Chapter Six: St. Quillia's

+++++Anise+++++

Anise spent exactly one day in the company of her parents before shipping back to school at St. Quillia's. Not even a whole day - noon until nine o'clock, and three hours of that was riding with her mother around the little stretch of greenery the locals called Emerald Ranch because only the wealthy could afford to ride there. Three hours of riding, an hour for supper, cocktails with her father's friends in the sitting room, and then a chat with her parents in the family room upstairs, where her father told her,

"Plenty of physicians would love to have a magistress for a wife - that's what your mother and I did, and look how well things have turned out for us. I've gotten you a spot at the medical fellow's gala, and I'll shop around for a few bright up-and-comers who I think you might like."

She just nodded, because what was there to say? Her father in his burgundy smoking jacket and her mother in her cream blue evening gown and two meters of space between them containing the char-dark fireplace, which wouldn't need to be lit for another few months. She got exactly one day with her parents, and their biggest concern was how they were going to pawn her off to somebody sufficiently high society. In many ways, that was the story of her life to date - any one of her three childhood governesses had probably had more interaction with Anise than both of her parents combined.

Anise's mother had suggested more than once that she'd be fine with her daughter being a modern woman, who established herself in a career before marriage. Marriage was still an inevitability in her mind, mind you, but it could wait four or five years for Anise to establish herself. After all, If she ever reached the 5th elevation at a reasonable age, she might be able to have children well into her sixties. She wasn't sure she even wanted children… though her parents had fairly firm opinions on that, as well: one girl and one boy spaced a few years apart, just as Anise and her older brother were.

Her father checked his pocket watch. "It's almost nine o'clock… wouldn't want to be groggy on your first day back to school."

"No, sir," she said.

+++++Anise+++++

There were plenty of ways to get to St. Quillia's. Anise and her friends often took the streetcar across to the West Shore and Parliament Hill, where there was lots of shopping, dining, and entertainment to be had. She'd heard the shore also had a lively night life, but the school's eight o'clock curfew meant she'd never got a chance to see it. Nor was it recommended for young women of means to be seen in those places after hours - even if all you did was drink and socialize, you might get a reputation as a girl who liked to do a lot more than that. Anise didn't really care… well, she cared a bit. But her parents cared a whole lot, and they were the ones who paid for St. Quillia's. And they wouldn't see her arrive at school walking from a streetcar stop and trundling along with her suitcases.

When she arrived, it was obvious that summer had crested into fall. All of the trees along Uncle Fenrik's avenue were still green, but those were all coniated beech trees that didn't change their colors until late in the autumn - or so her horticulture text said. St. Quillia's and the much larger Etudium Magica St. Arbalest, their brother institution, both contained broad open tracts with lots of trees. Thousands of trees of a dozen different species, some of which were already changing color to the yellows and fiery oranges of autumn… as well as the northern gumrose leaves, which turned a vibrant indigo before fading to plum and falling from their trees. Her herbology text stated that the indigo leaves, but not the green or plum-colored leaves, were useful in toxin antidotes.

Anise spotted Eloise and Franyi seated at the little fountain in front of their dormitory and skipped over to join them, indicating to her coachman that he could leave her bags at the second floor stoop. Eloise and Franyi were two of the trio of girls that Anise had known since she'd first come to St. Quillia's six years before, the fourth being Virtupi-Grace, who was one of the few kao-alta at the school, though she adored just about everything about human culture. Eloise and Virtupi had only achieved their 3rd elevation toward the end of last term, whereas Franyi was some sort of prodigy and had made 4th elevation a few months ago. Anise was somewhere in between: everybody agreed that she had a lot of potential, but they also agreed that she wasn't a prodigy.

"What are we talking about?" she asked.

"The room situation," Eloise said. "Have you got an early slot class?"

"I have classes scheduled for every slot," Anise said. There was a lot to learn, and if you didn't find a class to fit into every schedule slot, then you were wasting time and money. Or so common sense dictated. Right?

