A new child was brought to the island, blindfolded and weeping. She made him a sachet of cloves and cassia bark, the scents of his mother’s palms. He crept into her bed at night and she held him while he dreamed. His skill was slight, the island small. “I want to go home,” he said. Three months after he’d arrived, he did; she was called to pack the cavities of his body with funerary herbs for the journey.
She swallowed wine laced with karagal and vomited blood for six days. “You have no talent for this,” Jarad said, and set a folded note beside her bed: her next assignment. On the seventh day, when she knew she would survive, she took the note and went to their workshop, where Jarad already sat absorbed in his own task. She was sixteen years old; she had survived one hundred and fifty-nine poisons.
“Four left,” she said. Jarad said nothing. She set to work.
The scent was for a woman from the Principalities. Sarai imagined the wrists the woman would dab the oil against, deep brown and delicate. Imagined her long neck, the pulse-points at the curve of her smooth jaw. Imagined her sprinkling oil-scented water on her blue-black hair, so that when her lover leaned close he would catch its scent and think—
Think what? Scent was individual. It sparked emotion, teased out memory. No scent spoke the same language to two people. It would mutter nonsense to one, sing sorrow to the next, laugh joyfully to a third. Sarai saw with satisfaction that Jarad had included in his instructions two tightly-scripted paragraphs—one for the woman, one for her lover. Where they were born, where they had wandered. Where they first kissed, where their hearts had been broken.
Sarai had set foot on two shores, the golden and the gray, but her workshop was a scent-map of the world, and she had memorized it all. Wintergreen from the frost-glazed north, pebbles of balsam resin from the west, cinnamon and sandalwood, cloves and bergamot, amber and rose. She knew which flowers grew in the spring on sun-drenched hills, which clung to shadows; which towns made garlands of poppies and which of forget-me-nots during the festivals and feasts of marriage, and which woods they would burn for the bonfire when they danced.
They had met in the winter, this woman and her lover, and kissed in the spring. They had fought once beneath the boughs of an oud-wood tree, and even though such wood was the most precious in the workshop, she twined its scent through, subtly, so they would not know the scent but would feel it—the fight, and the forgiveness afterward.
And in among the notes that sang of his life and hers, she hid the scent of red-bark trees, which grew only on the golden shores. A scent they would not know; a scent to make them reach for unfamiliar things, so they would not be caught up forever in the past.
When she was done she touched it to her skin. It would tell her little; everyone’s skin was different, and the scent was not for her. But it bloomed like a promise, if only a promise for another, and she nodded in tight-curled satisfaction.
Jarad caught her wrist in his bony fingers and inhaled. “This is your talent,” he told her. “And this is what you love.”
“Four left,” she repeated, and staggered on weak legs to bed.
Sarai would have stayed below decks the morning after she was taken, crying into the rough blankets of her new narrow bunk, but the scarred sailor who’d recognized her for what she was came to collect her.
“You’ll want to watch,” he said. “You’ll want to see your home. Memorize it. You won’t see it again, and you’ll start to forget.” He spoke like he knew, and so she went with him back up to the deck. The wind had caught their sails already; the island was slipping away fast, so fast. She leaned against the rope that ringed the deck, trying to see every detail one last time.
Was her mother there? Was she watching? There were figures on the rocks, the cliffs that ringed the entrance to the bay. Figures in white, the color of mourning. A dozen of them, three dozen—the whole village it seemed, climbing, standing, lifting something in their arms—baskets.
They lifted the lids of the baskets, and birds flew out. Not the opal-bellied singers of the forest but the delicate white birds of the shore. Dozens. Hundreds. Flying up, stretching wingtips toward the free open air, calling out in raucous condemnation. Flooding the sky. They wheeled and wailed, and the whole village called to her from the cliffs.
Come home to us, they called. Come home.
“They never even watched me go,” the sailor said, but it was too old a wound for sorrow.
She watched until the island vanished; watched until the last bird vanished, too, and the sea turned dull and gray.
She was in bed again, recovering, in the small room above Jarad’s workshop where she lived. They roomed alone, ate alone, wandered the gray halls alone; they were too uncertain of their fates for friendships.
The seizures this time had been short but brutal. She had very nearly not survived. Two left.
“What is my next assignment?” she asked, voice raw as reef-dragged flesh.
“No more assignments but one,” Jarad said. “You’ve finished your training. You need only make your Mastery.”
She scowled. How could she have thrown herself so thoroughly into the poison-tamer’s arts, so thoroughly neglected her scent-maker’s studies, and still reached Mastery in the latter before she survived her final poison?
“It’s your talent,” Jarad said, as if he knew what question she wanted to ask.
“It’s useless,” she said. “If I become a Master scent-maker, I’ll be stuck here forever. I will never see the court.”
“You don’t want to see the court,” Jarad said. “It’s more comfortable but far more restricted. You would not go poling down the waterways or wander the museums. You would not attend the dances, except to prowl the edge and ’sense the drinks of fops, the soups of debauched heiresses. You would never leave your room except to ’sense. You would be poisoned a hundred times.”
“I have already been poisoned a hundred times.”
“You would never see your golden shores,” Jarad said. “Never.”
“What does it matter?” Sarai demanded. “Why do you care which cage I lock myself in?”
“Because I cannot abide loneliness,” Jarad said, and rose. “Or the waste of true talent.” He left her to her weakness.
Sarai did not ask for her Mastery. She did not even think of the task, or what Jarad might choose for her. She focused on poisons. She had two left, only two, but these were the worst of all. She would not be asked to consume tarsnake venom, gillem oil, or maddarek—even the very best poison-tamer could not survive their ravages, only delay them, and a ’tamer would be no use to the queen if they were too busy keeping themselves alive to see to her.
Still, the poisons were deadly enough. Varash powder killed slowly; the key was to burn through it quickly, three days and nights of horror instead of the three months it took for the poison to unweave the body. It was one thing to survive by lengthening and lessening the body’s suffering; another to intensify it so extremely and yet maintain the focused will necessary to continue for three full days.
Bellman’s Sigh was the nearest to the deadly three that could be ingested and still purged from the body. Only hours to kill, sometimes minutes if the heart or lungs were weak. It could not be survived alone, and in this the poison-tamer proved they could work in tandem with a partner, trading off seamlessly when they must rest, when they must sleep. A single second of failure would cause irreparable damage, such that even with the poison purged, the body would fail within the year.
It was customary for one’s teacher to be the poison-tamer’s partner, but Jarad would not do it for her, even if he had the skill. And so Sarai went to the ’tamers on the island one by one, accepting their refusals with bowed head and no argument.