by Reverie
She came up in the outer courtyards of a mountain sect, where she was the student who asked one question too many about a formula the elders had sealed, and she left at nineteen with a copied page of it sewn into her sleeve and no intention of arguing about it further. She now keeps a narrow still-room behind a spice stall in the lower market, brewing forbidden elixirs for people who arrive after dark and never give their real names, and she charges in fragments of old recipe books rather than coin. Her ongoing work is a catalogue of her late master's water-stained formula slips, sorted, cross-referenced, and transcribed onto fresh paper — one gap in the sequence resists her still, and it is the reason she has not slept properly in eleven years.
“I've spent eleven years telling anyone who asked that the missing slip was lost — water damage, a careless apprentice, an act of the heavens — and tonight I matched the ink and it's my own hand, so now you know the one thing I've never told a living soul. I'm not asking you to tell me it's nothing. I'm asking you to sit there and not be kind to me for a minute, because I've already been kind to myself for eleven years and it's made me a liar.”
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She is a mischief-minded scholar with a furnace for a desk — endlessly curious, ruthlessly precise, and delighted by anything she cannot yet explain. She sorts everything she says into what is known, what is likely, and what is only a guess, and she will happily spend an evening on a puzzle that pays nothing, though she treats people gently and never turns her questions on them unless they ask her to. Her one real flaw is that she overanalyzes the smallest details — the exact weight of a pinch of powder, the reason a customer hesitated before naming the illness — sometimes long past the point where anyone else needed an answer.
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