Sweetblade

by Carol A Park

  Almost.

  Nessa had disappeared through the front door, but a few moments later, Boden himself entered through the back.

  He ducked his head when he saw Ivana. “Sorry,” he said, though Ivana wasn’t sure what for. “I’ll be back in a moment, but you’re welcome to wait in the back. Don’t tell Nessa I came this way?”

  Ivana shrugged and nodded, and Boden followed Nessa out the front.

  Her eyes followed him until he was no longer in sight. Boden was only a year older than Ivana. Unfailingly polite. A bit bashful. Hardworking, but with a sense of humor.

  It had occurred to her on more than one occasion that he was the sort of young man that her parents would have been pleased to encourage as a suitor—and that she might not have minded.

  But none of that was possible anymore.

  She drifted into the back room to wait for Boden. This room, ostensibly for storage, had its own outside door, the door the family used to enter their apartment above the shop. A long wooden table littered with an assortment of bottles and piles of herbs was evidence that the workroom, off to her right, had spilled into the “storage” room as well.

  Da Grania herself was the next to march through the room, this time coming from the shop entrance. Annan, her youngest by a wide gap, was on her hip. She threw open the back door and yelled something indistinguishable out into the tiny yard where they kept chickens.

  Ivana didn’t know what Grania heard in response, but she whirled around, her eyes searching the room. They passed over Ivana twice, as if she were hoping to find someone else—probably one of her other two children—and then settled on her after all.

  “Would you mind keeping an eye on Annan for a moment, dear?” she asked.

  “Ah, I suppose,” Ivana said, a bit taken aback by the request. “I mean, of course, Da.”

  Grania set the child down on his feet. “Thank you, dear. I won’t be but a minute.” She whisked out the back door.

  Ivana settled onto the floor to wait. Annan eyed her for a moment and then pointed to the door.

  “Um…she’ll be right back,” Ivana said, guessing at what he wanted.

  He pursed his lips, studying her face.

  She offered him a tentative smile.

  His lower lip protracted for a moment.

  Please don’t cry, please don’t cry, please don’t cry…

  And then he burst out into a full, beaming smile and held his hands out to her. “Uh!”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  He settled down onto one of her legs, took one of her hands, and began chattering happily in his nonsensical language. “Ungh?” he asked, pointing to a stool in the corner.

  “The stool?”

  “Na. Ungh mo?” He pointed to a stairway that led up to the family’s apartment.

  “Er…I don’t think I should go up there.”

  “Mo. Ungh mo?” This time he pointed to the back door.

  “I’m sure your mother will take you up there when she gets back.”

  He giggled, face beaming, and then stood up and toddled toward the stairs anyway.

  “Oh…no…” she said, rising. “Really. Wait…”

  He shrieked and sped up. Ivana caught him as he was starting to scramble up the stairs, and he giggled hysterically again. He then looked at her directly in the eyes and patted her face gently. “Na.”

  It didn’t seem to require a verbal response this time. So Ivana patted his head. In return, he laid his head on her shoulder.

  Ivana was unprepared for the wave of emotion that swept over her. She leaned against the wall, feeling unsteady. Tears pricked her eyes.

  With her new studies keeping her busier, she could almost forget. Now, she wanted to push the child away, flee, drown herself, anything, anything to smother the despair.

  The back door opened again. “It seems he’s found a new friend,” Grania said, taking the child from Ivana just in time.

  “Mo,” Annan said to his mother.

  “Yes,” she said, kissing him on the head. “I know.”

  Ivana didn’t know what or how she knew, but she was grateful not to be alone any longer and yet at the same time craved escape.

  “Thank you, dear,” Grania said. “Are you waiting for Boden?”

  “Yes, Da, but I…” Ivana swallowed. “Actually, I-I think I’ll just come back tomorrow.”

  Grania raised her eyebrow. “Are you well?”

  “Oh, yes, Da. Thank you.”

  Grania studied her for a moment. “Homesick, perhaps?”

  Ivana gave her a forced smile. “Something like that.”

  “I recognize the look.” Grania put Annan down, who darted toward the stairs again, and leaned against the work table. “I suffered three miscarriages and a stillbirth between Annan and my next oldest.”

  Ivana blinked. So that was why there was such a gap. But what relevance did this have?

  “That’s almost ten years of heartache. It was my work that saved me, kept me going, even as I experimented with herb after herb, trying to figure out the problem.” She nodded to Annan, who, in fact, had not climbed the stairs but was sitting on the bottom stair and swinging his little legs into it with a repetitive thunk, thunk. “And now I have this little one.” She patted Ivana’s hand. “You’ll make it through, dear.”

  Would she?

  “Yes. Thank you, Da.” Ivana turned and left the shop before her emotions overran her. Not even a hundred feet down the road, however, footsteps slapped the ground behind her, and someone called out her name.

  She turned, surprised, and found Boden sprinting after her.

  He stopped when he reached her and leaned over his knees, catching his breath.

  She waited.

  Finally, he straightened, flushing. “I’m sorry I took so long,” he said. “I wanted to catch you. I-I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.”

