Bloodkin (Jaseth of Jaelshead) (29 page)

“That invisibility thing was
brilliant.
Do you think you could teach me?” She grasped at Anna’s sleeve, swaying wildly. “Oh Anna, you’re so
pretty
—” Anna caught her easily as she fainted dead away.

“Uh, hi Anna.” I had managed to walk the few steps to where she was holding Lolitha upright. “Um, what the hell was that?”

“Sorry I didn’t get here sooner, Jaseth.”

“But, but, those
men
…”

She smiled thinly. “I have had my eye on them for some time. It’s personal.”

“Gosh.” I couldn’t really think of anything else to say.

“Will you be alright with her?” Anna indicated the unconscious Lolitha and I nodded, speechless. Anna transferred Lolitha to me, and I slung one of her arms around my shoulder. “Good, get back to the others now. And no lagging behind, you hear? Oh, and Jaseth? We will keep this incident quiet, yes?”

“Uh, sure.”

“Good.” She nodded and stepped back into the shadows, then was simply not there any more. Sweet holy Lilbecz.
Seriously.

“’Litha? Wake up!” I tapped her on the face and she stirred. “Come on, can you walk? Let’s start walking.” I half dragged her out of the alley back onto the street.

“Oof, shit Jas, what just… Oh gawd.”

I was too shaken to even reply. Lolitha started to move her legs by herself, but she still leaned heavily on me.

“Oh shit, I told Anna she was pretty.” Seriously, I had almost been murdered and
that
was what she was worried about. “
Fyar khanall
, Jas, you almost got
murdered
.” I could hear the catch in her voice. Then she gave a little gasp that could have been a sob. “Murdered!” Then she giggled. Oh bollocks, she was hysterical.

“Yep, I almost got murdered.” Oh no, I could feel it coming.

“By two thugs, in a—” Another gasp. “In a dark alleyway!”

“Yep. Almost got murdered in a dark alleyway.” Shit. I couldn’t help it. I giggled too. It was almost too ridiculous to be true.

“
Murdered.
In a
dark alleyway
,” she repeated, and then couldn’t hold it in any longer. “What an effing
loser
!” She collapsed in hysterical laughter and I had to hold her up.

“And we were rescued, ha ha, by Lya Myn herself!” I couldn’t stop now, I was giggling madly.

“And she was
invisible
, ha ha!”

“And she used
magic
!” We shrieked with laughter.

“What are you two giggling about?” Telgeth asked us grumpily as we found the rest of our group waiting at the next intersection.

“We thought we had lost you!” called Charlie.

Lolitha managed to calm herself for a moment, and nodded seriously. “You almost did.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and that was it, we were off, cackling like mad people all the way back to the Hall.

he next day was the first of November, and with November came the rains. Two things of interest happened that month. The first was my birthday.

The day after Samhain, as promised, Fiona came to teach the class about moss. I was nursing a hangover and a decent case of post-traumatic stress and I found it difficult to concentrate on her lecture about the cultivation and life-cycle of moss. Fiona looked at Lolitha and me curiously as we struggled through the quiz she set us, but let us join the others on the couches at the back of the class to sample some White. Instead of using a pipe, Fiona had brought along a rather curious contraption she called a vapourette that heated moss to the point of releasing the active chemicals, but not to the point of combustion that actually produced smoke. She had been working on it for the Human population so they could use moss the way Nea’thi did, who could spark it with Hầұeӣ. And seeing as our interest in the moss was purely academic, it was an ideal way to try some of the different strains she had brought with her.

For the next week and a half, Fiona entertained the class with her history of the use of moss. Its psychoactive properties were realised by the Nea’thi not long after they had moved down to the Enclaves, although originally the moss was brewed with boiling water into a tea, or simply eaten. The earliest strain, or ‘wild moss’, was rudimentary. It alleviated chronic nausea, which was the primary reason the Nea’thi began to smoke it, as opposed to simply ingesting it, but it produced a rather dizzying high and left a hangover that lasted for hours. The earliest horticulturalists tried to improve on this with selective breeding, and later, with genetic tweaking with Hầұeӣ. By the time of the Leaving, six separate varieties were in cultivation, with many different strains of each ‘colour’. The newest variation, the Green, was engineered after the Leaving as Nea’thi going Outside discovered the joys – and pains – of drinking alcohol.

“What? So there’s no booze in the Enclaves?” Telgeth demanded to know.

“Oh, well, there is now. All imported from Outside, so it’s rather expensive. I suppose we didn’t really have much in the way of things to ferment, what with living Underground and all,” Fiona mused. “And we had moss to entertain ourselves while relaxing. So of course, Journeymen leaving the Enclaves for the first time have often never drunk alcohol before and tend to get a bit silly…” She grinned at the Mentors, who chuckled with her at the evident foolishness of Journeymen. “Therefore the Green was developed, so it can be smoked before drinking. It stimulates the particular metabolic processes that deal with alcohol, and it alleviates most of the more… unpleasant effects of drinking.”

