The Book of Potions

In the harbor town of Liminey there is a little shop called the Wheel and Well, where honest alchemy is poured over the counter: headache relief for dockhands, cramp cures for washerwomen, a hangover draught for anyone who needs one. Gemma Sacande has served there for three years, and she is good at the work, good enough to steady her own shaking hands with a sip of the shop's own medicine. Too many sips, lately. Her nights belong to the pub, her mornings to regret, her sister Elvis has run out of patience, and her master, Celeste, has promised to turn her out.

Then a stranger's threat hangs over the shop, and the threat turns to fire. In one afternoon the Wheel and Well is blasted to its foundations, and Gemma, late as usual, the only reason she is alive, loses Elvis, her husband Cotter, and the baby in a single roar.

Grief should have ended her story. Instead it opens it.

A scholar named Hamiltion takes the broken brewer under his roof and carries her, with gentle Himes and a sharp-eyed scout called Morgan, toward Craestor University. There, in a locked office, sits the oldest book in the world: the Facerum, the Book of Potions itself, a guild text a thousand years old, full of weights and measures and standards, and of creation myths from a time when trees could still speak. Gemma wants what any brewer wants, a license, a bench, a life in the craft, and the university's entrance test is the door.

But in the south, the art she loves is becoming a crime. Regent Bryn Beynon of Daitak calls potions barbaric and strangles them with law, while an empress sits caged beside him in a marriage she already dreads. His answer blooms underground anyway: the Celare, who brew in hidden cellar wells, mark their stills with the eye of their god Daepkarra, and promise no one will stop them from the brewing. Knives flash at the gates. And in Craestor itself, a mislabeled bottle burns a student nearly to death in Master Leon's laboratory, and the board that judges him may decide that brewing itself belongs in a darker alley.

Gemma sits the test with nothing but her sister's kitchen discipline and three years of counter work, and misses by eleven points. Ready to walk away from Craestor, from the faith, from everything, she is chased down in the rain by her own guardian, waving an acceptance letter: a seat has opened, and the crown will pay her tuition. Because the crown is thinking again. Regent john has spent a year trying to write one law for the licensed cook who raised half his street and the bucket-brewed poison that killed his mother's cousin, and the university's old book hands him the answer at last. License the brewer. Test the draught. Hang the felony on the seller who skips the paper, never on the craft.

A warm, wry low fantasy of an ensemble cast: a girl learning that her hands were steady all along, a found family raised from grief, a courtship blessed at a stone altar, an empress measuring the rest of her life, and the quietly radical idea that ordinary work, done honestly and in the open, is its own honor.