Liesl & Po by Lauren Oliver Page B

from the tone of her voice and her dark, furious, glittering eyes, that she had not summoned the alchemist to congratulate him, or thank him, or make him Official, and the alchemist had turned to Will with a look of such withering anger and hatred that Will had felt the very center of his being quiver and go limp. And though there had been a fire blazing in the corner of the room, his teeth had started to chatter again.
    “Useless!” the Lady Premiere had thundered at the alchemist. Normally hearing the familiar insult turned against his master might have struck Will as amusing, but not at that moment. At that moment he knew only that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong, and that he would be blamed.
    “Excuse me?” the alchemist had spluttered, eyes bulging from his head.
    “I said, useless! I ask you to bring me the greatest, the most powerful magic of all, and instead you bring me a pile of ash.” And she had snapped open the wooden box and revealed the pale ashes inside, as dead of magic, as cold, as the coldest, deadest root in midwinter.
    That was when the alchemist had gone the white color of the very hottest part of a flame. For a moment he had been unable to speak. He had stood there and stared at the wooden box in her arms. Then he had turned to Will and pronounced a single syllable: “You.”
    And yet in that tiny, nothing word, five years’ worth of hatred and disappointment and dashed hopes and blame had been compressed, so Will had felt as though he had been hit with a physical force, as though the word were a fist straight to his gut. And he had known then that his life with the alchemist was finished. That he would never again sleep in the cold, narrow cot directly underneath the chimney, or get up in the half-light to feed the fish with tadpoles, or grind dried mullet into a powder under the alchemist’s watchful gaze, or measure a goat’s tears into a beaker and then add exactly two drops of moonlight, no more, no less, to make a cream that could cure even the biggest pimples.
    The alchemist had tried to explain: The Lady Premiere had received the wrong wooden box, obviously. The one she was holding was most certainly not the one he had sent her. And it had all come out—that Will had not gone straight to the Lady Premiere’s, as he had been commanded to do, but had instead gone to Mr. Gray’s first; that he had fallen asleep by the fire; and afterward, his dim and bleary recollection of the large sack pressed into his arms and the wooden box on the table (no— boxes —there had been two of them, almost identical), and how he had gone stumbling outside, eyes half-closed, without checking to see that he had the correct one.
    But it had not been enough. The Lady Premiere had screamed, the alchemist had cursed Will to damnation, and Will had known that if he stayed, he would most certainly be killed.
    So instead he had run, hiding in the little guard hut when he discovered that the front gates were shut and there was no possibility of climbing them, and then crawling out through the cat door at the first opportunity.
    Plan, plan, plan. The word bounced around in Will’s mind like a pinball. His breath tore at his throat. He was sweating now, and the collar of his shirt stuck to his neck. His heart throbbed painfully, and he knew he needed to rest. He ducked into a narrow alleyway to catch his breath and listened for sounds of shouting or the pounding of feet. But he heard nothing except the faint scrabbling of rats. Good. He had not been followed. Not yet, anyway.
    He needed to leave town. He needed to get as far away from the alchemist, and the Lady Premiere, and her assortment of servants and henchmen and sympathizers, as possible. Of course he had nowhere to go, but that hardly mattered.
    He was an orphan, taken on by the alchemist to be little better than a slave. Will had never, not once, had anywhere to go—not really.
    He realized this for the first time as he was crouching in the