“You tell me.”
Closing her eyes, Arin tried to re-create the taste in her memory. Vanilla, sugar, flour, egg . . . all the usual ingredients. Had there been extra sweetness? Saltiness? She only remembered the tangy edge.
The half-eaten cake had been wheeled to a corner of the room. It was as stale as dried firewood, and the icing had hardened. Opening her eyes, Arin crossed to it. Her plate had been shoved underneath the table—Mistress Garnah had refused to allow any servants into the room, even to clean. Arin took the mostly eaten slice plus a new slice and carried both back to the table. She studied them. She smelled them. She plunged her fingers into the cake, feeling it crumble between her fingers. The icing of the cake she’d eaten felt more slippery.
She glanced back at Mistress Garnah, who was smiling placidly at her. “Did you poison me?” Arin asked, and then she felt a whoosh of shame for even considering . . . It couldn’t be poison. She didn’t feel sick. She felt much too . . . much. “My emotions. You affected them?”
Wiping the chocolate from her cheeks with a wad of lace, Mistress Garnah stretched herself out on the chair. She propped her feet up on a pillow. “If you can’t figure out how, you aren’t worthy of being my assistant.”
Fear.
Excitement.
Pride.
Each emotion swept through Arin, and for the first time, she questioned if they were really hers. There were potions to make you feel strong emotions, she knew. Red pepper, mixed with sin-san root, fueled anger. Marrow from mouse bone, combined with salt and eker leaf, made fear. She flipped through her notes—she’d learned about potions to thicken the blood, to calm the heart, to ease the muscles, to soothe anger, to cause fear or despair or ecstasy . . .
She’d always felt things deeply. Pride in her sister—she’d always thought Daleina was the best and deserved the best. Passion for her work—when she chose to be a baker, she threw herself into it, worked nonstop, planned to open her own bakery. Love for Josei—when she’d fallen in love, it was no-question head-over-heels, with full-blown plans for the future. And then the despair and anger when he’d died. She thought she’d be subsumed by the pain.
She pursed her lips and examined the ingredients that were on the table. Tin-ease enhances an ingredient’s essence . . . Glancing at Mistress Garnah, she lifted a cake-coated finger to her lips. First, she tasted the undoctored slice. She let it melt on her tongue, absorbing the ingredients. She knew them all—it was her cake. Eyes still on Mistress Garnah, she then tasted the tainted slice.
She let it linger in her mouth.
Extra salt. A hint of sugar. Nutmeg? No, it was sweeter than that, nearly hidden by the flavor of vanilla and sugar. She wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t been focusing.
On instinct, she reached for ingredients. She sniffed them, and then added bits to the undoctored cake, matching it in taste. She lost track of time as she mixed, added, and sniffed. She then tossed the piece of cake and fetched another one.
She tried again.
And again.
The texture . . . The smell . . . And last, the taste.
“It’s foolish to experiment on yourself,” Mistress Garnah said. “Hamon once acted as you did. I cannot tell you how many times I came home to that foolish boy unconscious on the workroom floor. Eventually I brought him home a cat. He was upset when it died, but better that than him, I told him. See, I did love him. I do. He’s my boy. He’ll always be my boy. I don’t know what I did to deserve such disdain from him.”
She felt a surge inside her—an urge to comfort. Tears pricked her eyes. Arin shook her head as if that would clear away the cloud of feelings. “It’s not a single emotion. It’s all of them, targeted toward you.” She looked down at her notes. None of the potions she’d learned matched, but combined? “You fed me a love potion.”
Mistress Garnah made a kissy face toward her. “Aww, how sweet. And no, try again.”
Scooping up a bit of tainted icing, Arin rubbed it between her fingers again. “Extra egg?”
“Yes, a special egg. A fertilized egg, the very first laid by that bird. Dehydrate it and crush it into powder, and it can have a powerful effect.”
An unhatched egg. The first egg. The first child. Tin-ease enhances what is normally merely metaphorical. “You made me imprint on you. Like a baby duck. You made me want to follow you, please you, nearly worship you.” As she said it, she felt a swirling sickness in the base of her stomach. Mistress Garnah couldn’t . . . She wouldn’t . . .
“Correct. I suppose in a way, it is a variant on a love potion.” Mistress Garnah smiled, as if delighted with Arin’s performance.
“I’m your cat. You experimented on me.”
“I had to be certain it would work on a person before I tried it on my Hamon. Emotions are fine, but I needed to be sure they wouldn’t dim a person’s intelligence. Frankly, I didn’t expect it to work so well.”
Now she felt a rush of anger. There it is, she thought. Her own emotion, untouched by the tin-ease. “It worked because I wanted to believe in you. I wanted to trust you.” The potion enhanced her feelings, especially the positive ones. But it didn’t dictate them. It didn’t force them to all be positive. This anger—it came from inside her, focused but hers. She gripped that anger as if she were in a storm and it was the strongest tree. Slowly, as she nurtured her anger, she felt the clouds lift in her mind. “It won’t work on him.”
Mistress Garnah’s smile vanished. “Why do you say that?”
“Because he doesn’t want to love you.”
“And you did? You barely knew me, and surely what you knew was bad. I saw Hamon, whispering his warnings to you. Don’t trust me. Don’t believe me. Don’t even look at me, hideous monster that I am.”
“He brought you here to cure my sister,” Arin said. “So yes, I wanted to believe in you. Very badly. You didn’t need to use any potion on me for that.” She felt clear now, at last. Her thoughts were her own again. Her emotions, her own. The anger had burned away whatever Mistress Garnah had done to her.
Mistress Garnah studied her. “Humph. I’d say the potion wasn’t strong enough. You’ve shaken it off, haven’t you? It’s the anger. Self-righteous anger is a difficult emotion to smother.” She sighed. “I knew you were a smart girl. That’s why I wanted you for my assistant. But now I suppose you’ll flee from me, like everyone does.”
She should. After all, Mistress Garnah had used a potion against her. But Arin hesitated. She looked at the worktable, at the microscope, at the test tubes, at the herbs and powders.
The potion hadn’t made Arin good at this. That was Arin herself. Arin had absorbed the lessons, prepared the ingredients, performed the experiments, and found the cause of her sister’s illness.
If she learned more . . . perhaps she could find the cure.