to the damp stone floor, Katya waved at a group of female faeries standing around what looked like a large pomegranate bush. “It will be a few minutes before the professors arrive,” she said, “and I want to check on my pear tree before they get here. Do you mind?”
Laurel shook her head. Mind? I wouldn’t know what else to do.
Katya walked over to a planter box with a small, leafy tree in it and pulled a composition book out of her shoulder bag.
Pear, Laurel thought automatically. For healing; neutralises most poisons. The juice from the blossoms protects against dehydration. “What are you doing with this?” she asked.
“Trying to make it grow faster,” Katya said, squinting at several marks on the trunk of the small sapling. “It’s a fairly rudimentary potion, but I just can’t quite get the knack of it.” She picked up a vial of dark green liquid and held it up to the sun. “If you need a potion to cure ailments, I’m your Mixer.” Laurel blinked at Katya’s casual use of the word; after all, Tamani had suggested it was a Spring faerie word, and even implied it wasn’t entirely polite. Katya apparently thought otherwise. “But simply enhancing already functional aspects grows knots in my mind,” Katya finished, not noticing Laurel’s reaction.
Laurel let her gaze wander around the room. Some of the faeries looked up to meet her eyes, some glanced away, others smiled, and a few just stared outright until it was Laurel who finally had to look away. But when she met the gaze of a tall, purple-eyed faerie with a straight, dark brown fringe, Laurel was surprised to find herself at the sharp end of a pointed glare. The tall faerie tossed her long hair over her shoulder and, rather than simply looking away, turned all the way around and presented Laurel with her back.
“Hey, Katya,” Laurel whispered. “Who’s that?”
“Who?” Katya asked, a little distracted.
“Across the room. Long dark hair. Purple roots and eyes.”
Katya glanced over quickly. “Oh, that’s Mara. Did she give you a look? Just ignore her. She has issues with you.”
“With me?” Laurel almost squeaked. “She doesn’t even know me!”
Katya bit at her bottom lip, hesitant. “Listen,” she said quietly, “no one really likes to talk about how much you don’t remember. We all make the memory potions,” she added quickly, before Laurel could interrupt. “We learn how, as initiates. I made my first successful batch when I was ten. But they’re supposed to be for humans, trolls – you know, animals. They don’t work the same in faeries.”
“Like being immune to enticement?” Laurel asked.
“Not exactly. If faeries were immune to Fall magic, we wouldn’t be able to use beneficial potions. But potions made for animals don’t function the same in plants, and who in their right mind would specifically brew a potion to rob memories from another fae? I mean, Fall faeries did study faerie poisons in the past – long before I sprouted – but there was a faerie who…she took it too far,” Katya said, her voice almost a whisper. “So it’s strongly discouraged now. You have to have special permission to even read the books about it. You’re a special case, because they didn’t want you to be able to reveal anything to the humans, even by accident. But still, having an amnesiac faerie around – to be frank, a victim of magic we’re not even allowed to study any more – you’re kind of a walking taboo. No offence.” She flicked her head towards Mara. “Mara hates it the worst. A few years ago she applied to study faerie poisons and was refused, even though she’s the best in the class and already an expert with animal poisons.”
“And she hates me because of that?” Laurel asked, confused.
“She hates that you are evidence of a potion she doesn’t know how to make. But on top of that, she knows you, or did. Almost all of us in here did, to one extent or another.”
“Oh,” Laurel said softly.
“Before you ask, I didn’t really know you before you were selected as the scion, and even then it was only from a distance. But Mara,” she said, flicking her head towards the tall, statuesque faerie, “was pretty good friends with you.”
“Really?” Laurel said, feeling both stupid that she had to find out from someone else who her friends were and mystified that having been friends with someone in the past could justify such a glare.
“Yes, but Mara was in the running to be the scion too, and she was really upset when you got the spot instead of her. She saw it as a failure instead of what it really was – that you fit the parameters better than she did. Being blond apparently was the clincher,” Katya said with a wave of her hand. “‘Humans like blond babies,’ they said.”
Laurel choked a little at that, coughing to clear her throat and drawing quite a bit of attention from the other faeries. Even Mara turned her head to glare at Laurel once more.
“I suspect she’s been out to prove herself ever since,” Katya said. “She’s really talented; rose to acolyte way earlier than most of us. She’s just about ready to become a journeyman, and as far as I’m concerned, the sooner the better.” Katya turned back to her tree. “She can go study with them,” she muttered.
Laurel angled her body that way too but kept peering at Mara out of the corner of her eye. The slender, languid faerie lounged against the counter with the grace and beauty of a ballerina, but her eyes took in the whole room, weighed it in the balance, and seemed to find it wanting. Could they have ever really been friends?
An entourage of middle-aged-looking faeries strode into the room, the one in the lead clapping her hands for the students’ attention. “Gather, please,” she said in a surprisingly quiet voice. But the sound carried throughout the room, which had gone completely silent. Every faerie had stopped talking and turned to the instructors as they entered.
Well, Laurel thought, that’s way different from at home.
The faeries walked in from all sides of the room to gather in a large circle around the twenty or so teachers. The faerie who had called everyone together took the lead. “Anyone starting a new project today?”
A few hands went up. As soon as they did, the other faeries shuffled and made room for them to come to the front. One at a time each faerie – or sometimes a small group – described the project they were starting, its purpose, how they planned to go about doing it, how long they thought it would take, and other details. They fielded a few questions from the staff and even some from the other students.
The projects all sounded very complex, and the faeries kept using phrases Laurel didn’t understand; phrases like monastuolo receptors and eukaryotic resistance matrices and capryilic hleocræft vectors. After a few minutes of this her attention began to wander. She glanced around the circle as the faeries made their presentations. The other faeries were standing quietly, listening. No one fidgeted; hardly anyone whispered, and even when they did, it seemed to be about the project being described. It was almost half an hour before all the new projects were accounted for, and everyone remained quiet and attentive.
It was a little creepy.
“Did anyone complete a project yesterday?” the instructor asked, once everyone had reported. A few more hands went up, and again the crowd shuffled to bring those students to the front.
As the faeries reported on their finished projects, Laurel glanced round the classroom with fresh eyes. The plants that grew here were as varied as those growing outside, but they seemed more haphazard in their diversity. Many were surrounded by sheaves of paper, scientific equipment, or fabrics strategically draped to filter the sunlight. This wasn’t a greenhouse, really; it was a laboratory.
“When I observed your project last week, it didn’t seem to be going well.” One of the professors, a male faerie with a deep, rich voice, was questioning a small brunette faerie who looked quite young.
“It wasn’t,” the faerie said simply, without any kind of shame or self-consciousness.