“Then why are you entering the contest?” asked Celesse.
Kara’s gut tightened up, she didn’t want her patron’s pity, nor admit that her Gran was flat broke.
“For the family’s honor,” she said, staring Celesse right in the eyes.
The patron made little reaction, maybe disappointment, her eyes searching momentarily before nodding, “Follow me.”
Her fellow contestants waited in a study drinking tea and nibbling on shortbread cookies.
“‘Sup,” said Lex Livingston, adding an annoying wink for good measure.
He kept his head shaved, letting his golden sandalwood skin glow, touching and preening over his bare skull as if he had a full head of hair. His family owned a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate, and while Kara would have liked to think he was a spoiled, rich kid, he worked as hard as any of the other alchemist students.
“Lex,” said Kara as she took a seat opposite him, before turning to the third member of the contest. Compared to the others, she felt completely underdressed in jeans and a patterned shirt she found at a thrift store when she was back in Texas during the summer. “Lovely to see you here, Seraphina.”
If Celesse D’Agastine was the ideal of humanity, perfected with magic and alchemy, then Seraphina was the embodiment of how sorcery could warp it with nails like tiger claws, brilliant red hair smoldering as if they were ever-burning embers, skin as smooth and hard as a porcelain doll, and eyes like a cat that glowed at night.
“Third times a charm, eh?” asked Seraphina Astor with a predator’s smile, which drained the blood from Kara’s face.
She rose towards Seraphina with full intention to bloody her perfect nose when Celesse reminded them of her presence with a clearing of her throat, leaving Kara to fall back into her chair blushing.
“Welcome to the Ascendant Cup,” said Celesse. “You three know the risks and rewards of this contest. I will not belabor the point. But I will go over the guidelines.
“The contest will last one month. This year, the goal is to craft an Elixir of Weirding, a recipe from the days of druids in the forests of Britannia, long lost until recently when a fragment was found which suggested how it could be made. The first student to create and successfully survive drinking their potion, under observation of course, is the winner.”
Lex leaned forward, leaning his elbows on his knees. “What does the elixir do?”
“It gives the drinker a level of influence over others with their voice,” said Celesse, a wry lilt to her grin. “The druids used it to coax their sacrifices to the altar willingly, going so far as holding the wooden bowl to collect their own blood when their throats were cut.”
“Splendid,” said Seraphina, shooting Kara a wink as if Celesse had been describing an exciting rollercoaster ride rather than ritualized murder.
Kara tried not to let Seraphina’s tone bother her, but she’d hoped to be working the contest without competition.
“Any questions?” asked Celesse.
“Do we get to see the recipe fragment?” asked Kara, resisting the urge to raise her hand as if she were in class. She was thankful that it was a different recipe than in the past, but she felt like no matter what, Seraphina would have an advantage.
“Of course, but not until after I have placed the binding on the three of you so you cannot tell anyone what you have read or accept help during the contest. At the end of the month, unless you are the winner, you will forget everything you worked on,” said Celesse.
After a series of glances, their patron made them raise their right hands. The spell was simple, a few phrases, the rush of faez—the raw stuff of magic—and a slight tingle down the back of her spine, and the binding would hold them to their patron’s conditions.
Afterwards, Celesse handed them a piece of paper which they passed around, quickly memorizing the recipe fragment.
spark in double at a divine rate / the essence must come from [scrambled] then be
“That’s it? That’s all there is?” asked Seraphina, lips curling.
“Wouldn’t be much of a contest if it were easy,” said Celesse, eyes glinting.
The lack of information didn’t daunt Kara, who loved a puzzle and had spent her nearly two and a quarter years in the Hundred Halls pouring over obscure recipes in preparation for the contest.
“Good luck, everyone,” said Kara, as her mind whirled with the possibilities of where to start.
“You, too,” said Lex with a wink towards Kara as he rolled his eyes at Seraphina. “Try not to die.”