"Virtupi-Grace and I haven't got early slots, so we thought we might room so we could fit in some early studying."

Anise suspected that this was code for sleeping in, but it was wise not to fess up to it, else the division magistress might force you to take sunrise calisthenics or something similarly awful. If Eloise and Virtupi were rooming, that meant they were suggesting that Anise should room with Franyi. She glanced to her friend, taller, slenderer, and darker than Anise… and a prodigy… it would be nice to be like Franyi. Apparently, Franyi interpreted the sustained stare as a question, because then she mouthed: 'yes, please'.

"Franyi and I are rooming!" Anise said, and she reached out to squeeze her friend's hand so quickly it made Franyi yelp, which made Anise blush, and then everybody laughed about it.

"What are we laughing about?" Virtupi-Grace asked. She settled on the little bench with her legs folded under her. She'd woven flowers into her golden ruff of fur, long and splendid even by kao-alta standards, and Anise was immediately jealous.

"We're laughing about how Anise is adorably awkward," Eloise said. And, because she said 'adorably', Anise chose to take it as a compliment. "Looks like we'll be rooming because Franyi and Anise are crazy and like to learn in the morning."

+++++Anise+++++

Common sense dictated that you took a class for every schedule slot - but common sense appeared to be incredibly, catastrophically wrong. At least when you were a 3rd elevation Adept taking five difficult classes, two of which were geared toward 4th elevation students like Franyi Jashopo. Students far smarter than Anise, students who breezed through the coursework and always asked insightful questions in class that Anise could only dream of thinking clearly enough to ask. It meant that when Eloise and Virtupi-Grace, and even studious Franyi, were taking the streetcar across the bridges to drink wine and eat autumn-crisps on the West Shore, Anise was eyeballs-deep in the books trying not to fail out of her five incredibly difficult classes.

Fine, intermediate herbology wasn't that difficult. But two hundred pages a week with lots of memorization was a big ask. At least if you didn't have the prodigious memory that came with high-level cultivation or, apparently, being Ezra Wormwood. Speaking of whom…

She'd been back for a week and a half already, and she'd been so busy she hadn't thought of her uncle's demon-thrall, if you could even call him that. She'd thought of him a little when she glanced over her sigil diagrams for the earplug-mufflers she'd designed. She already had some ideas for improvements thanks to her incredibly difficult Sigilics & Runology class, and she might try them out when she had a chance. But she hadn't thought much of Ezra, at least until she saw a shabbily-dressed boy cruising through the St. Quillia's campus on an incredibly odd bicycle. A shabbily-dressed boy with a set of heavy welding goggles bolted directly to his face. She was so surprised that she dropped her books, which made her curse because she hadn't bothered to save her spot in Herbalism for Medicinal Alchemy.

"Ezra?"

He was on a trajectory to pull in front of Bastia Hall, which was Anise's dormitory, but her calling out had distracted him. He turned to look, swerved a bit, and then dumped himself right in the big fish fountain in the dormitory yard. Nearby girls laughed and pointed, and nobody thought to help what was clearly a very unfortunate, very wet messenger boy. Anise left her books behind and dashed over to help a sputtering Ezra out of the fountain. He surfaced with water freely dribbling out of his goggles and a grimace on his face. He covered his left ear with his hand.

"Oh… you've lost your muffler. Um… right next to your foot. No, left. Further… got it!" she said.

He crouched and retrieved the ear plug, waving it through the air to dry it off before reinserting it. Anise was a bit annoyed that he seemed to have clipped off the little wires she'd put on the things to secure them. If he'd kept them on, the plug wouldn't have fallen out.

"Better," Ezra said. He opened and closed his mouth a few times and then removed his muffler again to drain his ear of liquid.

"Why in the world are you here?" Anise asked. "I mean… it's good to see you." The front of her dress was soaked and her hair was an absolute mess.

