Chapter 22 #3
By the time they were dismissed, the lamps had been lit anew, and Eiko was ready to toss herself from the cliff behind the barracks. She dragged herself back to her room and collapsed to her bed, fully clothed, unconscious before she could even kick her boots off.
The next day was worse.
Cairn went right back to beating her mercilessly, making her think she had hallucinated the previous morning. Chasin didn’t even answer the door when she knocked on his office, but there was a new recipe open on the bench when she made her way to the greenhouse.
Nulla Forma.
The page beneath the title was a battlefield.
Ink was layered over ink, cramped marginalia clawing at every available scrap of parchment. Lines were struck through and then rewritten. Ratios were circled and then violently crossed out. Entire steps in the method were bracketed with furious annotations in different hands.
Someone had written Don’t bother in the margin, and someone else had written: Impossible: Will not form.
“Well,” Eiko said faintly.
Hymn climbed to the back of her hand, reading with her. Is he punishing you for being so good at the first poison?
She gave a careless shrug and began.
It went wrong immediately.
The mixture refused to bind in the first few steps, forcing her to start over. She adjusted, following a correction scribbled in a different hand. That version separated instead, the plant oils sloughing away from the rest of the mixture.
She cleaned everything and tried again.
This time, the resin thickened too fast, seized into something brittle and useless before she could draw it off the flame. She swore under her breath, flipped the page, and followed a note that claimed lower heat and longer patience.
It still failed—but differently, this time, and that became the pattern. Each attempt obeyed some part of the recipe but betrayed the rest. If she fixed one problem, another surfaced immediately, as if the poison itself refused to obey.
She began to recognise the handwriting in the margins. This tight, careful script always favoured heat. This looser hand insisted on timing. One furious annotator dug into the parchment with progressively darker ink.
Hours slipped past.
Sunlight shifted and dulled as clouds moved overhead. The greenhouse grew heavy and stifling, the air thick with scent and heat. Sweat slicked her spine. Her hands ached. Her eyes burned. A drop of blood fell from her lower lashes, contaminating her final attempt at the poison.
She leaned back against the bench and laughed once, sharp and humourless.
“Light above,” she said, as her vision ultimately failed, plunging into darkness. “You’re such a fucking asshole.”
He’s the worst, Hymn agreed. At least Cairn scaled to your ability. Chasin just went from beginner to advanced in a day.
She cleaned her bench with shaking, furious fingers, wiping away every trace of her failures, but she didn’t close the book. There had been an empty vial beside the book, and it still sat there, just as empty.
She didn’t need to seek out Chasin to know that this would be her task until she finally succeeded at it, so she cleaned all traces of blood from her face and skipped right past his office, meeting up with Rion in the dining hall so that they could walk to Brightfort together.
She was too angry to speak in anything other than grunts and sighs during her evening lesson with the attendant-horde, even during the part of the lesson concerning proper ways of speech. Eventually, they dismissed her early, keeping Rion for further instruction.
The next morning, instead of sensing her wavering emotional fragility, Cairn simply beat her as usual, and when she made her way to the greenhouse, the recipe book was open to the same page, the empty vial still sitting there in silent demand.
Nulla Forma.
She ran her fingers along the battered page and briefly glanced at the small alcohol burner.
Should she …?
But no, she probably shouldn’t. If this was how Chasin reacted to her perfect, model-recruit behaviour, she didn’t want to know how he would react to her burning one of his recipe books.
So she tried again … and she failed again, leaving the greenhouse flush-faced, her hair a frizzy, frazzled dark cloud, her eyes heavy and burning.
The next day, she failed again.
The day after that, she failed again.
Several more failures, and she was beginning to think this was another trick.
A lie. The entire potion—the recipe of overlapping notes—was falsified by Chasin just to mess with her.
She had become so obsessed with her inability to produce the finished poison that she didn’t even notice the subtle looks from her friends.
Not until they cornered her one night before her princess lesson in Brightfort.
