Twenty-Seven: Chemistry

The queen didn’t die. Not at first. Elf’s cup was a subtle poison and had to work its way from the blood to the heart and brain before it could shut systems down. It also worked a lot faster if it was ingested than absorbed into the skin, but I hadn’t had a lot of choices. She was going to die, and that was a comfort, even as the hyphae from the queen’s magical fungus licked my cheeks and the smell of breakfast on Sameer’s breath filled what little air we had left.

All we could do from our shrinking enclosure was watch. Just as the pouch hit the queen, jagged red crystals pierced the leather, then shredded it. The crystals cracked the amulet wide open, and the contents, a thin, blue-green liquid, slopped onto the queen’s neck. Some ran down under her clothes, but most soaked into her hair and cape, and from there, I assumed, to her skin. Ethanol was great at penetrating skin. One drop was enough to kill a mouse, so an amulet the size of my hand was certainly enough for a human.

There was stillness then, for a few moments, as the queen clawed at her clothes and skin, desperate to be rid of the unknown damp compound. It was when the first bit of red crystal pierced the queen’s hand that she jolted up and ran toward us, her eyes wide and angry, while bits of red crystal built and spun off of her.

“Down! Mother, the crystals!” I grabbed a fistful of Sameer’s hair and pushed his face to the dirt. I didn’t know if Mother could hear me through the thick walls of red and gold fungus, or if she had paid enough attention to my pigments to know what the red could do, but if she had, if she had truly done of all this to protect me, then she might be able to help.

I squeezed my eyes shut, remembering the explosion of Mother’s house, and the bite of nails, knowing there wasn’t enough of the red pigment to explode the mound, but there was plenty to rip into my flesh if any of those crystals got close enough.

I could hear the sounds of clothes tearing. The queen shrieking. Mother’s grunt of surprise. The mound shook; the ground shook. Sameer reached out for my hand, and I held his, counting breaths, and heartbeats, and hoping, praying, that my pigments would be enough.

CRACKKK!

A fast exhale of breath, as if someone had been punched in the gut.

Another flare of heat magic.

A cry of pain from Mother.

How long had it been? A minute? Less? I opened my eyes and looked up, but our small opening had closed. Darkness surrounded us, the sounds of the outside muffled. I saw glints of light in a few places, perhaps where the earth had failed to come together properly, the legs of insects scratched my face, and hyphae tickled my arms.

“You’ll be a great woodcutter someday, Sameer.” It seemed right to say because I had no doubt he would make an excellent woodcutter. And because I hadn’t really apologized, had I, for being an ass to him on the glacier.

Sameer snorted but squeezed my hand. “You’re not a great alchemist, Sorin.”

I wasn’t certain if the comment was meant to sting or not, but I laughed anyway. “You’re right. I’m a terrible alchemist. But I think I might be a decent bastard chemist.”

“You won’t be able to file the paperwork to change your title before we are crushed to death here.”

There was a lightness in Sameer’s words, and though the conks were now pressing on my chest, I felt light too. Maybe the borders of the three countries would fall apart, through loss of the guilds, industrial revolutions, or queen treachery. But I had a brother, and for the first time, maybe a mother, though there was some room for debate on that. I had chemistry, and it was something different, but not new. I hadn’t had to make it up, just find it. Thinking about that seemed to loosen and cool my skin. The scars were still there on my arms, never forgotten, but they didn’t itch, even with the hyphae curling around them.

The ripping sound began again. Except this time, it was louder and accompanied by screams and thunderous claps of dirt. Particulate rained down into my eyes and mouth, and I curled tighter against Sameer, coughing and gasping. Chunks of fungus slammed into my spine, my legs, my head. A bright light shone behind my eyelids, and the world spun. The screaming became louder. I brought my hands up to cover my ears and…and I could lift my arms all the way up.

I coughed again, then sucked in clean air. The screaming stopped as suddenly as it had begun. I heard Sameer sit up and try to clear his own airways.

“You okay?” I asked him.

“I’ll live,” he responded sourly.

I rubbed at my eyes, then opened them. All around Sameer and me were clumps of burnt conk, pierced by delicate, hook-ended crystals. The conks had turned brittle and were shiny in places. The air smelled of brick, and although the area was bathed in an apple-colored glow from the crystals, the ground was scorched black from magic. Another reaction, perhaps, between my crystals and Mother’s magic.

“Do you see them?” I asked Sameer. Everywhere was just earth and smoke and fungus. He and I could have been the only living things in the entire forest.

Sameer stood, pivoted, then pointed. “Over there. Come on.”

We walked only a few steps, and then I helped him lift an oblong slab of baked red belt fungus off of two intertwined bodies. The queen was curled in on herself like a bug. Mother wrapped around her, clasping the desiccated woman to her chest.

We tossed the conk and dropped to our knees. Both of them were still alive, but when I tried to unwind Mother’s arms from the queen’s shoulders, I saw they were speared together by tiny fragments of red crystal.

