And in fact none of the five were any good during the run. The wisdom of our crowd is vicious, but it’s rarely wrong. The boy with the shakes, Hideo, would’ve been a quite good incanter, except that he’d have died twice during the single run when he interrupted his own invocations. But it didn’t matter; with only five kids in the run with me and Orion, we still all sailed through.
Afterwards I made myself tell Hideo, “I’ll get you a potion that will hold you for the run.” My mum’s got a recipe for something she calls calming-waters. She makes a monthly batch to give to wizards who’ve got muscle spasms brought on by overcasting—when you try to cast a spell you haven’t quite got enough mana for, you can make up the difference out of your own body, but it often has side effects that are brutal to get rid of. I was reasonably certain it would work for his shakes, too.
The sticking point was, I couldn’t actually brew it myself. I had to ask Chloe to do it for me. I gave myself the reward of a silver lining: I asked Orion to come down to the labs, too. He got all bright-eyed and enthusiastic, and then gave me a look of wounded disappointment when he discovered that Chloe was coming, which was exactly why I had asked him. The next time I asked, he’d be sure to ask if there was going to be any company, and then I’d have to say yes or admit I was asking him on a date, which I absolutely wasn’t going to do. It was the best protection against myself that I could come up with.
He was even more annoyed when it took us three hours to get the bloody thing concocted. Chloe kept asking excellent questions like, “Do you grind the scallop shells fine or just pound them to coarse bits?” and “Do you stir clockwise or counter?” none of which I could answer except by pantomiming Mum doing it, trying to remember with my body, and then guessing as best I could. I’m rubbish at alchemy in general, and I’m rubbish at healing in general, too, so the combination is almost always a disaster. The last time Mum tried to teach me, the test drop disintegrated a chunk the size of my fist out of the floor of our yurt.
“That can’t be right,” Chloe said, looking into the seething angry yellow boil in the pot, which indeed did not look anything like calming-waters.
“It’s not,” I said grimly. “I think I got the timing of the salt and the sulfur wrong.”
She sighed. “We’ll have to start over.”
“Oh, come on,” Orion moaned outright. In justice, which he wasn’t going to get from me, it was take four.
“Stop complaining,” I said. “Pretend you’re staking us out as bait. The two of us alone in this lab are as likely as anyone in the entire school to get jumped.” Judging by her sidelong look, I’m not sure Chloe really appreciated my argument.
The fifth attempt actually came out vaguely resembling the cool green-blue it was meant to be, only with a thick streak of muddy yellow-brown winding through it. I had absolutely no idea what we’d done wrong at that point, but Chloe very cautiously dipped in a lock of her own hair, rubbed it between her fingers, then sniffed it, and finally just barely touched it with her tongue. She made a face and spit into the sink and said, “Okay, I think I’ve got it,” then cleared the decks with a brisk cleaning spell and dived in once more. She went much quicker this time, and I couldn’t even spot what she did differently, but when she was done, at the end the yellowy mud streak got swallowed up smoothly and vanished away, and a single drop on my tongue was enough to tell me she had got it.
The drop wasn’t enough to keep away the burst of sour jealousy: I couldn’t brew calming-waters, my own mother’s recipe, and Chloe could. I’d have had to drink a triple dose to clear that taste out of my mouth.
But she made a big batch and we bottled it into thirty vials. It would take care of Hideo for the rest of the term, and leave enough over for anyone who panicked on graduation day: there were usually a reasonable number of unexpected freakouts. Orion lugged the crate downstairs to Chloe’s room for us and threw me one last reproachful look before flouncing off to go hunting, since I very firmly parked myself into one of the beanbags and made clear I wasn’t going anywhere alone with him.
Chloe bit her lip and didn’t say anything, but she continued not to say anything even after he left, which wasn’t usual for her. It was clear she could have happily used a dose of calming-waters herself to stop worrying: Is El going to take Orion away from us. I didn’t want to think about that myself, as letting the idea into my head was likely to lead me in the direction of many terrible decisions. “Were you always planning to do alchemy?” I said instead, by way of distracting us both. “Aren’t your parents both artificers?”