They appeared in the courtyard in the way people did when they were trying very hard to act casual about something they were absolutely not casual about. Eiko slowed, intimately familiar with each of their murmuring voices and nervous fidgeting. Her fingers tightened around her cane.
“What’s this?” she demanded, when they fell into sudden silence.
Ky cleared his throat. “We just—um—” His voice wobbled. “We’re worried, Eiko.”
“I’m fine,” she said automatically, without pause.
“Heard that before,” Kaito returned flatly. “You’re doing that thing again.”
Eiko sighed. “What thing?”
“The thing where you decide a healthy body is a bourgeois concept,” Rion supplied, perfectly sweet. “And you start treating it like an inconvenient carriage you’re dragging behind you.”
“What she said,” Ky mumbled.
Eiko decided to keep walking. The bastards decided to keep pace with her, forcing her to stop again.
“I have lessons,” she said. “I have training. I have—”
“You have a power that you’re abusing,” Ren cut in quietly, and the way he said it made her stomach tighten.
Ren only used that tone when he was afraid.
“I’m managing it,” she said, now a little confused. Had it gotten that bad?
Ky made a small sound. “You’re … not, though.”
She angled her face towards the sound of him. “I am,” she doubled down stubbornly.
“No,” Ky insisted, his voice hardening. “Stop it, Eiko. You’re skin and bones again.”
Kaito shifted close, his hand clasping her shoulder.
“It’s like when we first came here, and you’d disappear into the library, and we’d find you in the morning with ink on your hands and your hair a mess and your ribs showing.
And you always had this feverish flush in your cheeks that made it look like you were sick, but it was just leftover stain from you crying tears of blood. ”
Rion’s breath hitched, quiet and sharp. “You can’t do this to us again.”
Eiko stared into the darkness like it might offer her an escape route. “But … how can I follow the recipes if I can’t fucking see?”
“You’ll find another way,” Rion said, and she reached out carefully, catching Eiko’s hand.
Eiko’s jaw clenched. “I need it.”
Ky grumbled, “You don’t need it for as long as you’re using it.”
That’s true, Hymn said quietly.
She didn’t want to admit it, but they were right. Her face heated, and with immense difficulty, she dragged a single word out from deep inside her roiling gut. “Fine.”
Kaito shifted, and she could hear him reach into his pocket.
A familiar crinkle. He pressed something into her hand, and she felt around the edges of the waxy paper, uncovering the sandwich within.
She began to eat without thinking, but it was impossible not to suddenly recall him doing exactly this, several nights past—cornering her in the courtyard on her way to Brightfort and casually handing her food.
And it was always Ky waiting for her when she stumbled home, pressing more food into her hands.
Eiko scowled so that she wouldn’t cry. “You’re all conspiring.”
Ky shifted on his feet. “It’s a friendly conspiracy.”
Ren added, very quietly, “We don’t want to lose you to a book again.”
Eiko went still. Because that was the real problem.
It wasn’t that Chasin was forcing her. It was that she had found something that offered her control, and that control was now dangling just out of her reach.
It was that, as much as she complained, she thrived under challenge.
It was that she would have doggedly chased that impossible recipe into ruin even without Chasin putting it before her.
She could feel the obsession uncurling inside her, desperate to gain the upper hand.
To achieve something. To master this recipe that danced teasingly out of her reach every day.
She had felt the same desperate drive while learning Chasin’s language.
She curled her fingers around the empty food wrappings, wondering where the sandwich had disappeared to.
“Fine,” she grumbled again. The word was a little easier to say the second time. “I’ll—” She hesitated, the words tasting strange. “I’ll limit the sight.”
Ky exhaled, Rion’s grip loosened, relief humming from her throat. Kaito made a satisfied sound and squeezed her shoulder.
“Good,” Ren grunted.
“All right,” she muttered, because she really didn’t want to cry. There was no way of knowing what sort of liquid would leak from her eyes at that point in the night. “Time to go get bullied by attendants now.”