Chapter 5 — Revelation
Rína had come home; in a manner of speaking. She was once again wearing a thick leather apron, gloves, facemask, and goggles.
When Yvette first led her downstairs, Rína was expecting crystals and cauldrons, sigils and seances. She was disappointed, but only for the briefest of moments. Around her was enough glass to outfit at least three temples, and enough hazardous reagents to contaminate an entire mountainside. It was perfect.
While the cottage above was cozy and bordering on claustrophobic, Yvette’s laboratory that Rína now found herself in was expansive and brutally efficient. Instead of worktables that could be jostled, workstations were set on counters that ran the entire perimeter of the lab, as well as on eight island counters perfectly spaced from each other and all made of some laminate material. Each workstation was clearly specialized for a specific purpose based on the equipment present, though Rína only recognized about half of what she saw, and what she recognized were far more sophisticated variants of the equipment she was used to.
Yvette had asked Rína to recreate the fuse she had used to get an idea of her methodology, so she was doing just that. The process was going quickly, mostly due to Yvette’s reagent store room having more compounds than she had ever heard of, including zatri salt and a few other reagents Rína would normally have had to refine first.
The cold resistant version of the fuse was about halfway to completion when a thought started itching at the back of Rína’s head. She had already described the fuse to Yvette in detail, and if the older woman—who was at this point was sitting on the spiral staircase like a vulture feigning disinterest—wanted to see how she worked, she could have had her make something challenging, which the fuse definitely was not.
Rína scowled, smelling a trap, and put aside the current stage of the fuse. She retrieved fresh samples of all of the reagents for the fuse from the store room and set to work verifying their quality. The part of her that felt like she might just be paranoid was silenced when she looked over and spotted an impish grin spreading across the witch’s face. The first reagent quickly came up as contaminated. Rína could have stopped there, but she felt she had to know what the witch—hag, more like—was planning to have happened if Rína had just gone in blind.
“Really!? All eight of them?” Rína shouted, an hour later, glaring daggers at the witch. Indeed all eight reagents she had told Yvette she would use had been contaminated, some more drastically than others. And Rína had only guesses of what the contaminants were. They hadn’t yet affected the synthesis as far as she could tell, though if she had to take a shot in the dark, she’d say that the contaminants would sabotage the solution right at the finish line.
“What?” Yvette smiled sheepishly, “It’s not like it would be much of a challenge otherwise. The question is: what are you going to do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” Yvette said as she rose from her seat on the stairs and strolled over to Rína’s workstation, “it would seem that some villainess has tampered with your ingredients—only those eight, I promise—but you are still in need of chemical fuses. Afterall, the world has a lot of bastards in it, and their houses won’t burn themselves down.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how flammable would you rate your cottage?”
“Ha! If you could so much as char the interior I would be genuinely impressed,” Yvette said, “But seriously, treat this as a real world scenario: Can you remove the contaminants?”
Rína held her glare for another moment before relenting with a sigh, “I have no idea what’s going on with the zatri salt or the kodesium, but for the other six, it looks like…” she listed off her best guesses, “I should be able to decontaminate half of them, but the other half are a lost cause.”
“Verdict?” Yvette led.
“Give me a second…” Rína muttered as she returned to the store room.
She would have to come up with a new recipe on the fly, only she wasn’t familiar with most of the reagents.
“Gods, how do you even pronounce this one,” Rína muttered to herself, eyeing one of the labels.
“Kadelone trihexyphosphate. It’s the active ingredient in bashra extract, at least for most recipes I’ve seen that use it. Bashra extract-extract, essentially.” Yvette clarified.
Rína raised an eyebrow, “How about this one?”
Yvette grinned and what followed was the lifeline Rína needed as the two went through the store room’s contents.
The biggest trouble apothecaries faced, besides freezing temperatures threatening their incendiaries, is that they didn’t have a solid theory of why reactions went the way they did. Recipe permutations could be tested and memorized ad infinitum and ingredients could be categorized by how and with what they generally reacted—acids and bases being a perfect example—but the underlying mechanisms for the reactions were obscured; what made an acid an acid was unknown.
What Rína saw was that the veil could indeed be lifted. The naming of too many of the reagents followed an almost algorithmic naming convention, implying to Rína that Yvette was privy to those exact underlying mechanisms. One thing at a time though—she had a fuse to make.
Thankfully, like the bashra extract, most of the reagents were present in more common recipes and were thus indirectly familiar to Rína. In fact, her coincidental familiarity was bordering on suspicious even. Regardless, an hour later she had a tentative recipe, one that incidentally didn’t use any of the original reagents she could likely decontaminate. After some tests for the potency of the new reagents, Rína got to work.
She took it slow and steady. Safety gear or not, she was ready to duck and cover if the solution looked like it would go off early. But another uneventful half hour of work later, it was complete.
