by Kim Smejkal
And more important, even if Diavala didn’t suspect that Celia was making any progress, how long would she tolerate being so close to the one who scared her so much?
“Sorry I poked you,” Celia whispered to Lyric later, while Griffin was deep in a raucous game of Imp tiles with the tailor, Michali, at another table. “And thanks for covering for me. Things between us are . . . complicated.”
Lyric shrugged and took a sip of their drink, unbothered. “Until everything explodes on you, at least you’ll be entertaining.”
Griffin looked up from his game as Celia glanced over at his table. Their eyes met and held. Her heart fluttered when he smiled. It was one of his genuine smiles: soft and feathery light, as if he knew the world’s ugly secrets and had made peace with them. The constellation of stars tattooed beside his eyes represented his anchor, he’d said; no matter where he traveled, he could count on those stars to show him a familiar light. Sometimes, as in that small moment when he cocked his head to the left and graced her with a knowing smile, Celia thought that the tattoo on his temple worked a subtle magic. Despite the fact that he sometimes talked in Riddlish and others claimed that he got muddled, it felt like he understood everything perfectly.
Especially Celia.
Celia didn’t want to be entertaining, and she certainly didn’t want everything to explode. Most of all, she wanted to have moments like that with Griffin—the sharing of a smile—without Diavala between them reminding her of all she’d already lost and all that Diavala could still take away.
If ink was the answer, she’d have to try harder to accept that.
She turned back to Lyric and forced herself to smile. “Sastimos futura,” she said, holding up her drink. To a future where the ink gets us out of trouble instead of being the cause of it.
Across the room, Griffin held up his glass, as if that unsaid sentiment was one he needed too.
Chapter 10
All of Celia’s tutoring from Halcyon came in stages over the next few days, and she quickly learned that making educated guesses rather than asking direct questions was a better approach with him. Instead of How does this work? she would come up with a theory—It works like this . . .—and then wait for him to respond.
She was often wrong, but she was right often enough that at least he kept answering her, and she made sure to master each new aspect before moving on.
It was all about linking the pieces to something that was already there. The ink listened to nonverbal commands better than the most disciplined army fighters listened to the words of their commanding officer. The hardest part for Celia was figuring out a way of communicating what she wanted properly, so the ink understood her.
After fumbling her way through various random tasks and experiments, Halcyon instructed her to focus her skills. “You need to fool all the senses in order to make a convincing illusion,” he said. “Choose one thing and perfect it in all ways.”
Celia had become determined to make the perfect bee (and one that didn’t explode). Throughout every stage of training, she worked on her bee: first shape, then substance, then color, then sound, then animation.
And it worked. Celia made the perfect bee.
Of all the tricks and illusions she’d done already, Xinto was her most treasured creation.
She made him big on purpose: a bright yellow and black bee as big as her hand, adorable and soft. Something to keep her company.
At first she couldn’t master sound, the booms of Halcyon’s false thunder far beyond her current capabilities, so Xinto had been a silent giant bee. But sound came to her when she considered the notes and cadence. Xinto made a beelike noise only when she stopped thinking buzzzz and turned his buzz into a song, following natural dips and peaks.
And the simple thin string around his fat, fluffy neck was like a leash dragging along the ground, literally tethering him to the town. He could fly only as long as that string stayed connected, ink to ink. She eventually figured out how to have him move from illusion to illusion, but by then the leash had become an integral part of him. He’d protested with a loud buzz when she’d tried to take it off. It was sparkly, and he liked sparkles.
Most amazing of all was that even when Celia wasn’t consciously commanding him, he’d begun behaving in beelike ways all on his own, as if the ink knew what she ultimately wanted and was able to adapt accordingly.
Scent was the only sense still out of her grasp, to the point where she was beginning to believe she’d never used her nose before.
“Should you even have a smell, Xinto?” she asked him as he zigged and zagged above her head. “No . . . didn’t think so. Yet Ser Ronnea insists.”
Celia gritted her teeth and went back to her task for that day: Halcyon had thrown a dozen ingredients for a stew into a pot, brought it to a boil, and told Celia to sniff them out individually.
That had been hours ago.
Hours and hours and hours and getting nowhere.
After days and days of getting nowhere.
As if sensing her frustration, Halcyon entered the lab with another pot of tea. “You have to learn the shape and form of each scent before you can master it,” he said, setting the mug down in front of her. She suspected there was something else besides linden flowers and honey in the tea, no matter what he claimed, because it worked so well. Her headaches had subsided to the point where she could sometimes forget about them completely, and she hadn’t had a piercing flare-up for days.
“You can’t mimic the smell of a cooking broth without first knowing exactly what the ingredients are,” he added.
Celia had made notes on the scent of the carrots: earthy, bland, sweet. How can something be both bland and sweet? Halcyon leaned over her shoulder to look at her list. The proximity bothered her—it was too familiar—and she inched downward, shrinking in on herself.
He didn’t seem to notice.
