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When Welstiel died, Chane had taken his pack. A number of objects inside it had proven invaluable in his own experiments. The pack also now contained texts Chane had stolen from a monastery of healers on the eastern continent.

The most critical one for this night was The Seven Leaves of Life.

Chane was obsessed with one page in that volume, though its instructions were archaic and obscure. It described the making of a rare and potent healing concoction. During his stays with Wynn at the Calm Seatt branch of the Guild of Sagecraft, he had privately discussed both the ingredients and the creation process with Premin Hawes, head of the branch’s order of Metaology. Most of the ingredients were herbs, easy to obtain, but two were unknown to him until Hawes translated and explained them.

Muhkgean was a mushroom grown by the dwarves. Ore-Locks had once helped him gain those mushrooms, and they were harmless.

The other had not proved harmless, at least for him.

Anamgiah, the “life shield,” was a white flower found in the fields outside the Lhoin’na forests. Later, he had learned the same grew in the lands of the an’Cróan on the world’s far continent, where it was called Anasgiah. Even raw, those opalescent blossoms had healing properties. And so much more when combined correctly with the other six ingredients.

When he had recognized those blossoms upon first visiting the Lhoin’na lands with Wynn, Shade, and Ore-Locks, he had been stunned. He should have never gathered them by hand, and he had nearly died the last time upon barely touching their glistening petals.

But now he had them in his possession, dried, wrapped, and stored in the second pack well away from contact with his skin. Over time, he had collected the other necessities for the formula. At last, he had everything, or so he hoped.

Before rejoining Wynn, and hopefully Shade—and before any of them faced the Ancient Enemy—he needed to be certain of saving either of them, should the worst come. His own body was nearly indestructible. Wynn’s was not, and even Shade had her limits.

However, instructions to make the potion appeared deliberately vague.

This elixir was powerful enough to be feared in the wrong hands, and he had reasoned why. A tyrant or butcher of the battlefield could be nearly untouchable with the ability to heal the gravest wounds in short order. And from what Chane surmised, this elixir might as well be protection against poison, venom, disease ... anything that caused living flesh to fail.

He studied the page with a translation that he and Hawes had made, pausing on the word “boil” and not for the first time.

This suggested water or liquid; every concoction he had ever read of related to nonliquids used thrice-purified water as the medium. He suspected the same herein, though like many things in the fields of hidden knowledge and practice, it was not explicitly mentioned by the author.

Chane picked up a copper bottle but did not remove its matching stopper. He gently turned it, feeling its contents slosh. He had taken great pains to make as much thrice-purified water as he could.

From the journey’s earliest part, he had caught clean rain in a bowl held out the cabin’s porthole whenever he could, and he stored the rainwater in a glass vessel.

When he had enough rainwater, he sterilized an empty copper bottle with wood alcohol, pouring that out to save, and blowing out excess fumes, and then carefully inverting the bottle over the flame of a candle.

Any ignition had been extinguished.

After this, he prepared an oil-fueled burner with several Anamgiah accoutrements. He took up the glass vessel filled with rainwater and the copper one he had sterilized. Upon filling the copper bottle with rainwater, he replaced its stopper with a ceramic elbow-shaped pipe.

He set the glass bottle under the elbow’s other end.

Steam rose into the ceramic elbow and dripped into the glass bottle’s mouth. It took a while, and the process had to be repeated twice. In the end, he had less than a third of the original water, now thrice purified. He stored this in the sterilized copper bottle.

On the night the Kestrel docked at Chathburh, less than halfway to Soráno, Chane steeled himself to attempt making the elixir from The Seven Leaves of Life. He feared failure, for there would be no chance to replenish the two most important ingredients, but he could no longer put off the attempt. When he, Ore-Locks, and Chap went up on deck, he waited for Chap to wander off toward the forecastle.

Chane pulled Ore-Locks aside. “Do you trust me?”

Ore-Locks blinked and frowned. Neither had ever asked such a pointed but general question of the other.

It was a long moment before Ore-Locks nodded. “Yes ... I do.”

Equally surprised by the answer, Chane realized he trusted Ore-Locks enough to share part of the truth.

“I need time alone in the cabin to make something for Wynn’s protection—and maybe others’—should the worst come.”

In spite of his prior claim, Ore-Locks frowned. “Make something?”

“Medicine,” Chane answered, for this was partly true, though if successful, it would be more than that. “No one else should know for now, and Chap does not trust me enough to stay out of my way. Can you keep him from the cabin for as long as possible?”

Ore-Locks’s frown deepened, and he growled, “Very well.”

About to leave, Chane then wondered what the errant stonewalker might be able to do about Chap. Asking would waste time, so with a nod, he hurried for the aftcastle door. The last thing he did was to borrow a bucket of cold seawater from a deckhand.

Once inside the cabin, Chane bolted its door from inside and set to work.

He had attempted something similar only once before.

Welstiel had possessed an elixir that allowed a vampire to remain awake during daylight, though it had to stay out of direct sunlight. When Chane had stolen the pack after Welstiel’s death at Magiere’s hands, he had found a small amount of this elixir in the pack.

And there were journals and notes as well.

After obtaining a key component—a poisonous flower called Dyvjàka Svonchek or “boar’s bell”—he had later managed to re-create that elixir by using himself as a test subject. The process was unpleasant and dangerous, but he succeeded after multiple attempts and gained the advantage of guarding Wynn constantly during some of their worst times.

Unfortunately, he had used up all of that elixir, and there had been no opportunity to procure more boar’s bell.

Now he was to try something he could not test on himself, for it would contain extract from Anamgiah blossoms. The result would be “deadly” to any physical undead. There would be no room for mistakes, no way to test it, and no certainty of success until it was needed.

Chane slowly opened Welstiel’s faded pack.

One by one, he took out the components, tools, and necessities and laid them out upon the floor. A clear glass vessel was among them. After this, he prepared the oil-fueled burner. Then he took up the copper bottle filled with thrice-purified water.

Opening The Seven Leaves of Life, he turned to the correct page and laid the book out on the floor. With the copper bottle wedged between his folded legs, he began to powder and prepare the ingredients. Again, he guessed—hoped—the list in the book represented the proper order for adding ingredients. For such a concoction, adding all at once did not make sense; this was not some cook’s soup. For each ingredient added, he applied heat to the copper vessel and then poured a tiny amount into the glass one to examine it.