by Amy Alward
‘Oh, this is perfect.’ She grabs one of the bags and hands it to a client. ‘Here you go, Mr Talbort. I told you it wouldn’t be long.’
Mr Talbort looks like he’s about to explode with gratitude. ‘Thank you, Katie. My daughter needs this mix straight away and since you’ve been closed I was running out of options.’ He takes the bag and rushes out of the door.
Mum and I exchange a smile. This is the best part of our jobs: when we can really see what an impact our cures have on the community. And no one is asking about the aqua vitae nonsense.
Mum’s smile gently turns into a frown. ‘Shouldn’t Grandad be resting?’
‘You try telling him that.’
‘I suppose so.’ Mum hands over another bag, exchanging it for some crisp notes. The till is almost full to bursting. Mum turns to another customer and I start filing the mixes away in alphabetical order beneath the counter.
When I finish, I look up as a familiar face walks into the store. It’s Moira Grant – one of our most loyal customers but also one of our most devious. I’m sure that she takes advantage of my mother’s generosity and kindness, and that she owes us several months of back payment for her prescriptions. Of course, now that we’re successful, Mum wants to forget about the back payments – we don’t really need the money now – but it just doesn’t seem fair for her to keep getting away with it.
‘Good morning, Mrs Grant,’ I say with a smile. I want to take my time so that she can take her time – getting her money out of her wallet. ‘Let me check your prescription for you to make sure we have everything.’
She throws me a scowl that suggests she knows exactly what I’m doing, and I suppress the urge to stick my tongue out at her. Instead, I open up the paper bag marked Mrs M G in Grandad’s spindly handwriting and peer inside.
I frown.
‘What is it, dear?’ she asks, her tone sickly-sweet but with iron underneath.
I reach into the bag and pull out the mix. Something about it doesn’t look right. Moira takes a special cream for her arthritis.
Sunlight-infused devil’s claw leaves, mixed with aloe plant and red ochre – for help with arthritis, lubrication of the joints and smoothing of knuckles.
One of the key traits of the cream is its distinctive red colour. When he was younger, Grandad worked out a way to make the red disappear upon contact with the skin, but for a long time the potion was known as ‘scarlet fingers’. Having the tell-tale crimson skin was especially damaging for women who used to work in factories, sewing delicate garments or working the big machines. Using the cream helped the pain immensely – but it also gave employers an excuse to dock pay.
But the cream in this tube isn’t red. It’s a murky brown.
‘That doesn’t look right,’ says Moira, her eyes alight with the opportunity to make a complaint and maybe get her medicine for free.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ I say.
I pick up another bag and open it. On the front reads PENNYROYAL FOIL but once again, what’s inside looks nothing like I expect. Pennyroyal foil should be wafer-thin slices of coppery leaves that melt underneath the tongue, but these aren’t copper – they’re silver. They look more like mercury foils, which perform an utterly different task.
My heart rapidly sinks into my stomach. All these potions, these mixes, are wrong. I look down at my watch. It’s maybe only been half an hour since I brought out the new mixes Grandad made. How many of them have gone out? How many . . .
Moira coughs sharply, staring at me over her thick, tortoise-shell glasses. ‘Is there a problem?’ she asks.
I hope I haven’t gone as white as I feel. One mix every five minutes, that might be . . . six customers affected. And more by the moment. Mum hands over another prescription and I can’t help it. I cry out to stop her.
Mum frowns at me, her eyebrows knitting together. ‘What is it, Sam?’
I snatch the brown paper bag out of the customer’s hands. I gather as many of them up into my arms as possible. ‘I, uh . . . I just have to check something with my grandfather. I’ll be right back.’
But there’s no time for a ‘be right back’. There’s a shriek from the street outside, and someone flings our door open. It bashes the inside of the room, sending the jars on the shelves tingling.
‘You almost killed my daughter!’ Mr Talbort stands red-faced in our doorway. ‘The mix I gave her sent her into a fit of hives. Instead of her epilepsy medication you gave her honeysting!’