“We can test it in this.” Yvette said as she brought out a bucket-sized ceramic crucible from the store room, “How about we go for an hour test? Then we can have lunch while we wait.”
Rína noted that the crucible definitely was not there at any of the times she was in the store room. The witch could have grabbed it from literally anywhere else to give the illusion of mundanity, but at this point Rína felt like the older woman was deliberately teasing her.
“What kind of mage are you, by the way? I don’t think you ever mentioned it.” Rína said as she ‘lit’ the fuse for an hour. She figured a direct question had about as good a chance of succeeding as any other.
“A given mage can actually pursue various types of magic, so strict mage categories are only relevant for mages that specialize,—” Yvette began.
“Here it comes…” Rína muttered to herself.
“—but—”
“There it is.”
“—we should probably get started on lunch if we want to be done before this is supposed to go off.”
Rína shook her head in defeat as she removed her protective gear, then she and Yvette—wearing the guise of oblivious innocence—ascended the stairs.
Yvette waved off Rína’s offer to help cook, citing the rules of hospitality, so Rína took a seat at the kitchen table and let her mind wander. Her thoughts were drawn to the clothes she wore as she couldn’t help but marvel at them. The wardrobe Yvette had made for her didn’t look visually impressive, but the actual craftsmanship was incredible. The seams were practically invisible, Rína at first thinking that there somehow weren’t any, and all of the garments that hugged her body, like the blouse and trousers she was currently wearing, were like a sturdy second skin and yet somehow were breathable and didn’t restrict her movement. Every item, from the undergarments, to the footwear, and from the lite summer dresses to the heavy winter coats, were all of a quality Rína doubted could be found even in a large city.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Thanks again for the clothes; they’re fantastic.”
“I’m glad you like them,” Yvette said with a genuine smile, as she set a pot of water to boil, “I should have asked what kind of styles you liked,” Yvette added with a grimace, “but by the time I thought of it you were already asleep. If you want any alterations, just say the word.”
“Oh no, they’re perfect,” Rína insisted as another variation on the same nagging question rose in her mind, “I’m curious how you actually made them, you said you made them downstairs, but I didn’t see a loom down there.”
“You’ll find that the more advanced a workshop, the wider variety of products it can produce, but—”
“Please don’t.” Rína interrupted as she leveled her gaze at Yvette, “I can appreciate you wanting to keep your privacy, but this evasion-but-subject-change routine is starting to feel a lot like you’re just mocking my curiosity.”
Yvette froze for a moment, then cursed under her breath and met Rína’s gaze with soft eyes, “That certainly wasn’t the intention. And I apologize for it coming across that way. To answer your question: I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Shouldn’t. And I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to trust me that it’s for a good reason.” Yvette shrugged apologetically.
“Well… apology accepted. But for someone so keen on their privacy, you sure do flaunt whatever it is that you’re doing,” Rína said, waving vaguely around the cottage.
“I suppose I do,” Yvette conceded with a chuckle as she dropped raw pasta into a boiling pot, “but in truth, the moment Felix decided to intervene on your behalf, you seeing what you’ve seen became an inevitability.”
“So then what’s the point of further secrecy?”
“Magecraft is rather versatile. The majority of what you’ve seen could be accomplished through any of a dozen different forms of magic, so all you’ve really learned so far is that there is someone who is probably a mage living in the middle of the woods. And the things that you’ve seen that couldn’t be implemented by other magics, probably wouldn’t be believed by knowledgeable people. More likely, they’d say that you just misremembered some small detail of your story.”
“So then the specific kind of magic you practice is what you’re ultimately hiding.” Rína concluded.
“Magics come in a wide—” Yvette stopped herself with a half grimace, “No comment.”
“Is it some kind of twisted, taboo kind?” Rína said, staring starry-eyed at Yvette and subconsciously inching closer to the edge of her kitchen seat.
“You are awfully excited for me to say ‘yes’ to that.” Yvette commented, glancing at Rína through the corner of her eye, “Regardless: no, unequivocally, that is not the case. Sorry to disappoint. Now if you’ll allow a brief aside: I usually make a miniature dessert to go with lunch; are you craving anything right now?”
Rína thought for a moment before replying with a smirk, “Variety is generally best to cover multiple cravings, but… uh, but… shit. But… the… weather is nice today?” Rína stumbled as she tried to keep a straight face.
Yvette was also visibly trying to keep down a laugh, “Unfortunately for you, a non-answer equates to not wanting any dessert at all.”
“Wait, I didn’t mean that!”
----------------------------------------
Lunch having finished, Rína and Yvette were in the laboratory, standing before the crucible. Both were covered in protective gear and silently waiting to hear the fuse go off.
“Any minute now…” Rína muttered.
“Another two and a half minutes,” Yvette specified.
Rína turned to Yvette and opened her mouth to ask how she knew that but stopped, knowing that it would be a waste of breath. Yvette in turn shrugged apologetically.
