The students stirred. Hands-on science classes were far more interesting than a lecture.
Their tutor was a pleasant man with sandy hair and glasses, who dressed in the black and orange of the Alchemists. Like Agent Darling and Agent MacDannan, he was one of the Six Musketeers—the leaders of the students who had defeated the Terrible Five— making him a great hero.
“Some of you only recently joined the World of the Wise,” Mr. Fisher said, “and do not know anything about alchemy. So I will start with a basic principle: never transfer magical essences directly into a living creature. Never take the strength of an elephant and put it directly into your body. Not unless you want to end up looking like the Elephant Man. Anyone here know who that is? The young Victorian man whose body had huge lumps all over it?…Good. That’s what comes of improper use of alchemy.”
“So…putting magic into my arm is bad?” Zoë drawled. Her hair was bright scarlet today. The feather perpetually stuck in her braid was magenta with blue speckles.
Mr. Fisher nodded emphatically. “Putting magic directly into a living body produces unexpected and unpleasant side effects. Never, never do it. Never.”
Ameka Okeke, the soccer ace from Kenya, raised her hand. Her skin was a creamy brown but her eyes were slanted like Rachel’s, courtesy of her Chinese mother. “Sir? At home, I saw airomancers at the fairs—or even down at construction sites—lifting amazing amounts of weight with their bare arms. They claimed they did it with the strength of an elephant.”
“And you are wondering how they can do that without turning into elephant men?” Mr. Fisher turned back to the class. “Miss Okeke, I’m here to tell you, those men—or occasionally you see tiny female airomancers—are either using a talisman, such as a belt of strength, or, more likely, they have drunk an elixir.”
The tutor wrestled several large jars from the shelves to the table. His charm bracelet jangled. All the alchemists Rachel knew wore such bracelets. Charms made excellent talismans, and it was easy to add more to a bracelet.
One of the jars contained dried skins of frogs; another held lizard tails; a third some kind of scaly lizard hide. He gathered test tube holders and some crystal vials with cork stoppers. Next to these, he put a large bag of rock sugar. Filling a vial with water from the sink, he lit a Bunsen burner. Rachel caught a whiff of gas.
Mr. Fisher set the vial above the flame on an aluminum test tube holder. Then, he turned back to the assembled class, which consisted of Rachel’s core group from Dare, and a core group of students from Raleigh Hall. “Everyone divide into pairs and move to the lab stations. Send one member of each pair up to the front to gather your ingredients.”
• • •
As they left the central table and headed for the stations, Nastasia and Sigfried converged on Rachel. Nastasia was smiling so sweetly that Rachel’s spirits lifted. She smiled back at her friend. Being the princess’s lab partner was going to be such fun.
But Sigfried, too, was grinning with eager anticipation. He wore his crisp new robes and a pair of black running shoes that Rachel called trainers, but most of her new friends called sneakers. His new ruby-tipped wand had arrived, too. The length of cherry and gold hung from a lanyard around his neck. He even had on a proper square mortar board cap.
Siggy seemed to assume Rachel would be his partner. She hated to turn him down, especially after she had vowed to herself that she would be there for him. Maybe Mr. Fisher would allow the three of them to work together?
Before Rachel could open her mouth, Joy O’Keefe arrived, grabbing Nastasia’s arm.
“This is going to be great, princess!” Joy turned to some of the other students, waving the princess’s arm in the air. “Hey, everyone. I’ve got the best lab partner! The princess is the most amazing girl alive. Did you know she invented chocolate? That’s right. All the chocolaty goodness you’ve experienced in your life,—it was the princess’s doing!”
People laughed. Zoë shot them a thumbs-up. Poor, shy Nastasia struggled to look calm, but Rachel could tell she was terribly embarrassed. Rachel paused, conflicted. She could save the princess from Joy, but that would mean abandoning Sigfried.
The princess had betrayed her. Siggy never had.
Rachel slipped her arm through Sigfried’s and pointed at a lab station. “Let’s use that one. We’ll take one side. Nastasia and Joy can use the other. Then we can all work together.”
Nastasia threw her a look of gratitude.
