I lifted my hand and left behind a greasy print on the marble.
“It’s less bouncy,” I said. Divinations I’d done in wooden bowls were smooth and clear, but in metal, they rippled. The magic jumped about between the littlest pieces of metals.
Estrel nodded. “I see what you were going for, Emilie. Thank you. Would anyone else like to try?”
“Metal conducts magic, more so than stone or wood.” Coline’s low tone sounded more like a reading from some old tome she found unbearable and boring, than from her. “The ethereal makeup of wood, the way its smallest parts are organized, prevents conduction and stops the midnight arts from leeching out of the bowls and weakening our arts.”
Isabelle and I stared at her.
“As good an explanation as any.” Estrel poured water into each of our bowls. “Power breaks the bonds of the world—the ones holding iron and carbon together to form steel, and the boundaries of time—which is what allows noonday artists to transform a sword into a shield or midnight artists to divine a possible future.”
Estrel showed us the old scars on her hands. “Power breaks bonds and corrupts what it flows through, including mortal bodies. That is why many artists use hacks, but there will be no hacks here. Scry for me now. Show me what you can do.”
We did nothing but scry—what color ink Estrel was holding behind her back, how many fingers she was holding up, what the note on the very top of her desk read—and I saw none of it. My hands shook against the bowl, and a cold pit opened up in my stomach. I felt as if I were continually falling. Sweat pooled along my forehead and chin. Estrel laid her hand on my shoulder.
“Stop. It’s all right,” she said. “Let’s discuss portents.”
Estrel pulled out a chart on different divination forms from hares to doves to snowy owls. We each had an eye to a telescope and were staring at the stars by the time she sent us on our way. Isabelle was painfully studious, trying so hard and channeling so much power without thinking, I worried a cut in my lip. Coline stared at me until I changed out of the fancy dress I wore during the day and into the plainest dress Emilie had.
“What’s wrong with you?” Coline asked.
I shrugged, and that only made her frown more. “I can’t divine.”
We went to the baths and studied in our room, and after Coline and Isabelle had turned in for the night, I went to see Yvonne. The door to the kitchen was open, and she had divided the small building in half. One side was covered in glass stemware and narrow burners, jars and vials full of bubbling, sticky substances littering the tabletops. Each was labeled, and the controlled chaos of what she was doing lived in the taut line of her mouth as she measured the rate at which a clear substance bubbled in a vial. I waited for her to finish her notes.
“What is it?” I asked.
We hadn’t spoken since I met Laurel.
“Nothing,” she said far too quickly. “Let me show you this!”
She pointed me to the other side of the room and lifted a domed glass cover from a beautifully decorated three-tiered cake covered in thin white icing and peppered with edible petals. Balanced precariously on the top tier was a sugar-work moth that glittered as if made of glass.
“You’re a pâtissier,” I said, dying to know what the cake tasted like but wanting to save that moth forever. “And an alchemist who makes poisons?”
I turned and pointed to the apricot kernels she had boiling in alcohol.
“I have many talents.” She reached behind the cake and the moth’s wings moved.
I whistled. “Is it weird if you’re my friend and my hero?”
“No,” she said, blushing. “Hero worship does lovely things for my complexion.”
“I know I’m not supposed to be looking at that,” I said and rolled my eyes to the alchemistry setup. “But can I scry while you work?”
“I don’t really have time to talk,” she said. “Or make you food.”
“You don’t have to do any of that, and you can tell me to leave.” I reached for Alaine’s necklace and found nothing. My fingers itched. “I just need normal company.”
One of her eyebrows arched, and the flour stuck to it snowed across her cheek. “Then by all means, Madame, scry away.”
I scryed at a little stool and table in the corner of the room, thyme and rosemary branching