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hannon held the small ornately decorated vial in one hand. Inside was a tiny quantity of brown liquid that glowed orange when held up to the light. Alanna slowly spoke.

“Talitha made this to cure your hearing.”

Shannon nodded. She brushed her hair back over one shoulder and opened the vial carefully. Alanna looked up at the quiver and longbow slung on Shannon’s back. The smooth jet black surfaces and waxy fletching reflected the warm orange light of Talitha’s ember stove.

The other four Ajan Warriors and Kishi watched expectantly as the Warrior of the Night gently drank the tiny quantity of healing elixir Talitha had been able to brew from her reagents. Shannon closed her eyes and frowned as if she had felt a sharp pain. The dull ache that had persisted in Shannon’s head still made her ears ring.

Talitha watched the Huntress’ face carefully for any sign of effect, nervous that her recipe might be lacking. The last time she had brewed a healing potion for the Enuncia curse, she had the benefit of some formidable instruction. Alanna was worried there just wasn’t enough of it. She thought Talitha’s tiny vial might hold half a teaspoon, if that.

“I hope this works,” Ranko said. “We’re like half-strength without Miss Shannon’s arrows.”

“Say that again!” Shannon grabbed Ranko’s arm.

“We’re half-strength with–”

“Without Miss Shannon’s arrows!” Shannon exclaimed. “I heard you!”

“Yay! Shannon’s healed!” Cici said, crashing into the older girl and hugging her around the waist.

“Say something else! Alanna! Say something!” Shannon laughed.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Alanna said.

“I can hear again! Even my headache is gone! Talitha, you did it!”

“We’re unstoppable as long as we’ve got the Professor,” Ranko said, jostling Talitha around by the shoulder.

Talitha smiled and closed her eyes. She was so relieved she had made the potion correctly.

“It’s good to know these healng potions work against injuries as well as magical afflictions,” Talitha said. “Reina’s alchemy seems very versatile.”

“It should be,” Alanna said. “She spent centuries perfecting it.”

“We need to find Jessie,” Shannon said. “I’m really worried about her.”

“Yeah, me too,” Cici said. “And I can help too because she has dulcimite armor and a celestium sword and those are easy to find. They’re almost even easier than finding horseshoes and there’s about a hundred of those in Escator.”

“What do you say, Boss?” Ranko asked. “Shall we go rescue Goofy Bird?” Kishi turned to Alanna along with the rest of the group. His ears were perked straight up.

“Break camp, ladies.” Alanna said with a determined grin. “Let’s go get our fire back.”

Continue to Chapter Sixteen

Chapter List

his is why we bring the Professor to all our fights,” Ranko said, reclining on a wide bed of soft rillimender leaves. The four girls sat around a small salt pot and simmering flat cauldron of mint-flavored water inside a roomy wooden hut. They were deep in the recesses of the thistle stand and far from the outer edge of the arena.

The Warrior of the Forest had conjured her canopy from the plants that were available, and the thorny, tough maple thistles made an unusually sturdy shelter. Talitha had asked the thistle plants to weave themselves together into a magical structure complete with a door, a shuttered window and even a vent in the ceiling for her ember stove, and they had obliged with both enthusiasm and care.

Kishi reclined lazily in one corner, panting with his paws on either side of an enormous wooden bowl of fresh water. The Storyteller Warrior’s power to conjure an Autumn Canopy shelter in a dense enough forest or thicket made Talitha Hayashi one of Kishi’s favorite humans. Rarely did Kishi or the Huntress get the luxury of indoor meals or rest out in the wild, but when the Warrior of the Forest was along, they always had a warm place to eat and sleep whenever they wanted it.

Talitha walked back through the door, sorting small bottles of elixir ingredients to try and see if she had enough of each to mix her remedy for Shannon’s deafness. She had tended to Ranko’s left side first, fashioning a thick bandage from a bounche fruit rind and fixing it under the heavy fiberweave shirt Ranko wore to support her dense metal shoulder and body armor.

The Bounche Tree was a heavy, succulent perennial that grew mainly in Rotensha and southern Isia near the warm freshwater lakes that dotted the highlands between the central plains and the coast. Their leaves were extraordinarily thin, but their fruits grew to the size of large pumpkins and consisted of an inner fruit and an outer rind that retained a great deal of the plant’s water. The “sap” from these fruit rinds was well-known to most alchemists in Aventar for it’s topical medicinal properties. Talitha remembered vividly her trip with Reina to harvest their first batch of bounche fruit. She was almost overcome by sudden concern for her teacher, but quickly put it out of her mind so she could concentrate on the matter at hand.

Cici had located one of the leftover bounche leaves and was busy playing with Kishi, moving the end of the leaf quickly past the big cat’s paw and causing him to try and catch it. Each time he missed, a deep thump sounded through the hut. It was a fun game with a housecat, but Kishi’s paws were nearly eight inches wide. Ranko rolled her eyes way back and looked up over the top of her head at Cici, who was right behind Ranko and crouched near Kishi’s bowl.

“Please don’t let him flip the water on my head,” Ranko said in a nasal tone with her throat strained from her posture. “I really don’t want the giant cat water bowl on my head.” Cici half-nodded, not really paying much attention to anything except Kishi alternately snapping his eyes back and forth and occasionally trying to gather up the bounche leaf with one paw and try to eat it.

“What have you got there?” Alanna asked Talitha, who was now sitting next to the salt pot with the small bottles lined up next to the ember stove in the center of the room.

“I think the potion that heals the Enuncia Curse will heal deafness, but we have to leave one of the ingredients out,” Talitha said very quietly.

“Which ingredient?” Ranko asked, trying to turn so she could see and being rewarded with a fresh spike of pain down her left side. “Gahh..” she muttered to herself. “Why did I move this way? Why not that way…?”

“What’s in all those little bottles?” Cici asked. “Are all those magic potions?”

Talitha smiled.

“No, these are just the ingredients. They’re called reagents. By themselves they aren’t really magical, but if an alchemist mixes them together in the right proportions with the right pestle, then they can become magical,” the Warrior of the Forest replied.

“What’s proportions?” Cici asked.

“That’s how much of each thing you add,” Ranko said, her voice forced as she tried to prop herself up on one elbow without destroying Talitha’s finely-crafted bandage.

“A drop from one bottle, two drops from the next,” Alanna said. “If you get enough of each ingredient added, it’s like a recipe. The amounts of each ingredient from each bottle are called proportions when you compare them to each other.”

“But we have to be sure we’ve got all the right drops,” Ranko said. “Otherwise we might turn our tall pal here into a beetle or something.”

Talitha gently set the two bottles she was holding down and sat back and stared. She was suddenly concerned she might actually make such a catastrophic mistake. Talitha folded her arms around her shoulders. Alanna could almost see the confidence drain from her face.

“Talitha,” Alanna said calmly and evenly. Talitha looked up with a quiet expression of genuine fear. “Ranko was just kidding. You’re the only one of us smart enough to know how to mix these things. Just do your best,” Alanna smiled encouragingly. It was just enough to give Talitha’s razor-sharp mind an edge over her alarm. She gingerly picked the bottles back up and began examining them again.

Alanna silently frowned and made a face at Ranko to try and remind her watch the off-hand remarks. Ranko nodded and looked up at Shannon, who stared out the window into the dense thicket.

Continue to Chapter Fourteen