Ilyan was . . . taller than Taliana imagined.

That should have been expected. He was a human, while she was only a snippen. Even short humans were still three times her height. And he was short for a human, probably only five foot three. Still, even as she stood as tall and straight as she could, Taliana still felt tiny as the aged man peered down at her through his spectacles.

“Eh?” he asked, looking down at her through a perfectly circular set of spectacles. Wispy white hair floated around the edges of his head, held down by a cap so old, it looked even older than his wrinkled, pockmarked face. “And who might you be?”

Taliana hurriedly wiped a dot of paint from her elbow. “Taliana, sir,” she said.

Like many aquamancers, Ilyan wore spectacles custom-built with two sets of lenses, layered on top of each other to provide different levels of magnification. He lifted the first set like a visor, peering at her.

“Taliana of Greensburrow?” Taliana prompted. “Your new apprentice. From the University. I was told to report today at seven.”

Ilyan shuffled out into the pre-dawn light. He, too, wore a white aquamancy coat, but with so many extra pockets of various colors added to it, he resembled a patchwork quilt.

Taliana’s heart dropped to her tail as Ilyan looked up at his sign.

He squinted, flipping his extra set of lenses back over his eyes, then lifting them again.

Taliana held her breath, praying to the Sky Father that her employer would either not notice the change, or not be upset about it.

“You have desecrated my signage,” he said finally.

Taliana let out her breath. There was no use denying it, and she had pre-decided she wasn’t going to apologize if caught. “It had to be done,” she said, trying to keep her knees from knocking together.

“Well, now it must be undone.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I cannot work in a shop that perpetuates a usage error,” Taliana said.

Ilyan peered back down at her. “The serial comma is a usage error?”

“Normally, no,” said Taliana. “But when an ampersand is used in place of “and,” the serial comma should be omitted. Every second-year scribal student knows that.”

“I don’t recall hiring a second-year scribal student,” Ilyan said. “I thought I hired a top-of-her-class aquamancy graduate. Will you be correcting grammar mistakes in my recipe tablets, I wonder? Quite hard when they’re incised into baked clay.”

Taliana shrugged.

“Undo it,” Ilyan quipped, then started to withdraw back into the shop. He paused at the door and pointed a wrinkled finger at her. “On your own time, after you’re discharged this afternoon. I’m not paying you to undo your sacrilege.”

He stepped inside, leaving Taliana simultaneously wondering how she still had a job and how her hammering heart had stayed in her chest.

Ilyan’s call shook her out of her reverie. “Hop to it, Taniala! We have work to do!”

*****

“We begin with a tour,” Ilyan said as Taliana entered. “Don’t touch anything.”

Ilyan’s shop followed the typical setup: a front room, where customers could interact with the shopkeeper over the counter, and a back room, where the actual work of measuring and mixing would be done.

The front room of Ilyan’s shop felt as old as the man who ran it. Display cases lined the walls, overflowing with odds and ends with no semblance of order. The air was thick with the scents of a dozen herbs and spices, the faint odor of sulfur, and something indefinably sweet.

“This,” Ilyan announced, “is the Sellery.”

“The Celery?” Taliana said, looking around. “This looks like an aquamancy shop, not a vegetable.”

“No, not Celery with a C. Sellery. With an S.”

Taliana raised her furry eyebrow at the old man.

“A place where you bake is called a bakery, is it not?” said Ilyan. “So a place where you sell . . .” He looked at her in expectation.

“You have got to be pulling my tail,” Taliana groaned.

Ilyan held up his hands, showing they were both empty. “Nope!”

Ignoring the old man and his weird sense of lexicography, Taliana walked to a display case, squinting in the room’s dim light to examine its bizarre contents: The shards of a broken mirror, hanging suspended from a wooden trestle like a mobile. The jagged tooth of some mythical animal sitting in a jar. A glass vial filled with dark sand.

What did these all mean? She had never seen such items in her three years at the University. Did the tooth bring good luck? (Wouldn’t that be counteracted by the broken mirror?) Did the sand bestow some extra property to Ilyan’s potions?

“You won’t find my secret in the Sellery, Tamiana,” Ilyan said.

Taliana snapped back around. “I wasn’t—”

“Yes, you were. Now, let me show you the counter.”

The counter was where Taliana would fulfill orders. Behind it, the back wall was lined with rows and rows of shelves. Each shelf was recessed six inches farther back than the shelf beneath it, giving snippens like Taliana ledges to access each shelf.

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Taliana breathed a sigh of relief as she saw that these, in sharp contrast to the cabinets at the front of the shop, were immaculately organized. Each potion had its own cubby, labeled in the same steady hand that had painted the sign.

She looked around, reading the labels. “Are they . . . they’re kind of alphabetical . . .”

“The most volatile potions are on the lowest shelves,” said Ilyan. “Next are the potions that must be kept in glass containers. The highest shelves hold the powders that must be most zealously guarded against contaminants.”

“. . . And then each shelf is organized alphabetically, right to left,” Taliana finished. “I can get the hang of this.”

“And before you ask,” said Ilyan, “My organizing system is not my secret.” He opened a door leading to the rear of the shop. “That’s all to see of the sellery for now, Tanya. On to the mixery.”

Taliana stopped in the doorway, blinking in surprise. The mixery was as different from the sellery as a porcelain vase from a bird’s nest. Large windows lined two walls, letting in torrents of natural light. The room was meticulously organized. Shelves lined the other two walls, each holding neatly labeled jars, barrels, and bags. A staircase in the corner led upstairs, presumably to Ilyan’s living quarters. A row of tables occupied the middle of the room, their surfaces clear save for a couple instruments of polished brass.

