courtyard to retrieve my trunk, only to find it missing. It turned up in Mews, fetched by a pair of friendly girls who had seen the whole thing.

"We should ask for a written edict on the issue," one of them grumbled. "Masters cannot kiss female students. It will give the rest of them ideas."

"Masters already rule our waking lives," the other one said. "Why not our love lives as well? I'll take an unwanted kiss over the scolding Hemme gave me in class last term."

"That's disgusting," Mola said from her bed in the corner. "You want to be masters' property? We might as well give up what little pretense of equality we have."

"We need to file a grievance," the first girl insisted. "They love their rules here. They won't take anything seriously unless it's written in the register."

"A grievance against the Chancellor?" the second girl laughed. "I wish you luck in making that stick. Face it, we are property."

"I don't think he'll be Chancellor long," said an older girl, an El'the from the Archives.

"What?" I asked. "Why do you say that?"

"I stayed here over the holidays working on a Fishery project," she answered. "The things he did and said this summer..."

"Yes?" I said impatiently.

"He'll be in Haven before long."

"Says who?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Everybody. It's not strange for an arcanist to go cracked. He was more brilliant than most, he was bound to be more cracked than most."

"Speaking of..." said the second of the girls who'd spoken earlier.

I turned to face her. She had a smug face, with piggish eyes. I had never liked her much. "Speaking of what?" I asked.

"Speaking of mad people," she said deliberately. "Your cousin has been in the baths for the last hour. She said she needed to find the other side of water."

I left the room at a decent pace, but broke into a dead run in the hall. I flung open the door to the baths, and found Eilani standing alone at one of the sinks, wiggling her fingers in the water like my two-year-old niece.

She turned to look at me as I came in, her face free of anything but a naive wonder.

"Look," she said. "The water swallowed the sunlight. If I swallow the water, will I glow like the sun?"

I stood a moment, catching my breath. She didn't wait for an answer, just turned back to her water play.

"No water on the other side," she sang, under her breath. "Black and cold and dry, no water on the other side."

The next morning I was called up on the horns.

***

I imagine being called before the assembled members of the Arcanum is one thing you can understand if you've never been to University. Everyone has, at one time or another, faced down a group of highly learned men on often trumped-up charges, been given only brief moments to prepare a defense and less time to speak it, and been threatened with permanent expulsion from the field you've spent your life training for, all because someone filed a grievance against you.

You haven't?

I can tell you, it's even more fun than it sounds, especially when one of them is your newly mad, newly ex-lover.

***

That first trial was a formality. The charge they put on the official record that morning was "Conduct Unbecoming," of which I was swiftly found guilty. There was no elaboration or detail of the crime given, even to me. The punishment for a female student was a fine and a week's suspension. The votes were eight to zero. Elodin abstained. No mention was made of who initiated said conduct, and I seethed.

After this swift perversion of justice, however, I was not released. Instead, one porter took my shoulders and another wrapped something soft over my eyes, before I knew what was happening. The last thing I saw was Elodin's pale face, his darkened eyes seemingly staring at nothing.

They took me to a series of cells I didn't even know existed. I spent three days down there, growing faint from lack of air and increasingly worried about Eilani. The porters didn't seem amenable to bribes, even if I had anything to pay them with, and I couldn't trust the girls in Mews to realize just how deeply off-balance she had become. Worse, I couldn't trust them to see that it was only alchemical poisoning instead of mental strain, and not take her to Haven.

I realized just how serious things were when they brought me to the secret chamber. The porters left me alone with the nine masters, in a small, ominous room lit by red sympathy lamps. The flickering lights turned everyone's faces cruel, even Arwyl and Kilvin, even Elodin. Especially Elodin.

Lorren began to read the charges. I suppose he liked me least, of those who knew me. I cursed myself inwardly for the scene I'd made when I left the Archives at the end of my first year, criticizing everything about the place. Lorren had a long memory.

"Devi, Maewet's daughter, you are hereby charged by the council of nine with the following. One, that you did perform wrongful acts of vivisection upon living creatures."

I glanced at Arwyl. His face told me nothing, but I knew Boena had told him something. That had been nearly a year ago, and they had no proof. Had he saved the charge up for something like this? Perhaps all the masters kept female students' minor indiscretions in reserve, just in case.

"Two, that you unlawfully fraternized with a senior member of the Arcanum, namely, a master who shall not be identified by this tribunal."

There was some shifting in the room, and I understood. They weren't throwing me out for vivisection. Someone knew. Perhaps a porter, or perhaps that kiss in the courtyard had just confirmed a general suspicion. Or perhaps Elodin himself had talked. He seemed to have been mad all summer.

I won't detail the next two charges. They were lewd and humiliating and true, but only in a sick sort of way. I couldn't believe I was hearing stone-faced Lorren speak those words, or that someone had written them down. Hemme had a twisted little smile on his face, but the others had the grace to look embarrassed.

Elodin stared at the ceiling.

It doesn't matter how I pled, or what sort of defense I tried to cobble together. I'd had three days in the cells to think of it, but there was nothing I cared to say. I wouldn't lower myself to lie to these smug fools, or make excuses for my actions. I might have settled for hurling crude insults, except that in this secret meeting, I couldn't even get them into the official record. They had stripped me utterly, and I knew it.

