Brewing potions was generally safe, Foxglove often told her friends. Except, of course, when it wasn’t.
She didn’t tell them that.
The most dangerous part of potion making, she decided after years of fires and burst glass beakers and caustic smoke, was adding the final ingredient. By then the potion was already live, boiling over a gas flame, hissing and popping and changing colors whenever she looked away. It contained all the magic necessary to change reality, to bend the world to the alchemist’s desires. All that remained was to seal the potion’s magic with a final offering, a symbol of the brewer’s hopes.
Followed, of course, by running to hide behind a special blast-proof wall she installed in her workroom after a firelime potion went wrong several years before. She still felt the pebbly scars beneath her coat when she brushed down the ruff of fur on her chest each morning.
But danger was a relative term, and today’s order was so tame that she didn’t bother with the blast shield or the heavy lead apron she wore when crafting the more exciting potions. She did wear her safety goggles, but only because her old master had so thoroughly drilled that habit into her head that she sometimes went to bed with them forgotten and still on her face.
Foxglove kept her distance from the bubbling potion. She’d ruined more than one batch as an apprentice by hovering over them, impatient, only for the moisture in her breath to upset the delicate balance of ingredients and turn the whole thing into a mess of fused glass and colorful sludge. So instead she watched from several paces away. The muddy brown fluid boiled merrily, and when she judged it hot enough she gave her sister a tiny nod.
“Now,” she whispered. It wasn’t necessary to be quiet around healing potions – they didn’t react to sound, unlike some others she brewed – but she learned that habit from painful experience.
The peach filly – really a young mare, but to Foxglove she would always be a filly – stepped up to the table, using a stool to make up for the several inches of height she lacked on her sister. She twisted shut the gas line feeding the burner, extinguishing the flame, and then she turned the assembly holding the beaker so it hung just a few inches above the stone table.
“Good,” Foxglove whispered again. “What comes next?”
“State checks.” Anise turned her head away from the beaker to speak, and Foxglove could hear a faint quaver lurking in her voice. “Uh, highest to lowest?”
Foxglove smiled. “Are you asking me or telling me?”
The gentle rebuke had its intended effect, and Anise took a long, slow breath before responding. “Highest to lowest, starting with vision.” She lowered her head until her eyes came level with the potion, and she studied it in silence. “Color is ochre to dark ochre with small red inclusions. Not perfect, but pretty okay.”
Pretty okay? Foxglove fought the urge to roll her eyes. “What else?”
“Smell.” Anise waved a hoof over the beaker several times, wafting its fumes toward her. She inhaled deeply, eyes closed, and let the scents settle in her nose. “Burnt strawberries and cut grass. Perfect.”
It wasn’t perfect – there was no such thing in alchemy – but that lesson could wait for another time. “Good enough. Keep going.”
“Taste, which we skip for healing potions, followed by sound.” Anise tilted an ear toward the potion and waited. “Faint pops, a few seconds apart. That gives us… uh, three-to-five minutes?”
“Plenty of time,” Foxglove said. She stepped up to the table herself and sat close enough to Anise that their coats rubbed together. “Anything else before we continue?”
“Viscosity,” Anise said. She gave the metal arm holding the beaker a careful twist, turning the beaker just enough to unsettle the potion. It flowed slowly, like honey on a cool day, and clung to the glass wall. “A little thick. Did we mess up?”
Foxglove shook her head. “No, it’s fine. Just the weather.”
“Okay, good.” Anise stopped to lick her lips. “Good, good. Then we’re ready to finish it.”
“We?”
“Er, me. I’m ready to finish it.” So saying, Anise leaned over the table and picked up a silver lancet in her mouth. The obsidian blade at its tip was barely an inch long, chisel-shaped, and edged on both sides. With one hoof she steadied herself against the table, and carefully positioned her other leg above the beaker’s mouth.
Blood was a common element in alchemy, but healing potions were one of the few recipes that required fresh blood, straight from the wound. Not much, fortunately – just a few drops, more the idea of blood than blood itself, as her old master liked to say. But that didn’t make this part any more fun.
Anise pressed the lancet’s tip against the sole of her hoof, right on the margin of the frog where the skin was thinnest. At first the sharp point formed a dimple, but with a hair more pressure the skin broke and Anise jerked the blade away. It didn’t really hurt, Foxglove knew – a little prick, more surprise than pain – but the reflex was impossible to banish.