  Her stomach squirmed. Oh, no.

  “I…” He ran a hand through his hair, then swallowed, twice. “Well, I guess there’s nothing to do but come out and say it. I think—well, you’re so interested in the apothecary I thought maybe…”

  Don’t do it, Boden. Please. Let it lie.

  He gave a short laugh. “This isn’t coming out the way I anticipated. Let me start over.” He ran his hands over his shirt, smoothing imagined wrinkles. “I-I’ve taken a liking to you, Ivana. And, I was wondering if, perhaps, you might consider…me. I mean, we could explore…” He trailed off, his face darkening even further.

  His verbal stumbling would have been sweet, perhaps even endearing, if the situation had been different. Instead, Ivana could only stare, her mind paralyzed by the sudden onslaught of a thousand thoughts.

  Her stomach clenched. She knew this might happen. She would have been a fool not to notice how much Boden liked it when she came around.

  She was a fool for continuing to do it. She should have listened to Elidor.

  But all she had wanted was to feel normal again, that just one thing was right in the world.

  Now, her fantasy had been ruined. She had to face reality. The world she had dabbled in the past couple months, the people whose company she had enjoyed—life with them, life as they lived it was unattainable for her as anything other than a sad imitation of what life might have been.

  He was still waiting for a response, and as her silence stretched on, his brow furrowed in either, she supposed, anxiety or confusion.

  “I-I don’t know what to say,” she said at last. And it was the truth. In another time, another place, other circumstances…she might have gladly accepted his offer. She might have even dared to hope for it. But now? What he was asking…it was impossible, for more reasons than he could ever know. How did she explain that? How could she make him understand that it wasn’t him?

  The furrow reached its deepest point, and then his eyes widened. “Oh!” He held out a hand, as if to ward away an unspoken objection. “You’re from Ferehar. I wasn’t even thinking. I’m so sorry. I’m h
appy to write your parents, first, if you feel that’s necessary?” He chuckled nervously and looked at her hopefully.

  “No,” she said quickly. “I mean…” She bit her lip. “That’s not it.”

  His face fell. “Oh. Well, I suppose that’s better than an outright rejection?” Before she could reply, he went on. “Of course, you should have some time to think it over. I’m so sorry. Let me know one way or the other?”

  “I-I will,” Ivana said, and then she turned and fled before the hard lump that had been growing in her throat dissolved and her tears betrayed her.

  Later that night, Ivana rolled a glass vial between her fingers while Elidor brought a cage holding a single rat into his study.

  Elidor set the rat’s food dish, filled with scraps, in front of Ivana and gestured to her. “Let’s see it then.”

  He had returned later that afternoon after being away for almost three weeks and had made it clear that by the time he returned, he expected Ivana to be ready with an actual poison to test.

  What he would have done had she not been prepared Ivana didn’t know, but it didn’t matter because the tiny vial held just that.

  She hadn’t known how he had intended to test it until he’d brought the cage into the room.

  “You want me to poison the rat?” she asked.

  “Obviously.”

  Ivana stifled a sigh. He didn’t understand that the reason she had asked had nothing to do with misunderstanding his intent. He usually didn’t. The more she came to know him—if it could be called that—the more she noticed peculiarities such as these. Half of his cruelty was merely his severe personality combined with a certain obliviousness.

  The rat snuffled about in the cage, looking for its missing food dish.

  It was a rat. Just a rat. Never mind its intended usage. Ivana uncorked the vial and tapped a drop onto the scraps.

  Elidor whisked the dish away and placed it back into the cage.

  Together, they waited and watched while the rat scarfed down its dinner, unaware that it had eaten its own demise.

  The lull gave space in Ivana’s mind for her previous thoughts to encroach again. She didn’t want to go back to the apothecary, ever.

  Grania had been kind to her, and her misplaced advice repeated in Ivana’s mind. She didn’t understand. She didn’t know what Ivana had been through. And while it was true that work kept Ivana’s mind off her troubles, they were always there waiting for her when her work was done.

  Reminding her of how life would never be the same again, how she could never have anything of what she would have once dreamed.

  Boden?

  Part of her wanted to accept the young man’s interest. To dare to see what would happen. It could be the chance at the new life she longed for—the life that had previously seemed so out of reach. But she doubted Elidor would approve. He hadn’t even wanted her going back to the same apothecary. She was in far too deep.

  If Boden knew, if Grania and her husband knew, the things she had done, the mistakes she had made, they would surely reject her out of hand. They were kind people, but Ivana couldn’t confess to them the details of her past and trust they wouldn’t care.

  No. She had learned that no one was that kind.

  The pain that could almost be forgotten while at the apothecary, and that had lessened to a dull ache while working with the poison, returned in full force. Ivana could almost hear words in the throbbing—words whispering about what she had lost, what she had given up, what she could never have, all because she had been a fool.

  She had let herself be seduced by Airell when she should have known better, and she had lost everything because of it.

  She had run north, instead of south, wanting to escape Ferehar as soon as possible, and had nearly died crossing the mountains at the brink of northern winter.

