Holy Gods, how am I ever going to drink that?
Stirring briskly, she says, “No one gets new magic. Not unless it’s an oracular gift.”
Well, it wasn’t. Not this time. Does that mean I’ve always had it? Why didn’t I ever feel it before I met—
Oh. Pieces of my own personal puzzle click into place. Griffin. He’s changed everything in my life, changed me. Has our being together somehow unlocked power that was already inside me, just waiting to come out? The ichor? The lightning? He’s certainly upped my will to survive. And protect. And feel. Has the magic been there all along, but I needed Griffin to help bring it out in me?
I turn to him. Griffin watches me. He watches the witch. Like me, he’s hardly touched his stew.
Unfortunately, we still have the same problem we had before. Even if Griffin has helped make the magic surface within me, it still doesn’t work like it should.
I track the path of the hermit’s spoon through the now-lumpy sludge of her potion. I don’t want to drink it. I want to leave. That’s my gut feeling, but a big part of me wonders if it’s instinct telling me to go, or my stomach protesting the idea of swallowing something so vile.
“You want immense power in your hands.” The witch sets the spoon aside and then looks at me.
“I already have immense power,” I reply. “Now I want it to be reliable.”
She keeps looking at me, and I look back. I have no idea why we’re having a staring contest, but at least I’m good at it. Eventually, she turns back to her brew and utters a series of words in the old language—none of which I recognize—directly over the pot. Finally, with an odd hiss, she adds a carefully measured pinch of something granular and mauve.
Amethyst? It’s a balancing stone, enhancing intuition and mental powers of all kinds while also limiting their destructive nature. That would make sense for the kind of potion I need, especially when the magic in question is explosive, to say the least.
The coarse grains sink one by one, dragging the hissing top foam down with them. The potion suddenly goes still. All bubbling stops.
Griffin places his hand over mine and gives my fingers a light squeeze. “Can you help us, or not?”
“Us?” The witch’s head jerks up from studying her concoction. “I wasn’t aware the magic concerned you.”
“Everything about Cat concerns me,” Griffin answers, his expression as stony as the Deskathi peaks.
Unfazed, the old woman turns to her herb corner, takes three vermillion berries I can’t identify from a glass jar, crushes them, and then adds them to her mixture. “Cat,” she mutters under her breath, stirring again. “How pedestrian.”
A chill slides down my spine, landing like a block of ice inside me. My hair tries to stand straight up, and my scalp tingles all over. She sounds just like someone I know. And hate.
“That potion is for me, right?” I eye the revolting concoction. What if I should drink it? What if it works?
“Of course.” She pours it into a cup. The transfer makes it smoke. “But I expect payment first.”
“We brought gold,” Griffin says.
Her upper lip curls in contempt. “I have no need for gold.”
“I can hunt for you,” he offers. “Bring back a stag or a boar. Cure it, and it’ll last you the winter through.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t need food.”
Her words pluck at my already tightly strung nerves, making them play an off-key note in my head. Everyone needs gold or food. They’re the most important commodities. They buy her comfortable-looking furniture and perfect windows and keep her belly full. What old woman living alone in a remote area turns down an offer of food?
“Weapons?” I ask, frowning. I don’t want to, but I could give up my blades—if that’s what she really wants.
She shakes her head again, her green eyes scraping mine.
I have a jeweled crown I’d easily give her, but it’s not here. The emerald and gold ring Griffin gave me the night of the realm dinner winks on my finger, but there’s no way I’m handing it over. I won’t give up my ice shard necklace, either. Or my wedding band. Not in this lifetime, or in the next.
I pull a three-tiered string of fat Fisan pearls from my pocket. I’ve been carrying it around for weeks.
“I have this.” My heart not happy about it, I hold out Ianthe’s circlet. She gave it to me to hold when she went off for a bath and forgot to get it back. That was the evening before we met up with Lycheron on the Sintan border.
More quickly than I thought she could move, the hermit snatches the royal heirloom from my hand. Her eyes shine as she runs the lustrous pearls through her fingers, making them softly click.
“This will do.” She tucks the pearls into a drawer under her herb table, quickly hiding the circlet away. She hands me the cup.
Potions are universally disgusting. The smell hits me fully the second it’s in my hands, and I almost choke. My eyes start to water. My gag reflex preps for battle, and I try to calm it by swallowing the sharp bite of acid in the back of my throat.
“Will it work?” I ask in a rough, unenthusiastic croak.
“It will do what it’s supposed to do.”
Well, that’s cryptic. “Unlock my magic?” I ask, fishing for a precise answer. “Make it so I can control my lighting?”
She shrugs and doesn’t elaborate, almost like she knows I’m a walking lie detector. With a thump, I set down the cup.
She pushes it toward me, right under my face, and noxious vapors sting my nose again. “The potency won’t last long. Tarry, and it will take longer and be more painful to reach the desired outcome.”
I don’t detect any lies in her words, but something about them makes me sure that she’s twirling around the truth.
“What will take longer?” I ask.
“The effects.”
“What effects?”
“The effects inherent to the potion I just mixed for you.”
I lean back in my chair, putting some much-needed distance between myself and the mysterious concoction. Is the witch just tight-lipped and surly, as old-as-dirt hermits probably tend to be? Or is she performing an expert bob and weave with traitorous words?
“Specifically, what will this potion do to me?” I demand.
She thumps her wizened hand down on the table, making the cup rattle and the potion fizz. “I made the brew. You paid me. This transaction is complete. Drink it, or get out of my house.”
Griffin stands and holds out his hand to me. “Let’s go.”
I glance over. “But—”
“But nothing,” he says. “You don’t want to drink it, so don’t. Trust your gut, Cat.”
The hermit turns an irate glare on Griffin. “Stay out of this, Hoi Polloi.” There’s a heavy punch of power in her voice. Compulsion? It’s not directed at me, so it’s hard to tell. It won’t have any effect on Griffin anyway, but there are never more than a handful of people alive who can compel another human being, like Mother and I can. The hermit witch just entered an entirely new category in my mind—almost certainly an Olympian one.