The first drop of blood missed the beaker entirely, splattering on the stone table. The next found its mark, and Anise waited with her hoof over the potion until four more drops joined it. They sank into the fluid with a quiet hiss and left only a faint trace of steam, gone in a moment.
Anise spoke first. “So… did it work?” She held a cotton ball against the bottom of her hoof.
“Yeah.” Foxglove could see the small red dots scattered throughout the potion slowly growing in size. By morning the fluid would be a vigorous, uniform scarlet, and the healing potion would be ready to drink. Unnecessary, hopefully, but ready all the same.
“Start cleaning,” she continued. “I’ll get to work on dinner.”
* * *
One of the nice things about having an apprentice was never having to clean the workroom again.
Foxglove’s workroom was her pride and joy. A wide, empty space, with only enough shelves to hold the materials she needed for whichever potion currently bubbled away. All the rest – thousands of flasks and beakers, mortars and grindstones, burners and stills and enough copper tubing to stretch from her house to the center of the village and back – were kept safely in the next room, behind a solid oak door, where an errant explosion or two couldn’t damage them.
Further away, hidden in a cellar dug beneath her backyard, she kept the countless stores of powders and herbs and gems and berries and bones that served as the raw materials for her craft. A dozen years of hunting and scavenging had given her one of the greatest collections of alchemical materials in all the world. Or, at least, so she told herself.
Most of the workroom was open space, with plenty of room for her to walk around without fear of bumping into tables or snagging something with her tail. A series of grooves circumscribed the shop, cut deep into the stone floor. Most of the time they were empty, but every once in a while an order came along for a potion that required a specific ward during its crafting, and she filled the grooves with salt or ash or powdered rust. She could even turn the grooves into a tiny moat by flooding them with water, which helped keep everyone safe and happy when brewing potions with the help of spirits – the ghostly kind, not the alcoholic.
At the center of the room stood the work table. In any other setting it could have been confused for an altar – solid stone, smooth-topped and edged with a tiny lip to keep spilled fluids from flowing over the sides. Years of crafting had stained the surface with a patina of browns, grays and blacks, and no amount of polishing would return the stone to its natural color. The table’s base was fused with the stone floor, which in turn was fused to a long column of basalt that descended hundreds of feet down an old well shaft until it reached the bedrock. When Foxglove laid her hoof on the stone table, she touched the bones of the world.
She was doing exactly that when Anise walked in, her mane tied back with a faded handkerchief and her coat speckled with dark spots of water. She trotted over to Foxglove and butted her shoulder with her forehead.
“Dinner?” she asked.
“Patience.” Foxglove elbowed her back. “It’s cooking.”
“I’m patient. I’m, like, the patron saint of patience. I have to be, living with you.” Anise leaned her weight against Foxglove, pushing her without success toward the door leading to the shop’s living area and, specifically, the kitchen. “You’re just slow.”
“Dancing around like a filly who drank a gallon of apple juice won’t make dinner cook any faster,” Foxglove said. She stood and walked through the back door, eventually reaching the kitchen. The rich aroma of vegetable stew filled the room, and she gave the pot a quick stir followed by a taste from the ladle. “Almost done. You just gotta wait for some things.”
“Hmph. I’ve been waiting years for you to find a stallion and move out so I can have this place. Where’s that gotten me?” Anise darted away before Foxglove could swipe at her with the ladle and took shelter behind the dinner table.
“Who says I won’t find a nice stallion, and he’ll move in with us? We might need to commandeer your bedroom for a nursery.” Foxglove measured out two bowls of the stew, taking an extra moment to subtract a potato slice from one bowl and add it to the other. Perfectly balanced. “You could sleep in the workroom. Or maybe the cellar? It’s nice and cool in the summer.”
“Better hurry, then.” Anise snagged her bowl from Foxglove’s hooves and dug into it, using the spoon mostly as an afterthought. “Those ovaries aren’t getting any younger. Fertility potions can’t work miracles, you know.”
Foxglove resisted the urge to return fire. She was too young to obsess over her age, but the topic was nevertheless a favorite for her little sister. With nearly fifteen years between them, strangers had once confused them as mother and daughter rather than siblings. Now that Anise was well past adolescence and a young mare in her own right, such confusion was rarer, but that didn’t prevent Anise from teasing her as “Mother” from time to time.
The rest of their dinner passed quietly, though as usual Anise finished her portion before Foxglove was halfway through hers. She gave Foxglove a quick peck on the cheek and a chipper “Thanks!” before bolting out the kitchen into the supply room. The quiet clank of bottles rattling in saddlebags followed, and then Foxglove heard the front door open and shut as Anise took off with the evening’s deliveries.
