by J. S. Fields
Maja? Have I ever heard Mother use the queen’s name before?
The queen laughed—a honeyed, candied sound—and my jaw dropped as she stepped out and embraced Mother. Mother thumped the queen on the back, much harder than she ought to have been able, given the thinness of her frame. It wouldn’t have been strange at all if they weren’t of such severely disparate stations and, well, witches. At least, I assumed the queen was a witch. She didn’t bear the witch guild mark, but what other reason was there for her being here?
“Sorin?” The queen broke from Mother, and her unwavering, neutral gaze fell back on me. “Thank you for coming.”
“I wasn’t given an option.” I wasn’t often given options. I remembered Magda’s plea for me to join her on this quest, and Mother bringing me into the woods and repairing my hand. I thought about my tattoo, and my childhood in Thuja. If I’d had a knife in that moment, I’d have impaled my hand, just to spite them all.
“You were given plenty of options,” Mother retorted. “You ignored them.”
The queen waved a hand, then stepped forward, took my chin between her thumb and forefinger, and turned my head to the right, exposing my tattoo. Her fingers weren’t calloused like Magda’s, but she smelled of the same soap. I closed my eyes. I hadn’t forgotten about the tattoo, but I hadn’t seen it yet, either. Somehow, that made it less real. I was afraid that if the queen spoke about it, the mark would become a tangible thing. I wasn’t certain I could handle that right now. One more mark of absurdity and reality might crumble to pieces around me.
“Never mind that. Sorin is here now. Sorin,” the queen began.
“Magda is in Celtis looking for you!” I blurted out.
“I’m aware.” The queen frowned at my neck. “I’m surprised at this, Amada. I doubt Sorin decided to declare for the woodcutter’s guild on the sole delight of finding you.” She canted her head. “Was this mark freely chosen?”
Mother, for the first time in my memory, looked uncomfortable. She shuffled back a step, and her eyes flicked to the ground before returning the queen’s stare. It was comforting, in a way, to think the queen might have stayed Mother’s hand with the tattooing. At least someone could control Mother’s reins.
“It’s done. Sorin chose this. There is no need for a debate.”
“Hmmm.” The queen nodded and smoothed the front of her thick silk tunic. “No more alchemy, Sorin?”
I shrugged and tried to look indifferent. “I guess.” I couldn’t get out the rest of the words. They stayed stuck in my mouth. Why are you lurking in the woods of Puget? Why did you abandon Sorpsi? Why are you staring at me like I’m a tasty little bug?
“Pity.” She pointed to the north end of the camp. “Amada, would you join Walerian in his preparations? I’d like to have a chat with Sorin about Magda, I think. Sorin, sit by the south end there and wait for me.” She turned sharply on her booted heel and went back inside her tent.
Mother paused only long enough to squeeze my hand. It was a surprisingly affectionate gesture. She leaned in and kissed my cheek, which was terrifying, and slipped a…stone, maybe, into my pocket. I pushed her away, letting my fingernails dig into her leathers. She’d never kissed me, not in my memory.
“I do love you, Sorin.” Mother whispered the words, and a heartbeat later, she turned and headed farther into the camp.
Love. The word tasted chalky. I sat on a downed hardwood log and rammed my heel into the side. A fist-sized chunk came free, revealing a vein of red stain from the flaming dragon fungus. Out of disgust, I went to my knees and gouged at the wood with a stick, dislodging several red fragments. I’d find a fire and toss them in. Let the fire burn the wood. Let it cauterize my memories. Break apart my life so that I might reassemble it, properly this time.
“Always playing in the dirt, you woodcutters.”
I startled and dropped the wood as the queen knelt before me, a bucket of steaming water in one hand and a hard roll in the other. Now queens were kneeling before me? Maybe I had fallen unconscious near the spirit house and this was some petal-infused nightmare. I wiped my hands on my pants and sat so she would still be above me. “Your Highness?”
She offered me the roll. “Hungry?”
