the air instantly becomes cooler, as though we’ve stepped into a dairy or cool room. Except it’s dark, the way lit by torches, and I can feel Silas’s gait change as he shortens his stride. We’re moving downwards.
“Where are we?” I whisper.
“Hush. Just rest,” he murmurs back, I feel the rumbling in his chest as he speaks. I want to tell him not to dismiss me, but I’m suddenly exhausted. I hear doors being unlocked, then locked again, so many I lose count. I let my eyes drift closed, let the numbness wash over me.
I think I must have lost consciousness, because the next time I see anything, I’m not in Silas’s arms any more; I’m on my back, staring up at a rock ceiling. I can’t feel what I’m lying on, but from the height of it I guess I’m on some kind of table. The room is lit by candles, sconces mounted on the walls. There are stalactites hanging from the ceiling, thousands of them like needles, white and glinting. We’re underground.
Of course, you could travel the whole kingdom and never ever find it. No wonder they drugged guests before bringing them here.
We’re in the Conclave. Beneath Tremayne. It was here. That’s what the symbol means. Alchemists. On the doorway and on the gravestones. It’s part of Silas’s moon tattoos; a circle crossed with a line at the centre. It’s an alchemic symbol. It was right under my nose all along.
“Out.” Silas orders unknown people from the room and I hear them leaving. The woman who protested earlier is at the back. I can see her if I look to the side, her shoulders high and rigid. Only Dimia remains, looking nervous, her eyes focused on something behind me.
“You need the Elixir,” she says softly. “Without it you’ll—” She stops and presses her lips together.
I look at her. “But you said you weren’t an alchemist.”
“She’s not,” Silas says from my left, and I look towards his voice.
There is another table, next to the one I’m on, and he’s behind it, placing a tripod on a piece of slate. My heart starts to speed up as he places a small metal bowl under it, balancing a second one, ceramic, thin, almost iridescent in the candlelight, atop it. I watch him arrange tongs, glass jars with powders and leaves in, two earthenware jars, twists of paper that hiss against the scarred wood of the table when he puts them down, pipettes and spoons, ceramic stirrers. My mouth falls open and I stare at him.
“It’s you?” I say. “You’re the philtresmith?”
He nods, but doesn’t look at me, continuing to set up his laboratory. None of it looks especially alchemical, it’s the same equipment I know from my apothecary work, but there is something about seeing it in this place that makes it strange to me and a thrill of something like fear prickles along my scalp.
“It was you all along?” I ask and again he nods. “But the girl—”
Then his amber-gold eyes find mine and silence me instantly. It feels as though he’s seeing into me, reading me, and though my skin burns, I don’t flinch or look away.
He breaks the contact first. “What can you feel?”
I close my eyes, trying to work through my body. “Nothing,” I say, my eyes flying open, my voice coming out as a sob.
He takes a deep breath. “Can you try moving your toes?” he asks.
I focus on it, on making them wiggle, and he looks at me fiercely, then shakes his head. “Fingers?”
I try and he exhales, looking at Dimia, who nods.
“Did they move?” I ask, hope rising in me.
“Your little one did,” Dimia says.
“Again,” says Silas, and I do it. When he nods, the relief is dizzying.
“Good. This is good,” Silas says, but his gloved hands rise to cover his face, contradicting his words.
When he pulls them away he looks down at them, then takes a deep breath, and it seems that with that breath the room grows smaller, closer, as though he’s drawn it inside him. The air becomes charged and expectant and it settles over me like a veil, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up beneath the scratchy wool of my tunic. I can feel that.
“Are you ready?” he asks. “It might not work. I’ve never… Not with something this big. But it’s worth a try.”
“Thank you,” I whisper.
He nods and begins to work, uncorking bottles and opening twists of paper, examining the scales. When he