For instance, she can’t tell me why grinding prawnberries into a finer powder draws out the more deadly aspects of the fruit, only that it does.
She also can’t tell me why the same principle doesn’t work for hyacrith, a close cousin of the prawnberry.
It’s like her mind is a recipe book, but she wasn’t the one to write it.
Which I find confusing, since she claims to have been the first to discover most of these solutions.
It’s not long before I come to realize that, though I will learn to mix a variety of potions under the watch of the queen, I will never match her abilities.
I will only ever memorize, though my mind, the same mind the queen so aptly complimented, wishes to do so much more.
It wants to take the properties of the queen’s ingredients and rearrange them, turn them into something bold and new. But there is a key to the properties of these ingredients, and it’s locked away in the queen’s mind, and I don’t believe she quite knows where it is or how to share it with me.
Three weeks in, and I start to wonder why it’s taking so long for my parents to respond to my letter. When I ask the queen about it, she laughs and comments, “Children, such impatient little things.”
I don’t appreciate being referred to as a child, not when I’m her apprentice, but that doesn’t end up mattering, because that morning when the servant arrives to fetch me from my room, he doesn’t take me to the queen’s quarters.
Instead, we wind through dark stone corridors, down a grisly staircase, and into the dungeons.
The queen is already there when we arrive, and I take a moment to scan the strange cellar that’s obviously been converted into a workspace.
It’s plenty like the queen’s, just darker and danker, and the vials are stained rather than pristine.
“Is your laboratory indisposed?” I ask, as this seems to me the only logical explanation for why the queen would want to meet down here.
Except now that I look at her, she’s not dressed for potion making. Instead of her usual black robes, she’s dressed in a dining gown, one with opals lining the collar and sleeves.
“My dear,” she explains in a tone that sounds suspiciously like someone trying to frame horrible news in a way that sounds like it’s a good thing, “I’m afraid that my duties as queen are devouring my time, and I would hardly want your apprenticeship to suffer for it. In the meantime, Gunter will be taking over your studies.”
There’s a faerie tied to the dais in the center of the cell. He has deep indigo eyes and scales that frame each side of his neck.
Gunter says the faerie’s a prisoner of the queen. That he was caught swindling elderly residents of Ermengarde, selling them sham potions for their ailments that ended up killing several.
I think he tells me this so that when I’m made to peel the scales from the male’s flesh while he screams, I won’t cry.
I cry anyway.
Gunter seems displeased with having me as an apprentice. Most of the time, he grunts at me rather than giving me instruction, but the few instructions he does give are more helpful than the queen’s. There are moments when he’s helping me deconstruct one of the queen’s potions where I almost forget I’m a prisoner, but then I remember I’ve forgotten my family, and it twists my stomach all in knots, and my stomach can’t handle any more knots. Not when the faerie we’ve been experimenting on keeps begging me not to take another scale. I do anyway, and when the scale comes free from his flesh, it leaves a gaping hole, out of which pours a stream of dark blood.
It takes me and Gunter an hour of compressing the wound to make the bleeding stop.
There’s another knot in my stomach today. When I entered the cell this morning, the faerie wasn’t begging and panting like he normally does. Gunter says he died during the night, and when I ask if he bled to death, Gunter doesn’t answer.
I start planning a way to escape.
CHAPTER 16
NOX
“What do you mean we won’t be monitoring the subject overnight?”
I grit my teeth, not so much with agitation at Gunter—I get why he’s annoyed, I get it to my very bones.
Gunter is a man of science, a man who lives by his processes. He does nothing on whim, nothing without carefully measured forethought.
I’m convinced that Gunter has feelings, but it took years of deciphering his grunts to pick out which ones he was experiencing in any given moment.
I know he’s taught me better than this. Better than to let emotion get in the way of progress. It’s why we’ve managed to reverse-engineer hundreds of the queen’s potions. Why we’ve been able to sit through the screams of the queen’s prisoners, why we haven’t gone mad yet.
Because we do nothing without forethought.
Well, Gunter does nothing without forethought. I do nothing without forethought as long as my stomach is full of blood.
“I promised her,” is all I can bear to answer as Gunter stares me down, an incredulous look twisting his features.
“You promised her?” He huffs, the kind that means, You and I both know your promises are as good as a human’s.
His unspoken words sting, though he doesn’t mean for them to. Gunter is as blunt as a battle-ax used to fell an acre of forest. When he speaks, or huffs, as the case may be, it is only to express what he feels is already obvious.
“I might not be bound by the fae curse any longer, but that doesn’t make my vows worthless,” I say, running my fingers through my hair.
We’re in Gunter’s bedroom. It’s a rather overwhelming place—the male burns enough incense to fund the entire trade—and I don’t particularly like to come here often. There are grimoires and scrolls stacked in heaps on the floor, the type that Gunter claims he can find anything in.
I’ve yet to prove him wrong on that front, but I don’t have to like it. The mess in the library is about as much as I can tolerate, and Gunter’s room is much worse.
There’s a spinning wheel in the corner, one that belonged to Gunter’s mother. The mother he never speaks of.
But he keeps her spinning wheel in pristine condition, and he works on it late into the evening. Not a night passes when he doesn’t spin thread on it. I wonder sometimes if he does it to feel connected to her, or if he does it for me. If the tapestries are Gunter’s silent apology for the life I’ve lost.
