Chapter 6
THE MAGIC GROVE
SUMMER
Cadence showed up before I could clean up the mess, the alchemy lab swirling with activity right now, and she looked horrified at me when she came around the corner under the old brick archway.
“Oh, saints, that’s horrible,” she said, and I puffed out my chest.
“Thanks, it was my best work.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean it like that. Look at you, you’re all singed.
” She tugged a little cloth from her herbalism kit, a delicate thing with enchantments shimmering off of it, and she dabbed at my face.
I admit it wasn’t like I hated being spoiled with a beautiful woman fussing over me, her eyes up close studying my face as she wiped away smudges of black and brown that sparkled on the cloth before vanishing.
“Did it hurt?” she said, and I couldn’t help it.
“When I fell from heaven?”
She smiled, wiping one more time over the bridge of my nose before she stepped back, nodding appreciatively. I guess I must have looked better. “Not that,” she said. “Obviously you’re too graceful and you must have landed safely when that happened. I mean when your alchemy lab exploded.”
“I got a little ping in the forehead, but if it leaves a mark, I’ll just say it’s my third eye.”
“I have another Galyr’s tooth on me if you’re hurt.
But I wouldn’t want to shut your third eye.
” She turned back to the alchemy station, touching her wand to the surface, and it glimmered with magic, sparkling out over the surface, as enchantments filtered through into the materials.
I watched as the station rebuilt itself, sweeping up the soot and ash and caustic reagent dust, and after a few seconds, it was good as new, Cadence inspecting it before she nodded, putting her wand away.
Damn, though, I was a real sucker for a girl who was good with practical magic.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work,” she said, turning back to me, her gaze on the floor as she put her wand back. “Were the samples not good enough?”
“Oh—oh, no, that’s not it at all. I just screwed it up.”
“I doubt that.”
“Well, reach deep into your heart and believe. Don’t worry, I screw up all the time,” I laughed, and I sank back against the wall by the tall, arched window that was cracked open to the wind in the tree branches.
“It’s kind of my thing. I’m always on the hunt for new designs, for new extensions.
Sometimes it works, and it’s amazing when it does.
Sometimes… well, sometimes it blows up instead.
I figured it was about even odds with this one. ”
“Oh.” She scrunched up her face in thought. “That’s… bold, taking even odds on an explosion to the face.”
“I’m nothing if not bold. So…” I clasped my hands together. “I wanted to ask your help. I know I already did, and I’m ready to pay you back for as much of it as you’ll let me.”
“I told you, you don’t need to pay me back. We’re…” She stopped herself, flushing a little, as she looked down. “Um, I mean, we’re… reliable partners in procurement.”
I grinned. “You can say friends.”
“Okay, thank the saints, I wasn’t sure if I was getting too presumptuous,” she laughed nervously. She was so cute all shy and embarrassed like this. I really shouldn’t have been asking her this, considering the fact that I kind of wanted to kiss her, but I asked her anyway.
“I need your help finding something.”
She perked up. “Another herbological compound? What is it? I might have some leads. Well, I probably do. I tend to know a thing or two about these compounds.”
I opened my bag on the table, rummaging through my books, and I pulled out my alchemy notebook, flipping it open and passing it to her. She went wide-eyed, taking it in both hands and poring through it, even Knot perking up on her shoulder to look over the list.
“Um… which one?” she said.
“Any of them. Or all of them.”
“Are you going to blow yourself up for each one of these?”
I grinned. “All but one.”
She turned the page. “You don’t mean these too—”
“Oh, I mean those too.”
“Saints and stars.”
“So?” I said. “What’s your fee? You can tell I’m a pretty serious buyer.”
She stared at the book for a minute longer, a blush spilling out thicker over her cheeks, before she snapped it shut. “No fee,” she said, handing it back to me. “When do you want to start? I know a good place to get spinner’s knot, fangwood, and wild burnbark, an hour’s walk from the East Wall.”
Okay, now that was what I called flirting. Lumi didn’t need to know if I flirted back. “So, did it hurt when you fell from heaven?”
She stood up taller, meeting my challenge with a smile. “It did. But I had a good remedy on hand.”
She was too cute. This was such a problem. “You down for right now?”
