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the place.
    While she did so, Annaïg wandered around the shelves, too, studying their contents. She knew she didn’t have everything she needed. It was like cooking; there was one more taste needed to pull everything together. She just didn’t have any idea what it was.
    Hecua’s place was huge. It had once been the local Mages’ Guild hall, and there were still three or four doddering practitioners who were in and out of the rooms upstairs. Hecua honored their memberships, even though there was no such organization as the Mages’ Guild anymore. No one much cared; the An-Xileel didn’t care, and neither the College of Whispers nor the Synod—the two Imperially recognized institutions of magic—had representatives in Lilmoth, so they hadn’t anything to say about it either.
    She opened bottles and sniffed the powders, distillations, and essences, but nothing spoke to her. Nothing, that is, until she lifted a small, fat bottle wrapped tightly in black paper. Touching it sent a faint tingle traveling up her arm, across her clavicle, and up into the back of her throat.
    “What is it?” Hecua asked, and Annaïg realized her gasp must have been audible.
    She held the container up.
    The old woman came and peered down her nose at it.
    “Oh, that,” she said. “I’m really not sure, to tell you the truth. It’s been there for ages.”
    “I’ve never seen it before.”
    “I pulled it from the back, while I was dusting.”
    “And you don’t know what it is?”
    She shrugged. “A fellow came in here years ago, a few months after the Oblivion crisis. He was sick with something and needed some things, but he didn’t have money to pay. But he had that. He claimed he’d taken it from a fortress in Oblivion itself. There was a lot of that back then; we had a big influx of daedra hearts and void salts and the like.”
    “But he didn’t say what it was?”
    She shook her head. “I felt sorry for him, that’s all. I imagine it’s not much of anything.”
    “And you never opened it to find out?”
    Hecua paused. “Well, no, you can see the paper is intact.”
    “May I?”
    “I don’t see why not.”
    Annaïg broke the paper with her thumbnail, revealing the stopper beneath. It was tight, but a good twist brought it out.
    The feeling in the back of her throat intensified and became a taste, a smell, bright as sunlight but cold, like eucalyptus or mint.
    “That’s it,” she said, as she felt it all meld together.
    “What? You know what it is?”
    “No. But I want some.”
    “Annaïg—”
    “I’ll be careful, Aunt Hec. I’ll run some virtue tests on it.”
    “Those tests aren’t well proven yet. They miss things.”
    “I’ll be careful, I said.”
    “Hmf,”
the old woman replied dubiously.

    The house, as usual, was empty, so she went to the small attic room where she had all of her alchemical gear and went to work. She did the virtue tests and found the primary virtue was restorative and the secondary was—more promisingly—one of alteration. The tertiary and quaternary virtues didn’t reveal themselves even so vaguely.
    But she knew, knew right to her bones, that this was right. And so she passed hours with her calcinator, and in the end she was turning a flask containing a pale amber fluid that bent light oddly, as if it were a half a mile of liquid instead of a few inches.
    “Well,” she said, sniffing it. Then she sighed. It felt right, smelled right—but Hecua’s warning was not to be taken lightly. This could be poison as easily as anything. Maybe if she just tasted a little …
    At that moment she heard a sound on the stairs. She stayed still, listening for it to repeat itself.
    “Annaïg?”
    She sighed in relief. It was only her father. She remembered he had been bringing food home, and a glance out her small window proved it was near dinnertime.
    “Coming, Taig,” she called, corking the potion and stuffing it in her right skirt pocket. She started up, then paused.
    Where was