Feeling guilty, because she could have done much more, Rachel winced.
• • •
They retrieved their ingredients and brought them back to their stations. Mr. Fisher then explained the instructions, demonstrating as he went. “According to the dictionary, an elixir is ‘a clear, sweet-flavored liquid used for medical or alchemical purposes,’” he explained. “Elixirs are how we put magical essences or qualities into a living body. The effects of most elixirs—all the ones you will learn about in this class—are temporary. Usually, they last an hour. Now, watch.”
Mr. Fisher demonstrated the entire process. At the end, he poured the contents of his crystal vial into a cup, touched it with an ice bar talisman—this particular ice bar was painted to look like an icicle—until steam stopped curling from the liquid, and drank it.
As the students gawked, their tutor’s outline wavered. His hair, face, and clothing changed color to match his surroundings—like a chameleon, until he looked like the bottles and blackboard behind him. Each part of him reflected the image beyond it, so that no matter where anyone stood, it looked to them as if his body had the coloration of the scenery beyond. Rachel could tell the difference if he moved quickly, because there was the slightest delay as his body changed to match the background. Also, she could hear him. His bracelet jangled, the charms ringing against one another.
If she looked right at him, she had trouble seeing him. If she glanced at him sideways, however, she could catch the distortion between him and his environment.
Laughing, the students eagerly set to work on their own elixirs.
• • •
“Okay, we put our ingredients here, like this, right?” Joy laid the chameleon skin, the chameleon tail, and the dried skin of a color-changing Peron’s tree frog out on the three points of the triangle marked on the counter. She picked up her cube of rock sugar. “What’s this for?”
Rachel tapped the center of the counter, where she and Siggy had set up their three ingredients. “You put it in the center. It’s where the magic goes—into the sugar. Then you dissolve the sugar crystal into the water, by heating your vial over the Bunsen burner, and voila!”
“I beg your pardon?” the princess asked. “Magic into the sugar?”
Rachel took a deep breath and repeated what Mr. Fisher had told them five times in the last two weeks. It baffled her that everyone did not have it memorized. Her voice even dropped slightly in pitch, impersonating his intonation. “Putting magic into a physical object is called alchemy. Putting temporary charges of magic into high-quality gems is called thaumaturgy. Putting magic into a living body requires an intermediate agent. Now, if we put magic in a gem and ate it that would be an expensive way to do magic. So we use sugar crystals—which resemble gems and have many similar properties.”
“That’s all very well and good,” Siggy interrupted, “but where do I put the moonberry? The Elf’s book says that moonberry improves chameleon elixir.” He held up a leaf from the supply that he had, with Rachel’s help, dried on the roof, per the instructions he had received.
“Simple enough.” Rachel batted the dried lizard tail over next to the piece of chameleon skin and pointed to the spot where it had been. “Put it here.”
“Wait!” The princess glanced over at their tutor, where he blended into the wall as he helped Zoë and Astrid with their elixir. “You cannot seriously be planning to deviate from the instructions the tutor gave us! You don’t even know what you are doing! What if putting the skin and tail together causes a
bad reaction? Shouldn’t you, at least, remove one of them?”
“Not at all,” assured Rachel, who had watched her mother prepare elixirs for years. She had read many of the books on alchemy in the Gryphon Park libraries. She understood the basic principles. “More parts of chameleon merely represent chameleonness more precisely.”
“Represent in what way? To whom? I don’t understand!” the princess objected. “Please be careful. One of my father’s Alchemists deviated from a prescribed formula one day. Afterwards, he sprouted ears like a Koala and could only eat eucalyptus.”
“My father says alchemy is dangerous,” Joy warned nervously. “I would listen to the princess.”
“And miss a chance to try out my new herbs? Never!” Sigfried reached into the leather pouch and pulled out a bit of the gray-green leaf. It crumbled in his fingers, giving off a pleasant odor. He placed it where Rachel had indicated. “What’s the point of being destined to become a Great Alchemist, if I don’t commit alchemy? Commit alchemy, or be committed! That’s my new motto. No, my new motto is: No risk, no reward for your head posted at the Post Office!”
