Excerpt

Sorting through Wizard Garstang's Potionery one airy, improbably-coloured bottle at a time, Jessamine went through what seemed an infinite number before happening upon the one she sought (and too many of these ended up splashed over the rosewood floor, alas, or would have, were it not for the ever-ready sylphs catching them up and sweeping them to safety before they could fall).

The chosen phial bore no obvious signs of difference from its fellows, Wizard Garstang being the meticulous type, and preferring the contents of his Potionery to match exactly. It was six inches tall like the rest, bulbous in the body and graceful about the neck, and tightly stoppered with some porous material ("So that they can breathe," Wizard Garstang had answered upon enquiry, without specifying who or what or how).

Jessamine knew this bottle (a clear glass, just faintly tinted with emerald) for the one she sought by the great eye that slowly opened within, blinked once at her, and then slid sleepily closed. Emerald like the glass was this eye, only a thousand times more vivid, with a slit, black pupil. The wisdoms, glories and resentments of uncountable years glittered in the depths of that eye, and Jessamine was not sorry that it did not open again.

She put the bottle into her velvet potion-bag, and carefully tied the string. This she hung (securely!) from the belt of her mustard-yellow gown (a colour no one would have chosen, for its hue reeked of seedy magics and bile; but Jessamine was grateful for the luxury of the fabric, and she liked besides the way its skirt swirled over her hips).

'You have got it?' asked a gossamer voice, floating somewhere above her left ear.

'Safe and sound,' said Jessamine. 'As you have kept those I elsewise would have ruined. Stars! I swear the poxy things throw themselves off the shelves.'

'Why, but they do,' said the voice.

'I hope the Wizard pays you well for your service, then, or he'd have nothing of his Potionery left.' She wondered as she spoke what a sylph might want by way of currency, for their lives in Castle Chansany must be simpler than most of its residents. Did they wear clothes, or require sustenance? Jessamine had never seen a sylph, not possessing the requisite eyes, but she thought not.

'Does he pay you well,' said the sylph, 'to fetch his trinkets?'

'He pays me in knowledge,' said Jessamine gravely, for it was true, though her secret heart wished for some halcyon day when she might, against all odds, advance beyond the lowly status of Apprentice Potioner. Then might she not command fees of her own? She could choose how she lived, and where—and the colour (and fit) of her gown would be her own to determine.

Frivolity to think it at all, and the Wizard, were he to hear of it, would raise that terrible, satirical brow, and send her at once to clean the Mixery. But Jessamine, half a fairy and half a human, with all the uglinesses of both, had no other beauties to enjoy. Might she not, someday, aspire to a ribbon or two?

'They need not even be silk,' she said, thinking of ribbons.

But the sylph thought still of knowledge. 'Do they, then, craft books out of silk?' said the sylph, intrigued. 'I hadn't thought it so.'

'The Wizard would have such an oddity,' said Jessamine. 'He has one of everything somewhere, I'm sure of it.'

Including a sleeping and fearsome old power stopped up in a bottle, on the topic of which, she ought by now to be halfway to the Dispensary with it.

With a bob of a curtsey for the sylphs—it never hurt to be polite, with ethereal things—Jessamine hurried out of the glittering, colour-drenched Potionery, closing the door upon its old oak shelves and bottled secrets.

Her lithe little feet carried her post-haste down the three passages that divided the Potionery from the Dispensary, one hand cupped protectively around her velvet potion-bag as she went.

Wizard Garstang sat ensconced in the best-of-all-chairs, the thing having taken up a station in the shadowiest corner of the Dispensary. It did not belong in there, of course; there was scant room for so oversized an article, and its jewel-coloured upholstery and curlicued conceits were ill-matched with the scrubbed, dark wood of the walls and floors. But the chair, like most of Castle Chansany, obeyed the Wizard's bidding; where it was wanted, it was wont to appear.

The Wizard wore an embroidered surcoat and a velvet mantle, as befit his status. It wasn't called frivolity when a man wore finery, Jessamine knew; perhaps because there were no ribbons. The jewels adorning his fingers, and the curls to the toes of his shoes, didn't count.

Wizard Garstang's swarthy countenance lit with something upon seeing Jessamine; was it relief? 'Ah! You have it,' he said, leaping lightly out of his chair.

'Of course,' said Jessamine, a touch crossly, for did he have no faith in her at all? (Or in the sylphs, at any rate; she need not mention how many bottles they had saved from a messy demise). Untying the emerald-tinted bottle from her girdle, she offered it to the Wizard. He did not take it with his own hands, but instead wafted the phial aloft on a stray wisp of mist. The sleeper did not wake; all that stirred within was a low glimmer, as of a dying fire.

