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“And so it is,” I agreed. “Please make sure that no one disturbs my…grimoire,” I said with great satisfaction. “Am I signed up for self-defense?”
“Arranged. I shall escort you.”
“Never mind.” I waved my hand. “Fetch me when the time comes.”
I thoughtfully chewed the end of my paintbrush. No written language. This world seemed suddenly more empty without the prospect of books. At least I could be uninhibited in what I wrote, now that I knew no one but me would ever read it.
I flipped to the back page of the book and labeled the top To Do List.
1.
And stared at it for a while.
When overwhelmed, just make a list, my mother always said. If you have to, start with the things you already accomplished and cross them out.
1.Figure out a way to keep Rogue from impregnating me.
2.Get dragon blood out of dress (find use for dragon blood?)
3.Find out about humans in this world
4.Study the tie between sex & magic
5.Deal with Falcon
6.Get home—Rubber Ducky? Black Dog?
It would be ironic if, like the shoes on my feet, the creature that had dogged me along would turn out to be my way home. Crosser of boundaries. The Black Dog was the only being, besides me, I’d seen in both worlds. I really wondered who the rubber duck tribute came from.
Several of the girls brought me lunch, along with a couple of buckets of waterfall water. I put down my pen and set to filling the copper basin of the gleaming fire pit with water.
Time to get after my list.
I retrieved the Ann Taylor dress, which smelled of some kind of musty sweet patchouli. Setting the dress into the water to soak, I sat cross-legged on the floor and munched on cheese and chicken-type things. I had thought about lighting a fire under the basin. In Mary Stewart’s books, Merlin said that creating flame was the first of his gifts to come and the last to go. As much as I had admired Merlin and wanted to be like him, I hadn’t even tried the creating-flame trick. Not even during sadism boot camp—though that was because my trainers had never asked that particular thing of me.
As I still felt uneasy about fire in the tents, I promised myself I’d try some fire-starting later. Hell, if I could pull lightning—though I still wasn’t exactly sure how I’d done it—I could certainly create a little flame.
But for now I concentrated on the water gradually warming up, while I poked at the dress occasionally with my finger, to sink the puffy parts under the water. When the water was hot, but not boiling, I added a bit of swirling, while I focused on the dragon blood leaving the dress and entering the water. Which didn’t work—I could actually feel the null resistance of it. The classic immovable object.
So instead I thought about the dress pulling away, leaving the blood behind, and, yes, that sang right. The dress spun around the basin, black embroidery catching the light here and there. My own little washing machine, if I cared to do it this way. Which I didn’t. This was more about organic chemistry than housekeeping, though I’d always been struck by the similarities.
I finally lifted the dress out manually. It would have been neat to raise it magically, but I wanted to be sure not to mess this up. I did wish a hook into the tent post next to the basin and hung the dripping dress on it, so that the liquid fell back into the basin. Then I carefully poured fresh water over the dress, rinsing it clean.
Three rinses in distilled water to clean glassware for sterilization, three steps for magic in the stories—coincidence? I didn’t think so.
I wrung the dress out one last time and took it out back, draping it over the bathtub to dry in the sun. Concentrating on the basin of water again, I warmed it up enough to simmer gently but not boil. Who knew at what temperature dragon blood denatured? I’d need better equipment than this to find out. Better to treat this like a wine sauce—just enough heat to reduce, not enough to evaporate the best parts of the alcohol. Eesh, what if there were valuable volatiles I’d be losing to the air, or worse, nasty toxins swirling about to poison us all? Couldn’t have that.
I grabbed my ink bowl and dumped out the fluid. I could always make more. On a scrap piece of paper, I sketched my orgo lab distillation apparatus as best I remembered it, keeping it very simple. Fewer things to screw up. Focusing carefully on the design, I transformed the erstwhile ink bottle into a glass funnel that fitted to the top of the basin, complete with cooling chamber and output hose to another bottle.
Resisting a mad scientist cackle, I set the distillation into motion.
Chapter 27
The Sun, the Moon and a Man
‡
By the timeLarch came to fetch me for my self-defense lesson, I’d eaten and made several useful entries in my grimoire. I was really beginning to long for some kind of database capability so I could more easily revisit and cross-reference, but alas for that.