In the afternoons we sampled different strains of each variety – save the Purple (“this is going to be an academic study, not an orgy!”) and the Black. Fiona had us write up experiment tables for each, noting the history of each strain: who it was developed by, and where, and
why
. Some individual strains had been in cultivation for thousands of years, and were the pride of the particular Enclave they were from, and she got us to write down their proper names in Nea’thi as well as what they were called by horticulturalists operating Outside. We had to note the different
flavours of each, and I was pretty amazed to find that there was as much variety and subtlety between each strain of moss as there was between different varietals of wine. Lastly, she required us to think carefully about the different physical and mental effects each strain produced in us. At the end of each session she would go around the group and ask us to give a little speech about our favourite out of the strains we had sampled, forcing us to think critically – which could be difficult, depending on the variety that was the subject of the day. Fiona spoke only briefly about the Black, telling us that she would be back to give us more thorough instruction when the time came for us to take it. Charlie’s story about Joey had honestly made me feel more than a bit apprehensive about when we would have to use the Black. It was highly, dangerously psychoactive, and should only be used under the closest supervision, but its use led to a whole new depth of understanding and control of one’s Hầұeӣ – in a way that even months of meditation couldn’t achieve.

The Friday of the week after Samhain was my nineteenth birthday. After our meditation in the morning, Fiona brightly wished me a happy birthday and announced that we were to spend the day on a field trip. With our Mentors in tow we left the Academy and wandered through the Quarter to Fiona’s shop. To my surprise, Anna was tending the front counter. Two of her guards were seated in the front, pretending to be customers. She gave us a brief smile as we filed in, shrugging at the unspoken question in Charlie’s upraised eyebrows.

“Just helping out a friend. It’s the least I can do.”

Though most of us had visited the shop at one point or another since arriving in Lille, Fiona took the time to point out the baskets that held the different strains of each variety, and she allowed us, using our notes, to use her grinder to make our own blends. Mine was mostly the strain called White Cloud – a sweet, fruity White that I had noted left me feeling slightly hungry, but gave me a clarity of mind that I appreciated, especially when practising some of the harder Hầұeӣ exercises. I added a pinch of White Pony, a strain that was slightly musky and spicy and gave
a wee kick of energy, and two pinches of White Silence, a strain that tasted remarkably like a good Jaelshead Riesling and did wonders for headaches. Fiona sampled a taste of my blend in her vapourette and pronounced it excellent. She added a sprinkling of White Clover – a sweet, honeyed White – ground it again, then offered me a taste, and I could see the extra sweetness and honey flavour improved my blend remarkably. She bagged up our blends for us as a reward for being “such clever Bloodkin”, led us through the door behind the counter to the back of the shop. It was a great, kitchen-like room, full of ovens and drying racks and scales. There was a door to a store cupboard that was tightly padlocked.

“That’s where I keep the Black,” Fiona told us. “Don’t even
think
about it!” I gulped, I knew the reason for the extra security and it made me decidedly uncomfortable.

She pointed out the ovens and stoves, explaining about her experiments with distilling moss into butter, and baking with it. Then she led us through another door and down a long flight of stairs into the basement. And what a basement it was.

Brightly lit with glowbes hung from the ceiling and recessed into the walls, the whole room was set up with long rows of hydroponic gear. Great pipes had been sawn in half and held water that had been pumped in from the lake and augmented with a mixture of fertilisers that Fiona had added. On top of this water, in various stages of maturity, grew the moss. Each pipe had a different strain, carefully labelled. Fiona went briefly over the life-cycle of the moss, pointing out examples of each stage. She had a strain of Blue that was ready for harvest and demonstrated how you scraped it out of the pipe in sheets and laid it out on a drying rack to mature. Then it was back upstairs to hang the rack, so air could circulate freely.

After the morning’s activities and sampling my blend, I was starving, but Fiona had anticipated this. She had us sit in the front of her shop, then brought us a selection of her baked moss-infused foods. I suspected that she was using us as kind of taste-testers for her trials, but we certainly didn’t mind. I munched my way through tiny meat pies with moss-butter pastry (not bad),
bacon and cheese pinwheels (which were actually not great, the flavour of the moss was too sweet and overpowering. I told Fiona this and she thanked me, jotting something down in a notebook she produced from a fold of her voluminous dress), a thin chocolate brownie (delicious and a distinct improvement on the last batch I had tried) and a strawberry shortcake (also delicious).

When we had finished Fiona grinned wickedly at me. “I hope you like carrot cake, Jaseth.” And she disappeared out the back of the shop, then reappeared carrying a huge, frosted cake with nineteen candles burning on the top.

Sweet Lilbecz, how embarrassing. I hadn’t had candles on a cake since I was about five. Everyone sang Happy Birthday to me as I felt myself blushing furiously, and I tried to blow out my candles without spitting on the icing too much.

When everyone had eaten a slice and declared it marvellous, Fiona trundled the plate, littered with crumbs, back to the kitchen. She then gave us a talk on pipe selection. The vapourette we had been using was a prototype, though Fiona assured us that she was securing the use of a smith to construct some for sale soon, although they would be expensive. I had assumed that choosing a pipe was all about aesthetic taste, but this was not so. The length of the mouthpiece was important – long ones gave a smoother, cleaner flavour and were aimed at the moss connoisseur, while short mouthpieces gave a more intense and complete experience, perfect for poor students with a limited moss budget. Material was also important, and the best one depended on how you lit the moss. Hard woods were good for Hầұeӣ and metals were designed for use with matches or sparklights, while glass was good for both but were easily broken by the clumsy.

It was still only early afternoon, but Fiona let us leave after that. “I hear there are some celebrations planned for this evening.” She gave Charlie a meaningful glance, but he just blandly shrugged his shoulders at my questioning look.