Sure enough, two and a half minutes later the two women heard the telltale sound of the fuse igniting, only three minutes late of the one hour it was set for.
Rína sighed in relief as an arm was suddenly around her, catching her in a side hug. Yvette’s arm and body were like steel, but with just enough give so as not to make the hug uncomfortable. The taller woman lowered her face mask and nodded with a genuine smile, “Well done. Not many chemists would have gotten that on their first try.”
Rína’s breath hitched. Rína knew for a fact that she did good work, but she was almost always alone in voicing that sentiment. Master Andreou had been a good teacher and mentor, and she owed him a lot for actually agreeing to take her on as an apprentice, especially since at the time she was essentially just some kid haunting his apothecary shop. But to say that he could be miserly with his praise was an understatement. And the less said about what the other people of Leighton thought about her choice of profession, the better.
But there Rína stood, receiving heartfelt praise and affirmation of her abilities from a woman with gods know how much more experience than anyone she had ever known.
The heartfelt hug was another thing Rína didn’t exactly know how to respond to.
“Uh, yeah, thanks,” Rína smiled lamely before changing the subject, “So do you actually use this lab much?”
“Hm?” Yvette said as she released the hug to turn and consider the rest of the laboratory, “I do, mostly to relax or test a proof of concept.”
“What kind of projects do you work on?” Rína asked.
“If ever there was a question I would respond ‘no comment’ to, it would be that one,” Yvette replied quizzically, “And just for the record: no comment.”
“Yeah I figured,” Rína acknowledged, “But I suppose they keep you busy? They must be a lot of work, whatever they are.”
Yvette slowly turned and narrowed her eyes on Rína before tentatively replying, “Correct…”
Rína’s heart rate rose as took a steadying breath for the moment of truth, “Well, have you ever thought of maybe getting another pair of hands to help you out?” Rína’s heart was thumping hard against her chest as she appended, “Maybe an apprentice?”
Yvette’s gaze was unmoving. She eventually answered with a grave tone, “You do not know what you’re asking.”
“True.” Rína admitted, “But that would make for a great first lesson as an apprentice.”
Yvette snorted, “Didn’t you say your plan was to run off to some big city far away and open an apothecary shop?”
“Well, that plan has since been demoted to plan B,” Rína quipped as her palms started to sweat and she had still yet to hear an outright rejection.
“What about the isolation? I don’t get many visitors, even including present company. It will be a stark difference to a big city.”
“Even assuming I don’t enjoy the isolation, I could just dye my hair or something and visit some of the nearby villages that will be popping up in the next few years,” Rína countered.
“What?” Yvette asked, her eyes going wide.
“I mean, I obviously couldn’t go back to Leighton, not that I’d want to—”
“No, I mean, you said villages. Plural. Elaborate.” Yvette commanded, looking frantic.
“Uh,” Rína stammered, caught off guard, “They’re just people cashing in on the subsidy from the Homestead Decree, by moving out here.”
“Wh-,” Yvette started, before putting her face in her hands and starting again, “And what in the hells is the Homestead Decree?”
“It’s like a government program trying to turn as much of the Seric Highlands into farmland or mines or something. It’s been going on for a generation or two now.”
Yvette stared into the middle distance with hollow eyes, “I thought your town was just some religious outcasts or the like fleeing to the wilderness.”
“No, sorry.” Rína said as consolingly as she could, “Leighton’s first Magistrate, the current one’s father, was just more eager than average, I guess. He got the appointment because of how fast he managed to get enough people out here to form a village.”
“DAMN IT!” Yvette yelled, making Rína’s ears ring slightly.
Their conversation was interrupted by a pitying canine whine. Rína looked up to see the great wolf sticking its head down the spiral staircase. Canine though it was, the look of concern was unmistakable on its face.
“I’m sorry Felix. I’m sorry Rína,” Yvette began and pinched the bridge of her nose, “This… this changes things. I will have to investigate this for myself, but assuming it is as bad as it sounds… Felix, we might have to move.”
Another canine whine answered her.
“Rína, I will give your request full consideration; you have my word,” Yvette promised solemnly as she threw off her protective wear, “There’s no reason for us to delay though. If this will all be farmland in a generation, Felix and I should leave immediately.”
“Is it really that bad?” Rína asked, shocked at how fast the conversation turned.
“No comment,” Yvette replied with a smirk, “But, yes, it is. I think I’ll spend the rest of today and maybe tomorrow having a look around. As soon as I return, I’ll start preparations to leave, if needed. You are welcome to come with us, whatever our destination, whether as my apprentice or not.”
“Uh, yes. Yeah. I’d love to come,” Rína said, still off balance.
“Fantastic. Well not fantastic as a whole, but…” Yvette shrugged, “Oh! Felix? While I’m out, could you introduce Rína around to the local wolf packs? Just to avoid any accidents if Rína encounters them without either of us around.”
“Now hold on.”