“Deeper,” he said, the word booming loud in her ear. He was just as frustrated as she was that she couldn’t get this last piece. His instructions had become more insistent and regular, which made her more nervous. “Don’t bother trying to put it into words, because words put everything in a box. There can be no sides, bottom, and top to this. A scent cannot and should not be confined.” If she’d been at the temple, Mistico Lupita would have slapped her upside the head and yelled Get it together, Inkling Sand!
Celia was picking up a new scent now: a little too perfumed, as fresh as pine needles, what some people might find appealing—but it cloyed its way up Celia’s nose and stayed there.
When Halcyon leaned away, Celia exhaled hard.
“It’s the hardest of the senses to recreate,” he admitted, “because it’s often the most personal. Scents trigger memories. They live inside us by association. One person will gag because carrots remind them of poverty, of resources pushed too thin. Another will think of their grandmother’s garden. Earthy, bland, sweet aren’t nearly enough.”
Celia contemplated throwing the soupspoon at his forehead.
She placed the spoon down gently, slowly. “Even Xinto is bored,” she said, gesturing to where her pet bee had made himself comfortable amid a colorful nest of papers. “Are you telling me only now that every illusion is personalized?”
“No, that would be impossible. But you have to understand perspective. Believability comes from reinforcing worldview. If you can’t give people what they expect, you’re working against yourself.”
“Maybe in striving so hard for believability,” she muttered, “you’re missing a mountain of opportunity.” How sad that he didn’t have more patience for her “whimsy,” as he called it. That might have made all of this more tolerable.
Even keeping Xinto had been a fight. Halcyon had agreed to let her keep him only because she’d convinced him that it wasn’t too far out of the realm of possibility. “Your people don’t even blink at the town repairing itself overnight, and they’ve seen bees before. This one’s just bigger!”
She’d won, but bar
ely.
Halcyon ignored her comment about missed opportunity. “Although the ink is boundless in its capabilities, you have to work within a believable framework. It’s nonnegotiable.”
Celia sipped her tea, forcing herself not to get worked up over his use of the word nonnegotiable, then gingerly set the cup back down.
This believable framework was what they’d done with the Rabble Mob: given people a plausible story and nudged them into believing it. They’d extended real life and added new layers, but hadn’t added a new dimension.
Halcyon tended to underestimate her. She’d already put these pieces together and used them to her advantage: that’s exactly why her argument to keep Xinto had worked.
But scent was the last piece, and that was one she could decidedly not get to work.
“So, the ingredients?” Halcyon asked, his slim fingers dancing through the steam rising from the pot.
“Carrots, turnips, potatoes,” she said, “bay leaves, peppers of some kind, but I can’t tell which, and . . .” The one ingredient that didn’t belong in a basic stew and the one that left her doubting herself. It had actually been the first thing she’d smelled, so strong was the odor, but because it made no sense, she’d searched around it for the rest of the smells.
“And?” He didn’t look at her. Waiting.
“Grimfruit?” she said, trying to sound sure but inflecting it like a question all the same. The root of the plant could be eaten . . . if you wanted uncontrollable stomach cramps for many hours on end. Celia and Anya had snuck some into one of Teresia’s soups once, thinking it was the mistico’s meal, accidentally causing an unprecedented shutdown of Divine tattoos for a day when they’d made all the inklings—themselves included—sick.
Halcyon nodded. “It fattens up the meal, but unfortunately, the smell gives it away.”
“O-kay?” Celia didn’t know where he was going with this.
“Instead of creating a new scent,” Halcyon said, “begin with amplifying existing ones. Take the ones underneath, pull them over, and you should be able to disguise the grimfruit.”
Celia was adept at the visual because she’d always drawn the images in her mind. This was a new skill set entirely. It wasn’t about sketching something realistic, it was completely abstract: pulling threads, teasing them, folding them over.
“When Lyric returns,” Halcyon added as Celia concentrated on how she could possibly do this, “they’ll want something hearty and warm for lunch. Make it smell appealing.”
Celia looked up.
“It’s for the pursuit of science,” Halcyon said absently. “They won’t mind.”
When Celia remembered how it had felt—like her guts were twisting into literal knots, how Yusef and Dante had both passed out from the pain—she thought Lyric would mind very much indeed.
She stared at Halcyon long enough that he lost interest, humming offkey under his breath as he worked at carefully transferring another clay creation into the large kiln. He could create anything with the ink, but he played with more traditional art forms regularly as well. The picture of calm, even while asking Celia to mildly poison his assistant.
Xinto buzzed over and landed on her shoulder, preening himself calmly while she grappled with a moral dilemma.
Celia did what Halcyon asked, working with the scents and strengthening them in order to mask the offending one, but when Lyric walked into the studio later that morning, Celia immediately said, “Don’t eat the stew.”
Halcyon tsked, exasperated, and threw a clay-stained rag down on the bench. “Scent is the only thing you have left, and you insist on sabotaging your own progress.” He strode past Lyric, barking at them to clean up as he left.
Probably to go talk to the empty room. Complain about Celia to someone long dead.
“Wow, what did I walk into?” Lyric said with wide eyes, but they walked to the pot and began cleaning it up without asking anything else.
“I just saved your ass, literally,” Celia said. She stood up so fast she knocked over her chair and forced Xinto up from his cozy nap. “And now I need some air.”