Honeysting for allergic reactions – not at all for epilepsy, and can cause an allergic reaction in itself if taken by the wrong people.
‘We’ve had to take her to the Kingstown General Hospital where she’s getting proper treatment for your mistakes.’
‘I . . . I’m so sorry, Hank,’ my mum says. ‘I don’t know what to say . . . Ostanes had a fall this morning . . .’
‘And yet you let him make mixes? It’s beyond irresponsible. That’s why, I’m sorry, but I had to go to the authorities.’
Someone steps out from behind him. She’s wearing a sharp, pinstripe suit with her Talented object – a gold wrist cuff – deliberately on show. Behind her are two large men, also in suits, their arms folded across their chests. I recognise her as the government woman who was in our store the day before.
The woman walks straight up to my mother. ‘Are you Katie Kemi, manager of Kemi’s Potion Shop?’
My mum tries to draw up some height and gain an air of authority, but in her hippy headband, potion-stained white shirt and long skirt, she doesn’t quite pull it off. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘My name is Agnes Slaint, from the regulatory board of Potions and Synthetics of the Novaen government. Within the boundaries of regulation 13.4 of the Potions Safety Act, without a viable master supervising the mixing of potions it is illegal to keep an apothecary open to the public.’ She looks over at me, her hooded eyes filled with something other than sympathy. It’s a look I haven’t seen for a while, but when I recognise it, the hurt comes sharp and quick, like a snake bite. It’s pity. ‘I’m very sorry, but we’re going to have to ask you to close your store. You have until five p.m. this evening to comply – otherwise we will have to close you by force.’
CHAPTER TEN
Samantha
WE MANAGE TO GET EVERYONE out of the store and convince Mr Talbort, the other customers and Agnes Slaint not to make the news of the store’s closure public . . . for now. I know it won’t be long until this hits the forums, though.
‘We could say we’re taking a family vacation,’ says Mum from one side of the kitchen table. Her fingers dig at a knot in the wooden surface and she keeps throwing worried glances at the shop door.
‘Too obvious,’ replies Dad, who’s returned from his errands to chaos – though his first priority was not the store’s closure, but Grandad’s health. ‘He’s resting,’ he adds, reading my mind as to my next question.
‘Did you tell him about the . . . mixes?’
Dad nods, running his hands through his hair. ‘At first he didn’t believe me, but when I showed him the proof, even he couldn’t argue. We’re going to go to the hospital. He looks so tired. I’ll get some things together.’
‘Clearly things are much worse than we realised,’ Mum says.
Dad nods.
‘Who’s going to hospital?’ My parents spin around in their chairs and I look up. Standing in the doorway with a handmade paper kite in her hand is Molly. Her long dark hair is tied up in two braids that fall to her shoulders, and she’s flushed from the walk home from day camp. Her eyes are still bright and happy, but the quivering of her eyebrows tells me she knows that’s about to change.
Mum stands up abruptly and takes Molly’s hand, sitting her down at the table with us. ‘It’s Grandad, honey. He had a bad fall this morning and we thought he was going to be okay, but he needs to go to the hospital.’
Her lips quiver. ‘Is he okay? Can I see him?’
‘He’s asleep at the moment, sweetheart. How was day
camp?’
As Molly hesitantly recounts her day, I switch off, feeling sick to my stomach. This is so much worse than the fuss over the aqua vitae.
Grandad has never got a mix wrong before. Not like this. Something must be seriously wrong. If he doesn’t get better . . . what’s going to happen to the store? I’m still years away from my apprenticeship being over. Even with the Wilde Hunt victory, I’m not ready to run the store on my own. Grandad was ready at sixteen, but he’d already left school. I still have my high school diploma to get, and I wanted to go to university, maybe do a bit of travelling . . . all before I officially become a potions master.
We need Grandad, or else the potions board will keep the shop closed indefinitely.
‘I know he’s asleep but – can I go and see him?’ I ask, abruptly interrupting Molly’s story.
Dad hesitates just for a second, but then nods.
‘I’ll come with you,’ my sister says quickly.
