The Aquamancer’s Secret - Part 1/3
Ilyan the Estimable had a secret. And everyone wanted to know what it was.
This story takes place eight years before the main events of The Pyromancer’s Scroll.
Ilyan the Estimable
Ilyan the Estimable had a secret. And everyone wanted to know what it was.
For sixty-three years, the venerable aquamancer had peddled his potions, dilutions, and elixirs from his little shop on Renner Street—all the while wreathed in rumors of a secret to his success. And he was successful. His shop entertained a constant flow of customers. They came from all over the capital, the countryside, and even far-flung provinces. Ilyan was the aquamancer of choice for most of the nobility, and whisper had it that even the imperial aquamancers would go to him for help.
Everyone agreed that his potions just worked better than his competitors’. Stronger impact. Longer-lasting results. Fewer side effects. Aquamancy was a particularly exacting magical science, with the slightest errors having potentially dire consequences. Take an endurance potion, for example. The correct formula could give someone the strength to run twice as far as they normally could. But if one ingredient were to be off by a single percentage point, that same potion would cause a splitting headache the next morning.
No customer had ever complained to Ilyan of a splitting headache.
Rumors abounded of what Ilyan’s secret could be. A set of proprietary recipes? A secret additive? Imported ingredients from purer sources overseas? The blessing of angels?
Everyone wanted to know.
Ilyan’s Sign (and Its Illicit Copyediting)
For sixty-three years, Ilyan’s sign had hung proudly over his shop, weathering rain and snow with its unchanging message:
Ilyan's Aquamancery
Potions, Tinctures, & Elixirs
Until today.
Today, unless Taliana broke her neck in the attempt, it would read ever so slightly differently:
Ilyan’s Aquamancery
Potions, Tinctures & Elixirs
Taliana gritted her teeth in concentration as she hung, upside-down, suspended by her tail from the sign’s support bar. Taliana was a snippen—a small, spry, furry race of creatures, about the size of housecats but more resembling squirrels. She daubed at the old wood with her brush, using as light a touch as possible to cover up the affronting punctuation mark after “Tinctures.”
“I still can’t believe you’re risking both your neck and your apprenticeship over a comma,” said her cousin, who was sitting on the top of the support bar with Taliana’s bag of paint supplies.
“I miscalculated the hue,” Taliana said, ignoring the comment. “Hand me the lighter brown ink.”
Her cousin handed it over, and Taliana somehow managed to take it without spilling it, despite hanging upside down.
“Do you think you should’ve at least gotten permission from the old man first?” her cousin piped up again. “You haven’t even met him yet. Seriously. This is uncharacteristic of you, Taliana. On-brand for me, but very off-brand for you.”
“He probably won’t even notice,” Taliana said. She passed the ink jar back up. “See? Once it dries, you’ll barely be able to tell the comma was ever there.” She launched herself away from the sign, twisting in midair until she landed in a crouch on the ground. Standing up, she dusted her fur off, then donned her spotlessly white apprentice coat, checking that the various pockets still held their respective tools.
“Welp, I’m off,” said her cousin, dropping the bag of inks and brushes by Taliana’s feet and racing off. “Got my own apprenticeship starting today at a bakery. Can’t be late.” She glanced at the brightening sky. “Well, already late. Can’t be too late. Whatever.”
A bell rang somewhere in the city, marking the seventh hour of the day. It was time. Taliana straightened her coat, padded up to the door of the shop, and knocked.
First Impressions
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!”
The Sellery (No, Not the Vegetable)
“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.
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.”
A Matter of Precision
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.
“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.
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.”
The Shadow
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.
Taliana Gets Some Ambiguous Advice
Taliana told her master about the shadowy figure the next morning.
“Hmm,” Ilyan said, jotting a note down in one of his books. The man notated nearly everything. He must be single-handedly keeping the city’s vellum industry in business.
“Should I be concerned?” Taliana said.
“My shop is somewhat a curiosity, even a tourist attraction,” Ilyan said. “That someone was studying my storefront is not unusual.”
“. . . So I shouldn’t be concerned,” Taliana said.
“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Ilyan said. “Merely that it’s not unusual.”
“So I should be concerned.”
“If you have a mind to be concerned, then you are justified,” said Ilyan. He certainly did not seem concerned. “Keep your eye out, and don’t walk down dark alleys by yourself. Perhaps vary your route home each day.”
