The other room, entered through a door in the Potions room, was also stone-walled and stone-floored, and completely bare, except for the three magical circles inlaid in the floor. The outer one was gold, the middle, silver, the innermost one, electrum. They were not complete; there were bridge-pieces that could be placed in the empty groove in the floor to complete and seal them. This was a great deal more certain than drawing your circles out in chalk and hoping you didn't scuff them — because there could be something you would contain in there that you really would not want to get out. Or something outside the circles that you really did not want to get in. Lily had not been in either case very often — only a handful of times in three hundred years — but those times had been more than enough to cause her to be happy for such sturdy precautions.
In the right corner was a mannequin, in the left was a cupboard that contained the items Lily needed for spell-casting, and that was all that was in this room.
Now a sleeping potion was one of the easiest to concoct. It was also one of the most common. Virtually any common village witch could make one, and make a good one. There were perfectly good reasons to administer one to someone, if they were unable to sleep.
Of course, that was usually not why someone wanted one. Spouses wanted to be able to sneak out on their mates. Thieves wanted to make their jobs easier. Courtesans wanted to render their customers unconscious to rob them. The list of good reasons was shorter than the list of bad ones, so most of the trade in such things was confined to the...less than scrupulous. Nevertheless, it was something that was in Lily's arsenal, too.
Be that as it may, it was not a sleeping potion, as such, that was wanted here, not this time. At this point, it looked as if the easiest path to manage was the Snowskin Path, rather than the Beauty Sleeping Path. Therefore, what she needed was a potion to simulate death. And that was a far, far more difficult thing to manage.
In the Snowskin tale, the heroine was rendered insensible by a poison of some sort, and it was only the intervention of The Tradition that kept it from actually being fatal. It took alot of magic to do that, more magic than even Lily had at her disposal. So she was going to have to simulate what was wanted, the hard way.
You had to slow breathing and heartbeat to almost nothing. Which was fine, a perfectly reasonable and not terribly difficult thing to do. Except that you had to do it without damaging the person you'd given the potion to. The human body — or most any body for that matter — does not like trying to exist on very little air or without the blood flowing at the right pace in the veins. Terrible things can happen when a magician does that without thinking; the poor victim ends up, once revived, with damage everywhere. Mostly, damage to the mind. You not only had to slow the breathing and heartbeat, you had to slow everything else down, so that the body no longer needed that much to live on.
So, strictly speaking, you weren't making a sleeping potion, or even a "this looks like death" potion. You were making a slowing potion.
And that was very, very difficult indeed. You would think with so much magic about such things would be easier! But more often than not, magic only complicated an already-knotted situation.
This was why most of the time, when these things were applied as curses, they were done so as spells rather than potions, with a trigger and a possibility of a release. The "Beauty Dreaming" for instance — that was a simple sleeping spell, no need to feign death there. Touch a finger to the object, draw blood — that triggers the spell, instant sleep. There it was, simple. And because, by the way that The Tradition worked, if a release had not been built in, The Tradition wouldput one in there. The Tradition did not like absolute curses with no way out. The more powerful the curse, the more likely it was that The Tradition would arrange the commonest release, that the Prince passes all the trials, and kisses the Beauty, and all is well.
The potion was going to take some time to brew. Well enough, during that time she could go impersonate the Evil Stepmother impersonating the Helpful Old Woman. Right now, Rosa looked like five miles of bad road. Under all the bruises and dirt, she still was the fairest in the land, but only The Tradition would have been able to tell that. All well and good, but to make the sleep spell easier to lift, she was going to have to look like the Beauty Asleep.
Lily shook her head as she selected the components for her base, and began compounding. It was a wonder that more Godmothers didn't go mad.
However, not so bad really, because the Helpful Old Woman would be doing the work Rosa was supposed to be doing, making it possible for her to get a good bath, clean herself up, heal up all the bruises and look like a Princess again. Rosa would have to feel like a Princess for everything to work just right.
Hopefully the Dwarves were inclined to ignore anything that didn't affect them.
She set up the workbench in the middle first, then the ones against the walls, with three stations on each of the wall benches, and four on the bench in the middle. The Brownies began arriving with the ingredients, and Lily started the thirteen separate components that would eventually be combined to make her slowing potion. Oh, and of course every one of those components had a cantrip or a minor spell that had to be cast on it, and you had more cantrips to cast when you combined them. And they had to be combined at the right time. And the right temperature. And it went without saying, in the right order. She left it all simmering or chilling or bubbling away, with a Brownie team keeping an eye on it all. The first lot would be ready tomorrow.
Time for her illusion cloak.
She placed a plain cloak on the mannequin as she carefully concocted the illusion she wanted associated with this cloak. First, the general shape of the body under it — round, matronly, sturdy. Since she could see through the vast majority of illusions, she clearly saw the mannequin under what she was doing, but atop it, she also clearly saw the shape of an old peasant woman's body. At this stage it looked a great deal like a doll made of dough.
She tinted the dough with a healthy skin color, weathered and rosy. This was the stage at which most people began to be unnerved, because her creation was starting to look too much like a person for comfort.
Next, she added the clothing — it would be much easier not to do that, since she had so many costumes in her extensive wardrobe that it was a step she could easily skip, but she also wanted the Traditional impact of throwing off the cloak and revealing her true self. It was just another way of making The Tradition do what she wanted.
So she added another layer over the skin-colored body — a set of worn, sturdy leather shoes; heavy woolen stockings; a patched linen petticoat; the fustian skirt, also patched, over that; and a clean, crisp, embroidered apron over that. Then the clean, slightly threadbare linen blouse, the embroidered black felt vest. She walked around it, examining it from all sides. Kalinda, who had done this many times before, did the same.
"It's very solid, Godmother," the little Brownie said, then moved in to check closer. Lily's vision of what was really there showed Kalinda reaching out and fingering air; her vision of the illusion showed her checking the weight and feel of the apron, the skirt, the blouse and the vest. You actually had to know how these fabrics felt and acted in reality to replicate them in illusion. The simplest illusions, and the easiest to break, were the ones that acted only on the eyes. The best extended to all senses. Kalinda sniffed.