night – but astonishment turns rapidly to fear, and then I’m flying across the few steps to her door and grabbing the key, fumbling in my haste to unlock it. What if she’s – what if … I don’t know what was in Silas’s potion. How could I be so stupid? I didn’t even ask if it was safe, if it had anything dangerous in it. Oh Gods, the dream, it was a warning, it was a warning to me that she…
I fling open the door, forgetting to be careful, not thinking it might be a trick, or a trap. She’s in the bed, her mouth open, head tipped slightly back, and I run to her, my stomach roiling.
“Mama!” I choke out the word and grasp her bird-thin shoulders, shaking her. “Mama!”
There is a sickening, sickening moment when she doesn’t respond and I forget how to breathe. Then her eyes open and she looks up at me and the relief is so great that I crumple on to the bed, still clutching her shoulders as I slump beside her. She blinks slowly and I look at her eyes. They’re clearer than they’ve been for moons, barely pink at all, and her pupils aren’t dilated or contracted. Moreover there’s no malice in her gaze, and I gently lower her back to the pillow.
“I’ll get you some breakfast,” I say shakily, and for the first time in three moons, she nods. It’s faint, and it might not have been deliberate, but I see it. I back out of the room, unable to take my eyes off her. What is in the mixture Silas gave me?
It’s a lie if I pretend that I always wanted to be an apothecary. My earliest ambition was to be an alchemist. I knew all about the three branches of alchemy from Mama’s books: the aurumsmiths, who could create gold from base metal and so would never be poor; the philtresmiths, who could concoct the Elixir of Life and so would never be ill; and the vitasmiths, who could animate a homunculus, or – more terribly – a golem, and so would never be alone.
I never pretended to be a vitasmith – it would have been a fantasy too far, even for me. The lines between the Sleeping Prince, the children’s storybook figure, and the actual Crown Prince of Tallith, have blurred over the last half millennium, but both versions of his story say that he was the first and only alchemist to be able to give life to the not-living. But I never wanted that power; even as a child, something scared me about things being alive that were never meant to live. Sometimes I pretended to be an aurumsmith – usually when I wanted something and was told no – but the kind of alchemist I most played at being was a philtresmith.
To be able to create the Elixir was much rarer than the ability to create gold – in fact, Master Pendie later told me that the last known philtresmith died more than seventy harvests ago in the Conclave, and that the Council held a state funeral for her. As a matter of fact, that was the last time the alchemists left the Conclave en masse, and the last time the Tregellian army was active, drafted in to protect the alchemists from kidnap attempts by Lormerians.
But I didn’t know that when I played at it, and I spent hours mixing ingredients together – mud, milk, whey, berries – and declaring it the Elixir of Life. I fed my mixtures to Mama when she had a headache, to Papa when his back hurt, and even tried in vain with Lief, when he fell into nettles, or tumbled from the roof of the barn.
Eventually poor Papa explained to me that it was impossible to become an alchemist, that you had to be born one. Alchemy born, descended from the Royal Twins of Tallith, the ability passed down the bloodlines. But then he told me that, although being an alchemist was beyond my reach, there were potions and mixtures I could learn that would also heal, albeit without the miraculous effects of the Elixir of Life. So I switched my attentions to medicine, and it turned out I was a natural with plants, and a gifted apothecary.
When you train to be an apothecary, you learn about composition and creation, construction and deconstruction. You learn to isolate elements and how to put them together, how to balance them to