by J. S. Fields
“You missed!” Rahad groaned.
I balled my fists in frustration and bit my lip hard enough I tasted copper. It was the wetness. It had to be. The pigments didn’t solubilize in water. The fog and the water inside the palm were preventing the pigments from binding and reacting, and we were both going to die out here, and it was entirely my fault.
“Master!” I cried out, fog and failure thick in my throat.
The wind changed direction. It blew from the north, from the mountains of Puget and the glacier just above, and brought a chill to the air. The fog thinned as the air cooled and droplets of water formed on the leaves and sedge. I shivered at the beading moisture on my exposed skin, and the palm…the palm stopped moving.
Its roots dropped away as the moisture fell from the cooling air. My knife handle quivered in the bark though it was no longer under attack. Suddenly, it shot back out at me. I ducked, barely missing the wood handle, and it smashed into a cedar some twenty feet away with a loud thunk. I caught my breath. From the open wound in the trunk, red crystals flowered. They didn’t explode, but as the air continued to cool, more and more of the red pigment bound together. I ran to Master Rahad and pulled him back, his wet clothes sliding easily across ferns and sedge, until we were beyond the bounds of the clearing.
The monocot thrashed. Roots batted the forming crystals, but for every one it dislodged, three more took its place. It was a chain reaction because alchemy had rules and didn’t try to kill you in the forest, unlike magic.
Fissures spread across the bark in a jagged circle, and the bark sloughed like old skin, dropping red and brown shards in a wide circumference. I stared the tree in detached, horrified fasciation. It was like watching wood decay, kind of, as the bark and stem disintegrated into red petals of crystal. The palm screamed, I think, as two roots intertwined and rubbed against each other, producing a screeching sound. The wind shifted again. The temperature rose. The fog slid up past the fronds and consumed the palm and the clearing.
The screeching faded. The fog stayed, but through it, red and orange glinted—proof that my alchemy was worth something. Plus, we were both alive.
I turned to Master Rahad and knelt at his side. With the high fog, darkness shrouded us. If he was bleeding heavily, I had no way of knowing. I offered him a hand, and he sat up, groaning, and clung to my arms.
“Gods, are you all right?” I skimmed my hands over his wounds. Would pressure help? A tourniquet? My mind skipped like a stone. If I had the yellow pigment, I could have bound his wounds enough to get him back to the castle! Was I strong enough to carry him? Surely two palm pinpricks wouldn’t be fatal, but there were the leaf slashes, too, and who knew how deep those were.
“I’ll live, likely.” Rahad coughed, but mercifully it was a dry cough. “They pierced muscle but no artery. The leaf cuts are minor. Still, I’ll need help getting out of the forest. I don’t think my legs will take my weight.”
“I can try to carry you. It’s not too far to the palace, right?” I cinched the red pouch closed and pushed an arm under his knees and another around his torso, preparing to stand. I’d hauled logs from the forest for years for Mother, on sleds and with straps. Master Rahad couldn’t possibly weigh more than a tan oak.
Master Rahad’s voice cracked as he responded. “Ten minutes of brisk walking. Twenty with me in your arms, if you can manage.”
I did manage, and we were only a few steps down the path I’d made during my flight from the plaza when Master Rahad shook his head and really looked at me.
“Sorin?” he asked, his voice slurred, though with pain or confusion I didn’t know. “Master Amada’s heir? Care to tell me what you flung around? How did you become an alchemist?”
His words warmed me, though it was plenty warm in the forest already, especially from carrying my literal dreams in my arms as they slowly bled out. My stomach fluttered as I tilted my head back, showing him my unadorned neck.
“Not a guild alchemist, only a hopeful apprentice. I’ve worked under a trade permit for years, but I’m done with that. I wanted to see you today at the fair. To beg, really, because I’ve tried to come year after year to get an apprenticeship and…” The ground sloped uphill briefly, and I had to stop talking to catch my breath. That my throat felt tight was irrelevant.
“The powders?”
