horizon.
They turned down the hall, passing several doors until they reached theirs. Sora slid it open and stepped inside, nearly tripping on the nunchucks she had left haphazardly in the middle of the floor before going on the Autumn Festival break.
“Yipes!” Sora said as she caught herself on a bedpost.
Fairy merely shook her head. There was an unofficial but obvious line down the center of their room. Sora’s side was littered with dirty uniforms and unread books and the occasional nunchucks. Fairy’s side was spotless and tidy, especially her botanicals lab—a small desk and set of shelves lined with jars full of dried leaves and vials of flower nectar, as well as flasks of experiments, some successful and some not.
“I’ll, uh, tidy up your side of the room while you’re gone,” Fairy said.
“You shouldn’t have to,” Sora said. “I’ll do it when Wolf and I return. But I know you’ll worry while we’re gone, so if you need something to occupy your mind, maybe you can work on Wolf’s birthday surprise?” His birthday was only a couple weeks away, and after the success of their firework tiger at Rose Palace, Sora had an idea that she thought he’d love.
Fairy smiled a little. “That’s a good plan.”
But already, Sora was thinking of the journey ahead. And the last lines of the Evermore fable also lingered, a haunting reminder of what was at stake.
It was not man who achieved immortality but, rather, the curse, which trailed their greed like an unshakable, eternal shadow.
The Evermore was never worth its price.
But the opposite was also true. It was worth any price to stop Prince Gin and everyone else who pursued the unattainable legend of the Evermore.
Sora threw open her closet and grabbed a bag. She’d need some clothes, a canteen for drinking water, which she could fill in ponds and streams, and a cloak for concealing herself and keeping warm in the night.
And of course, weapons. She unhooked two leather bands from the wall. One had her usual throwing stars, and the other had spikes, poison darts, and exploding eggshells filled with blinding powder. She strapped several more knives onto her body and into the hidden pockets in the sleeves and every fold of her tunic.
When she turned around, Fairy handed her a small leather pouch. Her favorite, which she always kept strapped to her belt.
Sora’s mouth fell open. “Fairy . . . you don’t have to give me your satchel. I can just take a few of your concoctions—”
“I want you to take it,” she said. “Then I feel like . . . I don’t know. This is stupid. But I’ll feel like a part of me is there with you, helping.”
Sora hugged the satchel to her chest. Inside were half a dozen squat glass vials of poison, each with its own slot. These were Fairy’s babies wrapped in blankets, all in a row. She didn’t like going too long without cradling them. It was a big deal to hand them over to someone else. “Thank you.”
Sora jostled the finicky latch and opened the leather flap. She admired the different poisons, which Fairy lovingly milled and distilled herself.
“What is this syrupy amber one again?” she asked about the leftmost one.
“Demon sugar. One drop on a cake or in a cup of tea will send the victim into paralysis and a slow, strangled death.”
“Right,” Sora said. “The blue powder, I remember, is ground gaki berry mixed with salt from the Emerald Sea.”
“Yes. A little sprinkle of that on a dish, and the victim will get so hungry, he’ll go crazy and eventually devour his own limbs to satisfy his appetite.” Fairy went on to explain the other four powders and serums in the pouch.
When she finished, she whirled abruptly and hurried to a set of drawers, the one that seemed like a bottomless pit of anything one could possibly need. It was, of course, meticulously organized inside into little trays. Sora had seen Fairy retrieve everything from hair clips to seaweed strips to a romantic novel from the drawers’ depths. Now Fairy came back with a small red envelope.
“Hold out your hand,” she said. She took what looked like two pink coins out of the envelope and placed them in Sora’s palm. They were heavy too, like coins. Lines crisscrossed the disks.
“What is it?”
“Pressed rira powder. In small doses—like an eighth of this disk—it will put someone to sleep. In large doses . . .”
Sora’s heartbeat stumbled. But perhaps that was the point. Fairy