Taliana’s eyes darted about in delight. “This is . . . amazing!” She pointed to one of the instruments. “Is that a triple-beam balance?”

Ilyan nodded. “You’ve used one before?”

“The University had one in its highest-grade lab,” said Taliana. “I only got to use it twice.” Triple-beam balances were the newest technology, imported at incredible expense from an iron-worker from Larrisa. Instead of equal-arm balances, which used two platforms hung from a swinging arm, the triple-beam balance had weights that could be slid along notched rulers: one weight measured increments in shekels, the next tenths of a shekel, and the last hundredths of a shekel. It was an order of magnitude more sensitive than any other instrument on the market.

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Ilyan’s triple-beam balance. Generated by the author via MidJourney.

“The University should invest in more of them,” Ilyan said. “These are the scales of the future.”

“My professor said it cost two thousand shekels of silver!” Taliana said. That was twice her annual earnings as an apprentice (and, incidentally, twice her weight in silver).

“Worth the investment,” Ilyan said, moving across the room to tend to the fire in a hearth.

Taliana’s eyes widened. “This balance. Is that—”

“It is not my secret, if that’s what you’re wondering. I only procured the balance eight years ago.” Ilyan winked. “My secret’s been around a lot longer than that.” He gestured about the room. “I’ll give you twenty minutes to familiarize yourself, Taviama. Then we begin. Today we’ll be mixing a batch of endurance extracts, two batches of sleeping aromas, and three dozen purification capsules. Simple recipes, high tolerances for error.”

“When do we open the shop?” Taliana asked.

“The what?”

Right, Talian thought. “The sellery.”

“Three days from now,” Ilyan said. “I always take a half week off when starting a new apprentice. One thing at a time. First you learn how to mix. Then you learn how to sell.”

Taliana’s paws itched, ready to start taking orders. “I already know how to mix,” she protested. “I did finish top of my class at the University. Sleeping aromas were our first assignment on year one.”

“Ahh,” Ilyan said, raising one set of lenses on his spectacles to look at her. “You think you know how to mix.”

For the next seven hours, Ilyan proceeded to prove Taliana wrong.

image [https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F25b88547-cdc4-4d9b-b964-bc39dc61520d_1024x1024.jpeg]

Ilyan the Estimable. Generated by the author via DALL-E 3 (Copilot).

The man was the most exacting taskmaster Taliana had ever had—perhaps more meticulous than all her university professors combined. He measured everything. The temperature in the room. The humidity. The height of the flames in the hearth. The air pressure—Taliana didn’t even know there were instruments that could measure that, but apparently there were.

Each measurement’s result equated to the slightest adjustments in Ilyan’s recipes, dictated by complex charts hung on the wall. “The higher the ambient humidity, the less rapidly your liquid will boil off,” Ilyan explained at one point. “So the less aqua vitae we need to add, in order to preserve the correct concentration. Let’s see . . . twelve points of humidity . . . two percent less than the standard amount, which is sixteen ounces. Can you do the math, Tammietta?”

Taliana shrugged. “That’s about fifteen and a half ounces.”

Ilyan stopped what he was doing, straightening and turning to stare down at her. Taliana wilted.

“Never,” Ilyan said, enunciating through clenched teeth—“ever, use the word ‘about’ in my shop.”

“Y-yes, sir, yes, master,” Taliana stuttered. “I promise. I’m sorry.”

“Do the math. Two percent less than sixteen ounces. Precisely.”

She ran the math in her head. One percent would be 0.16. Doubling that made 0.32. Subtracting that from 16 would yield . . .

“15.68 ounces, master,” Taliana said.

“Good,” Ilyan said, a smile reappearing on his wrinkled face. “And luckily for you, the air pressure today is standard. Otherwise we’d have to account for that as well. 15.68. Measure it out with the graduated flask, and remember to measure—”

“From the bottom of the meniscus, not the edges,” Taliana said, rolling her eyes. “The University taught me that much.”

They worked in silence for a minute as Taliana dripped the precise amount of aqua vitae into a flask with a tall glass neck. Its gradations only measured to tenths of an ounce, so she ended up squinting at where the liquid hovered between 15.6 and 15.7.

“Master?”

“Yes?”

“Regarding words I’m not supposed to use . . . what about ‘approximately’?”

Ilyan chuckled. “‘Approximately’ is the inescapable bane of our profession. Everything is approximate. That will do.”

*****

Taliana ended the day utterly exhausted. She shouldn’t have. She had been mixing potions nearly every day for the last three years at the University. Still, the old man’s constant demand for precision left her back achy, her eyes sore, and her paws shaking by mid-afternoon.

He released her an hour early, after she accidentally spilled a bag of crushed peppermint seeds. To her surprise, he hadn’t gotten angry. “I can see I’ve driven you enough for today,” he said, fetching a dustpan and miniature broom from a closet. “Discard the seeds—they’re contaminated now—and sweep the rest of the floor, then you’re free to go. Though I do expect to see a certain punctuation mark restored to my sign by tomorrow morning, Tabitha.”

“Taliana, sir.”

“Tabiana. Right.”

Taliana swept the room spotless, then went to repaint the sign. She stared up at it, picturing how it had looked with the unneeded comma. Seriously, what was Ilyan thinking? Every scribe who frequented this street had to have been cringing every time they passed this sign.

She was getting out her brushes when she saw it: a shadow, watching her from across the street. The hair rose on her neck as she dug deeper into her bag, making a pretense to feel around for ink as she studied the figure out of the corner of her eye. It was a human, probably a male, shrouded in a cloak and tucked into the shadows of an alley. She couldn’t see his eyes, but his face was turned in her direction.

One of the brushes tumbled out of her bag, and she looked down for a moment to retrieve it. When she looked up, the shadow was gone.