“Yes. Thank you.” The roll was too dry and hard to be part of a dream, but I demolished it anyway in three bites while the queen pulled a white cloth from the bucket. I eyed the sopping thing warily. “Is there something in there?” It smelled faintly of wintergreen. In a camp of witches, it was logical to assume herbs and potions.
The queen laughed. “Just water, alchemist,” she said smoothly. “You have my word.”
“Do queens usually wash guilders?”
The queen clasped her hands behind her back. “Is it a problem? I cleaned your bottom, too, when you were small.”
I looked away. “No, Your Majesty, of course not.” I really had no reason to refuse, and the tattoo was still seeping. I turned my neck to her and bit back a scream as the queen dabbed the cloth around the tattoo, careful not to touch the actual mark. Combined with the heat of the campsite, the hot water made me to break into a sweat. The queen’s washing was attentively gentle, but I still hissed in pain when she got too close to lines.
“I trust my daughter is well?”
I didn’t know what she was looking for and had no idea how to respond. My argument with Magda from the day before seemed so far in the past as to be intangible, and Magda was clearly not “well,” since she’d had to make an emergency trip to Puget in place of her missing mother.
“As well as can be expected.”
The queen rinsed the cloth in the bucket and came back in for a second pass. “Magda is capable of running Sorpsi in my absence, Sorin.”
I jerked my head at her words. I’d had common sense once, and an understanding of how one spoke to royalty, but that had bled away, it seemed, into this ridiculous setting. “Ruling, maybe, but the treaty talks?”
The queen rinsed the rag a final time, then began to clean the dirt from my face. It should have felt patronizing, but instead it reminded me of the times the queen had wiped our tears—Magda’s and mine—when we’d fallen in the courtyard, or scraped against some log on the outskirts of the forest. Mother had often left me at the palace for days on end, and I couldn’t remember a time when she had been as gentle as the queen was now.
“The first day is merely the presentation by the census,” the queen said. She sat back and dropped the cloth into the bucket. “There now. You look like a human again.”
“But it’s a census for which Sorpsi has no guilds.” I wanted my words to have more sting to them, but they only sounded tired.
The queen chortled. “For which none of the three countries have guilds. Do you think industrialization is solely limited to Sorpsi?”
“I…” Of course it wasn’t, but wasn’t it Sorpsi we were trying to save?
“I’ll join her tomorrow when the negotiating begins.” The queen tilted her head to the side and tucked a thick lock of hair behind her ear. In that moment, she looked so much like Magda that a lump rose in my throat. “Is that the only issue you take with me, that I’ve abandoned Magda to the treaty talks? I’d always thought we got on well enough, you and I. Do you not trust me?”
I glared at the queen, partly because she was baiting me like some stinkhorn fungus, and partly because I was frustrated with the calmness of everyone around me. Sorpsi was going to fall apart, apparently all three countries were going to fall apart, and the queen was washing my forced tattoo like we were at tea and I was a ten-year-old pouting over sweets.
“Magda came for you because of the missing guilders, and what is happening to Sorpsi. I came looking for Amada. That’s all.”
“And you’ve found her. Well done.” She made a diagonal motion across my torso. “You lost something along the way, though, didn’t you?”
“My knife,” I muttered, for I missed the weight of it on my belt. My sanity, possibly.
“I was think
ing of something more substantial.” From behind the bucket, the queen pulled a strip of worn leather that dangled three small leather pouches. “Yours, is it not? I would very much like to know more about your alchemy.”
My eyes went wide, and I snatched my belt from her and cradled it in my lap. How? Why? Had Walerian found it as he’d trailed us on the glacier? Why couldn’t it have stayed there and been merely another relic to the king’s old magic? The pigments were mine; that they had been handled by anyone else, especially witches, made them feel that much more tarnished. I clutched at the middle pouch, still full of blue-green pigment, and tried to even out my breathing. They’d meant so much to me for so long. I missed their familiar weight and the reminder of the one thing I was truly good at.
“They’re just toys, Your Highness. I’m not an alchemist.”