'There, shall that do?' said Wizard Garstang, but not to Jessamine. She had not seen the person into whose care he intended to consign the bottle; as far as her eyes could tell her, he was alone.

'Admirably,' said a hissing voice, and what had appeared to be a darkened sconce upon the wall writhed about, shedding its iron-wrought semblance and becoming a boggle. The boggle, pale as milk and a little greenish, but clad in fine Court attire, clambered down the wall and righted himself upon the floor; then, bowing to the Wizard, he plucked the proffered bottle from the air, pulled out the stopper with a swift, deft movement, and downed the contents in one swallow.

'But—!' said Jessamine, appalled, for something had been imprisoned within. Something alive.

The boggle looked at her. 'Treganda's daughter, are not you? My regards to your mother.' Then, after belching out a gout of emerald-coloured flame, he sauntered to the Dispensary door and out into the passage, leaving Jessamine staring after him.

'He didn't pay?' she said, in great indignation.

'Payment is coming,' said Wizard Garstang, with a look of unholy amusement. Jessamine knew that look. It meant the Wizard was up to something.

A suspicious glare, however, failed to elicit an explanation, and she knew better than to ask. The eyebrow would go up, his dark eyes would fix her with a gimlet glare, and he would instantly find more work for her to do.

'He knows my mother,' she said instead.

'I fail to see the relevance.'

'I hope you won't incinerate him completely, if he is a friend of hers.'

'Only a little bit? Would that be permissible?' Up went the eyebrow.

'About the edges, perhaps,' said Jessamine. She had not yet ceased to pity the sleeping creature with the unsettling eye, greedily gobbled down, as though it were a stomach-settling draught, or a headache remedy.

Wizard Garstang did not reply, nor did he move. He stood frozen, head lifted, as though awaiting something.

'He seemed awfully pleased about something,' Jessamine suggested.

'He is to be disappointed,' said the Wizard.

A crashing sound split the silence, and the sudden roar of a ferocious inferno.

The Wizard began to smile, and then to grin; and when, moments later, the Dispensary-door opened again, and a thing of living flame wandered in, the grin became positively gleeful.

The flame-thing spat in disgust, spraying globs of white flame about the floor. 'Something tastier, I believe I said?'—uttered with the suppressed tumult of a forest fire, and laced with flaming crackle.

'You object to boggle?' said Wizard Garstang. 'But seasoned liberally with baseless arrogance! And, I believe, more than a hint of foolhardy ambition?'

'Succulent enough, I grant you,' said the fire-thing. Jessamine expected more, but it did not speak again. It looked up at the Wizard, licking its flaming jaws, and the bursts of fire wreathing its slender body, tapering tail and three, scaly legs dimmed a little.

Wizard Garstang permitted the emptied bottle to float to the dragon's feet, and with a further grumbled curse, uttered in syllables incomprehensible to Jessamine, it slithered over and poured itself down the neck, neatly bottling itself once more.

The emerald eye stared hard at Jessamine, in its depths lurking a twinkle of… satisfaction? Amusement?

Then the eye closed, and vanished.

'That dragon has only three legs,' said Jessamine after a while.

'The fourth was lost.'

'How?'

'I haven't asked.'

'I suppose it would be rude.'

'The wise are not rude to dragons, as a rule,' agreed the Wizard.

Jessamine only nodded.

'You are not going to ask me why I have fed your mother's friend to a dragon?'

'I should suppose he deserved it.'

'Perhaps it's only that Dragonfly was hungry, and I am a tyrant.'

'Naturally you are a tyrant,' said Jessamine. 'You're a Wizard.'

He smiled.

'Besides, he appears to have fed himself to the dragon.'

'So he did.'

'Expecting a different outcome, was he?'

'He imagined himself worthy of one.'

Having no further interest in the matter, Jessamine made him her graceless curtsey by way of farewell; it didn't hurt to be (passingly) polite to Wizards. 'I'll return Dragonfly, shall I?'

Wizard Garstang gave her back the bottle, this time with his own hands, which were warm and oddly roughened. Hers were so, and no wonder, with all the scrubbing she did; but what business had a grand Court Wizard with callused fingers? A puzzle, and Jessamine made the mistake of looking up, startled, into his face, as though the answer might be found there.

He was laughing at her. 'Carefully now, Jess-o'-mine. If you break Dragonfly's bottle, you will be the next delicacy in his banquet.'

Jessamine clutched the bottle close, thankful she had not run through the winding passages between the Potionery and the Dispensary. 'He wouldn't find me at all delectable. Perhaps one of the Court ladies, by preference.'

Wizard Garstang's glinting grin reappeared. 'I should like to feed every one of them to Dragonfly. Go,' he said, flicking his fingers towards the door. 'And do be careful.'