Ezra gestured to his bike. "Fenrik doesn't know I have a bike… well he does, but he doesn't pay attention to that sort of thing. So I get a free hour whenever I'm running errands to the Etudium because he thinks it takes me an hour to get here and back."

"That's fortunate… listen, I'd love to chat, but I have a lot of studying to do and my dress is soaked…"

"I'll only take a minute," Ezra said.

He squatted and carefully opened a small canvas backpack. It had obviously just been a single dingy piece of canvas at some point, but he'd cut it up and sewn it back together into a serviceable backpack. And inside that was a little silvered canister, the sort they used in the pneumatic tubes of government buildings. He unscrewed the top and inspected the documents inside for water damage - everything appeared dry. He carefully removed one of the papers… actually, it was the bottom half of a paper with a neat tear along the top. The header of the yellow, worn paper read: 3Z potion.

"What's this?"

"I need you to make me a potion," Ezra said.

"I do not make potions for servants," she said, and she winced just hearing the words come out. But she didn't like to be bossed around by anybody, least of all the likes of Ezra Wormwood, her uncle's demon-thrall. "I mean… I haven't got time…"

"Aren't you curious what it will do?" Ezra asked.

She frowned over it - it was a very odd potion, seeming to contain medicines and poisons in roughly equal ratio. "What will it do?"

"It'll help me escape your uncle," he said eventually. "I don't know how, exactly, but it'll do something to help…"

"About half of these are common healing decoction ingredients… the other half are toxic… it's pretty complicated…"

"If you don't think you can do it…"

"No!" Anise snapped. "I can do it. I want to… but it seems pretty illegal."

"Probably," he agreed. "So don't get caught."

"You, too… you should probably get back…"

Ezra shrugged. "I've got thirty more minutes to burn. I'm going to relax in the sun and dry off and pretend I'm not a thrall."

+++++Anise+++++

Ezra got fifteen minutes to relax before a campus matron spotted him and chased him off - men weren't supposed to be lazing about the St. Quillia's campus, least of all shabbily-dressed messenger boys, even if they did work for Fenrik of Westval. By then, Anise was in her room, changed into dry clothes, and nose-deep in Franyi's Crucial Elements of Alchemy text trying to figure out what in the four hells some of the reaction steps were supposed to do. What would happen if you gave somebody a toxin designed to poison them exactly to death but also greatly speed healing. It didn't make any sense.

"This doesn't make any sense," Franyi stated. "What is this potion supposed to do again?"

Anise shrugged. "My uncle gave me the recipe and told me he'd like me to try it…"

"Your uncle? Don't you hate that guy?" She glanced warily toward the door and then to the window. It wasn't wise to state that you disliked a sorcerer, even if he was a thoroughly unlikable man and, hopefully, a few kilometers away. It was said that magisters of the 6th elevation could see and hear through their familiars, and Fenrik was well beyond that skill level.

"Yeah, but I want to stay on his good side," Anise said. She felt bad about misleading her friend, but the more plausible deniability she had the better.

Franyi… sweet, brilliant, amber-eyed Franyi… eventually agreed to help Anise. Of course Franyi did. She was a good person like that, far better than Anise, who casually lied to her friends and occasionally snapped at them when she was angry. And, even though what they were doing was very illegal, Anise scheduled time at the school's alchemy laboratory to make the thing. It was either that or try to smuggle the reaction vessels out, which was far too ludicrous to even consider.

Anise did most of the work, but Franyi did some of the more difficult elements, or the things that simply required more energy than Anise had at her disposal. They took up twelve hours across three evenings - evenings where Anise should have been studying. She was sure she was on the verge of failing at least three of her classes… and, at St. Quillia's, when you failed, they'd pull you out of classes in the middle of the term and enroll you in the next class down, and everybody would know exactly what had happened. And even Franyi agreed that Anise's uncle's potion (as far as Franyi knew) was far more difficult than any of the laboratories in their alchemy or herbology courses.

