The Elusive Taste of Kolchoan Blue
by Patrick Honovich
Satet Nosso is trying to finish his apprenticeship at the Verrin School. He’s equipped with quick wits and potent magic in the form of a set of intricate, enchanted tattoos that embed his spells literally under his skin.
Satet serves a strict and calculating master. As his last task, to get his master’s approval to continue to the next part of his magical education, Satet is sent to acquire a few key items at Auntighur, the Imperial Auction House. When he arrives on the coldest day of winter, he encounters Sarah Bailick, another apprentice who might just be his equal or better.
Can he win the items he needs and keep from being hamstrung by the maneuvering of the other bidders? Or will the schemes of Sarah’s own Mistress be his downfall? Will his own arrogance doom him? If he wins his items, will he survive long enough to get them back to the school? The doors are open at Auntighur, and Satet feels ready for anything, but is he?
Chapter 9: The True Cost of a Good Coach West
part 1
I couldn’t see Sarah’s expression, but I felt movement as she floated me out into the hall, then down the stairs and out the front door to a waiting wagon. Once we were a few blocks away from Cadzana’s house, I lifted my head up and caught the strangest sight.
Master Tellrus, slipping past a thick-shouldered woman in black and gold, caught my eye and gave me the slightest, the thinnest, the most fleeting half-smile.
“What in all the hells?”
Sarah was in front with the driver, not speaking. As I lifted my head up, she glanced back at me, and whatever she saw in my expression scared her out of her manners.
“Pull to the side!”
“What, milady?”
“Stop the cart!”
I watched my Master walk up the street, his stride as strong as ever, dressed in his casual set of robes, cloak thrown back, riding gloves on. He passed around a fruit cart, and I lost sight of him for a moment. as I hopped down from the cart, then caught sight of him again, and the world seemed to flip as Cadzana’s house exploded.
The cart jerked, and I held out coins but the coachman swore us off, reined in his team and, even before we were out, he lashed the team to get away.
“Satet?” It was nearing midday, and the sun was beating down on us from nearly directly overhead, but it was still winter. The light carried little heat, and the sky began to dot with flakes of another snowfall.
Sarah’s shock showed up as hard pinches of color at the edges of her ears. “What kind of game are you playing? What have you... what have you done??” She stood, staring at me, hands on hips in a snowfall on a Corremantean side-street.
“It’s not safe to stand here. Come back with me to the school. I’ll explain the part I know.”
“But—”
“Not before.”
I set off at a lurch, still feeling a little unsteady, a little hungover, but starting to get back some of my usual swagger. Sarah fell into step beside me and asked me a dozen different questions on the way to the school. I kept quiet.
As we hurried along the streets, passing the few souls who, like ourselves, hadn’t had the sense to get in out of the weather, she kept pace and, as we walked, the foot traffic thinned away with the rising flurries of snow until it seemed the world was turning into white powder and the people dissolving away.
She asked, I didn’t answer, not when we came in sight of the school, not when Davey let us in, not while we climbed the stairs, not when I opened the door of my garret and not when I let her in. She came in, sat on my cot and brushed a strand of her hair out of her eyes, silent, watching me, waiting for the explanation.
I took the one remaining bottle from behind the desk and checked the seal.
“So, the bottle you gave Cadzana is a fake?” she asked.
“I don’t think she’ll be able to tell. Even my master, when he inspected it, said it might be genuine.”
Sarah didn’t miss a step. “Were any of the bottles the real thing?”
“The one I drank was.”
She looked at the desk, at the bottle sitting beside me. “What about that one?”
“Might be. But there’s an important fact that Cadzana doesn’t know,” I said. I carefully unbuttoned my shirt and took it off. “It doesn’t seem to work unless you’ve got Verrin ink in your skin.”
She stood and came close, her fingers brushing over the changed ink, feeling the difference in texture, seeing and feeling that the change in color wasn’t new ink. She looked up at me without moving away.