“Kept her against the mound,” Mother wheezed. “Your pigments amplify the heat residue. Hope I didn’t bake you.” She didn’t open her eyes, and I wanted, so badly, to look at her just then. To have her see me, and to really, truly, see her for the first time. I wanted to demand explanations, to vent the rage that still burned in my throat, but I held back. Again. “Thought…to get the crystals into the mound. Save you. So sorry, Sorin, the tattoo. Sameer. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve destroyed Sorpsi.” The queen’s voice was barely more than a whisper as she struggled to draw in breath. Just like the mice in my experiments, she was calm and did not thrash. But in the last moments of life, her eyes flew wide open and she managed to glare at me. Her eyes stayed that way, too, as she choked, and hissed, and finally, exhaled.

I started to shake. “We have to get them separated. We need a solvent. Something to dissolve the crystals.”

Sameer tried to pry at the conjoined areas of skin but pulled back sharply when Mother cried out in pain. “Do you have any more of the ethanol?”

“There are hundreds of old amulets at the camp. It will take hours, though, with the ethanol. We need bone oil. There are vats of it in the cauldrons.”

“Treaty talks?” Mother’s words were garbled now, and I had to lean in to hear her.

“I’m sure Magda has it under control, Mother.” I stood. “Sameer, you stay here with her. I’ll go back for the solvent. Hopefully—”

“Sorin.”

“Damn it, Sameer, it’s the only option we have. Just hold on. I’ll be five minutes.” Mother would be fine, I was certain. Mother was always fine.

“Sorin, Amada is dead.”

Everything stopped, even the nuthatches. I looked down as tears collected in my eyes, at the queen’s blank glare, and Mother’s half-closed lids. They were both dead. As dead as my laboratory mice, as dead as the false guards. The queen was dead, leaving hundreds of guilder skills trapped within amulets. And Mother…with a reconciliation, perhaps a reckoning, that we’d never get to have.

Still, I didn’t move. I searched for the next steps, for there had to be something proper to do when a queen died, or your mother died, but I could think of nothing. The ground around me was burned, my pouches empty. What was I supposed to do? Move? Maybe. It was cold without Mother’s magic, and a thin layer of frost was forming over the bodies. Breathe? Yes, breathing helped clear my mental fog.

“Should we bury them?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say.

At the very end of my words, fungi began to poke through the ground in a halo around Mother and the queen. Sameer jumped back and yelled in surprise, and I, too, leapt away. Of the palest white, the mushrooms also glowed green despite the daylight, reflecting off the crystal fragments, the colors mingling together.

Now, with the crystals and the fungi and the frost, both women looked like they’d been purposefully placed in a glass coffin. In enchanted woods, they were a pair of fairy queens, and that seemed right, somehow, after all this. The ground might thaw and decay might take its course, but it might not, with the magic. Stories might grow, of magic and fairies and elves and foxfire, and of a queen and a woodcutter, and some powerful, unearthly force that had overwhelmed them.

“I think we should leave them.”

“We can’t just leave her here, Sameer. She’s our mother.”

“She was a terrible mother.”

I wiped my hands over my face. She hadn’t been terrible, not really. Or maybe really. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore. I was still allowed to mourn, wasn’t I? To dream of taking her back to Thuja and burying her next to her parents in the soft soil behind our longhouse? Maybe to erect a spirit house for her, as they did in Puget, so that her soul could come and watch over me as it always had when she was alive.

Thick, wet snow began to fall. The flakes coalesced quickly, and I watched, without blinking, as they coated Mother and the queen in downy white.

“We have no way to get them back, not stuck together as they are. You have to let her go, Sorin. Your life is yours now. No one else’s.”

I kept my eyes on the snow-covered bodies, the red glint of the crystals slowly drowning in silver. “My life was always my own. I just chose to put other people first.”

Sameer snorted, but I didn’t look back at him. Instead, I turned to the heap of amulets to my left, dropped by the queen and Mother, the ground haloed brown around them. I gathered all three and tucked them into my pockets.

“You really want to take those?” Sameer asked, surprised.

“You expect Magda to believe us without evidence? We could try to collect an alchemist or two, take them back to Celtis. But without the authority of the queen, I doubt we’d get out alive. We need Magda, and in order to get her, we need a few amulets.”

And I want to leave. I have to leave. It hit me all at once. The absurdity that had kept me distant melted into reality. Mother was dead. The Queen of Sorpsi was dead. The guilds were dead, and if Sameer and I didn’t get to Magda soon, Sorpsi would be dead as well. I rubbed at my arms, hard enough to peel the fresh scabs.

“We have to go. Now.” My voice was dead of emotion, my sleeves damp and slowly turning crimson. Magda. Magda was who we needed. Magda would be the one who could straighten everything out. The royal daughter, Magda. Queen Magda.

“We’re going to have to break into those treaty talks. It’d be easier if we rounded up the masters first. Even shaken, they’ll make a strong statement.”

Sameer seemed immune to any emotion. That should have made me angry, but it didn’t. The wind that consistently blew strands of hair across my face should have chilled me, but it didn’t. I turned away from Mother and began to walk south. If I lingered, I would come apart, and I couldn’t do that yet. Not with so many guilders to rescue. Not with Magda waiting for us, and Sorpsi’s autonomy hanging in the balance. I’d wanted to be free of Mother for so long, and now all I could think of was how little time we had truly spent together, and that she was dead, and that I was leaving her here, chained to her keeper until the spring thaw when fungi would consume their bodies.

“Let’s get the masters first, as many as we can find,” I said into the wind. “Then, we find Magda and see if there is any part of Sorpsi left to save.”