“I made a new solvent from bone oil. Smells awful, but it pulls color from wood fungi—these funny pigments I’ve never been able to extract before. Mother used to send me mushroom hunting, and I stumbled upon them in our wood lot.” I bit my lower lip and looked him in the eyes. Hope pushed a smile to my face that I was desperate to squash. I didn’t need to look too eager. “I mostly use the elf’s cup, golden mango, and flaming dragon fungi. Their pigments are the most…active, but it works on many other fungi too. But these main fungi, they grow in your forest as well. I wouldn’t mind collecting some later, assuming you get patched up okay. I could show them to you, too, if you’d like. Show you the bone oil. I made it myself.”
Damn, I’d already said that last part, hadn’t I?
Master Rahad chortled. I was on the wrong side of him to see his guild mark, but on his bare arms the thumbnail-sized elemental symbols ran in a spiral down his forearms. I did smile then. I’d known of the master for years, even met him once or twice as a child when Magda and I had snuck into his laboratory to pilfer some small treasure. When I was seven, I made wild fantasy stories about his tattoos and their meaning, but now I knew them all. Every single one. Now, I wasn’t a little kid in a lace dress and my hair tied with ribbons. I was competent, and I’d saved his life, and gods, if he still had that apprentice position open…
The fog and the green of the forest faded as the lights of the palace appeared. As the trees turned spindly and the red cloaks of the Queensguard became distinct, Master Rahad tried speaking again.
“I’ve not had an apprentice in years, you know.”
I nodded. “I had heard. I also heard you were looking.”
He coughed. “A solvent from boiling bones. It never would have occurred to me. You’ve turned out different, haven’t you, than what Master Amada expected. An intriguing dichotomy.”
“I’m just me.”
Queensguard rushed to us as we lurched onto the palace lawn. They took Master Rahad from my arms and laid him on the short grass. One ran to the palace, likely to get a doctor.
“You’re sure it’s not magic you’re interested in?” Rahad still had a grip on my cloak, so I knelt to the ground next to him and took his hand. “The guilds are precious things because they are our history and our culture, but even as they give way to the factories, we’ll never truly be rid of magic. Alchemy and magic are unbound guilds for a reason as I’m sure you know—not beholden to any of the three countries. Few people practice magic anymore, but fewer still practice alchemy.”
“I’ve no interest in magic. Mother was forever warning me about witches and amulets, although I questioned whether amulets really existed until today. Witches were one of the reasons she kept me in Thuja.” One of the reasons, but not the primary one.
Master Rahad sniffed as one of the Queensguard pulled a tight bandage around his left leg. “Your mother was no fool. The old king’s artifacts are everywhere. Not just the one amulet in the glacier, you know, from that silly fairy story everyone tells their children. Our first queen, Iana, dug that up almost a century ago. No, the amulets are everywhere as you’ve just seen with that blasted palm. But there’s good money, and good magic, to be had in the witch guild. Alchemy is a hard life. Our solvents are caustic, and most of us don’t live well past thirty.”
I shook my head, determined to not foul up the opportunity I was certain Master Rahad was about to offer. A short life was better than no life at all. “I’d much rather work with solvents, and make observations, and work with the natural world.”
“I specialize in chrysopoeia and other forms of transmutation. Is that what you want? If you’re only interested in pl
aying with solvents, you don’t need a guild. There’s a cult of chemists running wild somewhere you could join up with. They’ve got no mind for real work.” He almost snarled when he said “chemists.”
I pursed my lips. “I want to apprentice with you. I think I’ve earned that.”
Master Rahad barked a laugh when the doctor came running from the palace, slid on the wet grass, and landed in a heap next to the master alchemist’s bloody legs. As the doctor recovered and rummaged in her bags for medicines, Master Rahad coughed again, and then a smile broke over his face.
“Caused, but yes, then earned. Well, young Sorin. With your mother’s permission—as I’ve no power to steal the firstborn heir from another guild—you may start in my laboratory immediately.”
What should have been joy transmuted into dread. No, not dread. That word was too heavy, too leaden. Melancholy, maybe, or frustration. Or maybe it was the weight of our history together, Mother’s and mine, falling back on my shoulders.