And just like that, the shop seemed a thousand times more empty. Foxglove considered the silence that followed in her sister’s wake, then gave a slight mental shrug and finished her stew.
* * *
The evening light filled the kitchen with a warm orange glow as Foxglove finished washing the dishes. Her shelves, crammed with hundreds of empty glass bottles, beakers and phials, caught the rays and refracted them, turning the bare wood room into a fluid starscape that lived, shifted and died in the minutes it took for the sun to finally set.
Someday, Foxglove hoped, there would be enough money to build another basin in the workroom to wash all that glassware. Until then, the kitchen would have to do. It sometimes made for interesting choices, such as whether she could store preserves in a jar that had once held essence of fireleaf.
It turned out she could – it even gave the preserves a certain spice.
Only at the height of summer did Foxglove see the sun set while washing up from a day’s work. The rest of the year, night came too early, and she more often saw the moon or stars while completing this last task of the day.
Only a single jar remained, smeared with pine sap that refused all her entreaties to come clean. With a heartfelt grunt she dunked it back in the soapy water and left it there. The damn thing could soak overnight.
The sun was gone, and she gazed out the window at the fading twilight. Clouds painted dark blotches across the vermillion, and she watched them for a few minutes, letting the stress flow down her legs and into the earth until nothing remained but stillness and silence.
She turned to fetch the lantern from its hook, to light it for the evening, when a bell sang from the shop’s main room, followed by the creak of her front door. It couldn’t be Anise returning from her deliveries yet – too quiet, and no accompanying clamor of hooves banging on the wood floor.
“One moment!” she called through the doorway. The lantern blossomed into life as she tapped the spark crystal, and she carried it with her into the shop. “Sorry, I’m closed for the day… er, my lord.” She finished with a respectful bow of her head to the unicorn stallion casually perusing her shelves.
“My apologies,” he said. His soft voice carried easily, and in those two words she knew his diction was crisp and perfect and utterly, completely at ease ordering around his lessers. His body was a study in symmetry and flow, from the long spiraled horn to the perfect, imperial arch of his neck.
“I wanted to speak with you alone,” he continued. His horn glowed with a pale-green light, the same color as his eyes, and the front door swung shut with a clatter. “On a private matter.”
“Of course.” She willed her heart to slow. “How may I serve you?”
“You know who I am?”
She nodded. No pony in the Riverlands, earth pony or pegasus, wouldn’t recognize this pale blue stallion. His coat was the color of clouds in shadow, with a faint dappled pattern along the chest and neck that sometimes marked those of royal birth. “You are Prince Hyperion, son of Queen Platinum the Seventh.”
The corner of his lips turned up. “And you are Foxglove, correct? Daughter of Oak Heart?” He tilted his head downward, a mocking echo of her own supplication. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
She swallowed soundlessly before replying. “What can I do for you?”
“I have heard of your skill with elixirs and potions. They say you are the greatest alchemist in the world.”
She couldn’t help but snort. “Whoever they are, they exaggerate. Wheat Husk taught me everything I know, and I still stand in his shadow. There are zebra alchemists who make even him seem like an apprentice. I am skilled, but nothing more.”
“Zebras are just myths. Stories for foals.” He gave one of the potions on her shelf a tap with the tip of his hoof. The crystal sang like a chime and the fluid within let loose a few bubbles. “And Wheat Husk is dead. His other students are timid – even the unicorns he taught are unwilling to test themselves with real challenges. Do you know what they told me? Every single one?”
Foxglove shook her head.
“They said to find you. Find Foxglove.” The prince turned away from the shelves and walked over to her, stopping only when he reached the counter between them. “And so, here I am.”
“Well, remind me to thank them,” Foxglove said. “And what is so important that a prince of the realm must go hunting for a simple shopkeep?”
He hesitated before answering. The smug expression he had worn since entering her shop slipped for a moment; his eyebrows drew together, and his mouth pursed as if tasting an unpleasant secret. His ears flicked to and fro, and his eyes scanned the dark doorway behind her before returning to her face.
“It’s better if I show you,” he said.
His horn glowed again, and a small black pouch floated out of his saddlebags, coming to rest on the countertop between them. Not cloth, she noted, but some fine metal mesh composed of wires thinner than a hair, bound together with a silver chain drawstring. A hot metallic scent filled her nostrils.
“And this is?” she asked.