And strangely, they weren't even punishing me for my real crime. No one knew or cared about one small golden-haired girl whose mind had gone out wandering forever.

By the end, when they had pronounced my expulsion (the details of which, I was assured, would remain private), and fined me on top of it, I was only aching to be out of that windowless, airless place. I would find Eilani, and take her with me back home. Uncle might know something alchemical to help her, once I had confessed all, and at any rate she had seemed better back home in familiar surroundings. I would help my father in the counting house, as he had complained that his son-in-law did not have a head for numbers, or for anything but hunting and hot wine. I would shake the dust of this place from my feet, and never think again about binding stresses or reagents or dark-eyed men with slender hands. I think I really believed, in that furious moment, that it was possible.

Elxa Dal approached me when it was over. I scowled up at him.

"Devi," he said, his voice soft.

"Master," I answered, bitterly.

"I am sorry."

"Sorry I wasn't expelled years ago?" I spat. "Or sorry I didn't choose you for my fraternization?"

He looked startled. "No," he said. "Though I regret that things came to this pass. I wish -- I wish you had spoken with me."

"I tried that, years ago," I said.

He nodded, closing his eyes briefly. "I am sorry that it falls to me to give you a final piece of news."

My heart sank.

"Eilani?" I asked.

"She disappeared several days ago. It seems that her disappearance was only reported this morning."

I imagined that piggish girl in Mews, her little smirk. Mola was probably pulling doubles in the Medica, and there was no one else who would have looked after a little wisp of straw.

"I'll find her," I said. "Just give me a day."

"Ah," Elxa Dal said. "Unfortunately, you must leave the University grounds at once. Is there one of your friends who can undertake the search?"

I glanced to my left, and saw Elodin, still staring at the ceiling. From the tilt of his head, though, I could tell he'd heard every word.

"Find her," I said to him, my voice low and hard. "Find her and care for her. She's your responsibility now."

Elodin still didn't look down, but he nodded. He might have been nodding at the ceiling, for all I know.

They escorted me into Imre that day, with my one trunk of possessions. The entire University turned out to see me go, not just the Arcanum students. I could feel their stares as I went, hear their whispers.

"What's she done?" one boy asked.

"Don't know," answered a portly master. "But females are always trouble. This is why we don't take them in the University proper."

In my fantasies I called the name of the wind as I went, or better, fire. I was angry enough I could have called the name of the whole world. But in truth, my teeth were clenched too tight to say a word. It was the first and last time that I let my anger silence me.

***

I couldn't go home, not without Eilani. My uncle died not long after I was expelled, I think from grief, combined with the weak heart that had always plagued him. My father was not the sort to search for a wayward niece. He wasn't the sort to search for a wayward daughter, either. Regardless, I was his child, and after I had fumed and cried and slept in a shabby tavern room for a span, I realized I had other talents I could use to make my way in the world besides alchemy and sympathy. A head for numbers and a reputation as a lawless arcanist could prove very useful. It wasn't long before I had moved to the baker's alley, and sent the last of my coin into the world to seed with desperate young men who left drops of their blood behind. Their harvest was gratifying, to say the least.

Here is my final confession: I have never returned to the University to search for my cousin, though I've never gone very far away from it. I heard they locked Elodin up, and I heard they let him out, and I still don't know if he ever found her. I heard about the exploits of a new, bright talent in the Arcanum, and I have met him and dealt with him and bested him with wits and with my will. I imagine he thinks he's the only young student to make the masters sit up and take notice. I imagine Elodin thought the same thing, when he was young.

I couldn't truly leave the University, but I can't face going back. I miss the books like someone tore my beating heart out. I am hungry for knowledge, barely surviving on the scraps I can earn. I am still, after all this time, so angry with the masters and their fear of me as a woman that I think I really could call the fire down on them all. Even if I haven't named in years.

I don't know if I am more afraid of finding Eilani, or of not finding her. She could be dead, though I feel somehow she's not. I've never gone home again, and sometimes I imagine that she was found and brought back to her father's green-painted townhouse, where she and my nieces play children's games all day long. That is one possibility.

There is also the possibility of finding her irretrievably mad, filthy and feral like the wild creatures she once resembled. Or worst of all, finding her just lucid enough to hate me.

The truth is that I think very little about those days, when I can help it. I have a new and absorbing line of work, one which combines all my talents surprisingly well. I have my books. Sometimes I make a friend, for a little while. Sometimes I take a lover, for as long as I can stand him.

Sometimes I wake up at night, my hands stretched before me, searching in the dark, and I wonder what it was that Eilani saw on the other side.

My name is Devi, just Devi. I killed my cousin and my conscience, and neither came back all the way. I was the lover of a madman, and a dangerous enough woman to make nine masters of the Arcanum throw me out on those grounds alone, foolish as it sounds now. I will lend you coin, in exchange for that which you least want to lose. Now that you've heard of me, try not to forget. There may not be much to me, but I hold on. It might be my greatest talent.