As the days continued, Demi desperately fought the urge to ask Aelfric to give her lessons in Fluid Alchemy. He was still convalescing, and it wasn’t as if he’d come to her farm of his own free will. He’d been carried there unconscious and bleeding out. He likely had no interest in teaching her alchemy.
She was an absolute novice and he was the Grandmaster.
And if he did want to teach her, surely he would just speak up when she was practicing in the workshop or studying from one of her books. He watched her particularly closely whenever she was doing synthesis, so it wasn’t as if the opportunity simply escaped him.
And then, one day after watching her bottle another noxious-smelling potion, he had grunted and shaken his head.
“You need to be using transmuted compound ingredients for this synthesis,” he had said, coming to sit on a stool nearby the cauldron. “And you need to change the order that you add the ingredients.” He paused. “You also need to make better use of your tools,” he said, silently eying the various pieces of equipment that lined the shelves. They had all arrived along with the workshop, when she had driven in the final nails. That had certainly been convenient, but the fallout was that she didn’t yet know what all the tools even were, let alone how they worked. But Aelfric continued. “First of all, you should measure your ingredients by weight, rather than volume,” he said, nodding toward a set of silver scales.
That’s just like baking, she thought to herself.
At the very least, she did understand how a scale worked.
She hadn’t thought of using it before because she had already gotten into the habit of thinking of Fluid Alchemy more like savory cooking than baking. Although some techniques in cooking were very precise, in the end, much of it was more free-form. With a suitable amount of skill, you could alter recipes in the midst of cooking and still come out with something marvelous.
But baking was different. Baking was chemistry. Every alteration to a recipe had a very tangible effect on the shape, feel, and consistency of the bread or cake produced. If a person fooled around too much with the recipe, or tried to substitute in different ingredients without careful consideration, it was very easy to produce a spectacular failure.
“I didn’t realize that precision was so important in Fluid Alchemy,” she ventured. “I thought developing intuitions about ingredient ratios was more important.”
He shook his head.
“You aren’t wrong,” he agreed. “You will need to develop a deep understanding of the nature of your ingredients, and this includes how they interact with other ingredients. This will inform your understanding of ingredient ratios. But for the time being, it’s more important for you to understand the logic behind standard recipes. Once you have fully grasped the reasons why a recipe is the way that it is, you will be ready to experiment with ratios and substitutions.”
Demi nodded, because that made perfect sense to her. Aelfric had explained it clearly and succinctly.
He’s a good teacher, she thought to herself.
She got the scale and moved it over to her worktable and began carefully measuring her ingredients.
As she did, he remarked, “You need a good filter to remove some of the impurities in the potion. That will also help to reduce the offensive taste and smell. The best way to get an effective filter at your level of skill is to synthesize paper. You can use either Stable Alchemy or Fluid Alchemy to do this, although Fluid Alchemy has the potential to produce an item with more relevant traits.”
He slowly talked her through the process of making paper through alchemy. There were fibers she had to pulp with the mortar and pestle, a liquid that had to be heated to the right temperature, and salamander crystal shards delicately filed into the mix. She had previously been using water for the liquid, but Aelfric suggested cutting the water with birch sap instead, so that was what she used.
In the end, after a failed attempt, she managed to make some suitable sheets of paper.
“Before you use it all in the course of your potion-making, you should duplicate it into your cyprianus,” Aelfric pointed out.
A cyprianus also acted as the high alchemist’s record of the items they had created: the ingredients, steps, and the range of traits produced, all recorded quite precisely. With a high quality cyprianus, it was possible to record information about synthesized items made by the owner simply by bringing them close to the book.
Less sophisticated books required more traditional methods of entry, namely pen and ink.
A cyprianus was really the alchemist’s version of a grimoire, and each one was unique and bound to an individual alchemist.
A rare and magical book about alchemy.
Of course Demi wanted one of her own.
But a high alchemist’s cyprianus was generally gifted to them by their alchemy master once they finished a probationary apprenticeship period.
