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“signature” base for her potions, and each worked her magic in different ways, you could oftenidentify one of them merely by the scent of her room. Not necessarily the potions themselves, because by the time you got done concocting, the potion was often odorless and tasteless, but definitely the scent of the room.
    In Lily’s case, the main note was the cool sweetness of April Lilies. Beneath that was mint, just enough to keep the lily scent from being cloying; lavender to cut it further; and a hint of Elflock, which only grew in the Fae realms. Most of her potions used that formula for a base. For Lily, the scent was always that of home, her own comfortable and secure castle.
    She stepped inside the room, which was actually two rooms divided by a wall, both heavily warded and shielded against interference of any kind, and against what went on within them. Neither room had windows, and both were lit by an enchantment on the ceiling itself. The Potions Room looked like the still-room in any noble house, save only that there was a great deal more of the apparatus than was ever in such a room—glass vessels, small ovens, crucibles, alembics, beakers, glass pipes, funnels, little charcoal braziers over which a single item could be simmered…. Walls and floor were stone, impervious to just about anything that could end up tossed against them. Sometimes there were accidents; a bit of miscalculation, and the next thing you knew, you were looking for a broom. Sometimes…well, sometimes Lily’s temper got the better of her, and when things had gone wrong repeatedly, as they sometimes did…a broom was definitely in order.
    The other room, entered through a door in the Potions room, was also stone-walled and stone-floored, and completely bare, except for the three magical circles inlaid in the floor. The outer one was gold, the middle, silver, the innermost one, electrum. They were not complete; there were bridge-pieces that could be placed in the empty groove in the floor to complete and seal them. This was a great dealmore certain than drawing your circles out in chalk and hoping you didn’t scuff them—because there could be something you would contain in there that you really would not want to get out. Or something outside the circles that you really did not want to get in. Lily had not been in either case very often—only a handful of times in three hundred years—but those times had been more than enough to cause her to be happy for such sturdy precautions.
    In the right corner was a mannequin, in the left was a cupboard that contained the items Lily needed for spell-casting, and that was all that was in this room.
    Now a sleeping potion was one of the easiest to concoct. It was also one of the most common. Virtually any common village witch could make one, and make a good one. There were perfectly good reasons to administer one to someone, if they were unable to sleep.
    Of course, that was usually not why someone wanted one. Spouses wanted to be able to sneak out on their mates. Thieves wanted to make their jobs easier. Courtesans wanted to render their customers unconscious to rob them. The list of good reasons was shorter than the list of bad ones, so most of the trade in such things was confined to the…less than scrupulous. Nevertheless, it was something that was in Lily’s arsenal, too.
    Be that as it may, it was not a sleeping potion, as such, that was wanted here, not this time. At this point, it looked as if the easiest path to manage was the Snowskin Path, rather than the Beauty Sleeping Path. Therefore, what she needed was a potion to simulate death. And that was a far, far more difficult thing to manage.
    In the Snowskin tale, the heroine was rendered insensible by a poison of some sort, and it was only the intervention of The Tradition that kept it from actually being fatal. It took a lot of magic to do that, more magic than even Lily had at her disposal. So she was going to have to simulate what was