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Tiva’s meal up to her mouth just short of hurling it altogether.
    Henumil paused in his tirade. “What’s the matter, girl? Did your food go down wrong?”
    The fleeting concern in his eyes made tears swell in hers.
    Tiva gasped. “I’ll be fine, Father, But may I please be excused?”
    “Certainly, dear.”
    She raced from the room, then outside into the field behind the house, gulping droughts of the night air as she ran. Only when she made it behind the first row of wheat stalks did Tiva drop to her knees and retch.
     

Y
    argat spoke to Tiva all the time now, as if he was a completely different person. It frightened yet elated her, especially when he talked to her as if she was a grown-up or something—telling her complicated secrets and stuff. He even explained to her about the Guild—how it helped the mages of Seti with new science and medicine. That made the Guild good, didn’t it?
    Yargat even sounded like a mage himself ; rambling mostly about new discoveries on how the human body made its own natural elixirs, which controlled her behavior, and his reactions to it. He told Tiva that her body made elixirs whether she wanted it to or not. He seemed especially interested in that; though he never made it clear exactly what her bodily elixirs and humors—another word he used—actually made her do to entice him so much. She wasn’t even sure always what the act of “enticing” was, or how she did it. Maybe it wasn’t as much what she did as what she was.
    Yargat confirmed her suspicion one morning when he told her that she could not stop enticing any more than a flower could stop having a sweet scent. At first , she smiled after he said this—like he was saying something nice about her—until she remembered the red and pink meadow flowers that looked like horrible open sores. Tiva detested flowers, but she had to admit that they couldn’t help smelling sickly sweet. It at least made her feel better that, whatever “enticing” was, she couldn’t help doing it.
    One morning Yargat even told her that it was possible for mages to make the elixirs outside of the human body and use them to fix people who were always afraid or always sad. This gave Tiva a wild hope that maybe they could make an elixir that would fix her so she didn’t entice so much. She was tired of enticing—it always seemed so slimy and worthless. Many mornings she physically hurt after counseling with her brother at the Shrine.
    Nevertheless, she listened hard to everything Yargat told her about the elixirs. Maybe this new knowledge would even make it worth the times she hurt after morning Shrine. It slowly dawned on Tiva that if elixirs controlled how people behaved, then who ever could control the elixirs could control people. This epiphany flamed her hope to an all-consuming passion. It also quietly terrified her in ways she could not understand.
    One morning, about seven months after Yargat started talking to her ; Tiva woke up from a nightmare she could not remember, except that it ended with shadows whispering horrible things to her.
    The Dream-shadow s said, “Hope with terror; hope from terror; hope is terror… Isn’t hope always just another terror in disguise?” She shook it off as nonsense—nightmare nonsense—but the idea would not go away.
    After all, Yargat knew about the magic and he only spoke of it to her , which meant that she too might eventually get the special knowledge he had learned at Sa-utar if she was patient and did everything he told her. Someday they might even make elixirs of their own. Tiva imagined using one on Father to keep him from being angry so much of the time.
    This hope grew—until the day that Tiva heard about the “Girl’s Elixir” the sages started giving to certain girls at their local academy.
    Her friend Tsulia had fallen behind in her studies , and gotten all weepy for weeks on end. She even lost interest in playing with Tiva and Weri. Tsuli’s instructors quietly took her to a