Chapter 1 #2
Thea dispatched a visiting vampire with a bottle of storytelling ink concocted from the ashes of a fire that she’d read her favourite stories aloud to in the thickest part of the night, and a single feather from a firebird.
Each sentence, penned in the charcoal ink would lend the writer the skill of a poet.
She served Paní Dagmar a thick cream drenched in honey and friendship lilies that softened the skin and invited flowers to bloom as you walked by, then shooed a couple of sneaky pixies out from behind her counter.
Their long fingernails were coated with the honey she kept there to sweeten her teas.
Then she spotted her: a girl, somewhere in her late teens.
Her gaze was furtive, her eyes shadowed.
Haunted with more than a lack of sleep. They always looked like that, the ones who come for something only Stiltskin’s Apothecary could provide.
The ones desperate enough to pay the price Lord Stiltskin demanded.
Thea’s heart grew heavy – or it would have done, if she had a heart.
Instead, a spell lived in her chest. She could feel it when she pressed a hand there: it fluttered like the wings of a paper bird.
Thea might be one of the few humans in the Magic Quarter, but she herself was bound together with magic.
The girl entered the shop, making a pretence of examining a bundle of rowan berries on crimson thread.
Thea tried to ignore her, busying herself with a string of customers instead.
Thea knew what she would see if she caught her eyes: the hope that would glimmer there. But her trust in Thea was misplaced.
From the corner of her eye, Thea watched the girl slink closer.
She was wearing a maid’s livery, starched and pristine, her hair neatly pinned back, though she kept worrying at her bottom lip with her teeth.
Her hands were red, too coarse for her age.
Dread crawled into Thea’s stomach; she’d seen too many people like this before.
Eventually, the morning crowd eased to a trickle, the apothecary emptying until the hanging crescent moon gleamed across the bare expanse of dark oak floor, bathing everything in pearlescence as though they were standing inside a seashell.
Enough for the girl to meet Thea’s concerned gaze over the counter.
‘I was told that you could help me,’ she whispered, twisting her hands together.
She was young. Too young to pay the necessary price. Thea’s pulse thudded with sympathy, her smile wavering for the first time that day. ‘You heard wrong.’
The girl blinked. Once, twice, before shaking her head and pursing her lips. Determination turned her voice stronger. Louder. ‘Please. I need help with my place of work, and I was told this is the place to get it.’
‘Look . . .’ Thea glanced around, ensuring they were alone. There wasn’t a customer nor honey-sampling pixie in sight.
‘Al—’ the girl began.
‘No names,’ Thea almost snapped. Closing her eyes for a beat, she leant closer, the counter pressing into her stomach, nausea rising in her throat. ‘I can help you, but the price is steep . . .’
The girl dug in her apron pockets. ‘I have savings . . .’
‘It’s not your money that I need,’ Thea said sadly. ‘Not for this. You will need to pay with time.’
The girl’s determination wavered.
‘Think on it. Try to find another solution. Because amending fate isn’t something I stock on my shelves, it isn’t as simple as drinking an elixir.’ Thea stared at her, imparting her words with the severity they required. ‘This is a last resort.’
The girl’s throat bobbed up and down as she swallowed. ‘And if I still wish to go ahead?’
Thea sighed. ‘Return after the sun has fallen, when the apothecary is closed and the night is still. Two sharp knocks on the back door.’ The rest of the Quarter might have been aware that Thea used Jasper’s borrowed power but she preferred to operate under the cover of darkness for the privacy of her customers and her own safety with some of the services she offered.
The girl nodded and scurried away, sending the bell ringing as she stepped back into the street and left quickly. Hopefully, she would never return.
After the girl departed, there was a quick flurry of business; an assortment of magical folk who had travelled from across Prague and the Quarter itself passing through, and Thea’s third new customer of the day, though they were giddy enough from voyaging into the Magic Quarter for the first time, their need that granted them admittance through the wards seeming simply to be their desire to have a little magic in their life, which proved as much a treat for Thea as them.
She dispatched them with a bottle of dream-bubbles: a gorgeous teal elixir that promised both the bubbliest baths and the sweetest dreams. Her good mood blossomed with the entrance of one of her favourite non-magical city regulars, Alena Bohmová, an opera singer as fabulous as she was lauded.