She sat forward and braced herself on her thighs. “No, you are not. But you’d like to be, wouldn’t you?” She tapped the first pouch and smiled. “I’ve watched you for years, Sorin. Don’t think I haven’t noticed, even with Amada insisting it was only for wood finishes. I’ve wanted you training with Rahad at the palace since you were twelve. Your mother would have none of it. She didn’t want you involved in any of this. Didn’t think you had it in you. And now, here we are.”
Twelve? Twelve was the year we’d stopped visiting the palace. Twelve was the last year I had seen Magda, and the last year we’d run through the square and climbed the old king’s statue. It was the year I’d snuck into Master Rahad’s laboratory at night on a dare and read his notes on how to dissolve gold in an acid mixture. It was the year I’d made my first solvent, and the year I’d started to turn from woodcutting.
The skin on my neck burned, though nothing had touched it. Forget magic and all its implications. Forget the history of the unbound guilds that I no longer wanted anything to do with. The trade I’d wanted had been right there, and now that I had found it, I was marked with another guild’s symbol because Mother couldn’t let me go. She would never see me as anything beyond a woodcutter, and her heir. Her deliberate cruelty pierced my heart like thousands of tiny bone fragments. The queen had been watching, and the future I’d wanted had been there, perfect and formed and more than anyone had a right to wish for, and Mother had kept me from it. She had kept me locked in that forest, away from Magda, and the queen, and alchemy, so I would have no choice but to follow her.
I touched a finger to my new tattoo.
And I hated her.
Twenty-Four: Aqua regia
In that moment, in that forest rotten with magic and burnt sorrel, I pushed away all of Mother’s words about acceptance and heirship. I wanted to scream, and throw, kick and punch and demand why why WHY Mother had seen fit to cripple my future.
“Sorin?” the queen asked, both gentle and impatient. She sounded like my childhood, like the woman who had brought Magda and me hot tea late at night when we stayed up telling each other ghost stories. Like the woman who’d chided us for playing too long by the river, thereby delaying her dinner because she’d not eat without us.
“Mother kept me from you.” I’d meant to ask, but it came out as a statement.
The queen nodded. “She did.”
“She kept me from Magda.” My voice caught as if Mother’s hands were around my throat.
“She did.”
“Why?”
The way the queen’s fingers spread across her thighs, and the look of hunger I saw as she eyed my pouches, pushed me to sit back. I rammed my balled fits into my hips and clenched my jaw. “Why?”
“Because you belong to her, by guild law. Because she covets your skills. Because she would not see the guilds die—would not have you wander off like so many guilder heirs to factory jobs that require less skill.”
“I would have stayed!” I pounded my fist into the ground. “I would have stayed for Master Rahad, for alchemy, for…” For Magda, I finished, silently.
“I know.” The queen moved the bucket to the side and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. “So let’s talk about that, you and I. I have a position open, it would seem, for a royal alchemist, but Walerian tells me this is perhaps no longer what you want.” Half of her mouth turned up into a smile. “Are you afraid of alchemy, Sorin, after that trouble on the glacier?”
“You know about Master Rahad?” I asked, although, really, if Walerian reported to her, he’d likely seen the body as well. “Do you know how he died?”
Irritation flashed across the queen’s face so quickly I almost thought I’d imagined it. “He and I had a disagreement. He was supposed to go back to the capital, but it seems the ice took him instead.” She frowned, and it highlighted the lines around her mouth and the hollowness of her cheeks. I was not, I reminded myself, simply talking to an older version of Magda. “He’d never been the best of apprentices either.” Her eyes bored into mine, and I couldn’t bring myself to look away. It felt like she could see all the way through me, to the trees beyond the burnt circle in which we sat. “You’d be much better, I’d think. Especially after all of Amada’s training.”
“A…apprentice,” I stuttered.
“Mmm.” The queen nodded and smiled, although it didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“You an alchemist?” I asked. I searcher her neck for a tattoo, but the skin was as smooth and brown as it had always been. “Does Magda know? Does the kingdom know?”
“I doubt it. But don’t look at me like that, Sorin, like I’ve just killed your pet monkey. Iana was an alchemist, a guilded alchemist at that. Most queens have to be, after a fashion. We’ve a legacy of old magic to contain, and that’s hard to do with no knowledge of the unbound guilds.”