“No pain, no remains burnt and screaming on the ground!” offered Lucky in a growly whisper from under the table.
Sigfried grinned. “That’s good. How about: No dragon, no wagon full of gold!”
“No threat, no more gold yet!”
“No dumb risks, no loud explosions followed by a day of no classes!”
Lucky said, “It does not rhyme. And there is no mention of gold.”
“You can count the gold while the school’s burning,” Sigfried suggested.
Rachel wondered briefly if it were necessarily a good thing that she would remember Sigfried’s nonsensical conversations with his dragon forever.
“I do not think this is safe,” the princess frowned. Turning, she called, “Mr. Fisher?”
Rachel sucked in her breath so quickly it made her throat ache. Was the princess going to betray Sigfried’s secret herbs to Mr. Fisher? Scowling, Siggy hid his moonberry and pushed the chameleon tail back to its original spot.
The tutor crossed to where they sat. Blackboards, specimen jars, and even students’ faces flickered over his body.
“Yes, Miss Romanov?” Mr. Fisher joined them, smiling—which looked odd on a face colored like the door across the room.
“Please, sir,” Nastasia asked, “what is a magical essence?”
“Ah! Excellent question!” He rubbed his hands together. “A magical essence is the quality we wish to take from one thing and put into another thing. The strength of an elephant, the stubbornness of a mule—though why you would want to make something more stubborn, I couldn’t say. The quickness of a fox. Or the cunning of a fox. Whatever you wish to borrow.”
A tiny furrow appeared on the princess’s lovely brow. “Cunning of a fox? Why do we take cunning from foxes? They seldom score well on IQ tests. And why a fox? Why not the cunning from a cow or flamingo?”
“Because people believe foxes to be cunning, Miss Romanov. But they do not believe that of cows, who are known for demonstrating less than stunning intellectual talents. Or of flamingos—so far as I know.”
“I have never seen a fox demonstrate cunning. In Magical Australia, they are routinely outwitted by our evil rabbit population.”
“Evil rabbits.” He blinked. “Ah…well, perhaps things are different in Magical Down Under, Miss Romanov, but here, we can take cunning from a fox.”
“So, in addition to strength and speed,” asked Joy, “we can take the qualities from popular sayings? Can you get wisdom from an owl? Gentleness from a lamb? Fat from a pig?”
Mr. Fisher nodded. “Very good, Miss O’Keefe.”
“Why would someone want to make someone fatter?” chortled Seth Peregrine.
“Can we give our fat back to a pig?” asked Zoë, amused.
“My father’s favorite saying is: ‘crazy as a cucumber,’” intoned the princess. “Can I take madness from a cucumber?”
“Does everyone in Magical Australia believe cucumbers are mad?” Mr. Fisher rubbed the back of his neck. “Um…I think the answer to that one is probably: no, Miss Romanov.”
“Would it matter if everyone did believe it?” Sigfried asked. Far from the bored student he had been a week ago, he was now intrigued by every aspect of alchemy.
“It might,” said Mr. Fisher.
“That…makes sense,” Rachel murmured, recalling the Elf’s and the Raven’s conversation about the mutability of the laws of nature. How much actually depended on the beliefs of the Unwary? The mundane world did not believe in magic, but magic was real. Yet they knew it from their fairy tales. Was knowing about it from fiction enough? Gaius had grown up among the Unwary. She wondered about his opinion on the topic.
The princess frowned. “If I do not make the same assumptions about foxes as other people, how do I know what qualities can be taken from which creatures?”
“Books, Miss Romanov.” Mr. Fisher gestured at a far wall where a bookshelf stood. It was crammed with volumes of all sizes. “Also, my class. This is a science class, not just alchemy. We study animals, plants, and minerals and their physical and alchemical natures.”
“I see.” The princess frowned, unsatisfied.
“Anything else? No? Ah, yes, Mr. Volakov…?” Mr. Fisher went to help one of the students from Raleigh Hall.
“You didn’t ask him about the moonberry,” Joy hissed under her breath to the princess.
“Of course not!” Siggy shot back. “Because if she did, she would be a tattler, and that’s a worse crime than murder or eating someone else’s food.”