‘Please just give me a moment, Mols? I just have to talk master-and-apprentice stuff, okay?’ I pause – I want to speak to Grandad alone. But I know the expression on her face. It’s a mix of wide-eyed innocence and steely determination that Molly has absolutely perfected.
‘One moment?’ I plead.
‘Okay,’ she relents. I dash from the room before she changes her mind.
Although I storm through the lab, when I reach Grandad’s room, I walk on my tiptoes. To my surprise, I can see a light shining beneath the door, and his shadow as he paces back and forth across the room.
I rap my knuckles gently on his doorway. His shadow stops. ‘Samantha?’ he calls out.
I take that as an invitation and I push his door open. ‘Yes, it’s me, Grandad.’
His white hair is in disarray, the expression in his eyes wild. His bare feet tap against the carpet, his slippers discarded beside his bed. ‘Grandad, you’ll catch a cold like that!’ I reach down and grab the slippers, dropping them in front of his feet.
‘It’s here . . . it’s here somewhere.’ He lurches away from me, turning towards the windowsill, where he has a series of old potion diaries lined up against the glass. He tugs one out and the rest topple, spilling out on the floor.
‘Grandad!’ I cry out in alarm.
He flips through the diary, moving so quickly he tears some of the pages. ‘Help me, Sam. It’s been taken.’
‘What has? What’s been taken?’
‘Grand Master Cleo’s diary.’
It takes me a few moments to process his words. ‘Great-grandmother Cleo’s diary? But that’s been gone for years . . . decades. Remember?’
He stops and looks up at me. For a moment, he doesn’t look any of his seventy-eight years. He looks like a young boy – wide-eyed and confused. ‘It has?’ The diary he was flicking through slips from his fingers onto the floor. I reach out and put a hand on his arm, guiding him towards the bed.
I sit down next to him, and he puts his other hand on top of mine. Then, in a flash, he grips it tight. ‘You must find it,’ he says, his eyes as clear as his voice. ‘You must find it before she does. It holds the key.’
‘The key to what?’
His voice breaks, and his eyes cloud over again. ‘I . . . I can’t . . .’ I worry he’s going to think himself into oblivion. He almost does. He shakes with the force of trying to remember, and even as I try to calm him, to hush his thoughts, he falls back onto the bed, releasing his strong grip on my fingers. ‘Find it,’ he whispers, before he passes out.
I can’t help it – I let out a cry and I fall towards him. I put my fingers against his neck and I sigh with relief as I can feel his pulse – rapid and uneven.
‘Is he okay?’
I whip my head around – it’s Molly.
‘Molly, please . . . we need to get Grandad to the hospital, now. Tell Mum and Dad.’
To my surprise, she lingers in the doorway. ‘What do you have to find? You know more about what’s wrong with him, don’t you?’ I open my mouth to protest, but she keeps going. ‘No, you promised after what happened in Zambi that you wouldn’t leave me out of the loop. I’m not just anyone, Sam. I might be young, but I’m your sister. I can help too.’
‘I know you can.’ I reach out my hand to her, and she takes it. ‘I promise you, I don’t know anything yet. I have a suspicion about something but . . . I need to talk to the doctors, and to Mum and Dad. I don’t think Grandad had an ordinary fall. I think someone did this to him. But do you promise not to tell anyone until I know more?’
‘I promise, Sammy. You can trust me,’ she says. ‘But as soon as you figure anything out about Grandad, I want you to tell me. Don’t keep me in the dark again.’ My sister might not be an alchemist, but she’s a Kemi through and through.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Samantha
Hey, it’s me . . . I came by the store after work but you weren’t there? Everything okay with your grandad? Text me back, I’m worried.
I READ THE TEXT FROM Zain but don’t have time to reply. I shove the phone back into my pocket.
‘I’m telling you, Mum, Emilia Thoth has something to do with this.’
Mum, Molly and I are waiting in Kingstown General Hospital’s intensive care unit. The wall opposite us is covered in pictures of wildflowers: a mural of bright, primary splashes of colour. I can imagine whoever designed it wanted to make the people sitting in the waiting room feel cheerful and optimistic. I know the colours should have an effect on me, the same way I know from potions mixing that certain smells and tastes bring calm.