“Suck a dick, Lex,” said Seraphina, knocking her embered hair away from her shoulder as she strode from the room in a rush. “I’m going to win this contest.”
Entering the contest had cleared her schedule of classes, not only so she could focus on the task but because the binding tended to interfere with rudimentary communication about the craft of alchemy. It also afforded her one of the high-tech mixing rooms on the fifth floor. The walls could be enchanted to act as a kill room, if the potion in question was dangerous to others, but in this case, the Elixir of Weirding was only dangerous to the imbiber if it were mixed incorrectly.
Kara entered, feeling like a queen in her throne room for the first time, running her fingers across the stainless steel tables as she strode around the room. The cabinets on the wall held runed glassware made for potions, titration instruments, witching stones, and dozens of other specialty equipment not found in the underclassman labs.
A massive walk-in storage room held copious amounts of common potion ingredients like hazel grains, sea salt, illilus fungus shoots, and even a few more expensive reagents like silver dust.
As she read the exquisitely printed labels, she knew that her task would likely not include much of what was in these drawers. While no one except the contest winners and Patron D’Agastine ever knew what went into the final potions, there’d been enough observations to know the trends—the primary one being that the reagents would include at least one exotic ingredient that would be difficult to obtain.
The first day, Kara didn’t open a single drawer or touch even one piece of glassware. Instead, she sat at the comfortable desk with a steaming mug of coffee, listening to an EDM mix on her phone, and wrote out everything she knew about potions related to mind control, and the history of druidic alchemy, while her foot bounced with energy.
She also made a combination chart, a basic tool for discovering new potions. Most mixtures required three types of ingredients. The first was the chyma which was the base that held the magic in place. The more expensive the chyma solution, the higher quality of the potion, usually anyway.
The second was the catalyst which triggered the magic when consumed, which was important to ensure that it affected the person who drank it properly. The final part of the potion was the andaridin, which was the maetrie word for “the essence”. This final part created the magical effects of the potion and was typically made from multiple ingredients combined in a specific manner.
For the chyma, Kara could find most of them in the goblin market in the Undercity with the blood gold coins Celesse had given them. She wouldn’t bother purchasing it until she knew what the catalyst and essence were since they could be incompatible with certain chymas.
The essence would be the hardest part to determine, since it did most of the work of the elixir but unfortunately the recovered fragment was missing the part that highlighted that final and most important part of the potion. Kara spent a few days experimenting with cheap ingredients from the storage room, exhausting the obvious solutions before deciding she needed to enact drastic measures to learn the answer.
Before she left the laboratory, Kara cleaned up the glassware, returned any unused reagents back to their drawers, put on her favorite jean jacket with ragged holes at the elbows—the one she wore when breaking horses—and wrote out a will and a final message to her Gran should she not return from her trip.
The nest was a five-hour trip from the city of Invictus to the Appalachian Moun
tains on the eastern side of West Virginia. She’d purchased hiking boots before she left Invictus, the city that was the home of the Hundred Halls, but after two hours on trails, her feet had blisters.
“Gran would laugh herself silly if she saw how soft my feet have gotten,” she said, parking herself on a small boulder for self-treatment. When she broke horses at their neighbor's ranch, her Gran used to say that her boots had welded to her feet with calluses and made her wash off in the backyard with a hose so she didn’t track mud into the house.
Kara removed the boots near a stream, pulled out a tube of ointment she’d mixed herself, and rubbed it on the ripped skin. The red flesh immediately foamed, followed by a stinging that made her grit her teeth, but within a minute, the skin had knitted back together.
As she was sliding her boots back on, a ranger in khakis with a Federal Bureau of Supernatural Creatures badge on his sleeve appeared from the other side of the stream. He had dusty black hair and wore a simple protection charm pendant in the shape of an eye.
“Young lady, I’m going to have to ask you to head back the other way,” he said. “This is a restricted area. You shouldn’t have gone past the signs, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say you missed them.”
