A Forbidden Alchemy (The Artisan Trilogy)

by Stacey McEwan

If I couldn’t imbue magic, then I would ensure I was surrounded by it.

Ma used to say it was one thing to be down, and quite another to dig yourself a grave.

He shook himself from his reverie. “Well,” he said. “That fuckin’ showed me, didn’t it?” Patrick Colson liked to say fuck a lot.

I’d never thought of desire that way—that it was the wanting that consumed a person, not the object they sought.

The symptoms of craftsmanship were accurate enough, but what most Artisans ignored was the cause. Crafters were born to parents without means. Often, those parents died young. The children worked at an early age for little pay, subject to occupational hazards an Artisan would never face. They medicated themselves against the trauma, the injuries, the knowledge that the next day would bring them nothing better, and if they survived to the right age, they eventually raised their own hungry children. It was a cascading line of falling bricks that built the brink.

It never once occurred to me that I might try to stop the earth from breaking apart. There was only fear.

“We’re not villains, Nina,” Patrick said. “Just simple Crafters.” “Simple Crafters who blow up schools,” she spat. He sighed bitterly. “In our defense,” he said, “we told you we were comin’.”

“If you have any misconceptions that I sympathize with you, I should dispel them. I’ve seen both sides of this fight. You both bleed the same. Both scream the same. Both leave women without husbands and children without parents. You’re two sides to the same coin.”

All of it reminded Patrick of that courtyard girl—the one whose hand he’d held in Belavere City. The one whose cheek he’d kissed. The one he’d thought of every day since.

But you do know him, another voice hummed. It all began with him.

I stared at the earth beneath his feet as he spoke and wondered why I could so easily move it, but I couldn’t move him.

“You’re too beautiful to be real,” he said suddenly, softly. With my ear pressed to his chest, I could feel the words, too. “There’s your compliment.”

“I drew pictures of you,” I told him, giving him this one small piece of myself. “In school.” He didn’t speak. Just pulled me round and round in a small orbit. I swallowed. “I was scared to forget you.” The sound of his heart beating made me think of caves under leagues of sea. “I never had a hope in the world of forgetting you, Scurry girl.”

How did we get here? I thought. “God knows, Scurry girl, but here we are,” he said. And I wondered if he’d somehow found the lock to my chest and was bleeding it of every good and terrible thing I’d ever done.

“How did we get here?” I asked aloud, the question genuine. I could no longer see the paths behind us. He smirked, though his eyes remained tight. “You’re making a habit of askin’ me that.” His tone implied he didn’t much care how we’d arrived. He waited patiently for my answer.

If there was a way out, surely it was with him.

“You left me,” I told him, my voice heavy with old pain. “You broke us. And you may have come to regret it, but I do not owe you sympathy for whatever pain you feel now.” I did not cry for him. I had purged him from my heart years ago.

“Theo—” “You think you know what you’re doing,” he said, already retreating down the alley. “But there will come a time, Nina, when you find yourself backed into a corner.” He looked over his shoulder at me one last time. “And I’ll be the only person left to free you.”