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"What in the name of the Rat," said Bishop Beartongue, her voice very even, "am I looking at?"
Grace, who could hear the undertone of horrified disbelief within the evenness, flushed as she realized that what in the name of the Rat the bishop was looking at was her property. Specifically, the alchemical text that had afforded her much amusement and confusion over the years.
She'd been idly wondering why she'd been called to this conclave and looking at the bishop, considering her talents, her humor, her compassion, even her name, and trying to settle in her mind what scent might best capture the cleric's essence. At present, the bishop's ruddily brown skin smelled pleasingly of lemon-balm soap and the massive coils of her iron-grey braids carried a welcome tang of cypress. Evidently the bishop did not need either of the muscle rubs that Istvhan compounded, though the faintest aroma of gingerbread lingered on her slender fingers.
"The moon smells of juniper?" Beartongue continued disbelievingly, her eye still on the passage setting forth the scents of the constellations. Grace cringed as if she'd written the damning words, simply because she knew that the bishop had a thousand other things she could be doing with this time.
Istvhan, who had planted himself in one of the chairs in the bishop's study — which strained mightily to contain him — murmured incorrigibly, "If it's written in a book, it must be true."
"Is a pilgrimage to outer space to verify these facts in order, paladin?" Beartongue asked briskly, not bothering to coat her threat in sugar; she grinned her concession when Istvhan began to laugh, tickled as a child who'd worked out a good joke for the first time. Knock-knock, Grace couldn't help thinking, even as Zale, next to him, cut their eyes sharply at the sight of a jolly paladin. Grace was fairly confounded as well, though she'd been getting used to Istvhan's baseline good cheer.
"Pardon, your —" what do I call her? Grace wondered, not for the first time, but couldn't remember how she'd been answered. Previously, she'd managed just by nodding along to whatever pronouncements Stephen and Istvhan made, but she could not keep dumb-showing and letting armed-to-the-teeth others do the speaking for her. Not sir, obviously. Madam? What's the ecclesiastical of "highness"? Your Exaltedness?
"I am called 'your holiness' properly, but I answer to Beartongue too," Beartongue said, waving her hand to move the conversation along. "Is this the text that nearly got you burnt for witchcraft?"
"Yes," Grace said, nodding, then corrected herself. "No, I would have been burnt as a poisoner rather than as a witch, but the reason does not matter much when the result is the same." It hadn't happened, thanks to everyone in this room, but tell that to the rush of fear twisting her stomach and clawing its way up her spine. In seeking to avoid all their eyes, her own gaze landed on Bearclaw's scrupulously clean nape, where small curls that had escaped her braids clustered, looking like scattered petals.
She had been thinking of trees, specifically cypress — tall, slender, and sturdy as the bishop herself — and her own favorite cedar, and elemental scents like petrichor as possibilities for Beartongue, but those tiny curls made her consider flowers. Nothing purely sweet: too young and uncomplicated for the lady who commanded, scolded, and befriended an honor guard comprising paladins she'd given a purpose to when their god died. Nothing that would clash with their persistent gingerbread and clove scents, but nothing weak enough to drown under them either.
Grace was close, she could feel it — and then Stephen spoke up. She hadn't even seen him tuck her book under his arm when he came to the shop to escort her to the temple. His kisses were distracting. He was distracting, even when he didn't mean to be, damn his wiles.
"Your holiness," he said, nodding deferentially at Beartongue and Zale, "you remember that the salle where we train was once not available as a training ground?"
"Being cluttered with junk?" Beartongue responded, smiling encouragingly at Stephen; if she was trying to get Stephen or Istvhan to speak with pride of any of their past actions, Grace wished her luck.
"Rickety bookcases, broken chairs . . ." Stephen listed.
Istvhan broke in: "General whatnot. The essence of et cetera. As the lady succinctly said, junk." He dropped a wink and Grace couldn't tell who he'd aimed it at. Possibly Stephen.
"And some outdated volumes of tax codes," Stephen continued doggedly, taking his brother-paladin's interruption and gesture in his stride. "Or so we thought."