“So you’re all witches.” It wasn’t a question, and the disgust was more than evident in my voice.
“Your mother is a witch,” the queen returned with a biting tone. “I am an alchemist.”
“They’re both obscene.”
The queen chewed on her lower lip for a moment, contemplating her answer. Good. Let her wrestle with the same definitions I’d had to since the glacier.
“Not obscene, necessarily,” she said finally. “Alchemy is a bit more…efficient. You’ve found that out, haven’t you, with your explosive fungal pigments.”
The way she looked at my belt felt almost predatory. I put a hand over the full pouch of the blue-green and scooted down the log.
The queen laughed, startling a nuthatch on a barren branch above our heads and sending it flying into the afternoon sky. She reached into the pocket of her leather pants and pulled out a satchel of yellow-brown powder. “Foxfire spores. Come now, do you really think you’re the only alchemist to ever play with fungi?” She shook a thimbleful onto the cap of a nearby amanita mushroom, and then blew across the top. The mushroom began to glow a sickly yellow. “Just a small change. A reaction, as you say.” Her eyes danced. “But this bone oil of yours, now that is interesting. Master Rahad walked me through the steps as you showed him. It’s opened up a new world for us, and for alchemy.”
The queen leaned in. Her breath gusted over my face, hot and humid in the dry air, but I didn’t back away. I was desperate for her words.
“Who knows what other secrets you have? I’ve watched you, Sorin, and I’ve wanted you for a long, long time. Consider what being my apprentice would mean for your future, not just in alchemy, but with Magda.”
“I…” I stood, my mouth still agape. The queen stood as well. We breathed in tandem for what felt like hours as I wrestled with the data. To study with the queen… I let my mind drift toward that future. I’d be close to Magda. I would have access to the royal libraries and Master Rahad’s laboratory—my laboratory. I would be close enough to see Mother if I wanted to. But…but but but.
“Why are you here?” I whispered into the dry air. “Why are you here when there are dead guilders? Missing grandmasters. When Master Rahad’s body is frozen to a glacier, and you don’t even care. And why am I here, with alchemists and witches i
n a desiccated forest, probably surrounded by the amulets the old king used to seep magic into the glacial melt water, to poison the population of Gasta Flecha?”
“Alchemy, my young friend.” This time when she smiled, I saw her joy, and when she clasped her hand to my shoulder, warmth filled my body. With Mother, moments like this had always been hard-won. Here, with the queen, her affection came so easily I felt drunk. I wanted to submerge myself into her enthusiasm, and acceptance, perhaps not of my body, but of what I had achieved with alchemy. Did it matter, really, if magic and alchemy were different points on the same line if the Queen of Sorpsi controlled both? I had no interest in magic—never would—but it was hard not to be enticed. Every part of my life to this point had been about my pigments and their potential. Maybe it didn’t have to be thrown away after all.
“You’d really take me as an apprentice?”
The queen offered me her hand. I searched her eyes, thinking I might find some deeper truth, but all I saw was the woman who had raised me as much as Mother had. I put my hand in hers, and we stood, the soft smile never leaving her face. She took my belt from the ground and fastened it around my waist, taking care to refasten each pouch in the front where I could easily reach them.
“You are brilliant, Sorin,” she murmured as she knelt before me, the burnt sorrel crumbling into her pants.
Tears collected in the corners of my eyes. “My queen,” I mumbled.
She rose, took my hand again, and together, we walked into her hide tent. The inside was sparse, but a pile of thick wool blankets clustered in the center. I recognized the purple-and-red one as the top covering of the queen’s bed. Magda and I had played under its enormous width more times than I could remember. Made from baby alpaca, the soft fibers felt like a bed of tulip petals. The sense of familiarity was so strong that I closed my eyes and inhaled. I caught the familiar scent of woodsmoke, a base note of cedar—no doubt from Mother—and the faintest bit of the lemon soap the maids used to wash the palace textiles.