I caught a faint hint of some perfume of her own, not the same stuff that Cadzana used, quieter, possibly a single scent like jasmine or lavender or honeysuckle. I could feel her breath on my neck, and she reached to put a hand on my shoulder, not stepping away. I looked down at her as she looked up.
As kisses went, it was nothing special, although it had potential. I was too concerned with too many other things to give it or her my full attentions.
She stopped, stepped back, looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, half-puzzled. “You’re telling me you know nothing about what just happened?”
“Cadzana was sponsoring me to the Sage’s College. I have to get back there.”
“If Tellrus used me and you to get her, don’t you think he’d make sure she was dead? He didn’t move until he saw both of us leaving.”
For a long moment she stood, staring at me. Then she seemed to come to some inner decision and stuck out her hand. “Give me the bottle.”
I reached for it, holding it by the neck and pulled it between us. “You don’t want this. I don’t think it will work on you.”
She reached, put her hand over mine. “I’ll take that chance.”
I kissed her forehead. “You could end up dead.” I spoke softly, murmuring into the roots of her hair.
She kissed my chin. “Then you’ll have to save my life. You should like that.” Sarah stepped back, bottle in hand, pulled the cork.
“I wouldn’t—”
She cleared her throat, wrapped her lips around the bottle and tipped it back, guzzling it down with a grimace on her face, telling me more than anything else the bottle she was drinking was probably the real thing.
I lunged as it slipped, half-full, from her fingers. She hit the floor. I put the cork back in the bottle. She started to shiver when I reached for her, then to jerk.
With effort, I moved her flailing body from the floor to the bed, smacking her head on the headboard, but it couldn’t be helped. I had a bottle of Verrin ink in my drawer, from which I’d added a few drops to Cadzana’s bottle to produce a convincing fake, but I felt as if my knees and elbows were made of thread.
Pouring a few drops down her throat would stain, not heal, simply giving me a corpse with a black tongue. I didn’t know the charms to weave a full spell into the ink. Only Master Tellrus could, and I might be a likely successor, but I had not accepted the mantle yet, and I did not know that particular secret.
Sarah coughed, still out cold, skin starting to flush with fever, sweat beginning to bead up across forehead and upper lip, her mouth mumbling words I couldn’t make out. She jerked, twitched, thrashed, barely staying in bed, with her eyes rolled up into the back of her head. I couldn’t think, for all my education, of anything better to do.
I picked up a steel-pointed quill, dipped it into the ink and began methodically piercing the skin of her ankle, drawing a line whose ends didn’t connect. There was one thing my master had trusted me enough to do, one piece of ink I did know. It was this simple thin coil that marked a novice as beginning their studies with the Verrin school. There was no enchantment laid into the motion, and it wasn’t easy to do without getting kicked in the head, but I did pierce her skin, letting blood and black ink roll alike to stain my blankets.
If I gambled, if I had ever gambled, if some god or goddess of fate had ever smiled on me, I gambled then and prayed to whichever gods or goddesses were listening to give me this one small bit of luck, one of pure instinct. I hoped the quill would draw Blue out of her skin, draw it up as ink rises up as it heals and cushion the tremendous blow.
I didn’t know if it would work or not, but I couldn’t watch her die even if she’d done it to herself. I hoped the quill and the ink in the quill, would help, hoped that if the complete ink could save me, some of the same could keep her from death. My hands shook as I drove the silver-plated steel into her skin, drawing a simple line, and I made sure the ends of the line didn’t connect — according to the Verrin and to Master Tellrus, drawing a loop.
“Come on, come on, work, work, work,” I talked to keep my mind occupied, to keep from listening to the inarticulate noise coming out of her mouth and, after I’d wiped away the blood with the edge of my shirt, retraced the line to make sure it was continuous, there was nothing to do but wait and watch the wound on her ankle as it slowly stopped bleeding and began to clot.
Copyright © 2023 by Patrick Honovich