‘Rehearsals have been brutal this week. Please tell me my throat drops are ready?’ Alena rasped, resting one hand on her neck, shrouded from the autumnal chill with a silk scarf, ruby-red to match her dress.
Though she hadn’t applied any cosmetics, her hair was piled high with dove-grey powdered curls, and a tiny beauty patch remained affixed to her forehead – a little star, which Thea had never seen her without.
‘I have enough to last you all winter.’ Thea retrieved a handful of small glass jars, filled with hard-boiled sweets in a curious shade of blue that shifted and deepened in the light, like river water.
‘Though I also recommend drinking honey and lemon and trying not to talk outside of the theatre,’ she added, wrapping the jars in paper and exchanging them for the hellers Alena had already deposited on the counter.
Alena took the jars eagerly. ‘Yes, yes, I will be a saint. A silent saint,’ she declared, speaking with her hands as much as her words, each as emphatic as the other. ‘You are magic, darling Thea, as magical as these.’
Thea smiled. Alena was a woman born to the stage. Nobody could ever silence that voice, least of all Alena herself.
‘Whatever do you put in these that sweeten my voice so beautifully?’ Alena fixed Thea with a shrewd look.
‘Marshmallow root, a fairy’s tear and the song of a nightingale, captured in honey,’ Thea told her, with not a small glow of pride.
She had concocted the recipe herself. She may not be a witch, but anyone could make a potion, provided they got their hands on the right ingredients – those with a little sprinkle of magic – and Thea happened to have a knack for hunting them out.
Alena gave a dramatic, heaving sigh. ‘That sounds as lovely as a song.’
After Alena left, Thea pulled on an apron and walked through her backroom and further back, until her darkly atmospheric apothecary gave way to verdant wilderness.
Flowers, herbs, ferns and mosses, even trees, stretched up to a high glass ceiling, which revealed a bowl of endless blue sky that did not match the clouded grey outside the apothecary windows.
This was Thea’s haven. Her sanctuary. The trees waved their branches in greeting and the ferns rustled with excitement on seeing her; this wall of Stiltskin’s Apothecary nudged against the Rose Basket, shop and home of Rose, her neighbouring garden-witch, and the reason why Thea’s jungle had just a little more personality than most plants she’d come across.
Magic didn’t believe in keeping tidy borders.
Emptying the basket of blackberries she’d picked earlier onto her work bench, her hands fell into routine, letting her mind fly free and wild. Thea loved making potions, but she was no witch. Paní Dagmar had been correct in that.
Sometimes, she wondered what would it be like.
To have the hum of innate magic at your fingertips.
To be able to conjure a ball of witch light at a whim, or grow trees that danced, or rule over the skies.
There were so many kinds of witches, each born with an affinity, like weather-witches or kitchen-witches – she’d always thought she’d be a garden-witch, if she were one.
But no. Thea was human. A human caught between two worlds.
She absent-mindedly crushed the berries with a mortar and pestle.
Seven years ago, she had been just like the girl from today.
Hopeful. Trusting. She had found her way to this apothecary’s back door and knocked on it, trading everything she had for a new life.
Trading away her very heart, leaving her unable to ever love anyone.
And now she couldn’t even remember why.
She pounded the blackberries harder, turning them to pulp, then liquid as her first memory resurfaced. Seven years ago. Standing in front of the apothecary with a stranger. Lord Stiltskin, owner of Stiltskin’s Apothecary, as devastatingly handsome as he was cold.
‘Our deal is concluded, then,’ he had said, as shock rendered her silent, unresponsive.
‘As per the contract we have forged, you will be my new apprentice and must reside on the premises to manage both the day-to-day running of the apothecary, and the deals in fate you have agreed to handle on my behalf while I devote myself to my other business affairs. You will find everything you need to be comfortable in the rooms upstairs. I will leave you now to acquaint yourself with everything, and will return in three days to begin your training. Fate is a tricky mistress, but in time I am confident you shall be able to shape her to your will. After all, my power runs through your veins now. Do not disappoint me.’
‘I don’t remember who I am,’ she’d managed to whisper.
He’d inclined his head. ‘That was your condition for this . . . arrangement.’
She’d frowned. ‘And if I no longer wish to adhere to whatever bargain I made that I can’t remember? I need to see this contract.’