The hair on Taliana’s back started to tingle again. “Is that just general advice to avoid getting mugged, or am I seriously in danger?”
Ilyan paused from his work (grinding a new batch of peppermint seeds) and raised both his lenses to look at Taliana. “Let’s just say that, as my apprentice, you have a higher profile than when you were just a university student.”
Great.
They spent the day making various elixirs, each rising in complexity. Taliana found her endurance already increasing. When she slipped out the door that afternoon, she took a long minute to study the nearby shops and alleys.
Nothing.
She still checked over her shoulder the whole way home.
Cousin Talk
“I bet I know what the old man’s secret is,” said Taliana’s cousin the next morning. “Bribery.”
Taliana jabbed her in the ribs. “Oh, be serious.”
The two of them stood in a corner of their family burrow as Taliana packed her bag. This particular room was shared between no fewer than seventeen of Taliana’s siblings and cousins, most of whom were still asleep, curled up on rugs or mats spread out over the dirt floor. Snippen families tended to be rather prolific.
“Bribery, I’m serious,” said her cousin, who was named Twigly. “Ilyan pays off his disgruntled customers to keep them silent.”
“Oh, come on,” Taliana said.
“What?” her cousin said. “It’s what I would do.”
“You would also use a rigged scale when measuring payments, then pickpocket your customers as they walk out the door for good measure,” Taliana said. “I know you stole my nice charcoal pencil, by the way. I want it back.”
Twigly flashed a guilty grin and fished around in a pocket of her tattered vest. “Hmm, must have misplaced it. Silly me. Can I get it to you tomorrow?”
A clump of dirt fell from the ceiling as a wagon rumbled by somewhere overhead. This burrow had been dug directly under a street, and much too shallowly—probably the work of sleazy diggers cutting corners to cut costs. It was just a matter of time before the room caved in completely during a heavy rain. Taliana closed her eyes, picturing a quiet, cozy hole underneath a shop that she owned herself. Soon. One year, one apprenticeship later, and she would arrive.
She’d come so far already. Three years of aquamancy school, studying tablets by candlelight late into the night. Acing her exams at the top of her class. Winning the coveted apprenticeship with the legendary Ilyan himself. Pinching and saving every shekel so she’d have the funds to start her own shop somewhere, once her apprenticeship was complete—once she knew Ilyan’s secret.
That was the big question mark. Did Ilyan’s apprentices learn his secret? Each of his past apprentices vociferously denied ever learning it. Yet, without fail, they had gone on to start highly successful shops of their own around the empire. So they had to have learned something special under his employ. The only question was, had Ilyan told them openly? Or had they figured it out more surreptitiously?
One way or another, she would learn that secret.
“Time for me to go,” Taliana said, shouldering her bag. “Time for you too, if you don’t want to be late to the bakery again.”
“Oh, I quit yesterday,” said Twigly.
“What?”
“Well, technically they fired me. Caught me stealing scones.”
“From your employer?”
“Nonsense. From the customers. After they had bought them. But it’s okay! I’m starting an apprenticeship at a candle maker’s today. Much less tempting situation. You can’t eat candles.”
Taliana shook her head. “Don’t burn anything to the ground. And I will expect that pencil tomorrow.”
Instructions and Disclaimers
Luckily, Ilyan’s handling of customers wasn’t quite as exacting as his handling of potions. Barely.
He still emphasized precision, of course. Each customer’s silver had to be weighed. But he used a traditional equal-arm balance for that, accurate only to a tenth of a shekel.
More tiring was his insistence on giving the customers instructions. Each elixir came with a set of precautions, warnings, and procedures that Taliana would have to recite from memory. Take this potion with food. Take this other potion on an empty stomach. Don’t eat any tomato products within eleven hours of drinking this tincture. This aromatic must only be used in a well-ventilated area.
Then there were the disclaimers. “Aquamancy enhances, but it does not make the impossible possible” was one of Ilyan’s common refrains. “A strength potion makes a weak man strong and a strong man stronger. But do not attempt to lift anything more than twice what you would lift normally, or risk injury.”
The first day the sellery was open, Taliana’s only duty was to weigh payments, while she committed each set of instructions to memory as Ilyan recited them to customers. Despite the old man’s age, he moved with a fluidity from decades of practice, selecting the right vial off the shelf with barely a glance as he handled a constant flow of customers.