“Open it,” he said. “Carefully.”
She grunted quietly and set the lantern down. With both hooves she slowly loosened the drawstring, allowing the pouch to fold open. The bitter, hot metal scent doubled, and her nose wrinkled as she tipped the bag onto its side.
A single black pebble tumbled out, rolling a few inches across the counter before coming to a stop. It left a charred trail where it touched the wood, and the counter beneath it blackened and smoked where it came to a stop. A baleful point of azure light shone out from the stone’s depths, stinging her eyes until she turned away. The lantern’s light flickered and grew weak.
“Get out,” she said. Her voice was calm despite the disgust in her heart. “I don’t traffic in black magic. Take that thing and get out of my shop.”
“I understand.” He lifted the bag in his magic and carefully scooped the pebble back inside. The room seemed to grow lighter as he tightened the silver drawstring. “You’re a smart mare and wise to despise dark magic. We unicorns know too well the suffering it can cause. But I do not use dark magic, and this is not mine.”
“Whose is it, then? Why do you have it?”
He shook the bag. “It’s a curse, or a very small part of one. I removed this gem from my mother’s horn two days ago. There are a dozen like it, and more grow each day.” He paused, and for the first time an emotion other than arrogance or amusement shadowed his features.
Fear. She saw it in his eyes, and then it vanished like it had never been.
“Queen Platinum is dying,” he continued, turning away to avoid her gaze. “She is cursed and dying and none of my or my sisters’ magic can stop this… thing. At best we’ve managed to hold it in check. Soon that will fail, and she will be consumed.”
“Ah.” That cast a different light on things. Foxglove’s shoulders relaxed. “I’m sorry.”
He waved a hoof. “Don’t be. Your morals do you credit.” He dropped the bag on the floor and ground his hoof into it. A faint wail, like a distant scream echoing up from a bottomless cavern, sounded in Foxglove’s ears, gone as soon as Hyperion removed his hoof from the flattened pouch.
“But I still need your help,” he continued. “They say you can brew the Panacea potion.”
Silence followed his statement into the room. She stared at him for a long moment, eyes wide, until the expression of confidence on his face faded with a faint frown.
“Well, can you?” he asked. His tone had lost some of its kindness.
“In theory? Yes. It’s an herbal potion, which is my specialty. I even have some of the components in stock.” She stepped over to her bookshelf, scanning the spines for a moment until she found the one she wanted. It was thin and unbound, just a sheaf of pages tied together with string, and she carefully took it over to the counter. The old and faded parchment threatened to flake away as she turned to the appropriate recipe.
“But that’s not the problem. See for yourself.” She carefully turned the manuscript and pushed it across the counter toward him.
“Panacea potion,” he read. “The magic of this potion is limitless and can cure any disease, illness or curse. Its power is matched only by its cost…” He trailed off, and his eyes danced across the lines as he read the rest of the page.
Minutes later, he spoke again. “I don’t recognize some of these. Prism lotus?”
“It’s a flower that grows on the surface of ponds in the Wildlands. It cannot be plucked, and the Panacea must be brewed on the living flower. But that’s not even the hardest part. Read the last ingredient.”
His eyes returned to the page. “Eyesight?”
“Yes.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Just what it says. Eyeballs, two of them, from the same pony.”
A much longer silence followed this time.
When the prince finally spoke, his voice was low, almost a whisper. “Assuming I could procure such things—”
“It’s not that easy, my lord. If it were, I’d be rich, and the world would be filled with immortal unicorns and blind earth ponies.” She tried to keep her voice even, but some of her distaste must have leaked through the words, judging by Hyperion’s tight expression. “Tell me, how much do you know about alchemy?”
He snorted, and she got the feeling he wasn’t the kind of pony who was used to being contradicted. “More than most, not as much as some. Less than you, certainly.”
“Well, thank you for that. You’d be surprised how often unicorns try to tell me my business.” She paused to clear her throat. “Anyway, the final ingredient is almost always the easiest to procure. It’s never rare, and usually has little value.”
Hyperion glanced down at the faded manuscript. “You consider eyeballs easy to procure?”
She shrugged. “Yes, but not for the same reason as you. The prism lotus, on the other hoof, requires a trek to the Wildlands, and it’s one of the safer items to find.”
“Is that all that’s stopping you? I’ll pay you handsomely, more than everypony has paid you for every potion you have ever made. I’ll be happy to provide an escort to the Wildlands. They’re not so dangerous as ponies believe.”