A little exhausted from the hike, Kara didn’t feel like arguing and pulled the folded paper from her jean jacket front pocket, handing it to the Ranger.
“I have permission to be here,” she said as she finished tying her boots.
The ranger reacted to her paperwork as if it were a viper. He read it with a forehead so knotted Kara thought he might have an aneurism.
“Do you not understand the danger that lies ahead?” he asked, gesturing behind him while shaking the paper. “I’m not quite sure how you got this approval, but it’s suicide to go this way.”
“I’m a student in the Hundred Halls,” she said. “And I know what the Gamayun are, otherwise I could have never received that permission.”
“You’re a looney is what you are,” he said, handing the paper back. “Good luck with whatever insanity you’re intending. I hope whoever signed off on that knows it was your death sentence.”
The ranger stalked past her, leaving Kara to gently fold the paperwork and place it back in her pocket. She had another hour of hiking before she reached the Gamayun nest and didn’t want to get caught in the woods when it got dark.
The ranger couldn’t understand why she was headed to the nest because to speak to the Gamayun was death. They were seers who could see fragments of the future and would answer questions for a price. This in itself would be no cause for harm, except the Gamayun fed on the misery of their victims by giving them answers that were technically correct but led them to ruin. To hear the voice of a Gamayun was to set yourself on the path to self-destruction. Her research had pulled up a litany of bad luck stories that sounded like discarded ideas from a Final Destination movie. Countless petitioners had thought themselves clever enough to avoid their fate, but their failures had cost them their lives.
When she reached her destination, passing through a wrought iron gate smothered by rose bushes, Kara paused and slipped a vial from her jacket pocket, the opposite side from her permission letter, and downed a potion that tasted like butterscotch spiked with mint. The aftereffects made her grimace and take a long swig from her water bottle before continuing. Then she pulled out her smartphone and triggered an app before shoving the device back into her pocket with a heavy out-breath.
The “nest” was a stately mansion with pristine white columns, the last thing she expected this deep into the West Virginia mountains. The Gamayun were birds of fate, supposedly capable of seeing the future, but it came at a heavy price.
Unease trickled down her spine as she stepped towards the building, expecting a great bird with the head of woman to come swooping down through the oaks. When she reached the front porch, the door opened before she could raise her hand, revealing an older woman wearing a peacock shawl in a simple black dress.
“Welcome, Kara Wilde, I’ve been expecting you,” said the woman with eyes as green as a summer storm.
“Hello, Miss...”
“You may call me, Lady Maven, please come in,” she said, opening the door wide and ushering her into the mansion.
Kara knocked the dirt off her boots before entering without hesitation. She’d come all this way. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“I appreciate you seeing me, Lady Maven,” said Kara.
The plush carpet swallowed her footsteps as they wound through the building, arriving at a sitting room. Two high-backed upholstered chairs sat across from each other with a basin of clear water between them. Racks of antlers from a dozen different animals—deer, elk, reindeer, and a few she didn’t recognize—lined the walls.
Lady Maven crossed her legs, settling her hands on her knees like a debutante at the ball, not a malicious supernatural creature bent on her destruction. A twitch formed at the woman’s red lips as if she were trying to restrain her hunger.
“I would ask you if you are sure you want to be here, but I know you’ve spent years researching the Gamayun, reading every fragment of newspaper, or myth on the subject,” said Lady Maven, clearly trying to unnerve Kara.
The stark reminder of the woman’s power did just that: twisting Kara’s stomach as if she were wringing water from a towel.
Kara forced herself to smile, glancing around at the animal heads. “The one thing I could never figure out is are there more than one of you? A lot of the early myths said there were three Gamayun, but no one has seen any of the others except for you. Did you eat your sisters in the lean centuries?”
The pleasant expression on Lady Maven’s face disappeared behind a mask of cold cunning.