Ilyan knew over half his customers by name. (At least, he said a name when they walked in the door. Whether the name was accurate or not was anyone’s guess.) With some he chatted like old friends.
“Meriam,” he called as a middle-aged aristocratic lady walked through the door. “Right on time. I have your drops of anti-indigestion right here. Takanah, weigh out a shekel and a half. Marian gets a discount for being a repeat customer. Now remember, Meriana, take two drops directly after dinner. Avoid milk and cheese any later than mid-afternoon. If you experience bad dreams, take only one drop the next day. Congratulations on your husband’s promotion, by the way! Next month when I’m not so busy, I want to hear all about it.”
When the lady had left the store, Taliana asked, “How long has she been coming by?”
“Marietta? Oh, two decades or so, ever since her stomach started giving her problems.”
“Once a month, for two decades . . . and you still give her the instructions? Each time?”
“Each time!” Ilyan said. He tapped the side of his head. “You know how easy it is to forget things, Tapioka.”
“Taliana, sir.”
“Exactly.”
Passables
For a whole week, Ilyan staffed the counter while Taliana observed. Then they switched roles, with Taliana dispensing potions and their accompanying instructions under the ever-watchful eye of her master. Only until she had gone three straight days without a correction from him did he announce she was ready to tend the counter alone.
“What will you be doing?” she asked.
“I’ll be in the mixery, mixing,” he said. “And studying. Reading up on the latest research. Answering correspondence. Reviewing the ledgers. Quite the backlog of work after three weeks of training.”
“What if someone wants to talk to you?”
“Every tourist from the outer provinces wants to ‘talk’ to me. Only come get me if a legitimate customer asks a legitimate question that you’re not trained how to answer. Oh, and if they have a passable, send them straight to me.”
“A . . . passable?”
Ilyan fished in one of his pockets and pulled out a small metal emblem. He passed it to Taliana. “Study it carefully. Notice the etchings on the front, the groove on the reverse. This is a passable.”
“So . . . it’s a pass,” said Taliana.
“It shows that people are able to pass,” said Ilyan. “Thus, a passable.”
“I’m just going to call it a pass,” said Taliana.
“You can call it a pass on the day my sign is no longer despoiled,” Ilyan said. He peered over his spectacles at her. “It’s been three weeks, now, Talitha.”
“Sorry, master. Slipped my mind. I’ll get on it.”
It was sort of true. The shadowy figure had driven all thoughts of the sign from her mind for a couple days. She had remembered since then, but her cousin had lost Taliana’s brushes after a stint apprenticing for a muralist. Why did she even talk to Twigly?
Hunting for Answers, Finding More Questions
For the next few weeks, Taliana kept her eyes peeled for Ilyan’s secret.
Turns out, he had quite a few.
What was with the menagerie of objects in his front display cabinets? Customers gawked over them, studying them from every angle, peppering the old man with questions. Each day the answers changed. The mirror mobile, alone, had more than half a dozen explanations. “Keeping the mirror suspended wards off bad luck from broken glass.” “The mirror reflects the many dimensions of the unseen realm.” “A wandering mage gave me this mirror with the promise that I would never let it touch the ground.”
More intriguing, however, were the various ingredients on the mixery shelves that Taliana had never seen in other labs. Sulfic rock. Magnolia blossoms. Over a dozen jars of rosewood powder. What did Ilyan use them for? She never saw him touch them. And yet . . . sometimes, when brewing batches, he would send her into the sellery or out to his herb garden to fetch something. Was it a cover? Was he adding secret ingredients when she wasn’t present?
On a couple occasions, when Ilyan was deep in conversation with a customer at the counter, Taliana snuck into the mixery and peaked into corners. Her discoveries only yielded more questions. What was the mysterious stack of ledgers with each entry written in code? Why was there a trapdoor in the floor, leading only to an empty crawl space? And what was up with the crossbow hidden behind one of the storage shelves?
And then there were the passables. A couple times a week, someone would come by, flash the metal token, and disappear into the mixery to talk with Ilyan. One frequent guest was a korrik—a stocky, reptilian race, with hard scaly skin and claws on their hands and feet. This korrik had lost an arm at some point, and walked with a limp. He would stump into the shop, carrying a crate under his remaining arm, and flash his passable to Taliana with an inaudible grunt. He would meet with Ilyan only a few minutes before stumping out again.