“If it were just that, I’d do it in a heartbeat, my lord. The problem is still that final ingredient. It doesn’t matter how many desperate ponies you pay to blind themselves – that’s not how alchemy works. The final ingredient is the most powerful because, even though it may be common and cheap and easy to find, it is an offering.”
He leaned away. “When you say ‘offering’...”
“Yes. It’s why uninformed ponies consider alchemy a borderline form of dark magic.” Foxglove pointed a hoof at a shelf, where a dozen small red vials stood like soldiers in a row. “Those are healing potions. Each one has a few drops of my blood in them. On the nightstand beside my bed is a dreamwalking potion that contains a memory of my childhood. I don't know what memory it was, because it is gone, prince. I gave it up to fuel the potion.”
“So the eyesight it requires…” He looked back from the shelf to meet her gaze.
She returned the stare until he blinked and glanced away. “Yeah, mine. The Panacea potion may be a great form of magic, but it is also cruel. I can’t imagine a situation dire enough to make an alchemist craft one. I doubt I will see one in my lifetime.”
He had no reply to that. Instead he studied the rows of healing potions aligned on the shelves. Outside, in the village, she heard ponies trotting through the streets on the way home from the fields or the mines. Their words were muffled and indistinct, but their laughter was clear.
Eventually the prince turned back to her, though he kept his eyes on the parchment between them. “I suppose it was too good to be true. But humor me for a moment – I am not just any pony. I am Queen Platinum’s only son. I can make you richer than any earth pony in the kingdom.” He looked up, meeting her eyes at last. “I would even take your hoof in marriage. ‘Princess Foxglove,’ do you like the sound of that? Your life would be one of leisure.”
“Leisure and darkness.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, my lord. I hope you find some way to save your mother, but I cannot—”
The door banged open, cutting her off, and Anise pounced into the room. “Foxy, I’m back! Belle Cast wasn’t home, so I just left the delivery on her...” She came to a stop, mouth hanging open as she stared up at the prince. Her surprise was so thorough she didn’t remember to bow.
Hyperion recovered first. “Well, hello, miss. What is your name?”
“Uh… Anise?” She glanced between Foxglove and the prince, her ears folded back against her mane.
The prince bowed to her, a tiny smile on his lips. “Well, it is a pleasure to meet you, Anise. I am—”
“Go to your room, Anise,” Foxglove said. “Now.”
“But—”
“Now!” Foxglove stared at her sister until the mare wilted and turned, plodding up the stairs with a final desultory glance back at the two. Upstairs, a door slammed, and Foxglove exhaled.
“Well, she seemed nice,” Hyperion said. “Your sister?”
“Yes, and my apprentice.” Foxglove saw the spark in his eyes and hurried to interject. “And no, she cannot craft the Panacea potion. I never intend to teach her.”
He sighed. “This doesn’t have to be a dispute, Foxglove. Please consider all the good you would be doing if you helped me. Good for the kingdom, and for yourself.”
“I don’t think so. I am sorry for your mother, Prince Hyperion, but I cannot help her. No alchemist will brew this potion.”
“Very well.” He stepped through the door, pausing astride the threshold. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
* * *
Anise was a curious filly. Most of the time, Foxglove considered this a positive trait.
“Offered to marry you, huh?” Anise chewed on a stick of her favorite snack, licorice, as Foxglove stalked around the workroom, straightening the various tools and books for the fifth time in as many minutes. “So, why didn’t you tell me about this potion?”
Now was not one of those times.
“Eyeballs, Anise. Just knowing that potion exists is dangerous. I should have feigned ignorance.” Foxglove let out a huff and stopped halfway through her sixth circuit of the room. “One of the others must have told him about it. Probably Heliotrope – she never could keep her mouth shut.”
“Do you think it’s true, though? About the queen?”
“I don’t see why he would lie.” Foxglove stopped next to her sister and wiped away a black smear the licorice left on Anise’s cheek, much to her displeasure. “Or if it was a lie, it’s an odd one to choose. Word will have to get out soon about this curse.”
She had slept fitfully the night before, with one ear turned toward the window overlooking the street. Her dreams were filled with panicked, half-heard sounds and visions, above all the image of a tiny black crystal shining with an evil light. It rolled across the floor to her hoof, up her leg, across her chest, leaving a burning trail wherever it touched. It rose up her neck, along her jaw and cheek until it perched on the edge of her eyelid, burning, blinding. All the world was lost, subsumed in its azure light, and when she was sure at last that her eyes had boiled away and she would never see again, she woke, and darkness replaced the dream for a few half-lucid moments before sleep claimed her again.