The insult was a calculated risk, Kara knew, but she didn’t want to get trapped in small talk. She wanted her information and then get the hell out.
Lady Maven’s eyes creased at the corners. “Shall we begin? Ask your question.”
Kara swallowed back a bit of bile, and her knees wanted desperately to bounce. She had to remind herself that she got just as nervous when she approached a wild stallion for the first time, but none of them had ever failed to succumb to her touch in the end. Then again, the price of failure had never been her life before.
Without taking her eyes off Lady Maven, Kara reached into her jean jacket pocket, pulled the tiny music box out but kept it guarded in her fist.
“I suppose you already know what my question is, but for the sake of propriety and so you know that it is my intention that I willingly seek this answer despite the dangers, I will ask it aloud,” said Kara. “What is the andaridin of the Elixir of Weirding?”
Before Lady Maven could answer, Kara flicked the lid of the music box open as if it were a Zippo lighter. As the Gamayun opened her ruby red lips, a swirling tune rose from the tiny device: a waltz played on miniature instruments.
Lady Maven glared at the music box as if it were a pile of dog crap on her carpet, but by this time, Kara cared little as the tinny song triggered the potion she’d drank before she entered the mansion: a solution she’d been perfecting for the last three years.
The effect was immediate and a little disconcerting. Vertigo slammed into her, but not in the way she felt it when she stood on a high place, but as her hearing disappeared like a dial being turned to the off position, the lack of sounds made her less aware of the world. It wasn’t just hearing that the potion eliminated, but any form of communication: lip reading, telepathy, sign language—it didn’t matter what it was—there was no way to break through her veil.
Kara sat on the high-backed chair, staring at the painting of the cuckoo bird on the music box trying to remember why she’d come to this mansion in the first place. Her thoughts were distance and hazy, like trying to read a book on Earth from outerspace.
A woman in a peacock shawl was before her, gesturing and making meaningless movements. Eventually Kara got bored, removed herself from the roo
m. The woman might have grabbed her arm, but Kara wasn’t sure.
As she trudged out of the stately mansion, the place wavered for a moment, and rather than sculpted railings and majestic white columns, Kara saw a collection of ratty sticks, matted with old fur and sun-bleached bones.
The vision only lasted a moment, but it put a hitch into her step as she stumbled into the Appalachian woods in complete darkness.
Kara didn’t remember her journey from the point she left the Gamayun nest, but her phone told her it’d been six hours when she finally awoke from her alchemy-induced slumber. Her arms bore scratches from the claws of the trees but otherwise she was unharmed.
Rather than risk falling off a cliff in the middle of the night, Kara slept in a hollow, using enchantments to ward off the cold, finishing her journey with a rumbling stomach in the dewy light of morning.
Five days later, Kara received a package from an alchemy supply company in a brown box the size of a paint can. Her progress in the contest had been non-existent while she waited for what she hoped was the andaridin of the Elixir. But as she stared at the package, she worried about any identifying information inside the box.
When she’d visited the Gamayun nest—a thought that gave her shivers even now days later—she’d made it so that she could physically not hear the answer given from the bird-woman. Instead, the information had been collected by her cell phone, sent to a transcribing company, which in turn, would send the answer to Borealis Alchemy Supply Company.
But now, posed above the box, she worried that a well-meaning employee might have undone her explicit instructions. Once she saw what she was working with Kara assumed the curse of the Gamayun would trigger.
A quick text brought Nifemi to the alchemy lab. Her best friend was wearing a cotton candy pink chiffon blouse and black pencil skirt. Her eyebrow arched when she entered the room, eyes flitting to the delivery box.
“Got a bomb in there you need defused,” said Nifemi.
“Kinda like that,” said Kara, standing back with her arms crossed. “I need you to carefully open the package to see if there’s any identifying information. I cannot know what’s in the container.”
Fantastic Schools: Volume One (Fantastic Schools Anthologies Book 1) Page 12