Stepping into the hallway, she glared at the door with the sunflower doorknob. If Halcyon was frustrated with her, she was ten times more frustrated with him. He wanted mastery from her and had refused to move forward until that happened. After all the hope and promise that first day, she’d been doing nothing but spin in circles.
Unlike Diavala, Celia didn’t have an eternity to piss around. Griffin was as happy as a puppy lately, and Celia was positive it had everything to do with Diavala’s being happy . . . happy with Celia’s lack of progress in getting Halcyon to help, happy with Celia’s endless errand runs as she tried to get on Halcyon’s good side, happy it started all over again each morning. With Lyric offering some distractions and the occasional white lie, Griffin and Diavala were both under the impression this was a dead end and Celia was just being stubborn about it.
Maybe she was.
Celia strode toward the front door. Every time she passed a portrait of Martina, she nodded a hello. Every time Halcyon appeared in one of the portraits, she glared.
Opening the red door to the courtyard, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, cleansing the studio air from her lungs, focusing on the feeling of the sun on her face. In a soggy country such as Illinia, where rain fell from the sky much more often than not, it was as if Wisteria’s sky didn’t know what a rain cloud looked like. The days were bright and blue, the nights clear and twinkly with stars.
It felt like she hadn’t been outside in a lifetime.
But as she lingered in the garden, trying to calm down, Halcyon found her.
Shifting from foot to foot, abnormally hesitant, he finally cleared his throat and waited for Celia to meet his eyes. The variegated greens swirled together, placid and calm. No black. “I came to apologize.”
Hmm, interesting. He didn’t strike her as the apologizing type.
“It’s just that you show so much promise, it’s difficult for me to watch this . . . floundering.”
Celia barked out a laugh. That was a Dante compliment. It sounded nice at first, until you realized it was an insult.
Xinto had landed in an adjacent shrub of lilacs, butt up, head down, and Celia had to help him right himself. “You’re the clumsiest giant baby bee in the world,” she cooed. He peeked out from the flowers and wiggled his nose at her, most definitely agreeing.
Halcyon ignored her laugh. “I’ve been thinking maybe you need a little more inspiration. What if Anya was here?”
He seemed to know everything about their last show in Asura, but it still surprised her to hear Anya’s name on his lips.
It took a long moment before she registered his meaning.
And even when she did—when the words found their mark right in the center of her chest and spread like a wildfire—she couldn’t do anything more than feel them burn. Paralyzed in place, she planted her feet and tried to keep the world from tilting upside down.
Halcyon’s expression softened. “Death is . . .” He paused, searching for the right word. “It’s unfair,” he finally said. “But it’s also not necessarily the end. Not here.”
Celia turned and stared into the swirling liquid of the water fountain. The want inside her had moved outward, so thick it dripped from her skin, puffed out with her breaths, rang in her ears. In the glimmering eddies and swirls of the water, she saw her face reflected back to her, distorted from the movement, waiting for calm before coming into focus.
In between the ripples (because time had slowed to measurable heartbeats), Celia saw someone standing a few paces behind her—tall, long hair falling over her shoulders, the shadow of a top hat perched perfectly straight . . .
Her next inhale stuttered as she whirled around.
“Anny?” Celia squeaked. Everything hurt, and she swayed, landing heavily on the stone rim of the fountain behind her. It was Anya . . . except it wasn’t. She had no fierce red tenor, her eyes were the wrong hu
e of deep blue, her expression was too disinterested, and she stood wrong, shifting her weight from foot to foot instead of planted firm and stable. It wasn’t her Anya, but a replica of Anya as made by an artist who’d never met her.
“If you created her,” Halcyon explained, noting Celia’s critical frown, “she would be perfect.” He dipped his chin and lowered his voice. “All I’m saying is that your version of her could be here with you, if you wanted her to be.”
Celia had created so much with the ink already—the rough texture of stone, the unique sparkle of water in the sun, the sound of the wind rustling leaves, the taste of sour cherries hitting your tongue—but this was something else completely. The thing she wanted most, the thing she could never have again.
He was suggesting she could have Anya.
Even the whisper of her name in Celia’s mind was an explosion, because now it was loaded with promise instead of finality.
So much time spent daydreaming about what couldn’t be, and Celia had never considered this other possibility: what could.
She knew it wouldn’t truly be Anya.
She knew it, she understood.
But maybe, if Celia brought every tiny treasured detail about Anya to the surface instead of keeping them hidden away because they hurt, a thousand complicated parts could become a whole.
The crinkles by her ocean-blue eyes when she smiled, the ruts between her brows when she frowned . . . Celia knew the landscape of her face better than she knew her own. Dark hair that felt like a waterfall between her fingers when she braided it, the shimmer of midnight blue that occasionally glimmered when the right light hit it.
Words in the cadence of Celia’s favorite song falling from her lips. Relax, Cece . . . Think about it . . . Remember the time . . .
The laughter in her eyes when she teased, the pinch of her lips when she was disappointed, the soft crook of her neck where she invited Celia to rest her cheek.