Pixies in the Kitchen

      A small fairy fluttered in through the open window, a handful of freshly picked mint leaves clasped between her fingers and glittering dots of light trailing from her wings. Most of the time, pixie dust was hard to make out. Set against the velvet black of a moonless night, however, it sparkled and shone like miniscule fireflies.

           “Thanks, Charlie,” I murmured, opening my palm so she could drop the mint into it.

With some of the newer folk I would have asked more questions: was every leaf picked fresh? Only from plants in the open field? From stalks at least half a foot tall? It took a while for most people to appreciate how important those details were. Take tonight, for example. There was one potion I had to brew during the new moon, and several that would be much more potent, so I had known all week I wouldn’t be getting to bed before dawn. I’d reminded the children of the Keep to let me sleep in several times, and they’d still tried to wake me twice before noon. But Charlie had been here almost as long as I had, and she knew.

           “I think that’s the last ingredient,” I continued. The soft leaves turned damp between my fingers as I broke them up, sprinkling them around my pan. The blue liquid bubbled up, catching the crumbled leaves and pulling them under with a steamy hiss.

           “How long does this one need to stew for?” Charlie flitted over to perch on the large table as she spoke, and I turned to watch her. The kitchen was empty of people, aside from the two of us, and bathed in a warm, flickering glow as the hearths’ fire danced around its logs. Aside from Charlie, the fires were the only lights in the room, and it made for a calm and gentle atmosphere.

           The kitchen was on the first floor of the Keep, set in the rear of the building so that it faced the herb gardens that filled the back field. There was a large wooden door leading outside, but it was closed and barred at this hour. A large window took up the top-half of the back wall, almost always left open so Charlie and the other pixies could come and go as they wanted. Counters lined the entire room, holding plants and spices under the window for whatever sun or moonlight they needed. Along the other three walls, the speckled marble supported other ingredients, cauldrons, pans, and utensils. Shelves jutted out in haphazard spots, holding more jars. Mops, brooms, buckets, and other cleaning supplies leaned against the counter here and there.

           “Just an hour or two. This batch of salve doesn’t need to be too strong; my Lord and his men won’t be in the western swamp long. And, the poison there isn’t very potent.”

           Charlie nodded. “Still, I’m surprised they’re going this late in the year. Even without strong poison gas and freaky swamp monsters, all that muck is going to be hard to get through. Dangerous, too.”

           I sighed, shrugging my eyebrows. Charlie was right – the western swamp didn’t have many of the dangers of a normal poison swamp. The mountain waters that ran through it carried much of the dark mana out and to the southern sea only a league away, diluting it. You could trapse through without any healing salve under your nose to purify the air, and it would take two or three days before you’d start noticing the effects of the poisonous gas that rose from it’s waters. You wouldn’t be bothered by any swamp suckers (balls of slithering tentacles with an annoying habit of grabbing you up by your ankles) or trees that weren’t as anchored as they looked.

           But, neither would you be able to tell whether the innocent-looking patch of water in front of you was just that, or whether it was hiding a six-foot deep sink of mud. In the summer, with an attentive friend and a strong rope, the worst you’d be likely to suffer was a ruined outfit. In the dead of winter, the puddle would be iced over, and you wouldn’t even give it a second glance. In the middle of fall, however, the mud took on a thick, sticky consistency that would drag a man under before you could manage to pull him free.

           “I guess they have to go,” I said finally. “Tarint’s been holding out against the ogres for two weeks now; they need reinforcements. If our Lord doesn’t help them, it’s unlikely anyone else will.”

           Charlie made a face, then spat on the floor. I glared at her. Pixies weren’t nearly as well-mannered as you’d expect for a race that was three-inches tall and sparkly. At a wave of my hand, the mop sped over to start cleaning the floor, it’s tall handle almost knocking Charlie off the table.

           “Hey!”

           I snickered as she righted herself. “Then don’t make a mess in my kitchen.” Turning back to the simmering pan behind me, I gave it a few stirs and sniffed it. “Hmm. Somethings off – maybe more salt.” I took a clean spoon and smacked it against the large salt crystal sat in the window, knocking off a few small chunks that I plopped into the mixture. “That’s better.” I covered the healing salve, leaving it to reduce down as I moved to check on my other pans and cauldrons.

           “Which ones this one again?” I asked, grabbing the large wooden spoon that sat in the kitchen’s largest cauldron. The cauldron was made of four feet tall solid iron, sat above a firepit dug into the room’s brick floor, and was currently full of some light-pink mixture that was probably a lot thicker than it should be. It took a lot of strength just to push the spoon around the rim once.