"Most were," Zale said, taking over the narrative while tucking a lock of silver hair behind their ear with their perpetually ink-stained fingers; those fingers' competence and strength had made Grace feel marginally safe when she'd been imprisoned. "But when I finally secured the return of Mistress Angelica's belongings, that peculiar alchemical notebook fell open and I could not help reading." They sighed in a way Grace would call self-recriminating if she felt like opening her mouth and drawing attention to herself. "I would like to pass off my nosiness as intellectual curiosity, but sometimes it is merely the former and no more."
"Shall I promote you, to keep you too busy to poke that nose where it might not belong?" Beartongue offered. Zale's only response was to bare their teeth. "Pity. An able archdeacon could take much off my plate. But what did you realize when you snooped?"
"That the writing in the notebook is in the style of a text that the paladins had turned up in that junk room. The furniture went to carpenter-gnoles, the books to the solicitors; Rat forbid we waste what may be reused or discard knowledge. That particular text purported to be a copy of a legal code pertaining to property rights but quickly devolved into the author's . . . distinct take on various precedents." Zale flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the knee of their vestments, as if to distance themselves from the author's mania. "The author never identifies themself in either of the texts we have seen, but I would be interested in putting a name to one who wrote so widely and so wildly."
Grace was still unsure of why she was in Beartongue's study; the book was her property, but she wouldn't have had it back in her keeping had Zale not worked tirelessly on her behalf, and she was happy to lend it to them for as long as they needed. She had no time for idle, ersatz divination in any case, with the shop doing quite well off the rumors of what the Crown Prince of Charlock had paid her. (He had paid though he hadn't placed the order; the Crown Prince was a man of honor.) She had herbs and sap and blossoms to gather, and she'd thought she and Stephen might make a day of it, visiting graveyards and unmown meadows, and then exercising their wiles on each other.
"Well, Mistress Angelica?" Beartongue asked, amending her words when Grace demurred and said, "Call me Grace, please."
"Grace, would you be willing to lend your time and energy to this endeavor?"
She was a perfumer, that was all, without even a masterwork to her name; she would see nothing in the text that Zale couldn't spot instantly and understand as clues. Still, these were the people who'd saved her just on Stephen's say-so. Before she could agree, Beartongue continued, "I know you expressed a preference for leaving the whole business behind" — Zale pulled a face, apparently still ready to charge the Hanged Motherhood with false imprisonment on trumped-up charges and bleed the order as dry as they could get it — "and it is for you to say if studying that particular text more deeply will cause you discomfort or cost you time you may not have. Speak freely." Beartongue had irises the same metallic color as her hair, but the effect of her silver eyelashes curling thickly around them was to make her eyes warm rather than austere. Grace looked at her and considered again how much she owed to Beartongue and her allies.
"Of course," Grace said. "I'm happy to help, your bishop." No, that still wasn't right, was it? One of these days, she might be able to bring herself to use the bishop's name like a normal person.
Master Perfumer Angelica had left the alchemist's notebook in their keeping, and all Zale could feel as they read through it, slowly, absorbing all of the preposterous "facts" and maddening theories, was that Grace had been extraordinarily lucky that the Servants of the Hanged Mother — the most aggressively ignorant sector of the populace of Archenhold — had concentrated more on Grace's guild paperwork and recorded status as a mere apprentice rather than her journals or, particularly, this text. Had the priests' prosecution centered on the alchemical text she'd had in her possession, Zale had no doubt that she'd have been found guilty of witchcraft, though the handwriting was florid and given to flourishes, completely unlike Grace's precise, cramped hand; any single page, taken out of context, was damning.
Taken as a whole, it was no less so, in part because it was so fractured, so haphazard. Each two-page spread was a miracle of minute detail — the process for determining the magnetic fields of dung heaps was painstakingly laid out and illustrated — but that was all the space each topic was allotted. How it had been discovered that dung heaps had magnetic fields, what good measuring them would do anybody, and what made those fields vary from one heap to the next: on those points the author had been silent. Zale flipped the page and mourned all of the sheep (dead or not) whose eyeballs had been dissected by the author in order to discuss and diagram the topic.