Foxglove was cranky in the morning.
Anise’s rather calm reaction to hearing the story of the prince’s visit hadn’t done Foxglove’s mood any favors. Worse, she’d peppered her with questions about the Panacea potion all throughout breakfast and the morning ritual of readying the shop for work.
And still they continued. “Were you ever going to teach it to me?”
“No. And if you’d think about it for five seconds, you’d understand why.”
“I understand why. I’m not stupid, Foxy.”
“No, but you’re young.” Foxglove hefted a stone mixing bowl onto her back and carried it over to the worktable, depositing it there with a loud thunk that shook their hooves. She measured out a cupful of powdered iron and tossed in dried plants from a series of earthen jars – a hoofful of cactus needles, honeysuckle, orchid petals and sycamore leaves. “And young ponies don’t always make good choices. Can you get me the rainwater?”
Anise found the appropriate jug and lugged it over to the worktable. At Foxglove’s direction, she poured a bit into the mixing bowl until the contents resembled an odd, unappetizing stew, then stood back to watch as Foxglove stirred the mixture with a wood spoon.
Most potion-making was like this. Slow and tedious, waiting for mixtures to set or complex proteins to denature before the next step could take place. Sometimes it resembled baking more than alchemy. It meant plenty of time to talk.
And Anise loved to talk.
“I’m just saying, you shouldn’t have turned him down out of hoof.” She nudged Foxglove in the ribs. “We could finally get that new sink you want. Eh? New sink?”
“Your estimation of the value of my eyesight is noted and appreciated.”
“Oh, don’t be such a grump. You’re missing what’s important!”
Foxglove spared her sister a glance. “I am?”
“Yeah! So you weren’t able to help him this time, but a prince came to you, of all the ponies in the world, for help making a potion. How many alchemists can say that?”
“Princes aren’t like normal ponies, Anise.” Foxglove gave the mixture another stir, clouding the water for a few moments before the heavy iron particles sank back to the bottom of the bowl and the leaves bobbed on the surface. “And neither are princesses or queens or any unicorn, for that matter. Having something they want isn’t a good thing.”
“Bijoux is a unicorn. She’s not like that.” Of the hundreds of ponies in Rivervale, precisely one was a unicorn – a canary yellow filly two years younger than Anise, and one of her best friends.
“Bijoux’s parents are earth ponies,” Foxglove said. “That’s different.”
“You just don’t like unicorns.”
“I like unicorns just fine, but they’re not like us.” Foxglove leaned over the bowl and inhaled deeply, letting the mingled scents of metal and water and leaves fill her mind. Almost ready.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help him. And I’m sorry about the queen,” she continued. “But if I never see another prince again, I’ll count my blessings.”
“Your loss, I suppose.” Anise leaned over to sniff at the bowl as well, then lapped at it with her tongue. She grimaced at the foul taste and spat on the stone floor. “I think it’s ready.”
“It is. Are you ready?”
Anise looked down at the small tray laid out before her. “No. Do we really have to do this?”
“Well, I guess we could close the shop and never make potions again. But if you want to be an alchemist, then yes, we have to do this.”
Anise didn’t answer – at least, not with words. Her lips curled as she stared at the small cotton swab on the tray, and Foxglove could smell the sweat breaking out beneath her sister’s coat.
Foxglove’s old master, the honored, departed Wheat Husk, was notoriously hard on his students. Alchemy was not a discipline that lent itself to gentle souls – every potion required an offering in proportion to its power. A mild purgative or insect repellent might only demand a few hoof shavings, an offering so painless it barely seemed worth the term. Healing potions, Foxglove’s stock in trade, required fresh blood. Shimmerveil potions, which rendered the imbiber invisible for a hundred heartbeats, needed a painful secret. On the far end of the spectrum were potions like the Panacea, which required eyesight, or Fecundity, which guaranteed a mare would conceive a foal the next time she mated. It cost the brewer a single nipple, sliced clean from her teat. That was another potion Foxglove never intended to brew.
As an apprentice, when she huddled at night with Wheat Husk’s other students, they whispered to each other rumors of potions that required even greater offerings. Potions indistinguishable from black magic, able to dramatically extend a pony’s lifespan, or let them transform at will from one tribe to another. The cheapest of those potions required decades of life as an offering – some required life itself, though why anypony would ever craft one was beyond Foxglove’s comprehension.