Another frequent visitor was a tall, thin man in a green vest. Ilyan would talk with him in the back room for up to an hour, their voices too low for Taliana to overhear. She peaked in once to see them both leaning over one of Ilyan’s coded ledgers, until Ilyan spotted her and waved her off.
Marian, the aristocratic lady, had a passable as well. The next time she came by, she spent a good chunk of the afternoon in the mixery, talking and laughing with Ilyan like old friends.
One morning, a young man stepped inside the shop. He was short for a human (though still taller than Ilyan), with a round face and curly brown hair. He poked around the front of the room, peering at each item in Ilyan’s odd collection. Two different times, Taliana reminded him not to touch anything.
Shortly after another customer arrived, the young man approached the counter. “Passable,” he said, flashing a token. Taliana glanced over and opened the counter door for him as she kept talking with the other customer.
Only once the other customer had left did Taliana notice the voices from the mixery were louder than usual. Scarcely a minute later, the young man hurried out. “Please reconsider,” he said over his shoulder. “You are leaving a fortune on the table.”
Ilyan followed a moment later, walking more briskly than Taliana had ever seen him move. “Show your face in my shop again, suborner, and I’ll call the city guard!” he snapped. Ilyan escorted the young man to the door, slamming it behind him so hard that the mirror mobile toppled over in its case.
“Master?” Taliana said.
Ilyan closed his eyes, letting out a deep breath. He fixed the toppled mirror, then walked slowly over to the counter.
“Taliana,” he said, holding up the young man’s emblem. “Examine this.”
Taliana did. She felt the difference at once. “There’s no groove on the reverse.”
“Forgery,” Ilyan said, pocketing it. “And an excellent one. Visibly, it was passable as a passable. That’s why you must always physically handle it.”
“What did he want?”
Ilyan hummed to himself for a bit before answering. “He offered a sizeable sum of money for some confidential information that I flatly refused to provide.”
Taliana stared at him in shock. “He tried to buy your secret?”
Ilyan blinked. “Did I say that?”
“In more words.”
“Hmm. Are you sure you were never a scribal student?”
Mistakes
Taliana always arrived three hours before the shop opened to the public, to help Ilyan mix potions and restock the shelves behind the counter.
Today, she was preparing a batch of aquaheal, a cream prized for its ability to treat minor wounds and soothe burns. The process was meticulous, requiring the perfect balance of seaweed extract, sheep’s milk, and ground dandelion fluff, simmered gently over a low flame for exactly forty-three and a half minutes.
“Stir it constantly, Tavacado,” Ilyan reminded her from where he tended a different cauldron. “We don’t want the mixture to curdle.”
“I am not going to let it curdle,” said Taliana, who had only paused for a moment to re-tie the sash of her lab coat. The thought made her curious. “In all your years, Ilyan, what’s the worst mistake an apprentice has ever made?”
“Well, I once had an apprentice spill a whole bag of peppermint seeds.”
“Ha. Ha. Not funny.”
Ilyan thought for a moment, tugging absently on one of the many loose threads dotting his coat. “I once had an apprentice confuse serafloris powder with seraferous powder while making a tonic for the winter flu."
Taliana’s eyes widened in horror. “What happened?”
“The customer was very confused when her children, who had been bedridden with high fevers, suddenly jumped out of bed and started dancing.”
“Really?” Taliana exclaimed. “Seraferous-induced euphoria cures fevers?”
“Not at all,” Ilyan said. “Soon as the potion wore off, they were right back in bed, worse than before due to the overexertion. Took them five more weeks to recover. Always double-check your ingredients.”
They stirred their cauldrons in silence. Taliana checked a terramantic timepiece in the corner. Twenty-seven more minutes. She switched the spoon to her other paw.
“And what’s the worse mistake you’ve ever made, master?” She grinned up at him, expecting a story that would be unforgettable. But Ilyan’s face had grown suddenly tense.
“That,” he said, staring into the depths of his cauldron, “is a story for another day.”
The next twenty-six and a half minutes passed in silence.
This story is also posted by the author on Royal Road and Wattpad.
I just love how this story makes the city and world come alive! It makes me want to live there.
In my defense . . . I DID ask Taliana's permission before taking her charcoal pencil. Wasn't my fault she was asleep at the time.