"It's like a muddle of contradictions balanced on the precipice of complete disorder…"

Anise suspected that this was exactly the point of the potion, though she couldn't have told you why. And the more she studied the thing, the deeper she delved into the actions, reactions, and counter-reactions, into the transformations and transmogrifications, the less she felt she understood. And trying to pull, push, or stabilize with all of her energy at once was far more magical nuance than she was used to wielding… even Franyi, who was bloody-4th-elevation could barely manage…

"I can't manage this," Franyi gasped. She rubbed the bridge of her nose - the potion has almost collapsed on them, but instead she'd barely reverted it back to its prior state, which meant they could just try that step again instead of starting from scratch. "This is a serious alchemist's potion, and not the sort you get for two brownbacks in the Chartham Canals."

"You've never been in the Chartham Canals," Anise said.

"Neither have you, but we've both read about them."

That much was true - just about every crime caper or mystery story you could buy featured a pulse-pounding chase scene through the dingy, dangerous Chartham Canal district, with villains and heroes leaping between shantytown roofs, fighting over crumbling bridges, or evading swarms of low-level goons while pursuing suspects or priceless artifacts. But it would be a minor scandal for somebody of Anise or Franyi's social status to be caught in that district. People would assume they were headed for an apuiha smoke-den, or else seeking the services of a gigolo.

"I don't know if I can do this again… not so soon," Franyi said.

"What if we both try at once?" Anise asked - in theory, it could be done, though this was more easily accomplished with simple transformations. Usually, when you were first starting out as a 2nd elevation Initiate, your instructor would do most of the work and you would simply have to nudge the potion along.

Franyi sighed. "If the potion's about to collapse, then you let me deal with settling it back down."

"Of course!"

They both sat on their little comfy stools - comfort was important - and gazed into the half-finished potion. It was green and swirling, lighter green roiling within dark like some inchoate wyrm roiling in a distant embryonic realm. Franyi ignited the refluxor and clicked it up to the third setting, the zip-zit-zat of lektrikal discharge lighting from the little crystals along its array. Then she started to manipulate the fluid - pushing, pulling, and maintaining energy along its three components, a deeply intuitive exercise. And Anise soon joined her. Push. Pull. Maintain.

Push. Pull. Maintain. They entered a synchronous rhythm, and for a moment it was like Anise and Franyi were one - one fluid, perfect magistress controlling her potion beyond any ability mentioned in their textbooks. Push-Pull-Maintain. The pace picked up and Anise struggled to keep the pace. PushPullMaintain. She felt as if she was being dragged behind a runaway carriage, cobblestones roaring beneath her. PusPulMaint…

"I… I can't keep this up. I'm cooling it," Franyi said.

"No!" Anise snapped.

And, for a minute Franyi said nothing, her face trembling as she tried to keep the pace. PsPlMnt. PsPlMnt. PPMPPMPPMPPM… it was going so fast now, the potion flickering like a dying crystal. Franyi gasped and nearly tumbled off of her stool as she lost focus, and it was only Anise. The potion flickered, its energy crumbling around her. Surely, she'd destroyed its structure. They'd have to start from scratch. But now she couldn't stop - it was like she'd been dragged along by that runaway carriage, the carriage had fallen apart before her, and now Anise was streaking through the air like a dorthek, just waiting for gravity to notice its oversight. There was a single great flash and Anise felt herself falling backward… and she gasped for breath, firmly seated on her comfy stool.

"What. Was. That?" Franyi asked.

The potion glowed a fiery warmth that gradually ebbed to a cherry red and then cooled to a slightly-glistening burgundy. Anise hadn't destroyed their potion. That's not what had happened at all.

"Holy shit… did you just attain the 4th elevation?"

Anise looked at her friend blankly. She blinked. "What happens if you elevate in the middle of making a potion?"

Neither of them knew.