The Alchemary

Light shined through my closed eyelids in a warm but intrusive red glow. I groaned softly and snuggled deeper beneath a heavy wool blanket, vexed at whoever had lit a candle in the middle of the—`

My eyes flew open, confirming a dreadful instinct that fluttered in my gut like butterflies with razor-tipped wings.

Not candlelight. Daylight.

I was late. Even worse, some veiled obligation tugged at my mind, like a string tied around my finger. I’d left something unfinished.

No . . . not quite. There was something I was supposed to do, first thing in the—

I bolted upright and threw back the blanket; as I stood, the stone floor cold and smooth beneath my bare feet, I realized with a sudden and near-blinding panic that I had no idea what I was late for.

Or…where I was.

My hands opened and closed around nothing but the cool morning air as I surveyed my surroundings, trying to make sense of a room that didn’t feel unfamiliar, and yet…was.

Clarity refused to rise through the fog of slumber. I couldn’t recall ever having suffered from somnambulism, but this certainly aligned with my understanding of sleepwalking.

I was merely disoriented.

Clarity would return.

Focus on the facts.

The room was small. A narrow bed took up a third of the space, and the rest was occupied by worn but serviceable furnishings, including a desk cluttered with heavy books—real bound volumes—as well as individual sheets of fine parchment covered in writing. There were inkwells—one overturned and empty, the other seated squarely in its cutout and properly covered—and several quills, one neatly trimmed and clearly well-used, the others whole and still clean.

The desk chair was wooden and plain. Functional. An armchair sat in the opposite corner, close enough to touch from the desk because of the narrowness of the room. It was plush with well-worn and faded green upholstery. Opposite the desk, a tall wardrobe stood half-open, but my gaze refused to focus on the neat collection of mostly dark clothing hanging inside, or on the lighter-colored underclothes folded and stacked at the bottom.

As I mentally sorted through the observable facts, assembling a hypothesis about where I was and how I’d come to be there, I noted several soft voices speaking indistinguishable words through the walls. And that told me more than the furnishings of the room itself had.

I was in some sort of small tenement: a single-room apartment, adjoining at least two others.

Though inky darkness leaked beneath the door, a brilliant line of daylight shone through the vertical seam between the shutters on the opposite wall, lighting the pillow precisely where my head had been moments before.

Iron hinges groaned as I threw open the shutters, and—

I stumbled backward, shocked not just by the burst of cool, salty air and dazzling sunlight, but by the sight!

Water. Crystalline blue and endless. Water, to the edge of the very earth, sparkling in the sun. Wind stirred it in rhythmic waves that looked gentle from my vantage, but were probably crashing against…

I leaned out the window for a glimpse of the ground below, but there was no ground. My room sat on the very edge of a cliff, perched upon a drop so sheer I could see nothing below except for several floors of the tower I was in and a few outcroppings of the rocky ledge it stood upon. The ocean crashed against the base of the cliff with no shoreline to speak of.

My fingers curled around the wooden window frame, fear slamming against the ramparts of my mind like waves against the cliffside, and I lurched backward into the safety of the room.

A groan echoed softly behind me, and I spun to find the lump of blankets on the far side of the narrow bed moving. A moment later, a man sat up and the bedclothes fell away, exposing his broad shoulders and sculpted chest, laying bare his narrow waist and just a glimpse of one pale hip.

My breath seized in my throat.

He was beautiful. Earnest blue eyes blinked at me beneath straight, bushy brows two shades deeper than his shaggy dark blond hair, still tousled from sleep. He smiled, a sheepish expression, as if he were unsettled to be staring at me with so much flesh exposed. Or perhaps embarrassed to still be abed in the daylight.

I gathered from that look that he knew me. Yet I did not know him.

This was his room, surely. That was why I didn’t recognize the furnishings or the stunning, terrifying view.

Which left several very important questions, the most important of which were: Whose bed had I woken in? and Why could I not remember taking to it in the first place?

“Amber?” My host’s brows dipped toward the center of his forehead, and it was the familiarity of that expression, as much as his question, that cleared the tiniest bit of the fog shrouding my memory.

I was Amber.

Amber Fallbrook . . . of Innswood township . . . three days’ carriage ride from the eastern coast.

“Are you okay?” As the beautiful young man tossed back his blankets and stood, for a moment he seemed to wobble. His face paled and his eyes closed. One hand reached for the simple wooden headboard, sturdy musculature standing out in his arm as he regained his balance.

He looked ill. From drink? Perhaps that could explain my lack of memory.

Yet I did not feel sick.

My focus traveled across his well-toned chest to where a pair of short, drawstring breeches hung scandalously low across his narrow hips. My gaze snapped up, heat building across my face, and that was when my thoughts on the subject of the nearly naked man sharply diverged.

I felt very strongly that I should not be staring at this objectively beautiful specimen of a man while he was clearly ill and in such a vulnerable…state.

And yet…

I’d woken in his bed. That fact carried a strong implication that I’d already seen this very sight. Experienced it. Likely, I’d studied it closely, and not in academic pursuit.

The flush in my cheeks drifted down my neck, across my chest, and toward my belly, as if gravity were ardently tugging at it.

The facts added up to an obvious conclusion—an intriguingly provocative one—and—

I blinked, and the face staring at me changed. The room disappeared.



# # #



“Amber!”