“I’m down for anytime.” She paused. “When it comes to, you know—harvesting herbological compounds and everything. In other contexts I usually actually need a lot of time in advance to prepare emotionally for something, and I want to know about some big event I’m expected to do, like, at least twenty-four hours in advance, but—well—yes.
Shutting up now. I’m down for right now. ”
I genuinely never wanted her to shut up. I could only hope she’d chatter incessantly while ingredient-harvesting, like she had last time. I couldn’t get enough.
*
Spinner’s knot, fangwood, and wild burnbark all didn’t work. I didn’t mind too much.
Cadence led me to an obscure little grotto in the cliffs towards Eagle House, where we had to cross a narrow ledge and she nearly fell in the water before I caught her with stylish grace, and then I was the one who fell in the water on the way out.
It was cold and a little slimy, but Cadence’s eyes sparkling as she laughed so hard she choked made it hard to be too upset about it.
She stayed in the alchemy lab with me while I went into the night brewing, sitting in the window nook with a book in hand that she wasn’t really reading because we were chattering the whole time, and she shrieked and dropped the book when I added the fangwood sample and the brew exploded, turning black and bubbling up in a caustic slime that belched greenish-gray smoke.
We evacuated the room, Cadence stumbling out and Knot grabbing her bag as she went, and it took a few more concentrated alchemy spells on my part to get the room to settle down, and it was only once we stopped the caustic overreaction that I laughed, and then Cadence laughed too, and I wondered if blowing up potions had ever been quite so fun.
I walked her back to Scorpion House after the evening, where she lingered on the ornate steps up to the Art Deco stylings of the building and its side entrance flanked with feyfruit trees, giving me a loaded smile that hovered between friendliness and something more, and I swear, for a moment there in the soft glow of the magic lanterns floating around the treetops, we almost kissed.
But we didn’t, which was good, because Lumi would have killed me.
I managed somehow to keep it cool with Lumi the next morning, but I immediately lost that cool when we got to the cute little place in the Astral Quarter district that Lumi and I frequented for breakfast and, of all the coincidences, ran into Cadence there, together with her friend with the pink hair from the other day, sitting at a table together at the window when Lumi and I got inside.
Lumi pouted, giving Cadence her best attempt at an icy reception—bless her, she wasn’t the best at being mean, but she tried—but Cadence’s friend Rosie took the exact opposite tack, dragging me into conversation and even pulling up a flicker of telekinetic magic to pull a second table up next to theirs so we could sit together.
Based on the way she gushed about me and Cadence getting along so well, Cadence had probably told her how…
loaded our interactions were. I’d thought maybe Cadence might have had some feelings for me too, so it made sense she might have told her friend, and, well, Rosie didn’t seem like… the type for subtlety, necessarily.
Neither was Cadence’s other best friend, because I was midway through breakfast sitting next to Cadence when I felt Knot slip around my leg and pull me to the side, pressing up against Cadence’s leg.
Cadence choked on her tea, stiffening as her face reddened, but I managed to keep it cool and act like nothing was happening under the table, long enough for me and Cadence to laugh at something together—even though she was tense and nervous the whole time and her laugh sounded fake when we finally got there—and Knot let go.
I kinda wished he hadn’t, though.
I spent all of class time just about bouncing out of my seat ready to go again, and I took off like a wild wyvern the second my last class finished, stocked up on potions for the both of us, and we went deep into Amber Woods this time, heading up a tangled knot of thick umberwood tree and helping her climb up to pluck precious gemblossom stems from the canopy.
She loosened up a little more, gushing about the natural purity properties of this certain magic clade growing in this area, and I’d never known that could sound sexy.
The brew with gemblossom stems exploded too. So did the next one, the day after, but by that point, Cadence was accustomed to it too, and she laughed it off like I did.
She had a whole crew with her when I met her at Scorpion House the next day, Saturday morning, for a longer expedition we’d saved for the weekend—her whole galeria there to talk to me in unsubtle terms trying to scope out how things were with me and Cadence.
Well, except for the short girl with the black hair and broody look.
She just glowered at me the whole time until, finally, she was the last one to leave me and Cadence alone, and she said you’re a lot louder than Cadence and left it at that, going back inside, and I somehow felt like she meant it as approval.