“I’m going to be Tarazed’s escort while he’s in Menkar,” Ascella continued.
Izar’s dessert fork paused mid-air. “His escort?”
“Yes. His personal escort. I’ll show him all the sights the city has to offer.”
“Is it usual for a curator to serve as an escort to an artist?”
“It’s not, but the relationship with Tarazed is an important one for Abstract, given his artistic status.”
“I see.”
“I’ve admired his work for so long,” she said dreamily. “I’ve been counting the days to his visit.”
Though Ascella worked at an art gallery, Izar had never been to an art gallery. In his field of invention and engineering, precision was key—every bolt mattered, and a single misplaced screw or nail could ruin the whole. In abstract art, in contrast, there were no standards of value that he could discern; the concept of value itself seemed subverted, for the most absurd pieces seemed to fetch the most absurd prices.
Izar’s world and Ascella’s were entirely different, and they would never have intersected if not for Saiph. Saiph had met Ascella while requisitioning a Tarazed art piece for his office. The next day, he had introduced Izar and Ascella at a cocktail party he’d organized at a bar. Izar hadn’t known how Saiph had guessed Izar would be infatuated with Ascella immediately, but he had known it, and Izar had been. Izar still remembered how Ascella had looked that night, a year ago, her hair lustrous, her nose pert, her neck long and smooth. An ivory dress had caressed her long curves and an ivory purse had dangled at her elbow, as she’d sipped a cloudy drink. She’d been surrounded by men, but she’d also stood apart from them, as conspicuous in their midst as a gazelle among rhinoceroses.
The scar along the left side of Izar’s jaw had, for the first time, prickled with self-consciousness. He’d hoped she wouldn’t notice it, but her eyes had traced its hook-shaped line from his earlobe almost to his lip. She’d frowned at it, as at chipped nail varnish. It was not just the physical mark of the scar that had given her pause, Izar thought, but the fact that it hinted at harshly different upbringings. Yes, Izar had been adopted by Antares, a wealthy businessman, but his biological father had been an impoverished fisherman; Ascella, meanwhile, was the daughter of a billionaire real estate tycoon.
A lanky waiter bowed obsequiously before refilling their glasses with the thousand-dollar vintage red wine they’d ordered. Upon his departure, Izar grasped the stem of his glass close to the base and swirled the wine just as his etiquette consultant had taught him to do, bringing his nose close for a whiff. The wine smelled a little like his old sneakers, but, smothering the thought, he took a sip.
“Happy twenty-seventh birthday, my love,” he said, putting his wineglass down. He extended Ascella a black velvet box across the eggshell tablecloth.
She opened it. Even from across the table, Izar could see the bracelet’s rose-cut and princess-cut diamonds flashing thousands of shards of brilliance across the restaurant, across the smile crescenting her face, across her shoulders, which glowed just a shade fairer than snow, and across her eyes, which sparkled like frost melting in the spring sun. She extended him her hand, and their fingers intertwined over the tablecloth.
But it was ironic, he thought for the first time: Jewelry was the most expensive thing in the world, yet it was also the least functional thing in the world. Now that he thought about it, jewelry posed, for him, a similar contradiction as abstract art, with its dichotomy between price and value.
“Ascella,” he said softly, leaning forward, “I’ve invented underwater fire.”
She sat back and stared at him, her eyes cooling. “You can’t have,” she said. “Underwater fire is impossible, a fantasy.”
Izar neutralized his expression so that she would not learn how deeply her words hurt him. He looked at the candle flame at the center of the table, at how delicately it flickered. At one point in the history of humanity, even this miniature flame would have been considered a miracle.
Avoiding her eyes, he clasped the bracelet over her wrist. Beaming at it as at a friend, she tilted her wrist this way and that, and the diamonds shimmered even more brightly.
He would prove his breakthrough to her soon enough, Izar told himself. After all, the thirty-thousand-dollar diamond bracelet he’d just given her formed a paltry substitute for what he truly wished to give her: a ring that would make other rings look like gaudy trinkets, a ring of the sort to which no other woman could lay claim, a ring that would be mined by Castor from the depths of the ocean and fashioned by Izar’s own hands in his Invention Chamber—a ring that would glitter like a constellation of stars upon her finger.
4
Intellect and Intuition
Coralline dawdled outside the door of The Irregular Remedy. She saw red from the corner of her eye and turned toward it. Rosette Delesse stood staring at her from the remedial garden of The Conventional Cure. There were no flasks or snippers in her hands—it seemed to have been the sight of Coralline that had drawn her out among the algae. She stared at Coralline’s rose petal tellin as though a magic spell could rip it off and transfer it to her own throat. Closing her hand over the shell, Coralline hurried through the door of The Irregular Remedy.
Coralline knew Rhodomela was waiting for her in the back office, but Coralline was alone in The Irregular Remedy only rarely, and she looked about the small space with the hunger of a trespasser. Her gaze caressed the shale walls, the low ceiling, the two counters crisscrossed by scratches, the narrow stretcher, and her beloved unit of shelves, stacked with white-gray limestone urns. How little the sight of the urns meant to a passerby, but how much it meant to her, the contents of each prepared painstakingly by her own hand.
She lingered before an article in a scuffed sandstone frame close to the door. Its ink was faded, as was the portrait accompanying it, but Coralline recognized Rhodomela by the hooked angle of her nose. Her cheeks had been full then, and there’d been a softness about her eyes that had alluded to an ephemeral beauty. Titled “A Young Master,” the article from The Annals of the Association of Apothecaries stated that Rhodomela was the youngest person in the whole nation of Meristem to ever have achieved the title of master apothecary, at a mere twenty-five years of age.
Five rungs defined a typical healer’s path: apprentice, associate, senior, manager, then, only for some, the coveted title of master. The Association of Apothecaries typically awarded the title of master not on the basis of experience but of invention: A healer had to devise a novel, life-saving medication to attain the title. Rhodomela had invented a solution called Black Poison Cleanser, which had propelled her in rank from associate to master apothecary, skipping the two rungs in between.
Rhodomela had founded The Irregular Remedy within a week of attaining her new title. Most healers started practices at a respectable distance from other clinics, in order to reduce competition, but Rhodomela had started The Irregular Remedy next door to The Conventional Cure, which had always rejected her on account of her nontraditional techniques. Though Rhodomela was just one person, and healers at The Conventional Cure numbered half a dozen on a typical day, The Irregular Remedy had, over its twenty-five years of existence, slowly but steadily supplanted The Conventional Cure to become the best regarded clinic in Urchin Grove, the place where the most confounding medical cases were solved.