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He takes another step closer, his nostrils flaring slightly. It makes me wonder if he’s angrier than he’s letting on.
“They call me and then I offer them a way out.”
A bitter laugh escapes me. “Like you did with me, you mean? Let me know when I’m going to actually get that ‘way out’ you promised.”
I want to walk out on him, to slam the door in his proud, handsome face, but as I turn towards the exit his facade of calm snaps. He lunges forward, his hand enclosing around my wrist, pulling me to him.
“You’ll get it when you uphold your promise, Gold Weaver,” he growls. I throw my free hand up, pressing it against his chest, trying to push him away. But it’s like trying to shove stone. He’s too strong. It drives home that the only thing keeping me breathing is his own self-control.
“Let me go.” I want to shout it at him, but the alarm is obvious in my voice.
And to my surprise, he immediately drops my hand.
“You want freedom? Then take it, Gold Weaver. Shape your own fate.” His voice takes on a fresh intensity. “Believe me when I say I want you to succeed as much you do.”
My breath is ragged, and I’m still standing with my hand pressed against his chest, feeling the hard muscle there, the strength rippling beneath the fabric of his shirt. The heat that was creeping up my neck has spread now, seeping down my body. I hardly know where to look, unable to meet his eyes.
This is too confusing, this mix of anger and fear and…something else, almost stronger than the rest.
I try to steady myself, removing my hand and taking a step back from him. My silence, and the fact my eyes are now firmly planted on the floor, must tell him I won’t argue anymore. Ruskin nods and brushes past me. Even this brief closeness sparks something within me that I try to clamp down on, squeezing my eyes shut.
“Get to work,” he says from the doorway. His tone makes it clear there’s no more time to drag my heels. His patience is wearing thin, and while he might have put up with my rebellion this time, there’s no telling when that patience will run out. I could sense it just now, how close to the edge of something he’d been. I don’t know what waits for me over that precipice.
The moment he’s out the room it’s like all the pressure has been let out of it—out of me—and I’m aware how thrown off balance I am.
The conversation careens round in my mind like a spinning top. When I’d returned to the palace I wanted to throw everything away. But the run-in with Ruskin has made one thing clear. Completing this task is my only way out of Faerie. And that escape hatch is something I want now more than ever. While I’ve been longing for home ever since I woke up in this place, there’s something pushing me now too.
I have to get away from him. Ruskin is too dangerous, too…unpredictable. I can feel it starting to swallow me up, distracting me from what’s important. The sooner I’m away from the fae prince and his deadly kingdom the better.
So I get to work early the next day, up at dawn to tackle this impossible problem. I’m starting with a lot of the same basic ingredients because I need test material—making the gold I’m going to attempt to unmake. I shake my head even as I pour out a drop of catalyst into each mortar, watching the lustrous shine come to life. What Ruskin is asking me to do is ridiculous.
And yet, the more I work, the more the problem takes a hold of me. It’s a puzzle to be solved, and I always did like a challenge. I try to invert the ratios of the catalyst—luckily, augium ore is a lot easier to come by here than Styrland—but of course, it’s not that simple. My gold stays gold, if a bit misshapen and with a weird film on top of it.
I wish I had my old notes and my mother’s with me, although by now I’ve read both so many times I’ve probably memorized them. Reading my mother’s notes, in particular, was something I started quite young—long before I could truly understand what her experiments meant. It was just a way to make me feel closer to her, to try to understand who she truly was, separate from the town’s adoration.
My mom’s interest in all this stuff started out with her healing. She used plants for medicines, but then wanted to know why they worked, so she broke them down, mixed them with other things, learned what chemicals were doing what. The metallurgy came in later—minerals were a natural jump from medicinal plants, then rocks and ores. I don’t know where she got the alchemy kit, the actual tools she acquired for all the melting and mixing, but she’d only just begun to get to grips with that side of things before she died. From her notes, she’d only hypothesized how one might go about making gold. It took me years of trial and error to get it to actually work.
There’s no telling how long this round of experimentation will last. But I come into it with a good bit of knowledge on my mind. For example, I know that one of the basic compounds in bluecup flowers is terrible for getting a chemical reaction to stick. I had to throw out a whole batch of augium because of that mistake. But if it could prevent a chemical reaction, maybe it could undo one.
The problem is, I don’t even know if Faerie has bluecups.
I douse my fire and throw off my apron. Destan’s my babysitter today, trying out scarves in the next room while I grow sweaty and stinky from the heat and the fumes. He looks at me with thinly veiled distaste when I come in, so I must look a mess.
“Do you have bluecups?” I ask.
“Excuse me?”
“The flowers. Do bluecups grow in Faerie? I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen any in the palace, but then they prefer to grow in woodland anyway, so that doesn’t mean anything.”
“I have no idea,” Destan says, with the air of someone being spoken to in another language.
“We’ll just have to go to the Emerald Forest and look for them, then, won’t we?” It occurs to me I can use this to my advantage—yes, I genuinely need the flowers to test my hypothesis, but I’m almost certain the gate out of Faerie is also in that forest, and I’ll be going there, with a fae escort. There is possibility here.
Destan gapes at me.
“The forest? You and me?”
“It’ll be quick. In and out. I’m sure we’ll find them fast with no problems.” I had no way of guaranteeing that, of course, but the fae have so many advantages over us I don’t really feel bad using the dishonesty, which is the one we humans have.