Such were the rumors, at least. Wheat Husk never spoke of them except to say they no longer existed. Better, older alchemists had burned those recipes and taken the memory of them to their graves. The discipline they passed to their students was harsh, and sometimes cruel, but never evil.
Wheat Husk could certainly be harsh. Foxglove still shuddered when she recalled some of his lessons, or his casual acceptance of pain and blood as the price of magic. But he was effective, and over the years he had pounded into Foxglove’s young head the necessity of such offerings. They were the cost of being a master alchemist, and they should be embraced, not feared.
Did Wheat Husk feel this way with his first student? Foxglove wondered as she watched Anise fret. Did he regret this part?
“You don’t have to. I can do it this time…” Foxglove whispered.
Anise shook her head. She snorted, nearly blowing the little roll of cotton off its tray, and she set her shoulders as though preparing to lift the whole world. “No. I can do this. I can do this.” She repeated it several more times, quieter, almost a mantra.
Without any further prompting, she grasped the cotton swab in the crook of her hoof. She dipped one end in the bowl, letting it soak up the water, and then carefully touched the wet end against a pile of greenish-yellow powder also on the tray.
There was nothing magical about the powder. Foxglove had made it the previous night by grinding dried mustard seeds in her mortar and pestle. It was a common potion ingredient, though in this case being used for other purposes.
“Remember, just a tap,” Foxglove said. Part of her, the part that remembered changing Anise’s diapers and holding her while she cried, wanted to snatch the cotton swab away and use it on herself. Anything to spare her sister. Another part, older and wiser, swelled with pride.
“Right, just a tap.” Anise exhaled and leaned over the bowl again. She placed her free hoof against her cheekbone and pulled down, stretching the skin and holding her right eye open. Without hesitation, barely flinching, she brushed the discolored end of the cotton swab against her exposed eye.
For a moment, nothing happened. Her head jerked, and the muscles of her face spasmed, but she didn’t cry out. Her breathing slowed, and the firm set in her shoulders relaxed.
“That wasn’t so bad…” Anise tried to blink, but the hoof against her cheek kept the eye from closing. “It stings a bit, but… okay, now I can feel it. Ow. Ow ow ow ow!”
“Keep holding it open.” For all that pain and blood and sacrifice were intrinsic to alchemy, she still hated to see her little Anise in pain, like the foal whose skinned knees she bandaged and whose tears she silence with a kiss.
“I know, I know.” Anise exhaled loudly. Her tail flicked about wildly, and her hooves beat out a frantic tattoo against the stone floor. “Owwww! It hurts!”
“It will pass. Stay over the bowl.”
It didn’t take long. The mustard-seed powder was a powerful irritant, and within seconds a stream of tears began flowing from both of Anise’s eyes, wetting her muzzle, cheek and jaw as they dribbled down her face to fall into the mixing bowl.
Foxglove counted them. When two dozen had dropped into the mixture, she gave her sister a gentle tap on the shoulder. “That’s enough.”
“Ohhh thankyouthankyouthankyou—” Anise ran across the room, and her words cut off as she dunked her face in a basin of saline water. She shook her head violently, spraying it every which way, and eventually rose. Her mane and face were soaked, and she dripped unashamedly on the floor. Her right eye was a vibrant, throbbing scarlet, but Foxglove knew from experience that the irritation would fade within a few minutes.
Foxglove waited for her to stop panting. “See? That wasn’t so bad.”
“Not bad?! It still hurts!” Anise blinked so rapidly her eyelids were a blur, and she tossed her head about, as though trying to dislodge a bat from her mane. “How can you stand this?”
“It gets easier.” Foxglove lifted the mixing bowl and poured it through a fine mesh sieve. The iron powder and water flowed between the wires, and she picked away the leaves. “But look what you made.”
In time, Anise stumbled back over to the work table and sat down next to her sister. She stared, silent, at the dozen crystal tears gathered at the bottom of the sieve.
* * *
Eleven of the crystal tears went into a lead glass vial labelled with Anise’s name, the date they were created, and the word “Pain.” The twelfth tear Foxglove kept for herself, and she placed it in a tiny keepsake box with other trinkets from Anise’s childhood – her first milk tooth, a scribbled bit of art, a lock of dark-green hair from her first manecut.
Anise didn’t know about the box, and she would have laughed if she saw it. Or maybe she would have blushed and pretended to ignore it, embarrassed in the way that young ponies were by such displays of love.