Amada. Amada, now grandmaster woodcutter, whose heir sat with a master alchemist, dripped in his blood, trying desperately to leave what should have been a cherished birthright.
I closed my eyes and sat back on the grass. I pulled my cloak around my shoulders, brought my knees up, and rested my forehead upon them.
“Sorin?” Master Rahad prodded.
“Tomorrow,” I said through the wool. “I’ll start tomorrow, right after I talk to Mother.”
Five: Salt
Master Rahad was bandaged quickly and taken inside the palace before we had a chance to speak further. There wasn’t anything to say, anyway, until I found Mother and she released me from the woodcutters, which sounded so unlikely as to be ridiculous. I would convince her though. I had to. I wasn’t going back to that house, but I would go to the grandmaster’s guildhall, one final time, to find her.
The guildhalls—both the large ones held by Sorpsi and the smaller outpost ones held for the guilds housed in Puget and Eastgate—were only a few roads from the palace, separated by the plaza. I wound around the king’s statue, turned left onto the brick, and again had to weave around people. They were primarily apprentices. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t spot a master, which was weird, because the Queendom of Sorpsi held four guilds, and all of those grandmaster halls were here in this plaza. I didn’t have time to debate the whys of that just now though. Instead, I pushed forward to the woodcutting hall where the grandmaster lived. The building was set back behind the main row, nestled between the master halls for the guild of glass and the carpenter’s guild. The smell of sweetbread floated in the air from the dinner meals, and it was a nice relief from my own odor.
When I made the sharp turn between the two halls, the small woodcutting guild house came into view, dwarfed by the others in both size and stature. Mother was clearly here as her signature need for perfection was stamped on every surface. The ceramic tiling on the roof was perfectly laid. It had been moss-covered and cracking the last time I’d been here. The wood shingles on the walls were new and not yet gray from the sun. A rough lumber delivery was stacked in the covered bay to the right of the house, sorted by grade and still beading moisture from the end grain. Even the saw oil marks on the lumber looked fresh, and the lumber was quartersawn, something Mother always insisted upon.
I took a calming breath as I reached the wood door. Its paint was fresh and bright without a hint of algal growth, and here I was, damp and blood-soaked, shivering, my hair slicked against my head. The palace staff had offered me clothing, but I didn’t want to deal with their questions, and I didn’t want to dawdle either. Still, looking like this, I’d be lucky if Mother let me inside at all. Maybe we could say everything we needed to from the doorway. Maybe she wouldn’t care because now she had dozens of apprentices she could pick from—masters, too, if she wanted, even the grandmaster’s own firstborn daughter. Maybe everything would be all right.
I knocked.
It sounded too loud, set in from the main square as I was. When I looked around, however, there was no one on the street to notice.
No sounds came from inside, so I knocked again. This time, the door swung ajar. I walked in, daylight spilling across the threshold, and stopped just inside.
“Mother?” I called out.
My voice echoed, and the sound chilled me further. The room was bare. Where lathes and saws had once crowded, there were only shadows of sun-damaged wood flooring. The room had been an eating area where the master’s first daughter and his thirteen fosters had shared a meal with Mother and me during our last visit. I’d sorted wood shavings by color, there, with the first daughter as we chatted about our parents and our inevitable inheritance under Sorpsi’s matrilineal inheritance laws. She’d shown me her new carving knife, and we’d doodled our names into the lacquer finish on the bottom of the table. It, too, was gone. The walls were stripped bare of their marquetries and the paneling underneath sanded down and smooth to the touch.
My breath stuttered as I ventured past the threshold. Every room was the same. The three bedrooms were bare and smelled of rough-hewn wood. The outbuilding was scrubbed clean with a hint of lemon. The outdoor workspace didn’t have a single scrap on the floor, not even curls of dust. Woodshops were never this clean.