Zale couldn't say, even to themself, why it struck them as so evidently important to determine the mind behind these meanderings that struck out in a hundred different directions. The quasi-legal text seemed like an earlier work, if only because it had a more stable foundation. Zale had been idly turning pages, wondering if this volume would render the crucial word in Article VII, Section v, Paragraph 4 as owner's or owners', and realized that the word did not appear all, as the copyist had turned author and chosen to jot down their own thoughts on how the vegetation covering any given parcel of land should determine ownership of said parcel. It was a fascinating argument, forcefully if not coherently made, and it was clear that there had been some mental deterioration between the writing of the legal treatise and the fractured notebook Grace had been gifted by her first master. The section breaks in the former were asterisms — unusual for a legal text, but executed regularly — while in the latter there were fleurons and other flourishes that grew more extravagant and abstract. There was one ornament that recurred often enough in the later spreads that Zale could rightly term it a motif that looked like decorative whirls of hair or coils of rope.
Zale sat up straight, startled out of their typical readerly slouch, and nearly upset their mug of stone-cold tea. Could those marks be a signature of sorts? There was no point pressing on tonight — Grace would be fast asleep at this time of night, and anyway their eyes were crossing from having tried to read such densely written pages by candlelight — but tomorrow was, Rat be thanked, another day.
*
"What?" Grace asked, her large eyes wide with confusion. "Translate it into . . . what? It's already in our common tongue?" She caught herself before she lost a drop of some essence off the end of her pipette, managing to get a vial under it before it stained the floor.
"I don't understand any of these alchemical references," Zale reminded her patiently.
"Nobody does," Grace assured them, anointing a strip of paper with a drop from a different flask and then fluttering the strip by the side of her head, waiting one long moment, and then turning her head to sniff delicately at that same spot.
"But you know the vocabulary, and perhaps together we can catch the syntax underlying the author's words."
"I don't even know what that means," Grace pointed out, staring at them again. Zale started to speak but fell silent when she remembered she was evaluating one of her scents. "This just smells like verjus," she said with a frown.
"Instead of?"
"Vervain, beebrush." Zale shook their head; aside from vaguely remembering those terms from the mysterious author's passionate arguments on ground cover, they had never heard of those plants and had not the least idea what they should smell like. "Lemony? Complicatedly lemony?" Grace ventured, clearly trying to help.
Zale smiled. "That much I can comprehend, and that is what I am asking of you now. Can you give me other terms than the ones the author uses, so I have some basic understanding of the topics they are writing of?"
Grace shrugged. "I can try. Not like alchemists and perfumers have much common ground, but there's some." She grinned at them — they stood nearly eye to eye, at their ease in her workroom — and said, "More than perfumers and poisoners, at any rate."
*
Why the knotty problem of the author's identity was so compelling to Zale's mind was a question in and of itself. They only knew that Grace had unlocked the problem — or rather unwound the twisted skeins of alchemical threads — in translating a few of the most densely decorated spreads in the notebook she'd carried almost as a talisman.
Alchemy of the sort that sought to transmute base metals into gold was not the author's passion and goal. It was the spiritual transmutation of a man to a higher plane of being. Specifically a man rather than a person. Even more specifically, the author himself. And what he believed himself to be, at heart, was a dragon.
After revelations like those, Zale had felt it almost anticlimactic that Grace had discerned the author's name by way of what she belatedly realized was a puzzle with clues alchemical (her territory), astrological (Zale's, due to a wilder upbringing than they usually admitted to), and martial (Stephen's, when he called at Grace's shop for the evening, none of them having thought to keep an eye on the time): Rolland Trewson.
That name struck a bell in Zale's brain, though not clearly; they had heard it before, but in what context, they could not say. It was evident that neither Grace nor Stephen was familiar with the appellation, and when Stephen said, just to make sure he hadn't misunderstood, "Rolland the man-dragon?" Zale let out one sharp burst of a laugh.
Grace hummed thoughtfully. "Mandragora?" she said, changing Stephen's utterance slightly and giving it an entirely different meaning.
Stephen's eyes narrowed and his arm stole around the perfumer; Zale had no objections to such mild displays of affection and in any case they had thought they would be alone together by this time of night. "Isn't that what those Motherhood assholes claimed you were illegally scavenging the day we met?"
Zale did not heed Grace's nod; Stephen's words shone a spotlight on the link that had been hidden from view before: the name Rolland Trewson was known to them because Trewson had been, for the last years of his very long life, the spiritual tutor to the current Archon, the one who had taught a younger, evidently impressionable Caster Leffick of the religion he had immersed himself in decades before: the Cult of the Hanged Mother.
