Page 14 of Skyblossom
“Saints and stars.”
“So?” I said. “What’s your fee? You can tell I’m a pretty serious buyer.”
She stared at the book for a minute longer, a blush spilling out thicker over her cheeks, before she snapped it shut. “No fee,” she said, handing it back to me. “When do you want to start? I know a good place to get spinner’s knot, fangwood, and wild burnbark, an hour’s walk from the East Wall.”
Okay, nowthatwas what I called flirting. Lumi didn’t need to know if I flirted back. “So, did it hurt whenyoufell from heaven?”
She stood up taller, meeting my challenge with a smile. “It did. But I had a good remedy on hand.”
She was too cute. This wassucha problem. “You down for right now?”
“I’m down for anytime.” She paused. “When it comes to, you know—harvesting herbological compounds and everything. In other contexts I usually actually need a lot of time in advance to prepare emotionally for something, and I want to know about some big event I’m expected to do, like, at least twenty-four hours in advance, but—well—yes. Shutting up now. I’m down for right now.”
I genuinely never wanted her to shut up. I could only hope she’d chatter incessantly while ingredient-harvesting, like she had last time. I couldn’t get enough.
*
Spinner’s knot, fangwood, and wild burnbark all didn’t work. I didn’t mind too much.
Cadence led me to an obscure little grotto in the cliffs towards Eagle House, where we had to cross a narrow ledge and she nearly fell in the water before I caught her with stylish grace, and then I was the one who fell in the water on the way out. It was cold and a little slimy, but Cadence’s eyes sparkling as she laughed so hard she choked made it hard to be too upset about it. She stayed in the alchemy lab with me while I went into the night brewing, sitting in the window nook with a book in hand that she wasn’t really reading because we were chattering the whole time, and she shrieked and dropped the book when I added the fangwood sample and the brew exploded, turning black and bubbling up in a caustic slime that belched greenish-gray smoke. We evacuated the room, Cadence stumbling out and Knot grabbing her bag as she went, and it took a few more concentrated alchemy spells on my part to get the room to settle down, and it was only once we stopped the caustic overreaction that I laughed, and then Cadence laughed too, and I wondered if blowing up potions had ever been quite so fun.
I walked her back to Scorpion House after the evening, where she lingered on the ornate steps up to the Art Deco stylings of the building and its side entrance flanked with feyfruit trees, giving me a loaded smile that hovered between friendliness and something more, and I swear, for a moment there in the soft glow of the magic lanterns floating around the treetops, we almost kissed.
But we didn’t, which was good, because Lumi would have killed me.
I managed somehow to keep it cool with Lumi the next morning, but I immediately lost that cool when we got to the cute little place in the Astral Quarter district that Lumi and I frequented for breakfast and, of all the coincidences, ran into Cadence there, together with her friend with the pink hair from the other day, sitting at a table together at the window whenLumi and I got inside. Lumi pouted, giving Cadence her best attempt at an icy reception—bless her, she wasn’t the best at being mean, but she tried—but Cadence’s friend Rosie took the exact opposite tack, dragging me into conversation and even pulling up a flicker of telekinetic magic to pull a second table up next to theirs so we could sit together.
Based on the way she gushed about me and Cadence getting alongso well,Cadence had probably told her how… loaded our interactions were. I’d thought maybe Cadence might have had some feelings for me too, so it made sense she might have told her friend, and, well, Rosie didn’t seem like… the type for subtlety, necessarily.
Neither was Cadence’s other best friend, because I was midway through breakfast sitting next to Cadence when I felt Knot slip around my leg and pull me to the side, pressing up against Cadence’s leg. Cadence choked on her tea, stiffening as her face reddened, but I managed to keep it cool and act like nothing was happening under the table, long enough for me and Cadence to laugh at something together—even though she was tense and nervous the whole time and her laugh sounded fake when we finally got there—and Knot let go.
I kinda wished he hadn’t, though.
I spent all of class time just about bouncing out of my seat ready to go again, and I took off like a wild wyvern the second my last class finished, stocked up on potions for the both of us, and we went deep into Amber Woods this time, heading up a tangled knot of thick umberwood tree and helping her climb up to pluck precious gemblossom stems from the canopy. She loosened up a little more, gushing about the natural purity properties of this certain magic clade growing in this area, and I’d never known that could sound sexy.
The brew with gemblossom stems exploded too. So did the next one, the day after, but by that point, Cadence was accustomed to it too, and she laughed it off like I did.
She had a whole crew with her when I met her at Scorpion House the next day, Saturday morning, for a longer expedition we’d saved for the weekend—her whole galeria there to talk to me in unsubtle terms trying to scope out how things were with me and Cadence.
Well, except for the short girl with the black hair and broody look. She just glowered at me the whole time until, finally, she was the last one to leave me and Cadence alone, and she saidyou’re a lot louder than Cadenceand left it at that, going back inside, and I somehow felt like she meant it as approval.
It was early that evening when we were stationed out in a blind in the woods, watching for any sign of movement. What I thought was my best bet yet, shuffling sunflower root, wasn’t named for its skills as a card dealer but for the way it shuffled slowly around the forest, creeping looking for the best concentrations of ley line energy to feed on. What that meant, however, was that we couldn’t track a location where it should have been, exactly, but just a path it was likely to be shuffling along, and we hiked through dragon territory and past a few rocks carved by dragon talons in the likeness of dragon faces, some of them unnervingly realistic, to get to a lookout point in the bushes above a ledge rich with flowering mosses.
And we sat. It was a lot of sitting, actually. Sitting wasn’t my strong suit. Cadence was infinitely more patient than I was, settling in easily, while I shifted constantly and made small talk, but eventually even I ran out of things to yammer about, and when we’d fallen quiet for a minute, Cadence said, “So… how come?”
“How come I’m creeped out? Because I swear one of those dragon rocks is actually a real dragon pretending to be a rock. They’re too realistic.”
She laughed, nudging my shoulder with hers, as she pulled a package of snacks from her bag. “I’m sure you’d… heroically sweep me off my feet and rescue me if that happened. No, I mean… how come you’re so intent on this potion extension? You’re going through a lot for it.”
I poked at the tiny colorful flowers in the mossy carpet below us. “I can’t fly.”
“That’s… actually a pretty normal state.”
“Not even with magic. I don’t know what it is. I’ve worked hard on the Flight spell. I’ve even tried studying it from the draconological angle, but nothing. I don’t know if it’s a psychological thing, giving full control of my physical status over to the magic force, but I’ve never been able to cast a successful Flight.”
She furrowed her brow. “Oh… so that’s why you have the potion focused towards evocation.”
“I like alchemy because anybody can take a potion, you know? It kind of transcends all boundaries, all barriers. Even someone who’s never cast a flicker of magic in their life can take a potion and do something amazing. So for me, it’s like… if I can focus the standard Arcane Conduit brew to make a potion to empower Flight enough that even I can cast it, then it’s proof I can make potions that can cross any boundary, any barrier. And proof Icanfly, dammit,” I laughed. “I’ll be walking on air.”