Mother wasn’t here. And if Mother wasn’t here, if no one was in the grandmaster guildhall, then there wasn’t a grandmaster. Residency was a requirement. Sorpsi held the woodcutter’s guild. Without a grandmaster, and a guildhall, that meant…there wasn’t a guild. We’d lost control, and there’d have to be a census, and the country with the most woodcutters in residence would win the guild, but… I forced myself to take a deep breath. Calm. I needed to work on being calm. They might have just…moved? The guildhall might not have been to Mother’s liking, even after all her improvements. If I could find her before the queen found out and before the treaty talks…
I slapped the wall and cringed. The treaty talks! The census would come around any day now if it hadn’t already passed. If they saw the empty guildhall, the woodcutting guild would be lost to Sorpsi, and the guild secrets along with it. We’d be stuck with…with trade craft.
Where was Mother?!
I moved to the courtyard and slumped to the dirt floor of the outdoor workspace. A thick layer of woodchips had covered it the last time I was here. It had smelled like burnt mahogany. The floor had been streaked with teak oil. It smelled sterile now, and new, and foreign.
Had other guilds suffered the same fate as the woodcutters? The textile guild, perhaps, with the cotton machine that the man had spoken about. That guild was housed in Puget, but still, what about it? Had the woodcutting guildhall closed down, the same as the clothing shop? What manner of machinery would cause that? Would it be machinery, to make a guildhall this clean? This…this suggested magic, and witches, and gods, why did it have to be witches? I’d had enough magic today to last a lifetime.
I gave in to the weight of my eyelids and the dizziness in my head and curled onto my side on the dirt, too tired to go back inside. My mind drifted away from the guildhall, away from the queen’s forest, back to my own bed, somehow intact, and the thick blankets, the warmth of the fire. I could hear ghostly sounds, too, of saws on wood, of hammers, of laughter…
“Sorin? Sorin, what are you doing here?”
I sluggishly pulled from sleep and opened my eyes to a blur of blue and red. The imaginary sounds of saws and gouges faded into the shuffle of boots and the chatter of voices.
I rubbed at my eyes, failing to clear the blurriness away. A woman stood before me, my height, with long black hair braided against her scalp, in fine leathers. She wasn’t wearing her circlet, but she didn’t need to.
Her silhouette was enough.
In my sleep-fogged mind, I had expected to see the apprentices back and working with their handsaws, the treadle lathe spinning, and perhaps even a master expectantly standing over me, a sheet of fine veneer in their hand. Or maybe not a master, but at the very least my mot
her, annoyed and bemused, covered in wood shavings and leather and demanding to know why I had left Thuja.
Magda wasn’t any of those things. She was the Royal Daughter of Sorpsi, heir to the throne, and she was staring at me as if I were a drunken smith in a shepherd’s guildhall. I caught swirls of red from behind her—Queensguard, no doubt, further in the house—but the yard around me was as empty as when I’d fallen asleep, and the scent of lemon still hung in the air.
“Sorin,” Magda demanded this time, her voice so much deeper than I remembered and laced with authority. I shivered at the formality. It cut deeper than it should have, especially since I was still having a hard time seeing her as anything other than the mischievous child I’d known.
She offered me a hand up, and I took it, my still-damp, bloody clothes clinging to my skin and the cloak wrinkled around me.
“Hello, Royal Daughter,” I managed, swallowing, then squaring my shoulders. “It’s been a long time.”
Magda snorted and put her hands on her hips. “Yes, one could say that. You didn’t think to say hello, apparently, after bringing Master Rahad back to the castle?” She continued to stare expectantly at me, and I pursed my lips, wondering how best to explain. That stare of hers could melt steel if you let it.
How long had it been since we’d stood together like this? Five years? Six, maybe, since Mother had forbidden me seeing her again and stopped our visits. Too long to pretend I still knew Magda. I didn’t know how to act. I didn’t know what to say. The royal daughter was strong, and well dressed, and…regal. I was, what? Damp, and I smelled like blood, and was sleeping on a dirt floor of an abandoned guildhall. And she was right. I had avoided her because it was hard to think of anything outside of getting Mother’s consent and beginning my life with the alchemists.
I put a hand over my pouches, more to comfort myself than hide them.