Joy laughed, as if she thought Sigfried was kidding.
Rachel was not so sure.
Rachel met Siggy’s gaze. “Are we going to try it?”
“Of course! Do I need to say another rhyme to make my point?” Sigfried looked at her as if she were crazier than a cucumber. Rachel grinned inwardly. Siggy was so reliably gung ho.
She poked at the ingredients. “Let’s do two. Some of the others teams are. We can make one according to the instructions and one using the Elf’s ingredients. Then, we can show Mr. Fisher the first one. And test the second one secretly, in case it has…an odd reaction.”
“Great!” Siggy grinned with great anticipation. “Then we can compare the results!”
“You’re kidding, right?” Joy burst out. “You’re not going to drink an untested elixir?”
“It will be tested once I drink it!” said Siggy.
“Of course, he is kidding.” The princess leaned over the counter adjusting her tricorne mirror. “No one would be so foolish as to ingest an unknown substance. Mr. Smith, this weekend, we will look your new herbs up in the library and discover if they are poisonous.”
Siggy was not listening. He was crouching under the table, asking Lucky what rhymed with obliterate.
“You can look up the elf herbs,” murmured Rachel, “but you won’t find them. They’re not from our world. She must have brought them with her.”
Rachel picked up her own tricorne mirror—the centerpiece of all alchemy, as Mr. Fisher had stated precisely seventeen times since the school year had begun two weeks ago. Rachel could remember each incident distinctly.
A tricorne mirror was about the size and shape of a large, angular, old-fashioned megaphone. The one the school provided was a solid black device, much simpler than the ornate silver antique Rachel’s mother used. They had a similar form, however: a long, slanted, triangular case with a bowl-like shape, maybe four inches deep, set into the mouth of the wide end. The bowl consisted of four mirrors. Three, orange-tinted, triangular essence glasses made up the sides. The triangles were angled at each other, with their narrow ends meeting at a fourth mirror that was round and slightly convex. On the outside of the device were toggles that changed the angles of the three triangular mirrors.
Rachel filled her glass vial with water from the nearest sink, set it in a test tube holder, and lit a Bu
nsen burner. She started the water heating, carefully holding back her stray hairs, which kept threatening to float too near the flames. While it sat above the flame, she retrieved a second set of ingredients. She set them up in a triangle, so that one ingredient was reflected into each of the orange essence glasses in the tricorne mirror. Then she put her crystal of sugar in the center, where it was reflected in the round convex mirror.
As she worked, Rachel thought about the Elf. Could they trust what she said about the herbs? Or was there a chance that she wished to trick them—that if they made an elixir following her instructions, something terrible would happen?
She thought of the wonderful, kind look in the Elf’s eyes, of the searing pain in her head when she received her memory Rune, of the memories she could recall now that had been hidden before. If Illondria meant them ill, had she not had sufficient opportunity to harm them? Why disobey the Guardian and restore Rachel’s memory, if she meant harm? Unless the visit of the Raven had been a trick, too—a good Agent, bad Agent routine.
Rachel threw up her hands. The ramifications, if everything were a trick, were too complicated to follow. She would trust the kindness in the Elf’s eyes.
If harm came, it came.
Her ingredients were all in place, and the water in her vial was steaming. Now, to bring the essences together. By adjusting the toggles on the sides of the tricorne device, she manipulated the triangular mirrors. As they moved, the image of the reflected ingredient moved, sliding down the triangle. Moving the mirrors, she slid each image off the triangular mirror and onto the convex one at the center of the bowl. It was eerie to see the object present on the table but no longer reflected in the orange triangular essence glasses.
The final step of was to use the Word of Bridging to move the magical essences to the sugar. It was the same cantrip Agent Standish had used to connect her to the thinking glass. Rachel put her fingertips together with her thumb, forming a beak and spoke the cantrip.
“Oré.”
Nothing happened.
She looked at the others. Sigfried, Nastasia, and Joy all performed the bridging cantrip. The image in their central mirror vanished, and their sugar briefly glowed with an orangey light. Rachel tried again and again. Nothing.
The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel (A Book of Unexpected Enlightenment 2) Page 28