The man grins at me from across a narrow alleyway, bright sunlight bleeding from between two buildings to set his blue eyes alight. Only he isn’t a man yet. He is a boy. Fourteen years old. I know that, like I know I can claim the very same number of years.

I am fourteen now, and I have better things to do than follow Wilder down an alley on the edge of town to watch him carry out his boast. To watch him prove that he can charm the alewife into giving us a sample of her latest brew, using nothing but his beguiling face and a few well-chosen words applied to his mischief like grease to the wheels of a cart. I have better things to do, yet there I stand, captivated by my friend’s boyish charm and—



# # #



“Amber?”

“Wilder…” I murmured, and despite the familiarity of his name on my tongue, no further understanding blossomed. He looked familiar, and some latent memory painted him with the brushstrokes of a beloved little brother, and yet he was not looking at me like a brother.

My body’s reaction to his proximity—to his relative undress—was not that of a sibling.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Have I… Have I made a hopeless mess of this?”

I had no answer for him. I had no answers for myself, and with each passing second, the weight of my own nescience seemed to push me a little further toward the cliff’s edge of true terror.

“Do you want me to go?” Wilder bent on the opposite side of the bed, and when he rose with two crumpled pieces of clothing, I understood. This was not his room.

It was mine.

Which only made things worse.

I indulged another look around the space, noting the candle on the bedside table, the small, hand-carved wooden box, and—

From somewhere beyond the room, a bell chimed, and its heavy, repeated toll sent a familiar bolt of urgency ringing through my legs, which suddenly turned me toward the corner. I reached, with no true intent, for a garment I hadn’t noticed before, where it lay draped over the arm of the green chair.

Intriguing! My limbs were responding to the familiar chime with actions they were clearly accustomed to taking, even though my mind had not caught up with this routine. Though my brain refused to tell me where I was. Who I was, beyond my given name.

Amber.

“Who—” I stopped to clear my throat. It felt sore and scratchy. “Who are you?”

Confusion washed over Wilder’s expression, leaving it blank, like beach sand beneath a wave’s retreat.

A sharp knock echoed from the far side of the closed door, and my head swiveled in that direction as a deep voice called from beyond the room. “Amber?”

Wilder flinched at the voice, scurrying to find the opening in his tunic as his other garment fell to his feet again.

“Amber? I’m coming in. We need to talk,” the voice said plainly, confidently.

The door creaked open before I could formulate a response.

The man who stepped inside shared Wilder’s square jaw and the shape of his nose, but his coloring was different. His skin was a shade deeper, his hair a dark chestnut with subtle caramel streaks only visible where the light shone upon it. Rich brown eyes narrowed at me, flaring almost coppery where they caught sunlight from the window. He was older than Wilder, but not by much, yet his bearing and stern expression gave the impression of authority.

His imposing height and the formidable breadth of his shoulders would have labeled him memorable, even without the formal black cape draped over his right shoulder.

His name would not come to me, but something twisted deep in my gut as I studied him. My free hand twitched, trying to reach for him, and heat burned at the back of my throat, as if the words that had lodged there were flames ready to be spewed at him.

His brows drew together, as if he could tell something was wrong before I’d spoken a single word. Before he’d even glanced at the man standing between the bed and the wall.

Wilder had frozen, his tunic stretched over both arms and pulled taught across his chest, in preparation to drag it over his head.

“You’re not dressed,” this new man said, and though I couldn’t remember ever having heard his voice, I knew it the same way I would know what an unripe berry tasted like before I bit into it. As if I’d experienced the tart burst countless times before.

A new heat kindled inside me with that thought, but it sputtered at the disgruntled tightening of his jaw. At his impatient huff.

This man was displeased with me.

The dark weight of his focus suggested that was not a recent development.

“Why aren’t you dressed?” He glanced around the room, evidently looking for a way to hurry me along, and when his focus found Wilder, it cooled into a malignant glare. “Am I to assume, then, that punctuality is too much to ask of your entire cohort?”

Cohort?

When neither Wilder nor I answered, he continued, turning that icy gaze my way. “You are both aware, are you not, that this is a single occupancy room?”

“Something’s wrong with her, Des.” The words almost exploded from Wilder, as if he were desperate to change the subject. “The rest of… this, it can wait.”

The new man—Des—turned back to me, and the room suddenly felt too warm, despite the open window. With this, the space—my room—began to feel somehow obliquely familiar, yet still entirely alien. Just like both men.

“Amber?” he said. “What’s happened?”

I stepped back, and my calves brushed the armchair through the thin material of my gown. “I do not know you.”

But that wasn’t entirely true.

Desmond. He hates being called Des.

Focus on the facts.

I could not be sure whose voice was whispering in my mind—my own?—but the advice felt wise: Let the facts lead to a conclusion.

“I don’t know who you are,” I said, rephrasing my statement for accuracy, since I was fairly certain that I did, in fact, know them both. “But I cannot be certain how significant that is, because I don’t know who I am either. Beyond names, anyway. Still, I don’t remember our names, so much as I simply know them.”

Both men blinked at me. Neither moved. I couldn’t even be sure they were breathing.

“My conclusion,” I continued, “based on the fact that this bed chamber appears to be mine, and that you both seem to know me, is that I have lost my memory.”

Wilder huffed, a mild sound of amusement that inexplicably eased my anxiety, albeit only a little.

“Well,” he said, “she certainly sounds like the same old Amber.”