Alpennia: Teasers for The Mystic Marriage (ch 7)

It wasn't only boredom that drew Jeanne down to the near-squalid south-bank street where Antuniet had set up her alchemical laboratory. There was something about Antuniet...her intensity, the passion in her eyes when she could be coaxed into describing her experiments. She made the world seem fresh and new. And what of the ancient book that was the seed of her work? How had it come into her hands? At the question, Antuniet seemed almost embarrassed.

* * *

“My old nurse…you know those silly fortune-telling mysteries that girls play at floodtide? The ones for predicting your true love or your future husband?”

“Mmm-hmm?” Jeanne encouraged. It had been a long time since she’d been young enough and silly enough to take anything of the sort seriously.

“My old nurse knew one that—well, let’s say that it worked better than a lucky guess. You brought everyone together in a circle around the fire and wrote everyone’s name on a slip of paper. There was a great deal of fuss with symbols and herbs, wax from the altar and water from a sacred well. Not all of it seems to matter. But you folded it up in a billet and threw the contents in the fire and if that person’s true love were present, the sparks and smoke would pick him out.”

“And your true love was a book?” Jeanne asked.

Antuniet laughed despite herself. When she laughed she became another person entirely.