jars filled with distillations, tinctures, and brews, a dozen kinds of snake scales in leather pouches, bones, tiny and large, whole and ground, minerals in all shades of the rainbow, some powdered, some in single crystals longer than fingers.
The cave had been chosen for its lack of leaks and the walls rendered with pitch to seal it. Even so, pots of deliquescent rock-salt stood at regular intervals sucking moisture from the air to prevent mould. The place had an aromatic smell to it, scores of herb scents mixing. A sharp edge to the mingled aromas served as reminder that sampling what lay on display would likely kill you.
In cabinets around the cavern pots and jars lined further shelves, scores of them in tidy rows. Unlike the herb bunches, which Apple presumably thought impossible to misidentify, the containers were labelled, some with the ingredients written in the glaze, others with the identifier seared onto a leather tag tied around the neck. Cloves, green peppercorns, red peppercorns, illwort hearts, dried cowdung, elmbark scrapings … On and on, the ordering sufficiently abstract that Nona could see only a hint of it.
Nona’s salvation in all this confusion was that the finished preparations were kept on one great set of shelves with an alphabetical ordering within various subgroups such as ‘contact poisons’, ‘ingested poisons’, ‘antidotes’, and ‘miscellaneous’.
The drops that Sister Apple had prepared were stored in a distinctive ceramic flask, wide at the base, narrow at the neck and about two inches high. Nona found the flask quite rapidly in the miscellaneous section, sporting the label, ‘Optorical greyjak, recipe fourteen, unreliable’.
The tiny flask released its hold on its cork stopper with a small pop. Nona poured half the contents into a glass tube and sealed the end with wax. She pushed the stopper back and was about to return the drops to the shelf when a key rattled into the door’s lock.
A great number of thoughts attempted to pass through Nona’s mind at the same time. Everything from the excuse she would offer first to which weapon she should use. A rant about the unfairness of it all struggled to be heard among the babble. Nona refused all of them admission. Instead her hand fell to the lantern. Sister Apple’s training was so ingrained that Nona had unconsciously been assessing the room for hiding places ever since she entered. The most obvious was in the gap behind the mixtures’ shelf. The curvature of the rock walls meant that none of the shelves could stand anywhere near flush with the stone. Instead Nona moved with hunska swiftness towards a sack bulging with fresh pickings from the woods and fields, still unsorted. Beside it lay two empty sacks and an over-habit soiled from some recent work.
The key turned, the lock clicked, the door began to open. Nona threw herself down, arraying the over-habit and sacks across the length of her, pressing her body into the angle between wall and floor. She hid her feet behind the full sack, wishing that she was as small and flexible as Ghena who might have concealed herself entirely in such a bag. As the gap at the door grew still wider Nona blew out her lantern and pushed it down between her legs beneath the over-habit, wincing at its heat. At the last moment she pulled her hood up to hide her face. Only then did she allow despair in. Perhaps Apple and Kettle wouldn’t report her to Wheel, but the loss of trust, and the disappointment in their eyes, would hurt worse than a whipping.
As concealment went it was a pretty poor job, but people see what they expect to see and a shapeless heap of sacking and soiled clothes rarely merits close inspection. In any event neither Sister Apple nor Kettle would miss her wherever she hid. Even if they didn’t notice the groove in the stone that meant unlocking the door had been unnecessary, and neither of them would miss that, then the smell of her lantern would be enough to set them searching. If it were Apple rather than Kettle then at least Nona’s current position held the possibility of a mad scramble for the door while her back was turned.
Nona lay as she had been taught, not rigid but boneless despite every instinct to tense. A lantern’s glow pressed through the material of her hood. Why would either nun have a lantern with them? Nobody at the convent worked shadows as well as Kettle or Apple.