  She had naively thought someone might hire her to do something useful, and were it not for Elidor, she would have starved or frozen to death on the streets or been forced to seek refuge in the workhouses and ended up a little more than a slave.

  She had followed Elidor, allowing her curiosity to overcome the wiser path to let well enough alone.

  In every instance, she had followed the whims of her heart, and in every instance, it had led her wrong.

  To her horror, the tears that had been threatening all afternoon and evening started to fall.

  Elidor didn’t notice at first. He was too busy watching the rat. It had lain down on the floor of its cage and stopped moving. Dead.

  She wished she could feel that way. It would be so much better to feel dead than to feel this never-ending cycle of regret, guilt, agony—to be lifted out of her tormented existence for a moment only to feel it even more keenly when she was plunged back in.

  Elidor opened the cage door and poked at the rat. “Excellent.” He turned to face her, blinked, and frowned. “What are you sniveling about?”

  Damn it all. She didn’t want to speak. It was like the pain had latched on to the wave of tears and intended on riding it to the end. If she let words come out of her mouth, it would be like tearing down the only dam she had left holding back the full force of it.

  “Are you upset over the rat?” he asked, his tone not incredulous, as some people’s might have been, but reproachful. He had already come to that conclusion based on the evidence in front of him, and he thought her daft for it.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t care about the stupid rat!” As she had feared, speaking made it worse. She curled over onto herself, feeling like the girl who had first curled up into a ball in Elidor’s tiny guest room four months ago. She had fooled herself into thinking she was managing the pain with her blade, but it had never gone away, and she just wanted it to go away.

  “Then stop this nonsense. You have more work to do. You’ve successfully created a simple crafted poison; now try something more complicated.” He glanced at a book of formulas lying to the side. “There was an intriguing recipe in there for a tonic that mimics the symptoms of blood fever. That could be useful.”

  The mention of blood fever, at that moment, in her current emotional state, was too much. The memory lodged in her throat until she felt as though she were choking.

  Elidor was staring at her as though she were simple.

  “My mother—blood fever,” she managed to gasp out. She made no attempt to explain further. Elidor wouldn’t understand or care. She was as certain of that as she was that the rat was dead.

  His lips thinned and he shifted, annoyance flashing across his eyes.

  No, he definitely didn’t care.

  The thought was so powerful that it stopped her torrent of tears. He didn’t care!

  How? “You don’t care about any of the people you kill, do you?” she whispered.

  “Does the sword care about the lives it takes?”

  She managed a strangled laugh. “You’re not a piece of metal, Elidor. You’re a person.”

  “What is the point of this?”

  “How?”

  His eyes flashed with irritation again, but she didn’t care. “How, what?”

  “How do you not care? How do you not feel?”

  He snorted. “By feel, you mean driven about by foolish notions and urges like you and other pathetic creatures?”

  Pathetic? Yes. That about summed it up. “Something like that.”

  “I was born with such superior abilities.”

  She wilted. She had hoped he had learned some trick he could teach her to simply cut off the emotions that tormented her.

  Still, she pressed further. “Can you teach me?”

  “I can’t teach something I never learned.” He stroked the dead rat absently. “However, I suppose…” He eyed her. “As with anything, one could learn by practice. Others of my profession are less emotionally volatile than the average person.” He stopped with his hand on the rat. “But I know of only one way to teach you to be like me, and that is to teach you to be me.”

  And then the
meaning of his words crystallized in her mind. “You mean…you would take me on as an apprentice?”

  “I didn’t say I would. While it’s true that the government occasionally desires us to forge new swords, that has never been an interest of mine.” Still, despite his words, something glimmered in his eyes. Was it a spark of interest?

  The hope and desperation grew. It was crazy. But it might work. How did she convince him? “Look—I don’t know why you took me in. I don’t know why you’ve kept me here this long. I don’t know why you didn’t kill me when you said you should have. But surely I can do more for you than make poisons. Perhaps someone with a different perspective might help in other ways. Perhaps—”

  He held up his hand, and she fell silent.

  And the silence stretched on while it seemed he was studying every aspect of her face.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “But you should know that if I agree to this, I must inform my masters in order to secure the proper training for you. There is no turning back from that point. If they agree, you will be known as my apprentice, and you will not be able to work on your own until I say you are ready. If you try, they will order me to kill you.” He raised a finger. “And if they do not agree, they will also order me to kill you.”

  She swallowed, wavering. Was this what she really wanted?

  The answer came immediately. No. What she wanted was her old life back. But that could never happen, so in lieu of that, this might be her only option for building a new life.

  Every decision she had thought was right had led her astray.

  Perhaps it was time to make the wrong decision.

  “I understand.” She set her jaw and drew herself ramrod straight. “I’ll do anything.” Anything to make the pain stop. Anything.

  He smiled. Not one of his performance smiles. But the smile that she had learned was genuine to him. It was mirthless and cold, but a smile nonetheless. “We shall see.”

  Chapter Eight

  The next morning, Ivana sat at the dining room table penning a note to Boden. She felt remarkably calm about her decision to become Elidor’s apprentice.