Demi did not have an alchemy master, and she had no way to make a cyprianus of her own, regardless of her studies. If she had been in a large city and also blessed with outrageous disposable income, she might have found a high alchemist willing to make one for her.
But she was on a farm in the hinterlands of the frontier and she had been learning alchemy for less than a month.
So her answer really oughtn’t have been that surprising.
“I don’t have a cyprianus,” she said honestly.
This caused his eyebrows to draw together in a frown.
“You don’t have one?” he asked incredulously. “Not even a basic one?”
She gave a slightly uncomfortable laugh, sounding sheepish.
“Ah, no. Sorry, I don’t.”
She couldn’t have explained why she felt it was necessary to apologize to him for her lack of a cyprianus. Perhaps it was because he was the father of Fluid Alchemy.
He made a low rumbling sound in the back of his throat.
“What was your master thinking?” he said lowly, half to himself. “You can’t advance as a high alchemist without one.”
Even Demi understood that much. The cyprianus collected the knowledge and understanding of the high alchemist as they worked, and converted this into experience that translated directly into skill levels in Fluid Alchemy. Although Demi could practice Fluid Alchemy all she wanted, and improve her understanding and technique, she would never advance her level in Fluid Alchemy without a cyprianus.
None of the experience she had so far gained during the course of her alchemy practice had counted for anything. Her skill level with Fluid Alchemy had not advanced at all.
But it wasn’t as if she liked the fact that her hard-earned alchemy experience was going essentially nowhere. That was simply the circumstance that she found herself in. Demi had been interested in Fluid Alchemy from the outset, and then Tata’s illness had given her a strong incentive to practice, even now, when this practice did nothing to advance her alchemy levels. Realizing how important a cyprianus was to her continued studies, she had already inquired with Grandmeister Fairfox about getting one, and he was even now attempting to source it, but he had been frank about the fact that it would probably take a long time to acquire, given the state of things.
So she again thought it was best to be honest.
“I don’t have an alchemy master,” she admitted.
And this was apparently so surprising to Aelfric that he turned and looked at her hard.
“Explain yourself,” he directed immediately, as if he were the headmaster at a school and she was his most unruly student.
Despite the fact that they were currently standing in her atelier, in her house, on her farm, she still felt obliged to do exactly as she was told. He had that kind of effect on her.
“Ah, I’m sorry, I uh,” she mildly panicked, looking and sounding guilty. “I’ve just been studying on my own, from books.”
“For how long?” he asked, his brows still drawn together. She was not entirely sure that he believed her.
“About three weeks?” she ventured with a contrite smile. Even as she said it she got the sense that it was not an answer that he would like.
“Three weeks?!” he thundered, his volume rising inadvertently with his shock. When he saw her wince, he raised a hand in apology and got control of himself, briefly covering his face with one of his long-fingered hands. “I’m sorry,” he said shortly. “I did not mean to raise my voice. I was merely surprised.”
He lapsed into silence for several seconds, apparently thinking. In the end, he sat down at one of her worktables and made use of a nearby pen and one of the failed pieces of almost-paper.
“Here,” he said, passing the completed list to Demi. “Get me these ingredients.”
Demi tilted her head to the side slightly. “Do you need something?” she asked in concern. “I’ll try to get it for you if you do.”
His brows drew together sharply again and he said, “You are the one that needs something. You can’t be without a cyprianus. Get me the ingredients and I’ll make one for you.”
And somehow, even after all they had been through thus far: her tending his wounds, washing his battered body, their peaceful cohabitation—
They were still sleeping in the same bed. (Out of convenience.)
—Somehow, somehow, in spite of all of this, it was these simple, direct words that made her blush rosily and cover her cheeks with her hands.
After she had fully emoted her feelings on the subject, she took the list and drew both of her hands to her chest.
“Ah, yes, I’ll go get what you need,” she said, her words stumbling over one another in her shyness.
And she hastily exited the workshop, her cheeks still rosy.