Tears were a common ingredient in potions. Sleeping potions required them, as did prophylactic potions, which Foxglove did brisk business in during the spring and summer months. The fact that these tears were crystallized made no difference to the potion – it merely made them easier to store, and when it came time to brew up a recipe she could simply drop them in rather than trying to cry on the spot.
A week had passed since Prince Hyperion’s visit, and Foxglove found her thoughts returning to him less and less. There were no rumors in the village market about the queen being ill, and she wondered if perhaps the prince had found another cure, or if the queen had already died and the royal family was keeping the news hidden.
The capital was a dozen miles from Rivervale. On clear days, if Foxglove squinted, she could see faint shapes rising in the distance – towers and spires and minarets, all vaguely suggestive of a unicorn’s horn. Or maybe every tall building resembled a unicorn’s horn, and she was being too sensitive. Most days it didn’t matter, as the Riverlands were a wet and warm place, and the haze in the air shrouded the capital from her sight.
Foxglove was fine with that. The unicorns had their city, and the pegasi had their sky, and the earth ponies had their villages and farms. If it wasn’t quite harmonious, at least it was balanced, and that was good enough.
Summer was a busy time for earth pony villages. For miles in every direction, farms and orchards and fields covered the land. They were a riot of growth now, at the height of summer, when the sun beat down on them sixteen hours a day. Every morning a giant bank of fog, nearly a cloud, loomed above the river flowing through town. It cut the world in half, until the rising sun finally burned it away. Its ghost stayed with them, though, a humid, oppressive blanket of wet air that dampened coats and curled manes and clogged lungs. Walking through the Riverlands in summer was like swimming; the air more chewed than breathed.
Foxglove loved it.
The other seasons had their charms, of course. She enjoyed the snow, and spring was magic, filled with blossoms that transformed the green and brown of the lowlands into a living rainbow. Fall was crisp and heady, every step feeling like the last of the year.
But summer Foxglove adored. She loved splashing through muddy fields in search of ingredients for her potions, and the way the sun burned like fire against her shell-pink coat. She loved that she could sweat and sweat and sweat and not worry about feeling dirty, because every other pony in the Riverlands was dirty and sweaty too, and none of them had time to care.
Summer was when Foxglove restocked her shelves. Summer was when she made nearly three-quarters of the entire year’s sales. Summer was when earth ponies were most alive – let pegasi have the cold winter months, and let the unicorns cherish the liminal days of spring and fall, when magic was at its strongest. Summer was when life itself ruled the world, and every day was a celebration for their entire tribe.
Summer days were endless, filled with working the fields and harvesting fruits and hauling the abundance of the earth to market. Summer nights were filled with singing and dancing and doing the things ponies do to make more ponies, followed by a few hours of exhausted, death-like sleep, and then the whole experience started over with the dawn.
Most summer days, Anise stayed close by her sister’s side, learning what plants to gather and where to find them. True to her name and her cutie mark, a star-shaped seed pod, she had taken rapidly to herbalism. She already knew as much of the art as Foxglove, and soon Anise would be the one gathering most of their ingredients.
But on days like this, with clear skies and a hot sun, Foxglove knew better than to keep her sister leashed to work. Young ponies needed time to be themselves, to roam in herds across the Riverlands, making friends and building the bonds that might, one day soon, blossom into something more. Foxglove had already seen Anise making eyes at the teenage stallions – colts, really, but all colts thought they were stallions. Rather than fight back, Foxglove had given her sister a long talk and made sure she learned to craft prophylactic potions.
And so today Foxglove was alone, wandering through the semi-wild meadows that extended past the endless fields around Rivervale. The river itself – a wide, slow, muddy snake that split the valley in two – extended far to the north and south. The villages downstream were much like Rivervale, though they grew smaller and farther apart as the distance to the capital increased. Eventually there were no more villages, and civilization ended, and the Wildlands began. She’d been to them several times, more than every other pony in her village combined. They were the best place to find the magical plants crucial to the most powerful of her potions. Potions as powerful as any unicorn’s spell.
Someday soon, probably before the year was out, she would make another trek to the Wildlands. There was always some new plant to find, or new recipe to attempt. But that could wait until summer ended. Perhaps Anise would even want to come with her.
So thoroughly had summer cast its spell over Foxglove that she forgot about Prince Hyperion and the queen. She forgot about the Panacea potion, and the questions her sister had asked. There was just her, and the summer, and the wide, beautiful world.
Until, one day, Anise didn’t come home.