           Charlie flew over, looking down into the cauldron and being careful not to get any of her dust in it. Pixie dust changes the effects of a good many potions. Fortunately, this was one we didn’t have to worry about. “Algaecide,” she said. “For the pond.”

           I nodded. Despite the cold, a good amount of algae covered the sides and bottom of the large pond decorating the front yard of the Keep. It clung to anything that touched it, and several of the frogs had complained that it was making settling into the mud for the winter difficult.

           “Is it too thick?” I asked her, trying to push the spoon through it again.

           Charlie considered, tilting her head from side to side. “I don’t think so. I mean – its consistency won’t affect the barley straw, and you’re going to dump it into a bunch of water anyways.”

           I nodded. “Good point. I think it’s ready, then. We’ll just leave it here until morning, and have Marcus and Tom take it out to the pond.” Marcus and Tom were two of the stable boys who helped around the kitchen. Marcus was half-troll, and Tom was built like a blacksmith, so they would be well up to the task.

           Both of the other two cauldrons needed a bit of attention; the invisibility spell – the potion I could only brew tonight – needed the flames turned down, and the sleep aid needed more lavender. I was brewing both for my Lady. The latter because her hip ached worse in the cold months, and the former because my Lord sometimes forbade her from coming on dangerous trips with him and she needed a way to be sure he wouldn’t find out. I didn’t worry about my Lady’s safety on such outings. She was a better swordsman even than my Lord, and not bad with a bow. But my Lord was infamous for his mischievous brand of revenge, so we were all wary of getting on his bad side. Luckily for me, I’d never once seen my Lord up between midnight and dawn, so brewing the potion was a lot less risky than using it.

           Turning down the flames was as simple as waving my hand at them, but as I crushed a dried lavender stem into the sleep aid, I accidentally knocked the jar off its shelf.

           “Careful!” Charlie scolded, zipping in to grab it before it could shatter against the floor.

           “Sorry.” I quickly took the jar from her, worried it would prove too heavy for her to keep afloat.

           “Seriously, Naomi, you’re the clumsiest witch I know.” Relieved of her burden, Charlie rose back to eye-level with her hands on her hips. “I don’t know how you manage to avoid accidentally poisoning us every time you brew something.”

           I rolled my eyes at her. “I’m not that bad.” Taking a rag, I busied myself with wiping down the counter. “Will you check on the pans for me? The two on the big stove are WakeMeUps, and the one on the smaller stove is a healing potion.” The healing potion was one of the ones that would be much more potent if brewed during the new moon. Whereas a salve had more restorative effects and was applied to the skin to be absorbed, a healing potion was a liquid meant to be ingested. They were difficult to make, needing rare ingredients and complicated steps, but they could mend anything from a broken bone to a fatal bleed if they were brewed strong enough. Out of everything I was making tonight, the healing potion was by far the most important. If my Lord or his men found the ogres to be more of a match than expected, they would need as much healing as they could get.

           Charlie nodded at me and flew over to check the pans. I started pulling the next ingredients we would need off the shelves.

           “The WakeMeUps are fine,” she said, holding a ladle that was twice as long as she was. “Bit too much chocolate, though.”

           I rolled my eyes again, though she couldn’t see. I was pretty sure that Charlie was only a few years older than I was, but pixies age weird, and she’d never stopped treating me like a child. When I’d first come to the Keep, barely five years old and seriously lacking in my knowledge of witchery, that’d been fine. Fifteen years later, it was getting a bit old.

           “Molly said to add chocolate to taste,” I reminded her, referring to our old mentor. A witch of at least two hundred, Molly had retired a year ago, though she popped in now and again to check on us. “And my Lady likes it strong.”

           The pixie huffed, but didn’t say anything more about it.

           “This one’s not right,” she said, moving over to the healing potion. My stomach clenched at the words.

           “What’s wrong with it?” I left the ingredients half-prepared, hurrying over to the small stove set kitty-corner to the outside door. Being so close to the exit, any potion on the stove sometimes got too much wind or not enough heat. But, it had the advantage of being blocked from most of the kitchen’s light by the large cupboard beside it. Light, like temperature, could impact how well a potion brewed.

           “I’m not sure.” Charlie’s voice was concerned as she moved aside for me. “It’s too green; it should be almost entirely yellow by now.”