Chamomile leaves steeped in water; a pillow of lavender; a mug of thick hot chocolate. None of them are potions exactly, but they can have the right effect.
But not for me. Not right now. Everything I put in my mouth seems to taste like ash and the mural of flowers makes me want to gag. Someone thinks a picture of a stupid flower will make my pain disappear? Who came up with that? I pace around the room, restless.
Mum takes my hand and tries to pull me down into a hard plastic seat. But there’s no way I’m going to sit down. I’ve been trying to explain to anyone who will listen – Mum, Dad, the doctors – about Grandad’s last words to me and about the smell I noticed back when we first found him on the street. I silently curse myself that I didn’t speak up before. Now, we’re in the intensive care ward and dread hangs around my neck like a noose.
She sighs as I yank my hand away. ‘Honey, I know you are feeling a lot right now, but we are all upset for Grandad.’
‘But no one is listening . . .’
‘No, you are the one who is not listening,’ she snaps. Her tone pulls me up short. She almost never loses her temper with us – Mum prefers the gently-gently method of parenting and usually leaves any disciplining to my dad. But I can see that this outburst has pained her: tears glisten in her eyes. ‘The doctor says he is deteriorating rapidly. There’s nothing we can do.’
‘But what about what he said about Great-grandma Cleo . . .’ Even my voice sounds small and far away. My persistence is waning.
This time, Mum really isn’t listening to me. She’s looking up at Dad, who’s just come in with another status report.
‘He seems to be stable at the moment but they’re going to keep him in overnight at least,’ Dad says, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘They don’t exactly know what it is – but what it boils down to is that Grandad is old. These things happen as people get older.’
Like a jack-in-the-box, my persistence rears its head again. ‘Have they tried everything? I’ll go back and research some cures. There must be something in an old Kemi diary somewhere . . .’
Dad shrugs. ‘Maybe if we had an aqua vitae . . .’
‘But there’s no such thing,’ says Mum. ‘And I don’t think false hope is going to do us any good either,’ she continues, resting her hand on my dad’s forearm.
‘We can light a candle for Grandad, right?’ says Molly.
‘Of course we can, honey.’
While they ta
lk, I pick up my backpack, which has slid down onto the floor. Mum looks over at me. ‘Where are you going?’ she asks.
‘If he’s stable for the moment, I’m going to go and see Princess Evelyn before she leaves for her tour tomorrow. I’m going to tell her in person that I’m not going to be able to go with her.’
‘I think that’s a good plan. Don’t be back too late, okay?’
I nod. The soles of my shoes squeak on the sickly-green linoleum as I walk out of the hospital. I feel a soft breeze, the early evening air still warm. I pull out my phone and text Zain quickly: Grandad much worse. I’m going to see Evie now – meet me there?x
But even as I hit send, I have the sudden urge to see someone else – not Zain or the Princess.
I want to see Anita, my best friend in the whole world.
Are you free? I text her.
Yes!! Where are you?
Meet in the Coffee Magic by Kingstown General Hospital?
You got it.
Five minutes later, I spot her cycling furiously towards the coffee shop, her long black hair streaming out behind her. I smile, despite everything, but by the time Anita reaches me, the smile has dissolved into a flood of tears. Before I know it, Anita’s arms are wrapped around me and we stand together in the doorway of the coffee shop until someone coughs loudly behind us to try and get in.
Anita steers me inside and sits me down in a huge red leather armchair that engulfs me on either side. She orders me a hot chocolate with double whipped cream and when she returns with the drinks, everything spills out of me in a stream of words I can’t control. ‘It’s all been such a blur – he was fine when we left to collect the ark flower this morning, but then seeing him after his fall, and all those mixes . . . He never gets those wrong. Never. Now he’s in hospital. I don’t understand what’s happening.’
Anita leans forward and grabs my hand. ‘Sam, I’m so sorry.’