"Stephen," Grace said to him, and from her tone he guessed she'd been rolling words around in her head, trying to find the kindest way of putting it, "I'm not in any danger."
He gaped at her then marshaled his thoughts. "Grace," he bit out, as if her name weren't a pleasure to say, heightened by the sight of her — all tangled curls and big grey-green eyes and decisive movements — "first of all, you were nearly burned at the stake as a witch by the asshole Hanged Motherhood priests just for having in your possession a book written by one of the earlier assholes who apparently founded their fucking cult." Calm, he was staying so calm through all of this; his voice stayed at a conversational pitch and no black tide crept up on him. "Second, we are back in the commons, across the Elkinslough, at the same errand upon which we embarked once before, when, you know. You stepped on a head that had been bitten off its body and spit out like it was trash." He couldn't cross his arms for emphasis, not when he had to keep his hands free to fight in case any threats popped up, and he ended up speaking in a tone imbued with bitter panic. "You are in fact in danger. We all are, as long as the smooth men have the run of Archenhold and the Motherhood fuckers have the Archon's favor."
"Stephen," she said, softening, lowering the bag of hairy fucking oakmoss — it was the same bag she'd carried last time, and that realization nearly made him howl in rage — and moving to stand in front of him. She rested one hand on his arm just above the elbow and tilted her face up to meet his eyes. "I'm far safer now. You're here with me, looking out for the smooth men you discovered in the first place." She did her best to jiggle his arm affectionately, but he'd spent years of his life training so none of his limbs jiggled or moved in any way except how he specifically directed. "And the Motherhood —" She stopped and swallowed, and he knew she still lost moments to the horror of being jailed, presumed guilty of a crime she'd had no reason to commit. "Well, the Motherhood caught me once but you all got me out of their grasp, and now I don't care a fig for them." She snapped her fingers to indicate her disdain and nodded up at him, glowing with defiance, and he unbent enough to cup her radiant face in one hand. "Let's go pick flowers in a graveyard and see if those assholes have anything to say about it this time."
*
Grace traversed the borders of the Crescent Street Cemetery, gathering plants as she went, Stephen trailing behind and proffering separate cotton sacks for each variety that she named at his questioning look: orris root, startleflower, and fescue. A flash of scarlet caught his eye and he turned, braced for fresh blood, and found a flower — a profusion of flowers, bright and bold, elaborate with overlapping petals and leaves no less ornately shaped with crimped edges.
Grace followed his gaze down — they grew low to the ground — and she beamed at him. That crooked front tooth of hers was just like one of those petals, crowding and overlapping its neighbors, certain of its own beauty. "Geraniums!" she said delightedly. "I didn't know they grew in Archenhold. I've only ever seen them in Anuket City, and never this color." She bent, her hair slipped loose over her shoulder, and Stephen knew better than to think that come-hither look she gave him was due to his good bits; she was applauding his prowess as a finder of lost botanicals, that was all. Still, she was flushed with excitement and he loved the way she looked when she was deeply engrossed in her work, so there was no denying that he was quite pleased with himself as well.
She had her eyes closed and her nose was twitching, she was sniffing so quickly and efficiently. She rose from her crouch and pulled him back down in one movement so smooth he was taken entirely by surprise. "Smell," she demanded, so he stuck his nose in the nearest cluster of vivid red blossoms.
He didn't think he'd been expecting anything in particular, so why he was taken aback by the complexity of the scent — scents, plural — that greeted his nose was a question for another time. Instead of the consuming sweetness of a rose, he could smell sweet and spice in equal measure, the scents of earth and fresh rain pulsing insistently below the headier notes. It all smelled scarlet and green and entirely magnificent, and at once he knew just what she had in mind. "Yes," he agreed before she could say anything.
"Beartongue?" she confirmed that their thoughts were on the same track. "I knew I knew something that would suit her, I just couldn't name it."
She was glowing with triumph and he wanted to proclaim that fixing this complex scent into a fragrance that the bishop could wear as if it emanated from her soul would be Grace's masterwork, but he knew nothing of the Perfumers' Guild or its determinations. "You've found it now," he said, sharing her victory, "and I can put a name to it."
"Geranium?" Grace asked, wrinkling her nose in that winsome way of hers.
"Terrifying Glory," he said, and laughed with her when she conceded the rightness of it, being for the woman who had saved them both.