           I took up a clean spoon, stirring the mixture gently as it bubbled. “It smells fine,” I said, inhaling the clover-and-cinnamon wafts. “And the temperature is right. Does it look off, aside from the color?” Pixies have better eyesight in the dark than humans, and I often relied on Charlie to tell me when the colors or textures of something looked wrong. Especially on nights like tonight, when there was little light for me to see by.

           “Um,” she lowered herself down gently, peering into the liquid. “It isn’t as smooth as it should be. Too viscous.”

           I bit my lip as I considered. What could it be? I ran and re-ran through the steps we’d taken, making sure we’d done them in the right order at the right time.

           “Everything was picked fresh yesterday, except what needed to be dried or frozen.” Charlie’s voice was full of anxiety. If we couldn’t fix whatever was wrong with the healing potion, my Lord’s mission would become a lot more dangerous. We had neither the ingredients nor the time to start over.

           “Did you take the cinnamon from the jar marked ‘north’?” I asked. That was the batch that had been grown in one of the covered gardens – as little sun as possible during the day, as much moonlight as possible during the night.

           “Of course I did! I’m not an idiot. Did you make sure the clover was the one we grew inside?”

           “I’m not an idiot, either,” I scolded. “I don’t use ingredients that might be tainted by the blackbees.” Blackbees, a species of bumblebee native to our little peninsula, had a tendency to carry specks of acid on them from the insides of the dying trees they preferred to build hives in. It was a small enough amount that it normally wouldn’t matter, but we always grew a few pots of the vital herbs inside for the more finicky brews.

           Thinking of the blackbees gave me another thought, and I set the spoon down with a click.

           “Which honey did you grab?”

           Charlie froze, dropping onto the counter as her wings stopped fluttering.

           “Fuck.” If Charlie had used the wrong type of honey, it wouldn’t dissolve right as it boiled. That would explain the more viscous texture.

“Which kind did you use?” I hissed, and she flinched at the anger in my voice.

           “It’s right here,” she stepped over to a small jar tucked into the corner. “The orange one, right?”

           “Orange – yes.” I picked up the jar, reading the label with a sigh. “Unaged – no.” One of the ingredients that made healing potions difficult to make was the honey it required, which needed to be aged for a number of years so the needed level of crystallization could occur.

           Charlie sputtered, her wings whacking my nose as she flew up to read the label. “It says five! Five –”

           “Months, Charlie. We needed five years.”

           The two of us were silent for a moment, considering our options.

           “What should we do?” she asked, voice a small whine.

           I considered. “Well, we can add some of the right kind of honey, for the crystals.” I grabbed up several tiny orange jars, looking for the right one. Charlie found a small spoon from somewhere.

           “Here,” she proffered it to me as I unscrewed the top of the correct jar. Carefully, we measured out two spoonful’s. Only the sounds of the flames cracking in the hearth and the quiet gurgle of simmering liquids filled the room as we waited, breath held.

           Please, please, please, I thought to myself, crossing my fingers at my side. No – that doesn’t really work, even for witches. But we needed all the luck we could get, and I would take superstitions over nothing.

           ”It’s getting more yellow!”

           I let out half a breath at Charlie’s words, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. If it didn’t reduce down right, it might not stay liquid as it cooled. Minutes ticked by as we stirred and watched. I couldn’t sense even the slightest shift in it’s consistency.

           “What can we add?” I asked. “What will break up the honey without ruining the crystals?” We would need a particularly gentle ingredient, and one compatible with everything else in the potion.

           “Newt tears?” Charlie asked. “That would do it. It’ll dampen the healing impacts a bit, but…”

           “It might be the best chance we have,” I finished, grabbing up the vial of newt tears and pulling out the stopper. Charlie took the vial, slowly tipping it until three drops fell out and burst against the surface of the potion. I picked up the larger spoon again.

           “It’s working!” We both let out sighs of relief. “How much weaker will the healing effects be?”

           “I’m not sure. Newt tears are a bit poisonous. But – I don’t know what we could do to counteract that.”

           I ran the hand not holding the spoon through my hair. What could we do? I turned, eyes searching the room for any inspiration that the kitchen shelves might hold. I passed over shelf after shelf, then stopped.

           Charlie.

           “What?” she asked, catching sight of the look on my face. I grinned. “Naomi, what are you thinking? What are you – he--!” my hand closed around her tiny frame, muffling her protests as I held her unceremoniously over the pan and shook her. Pixie dust puffed off her, falling down to glitter in the now completely yellow liquid.

           Pixie dust neutralized poisons.

           “All better.”