The Taste of Copper

Caustic quicklime does not care about your skin. It only cares about water.

The fine white powder from the saboteurs' sacks had settled across my collarbone, the hollow of my throat, and the raw skin of my forearms during the struggle at the grain flue. Mixed with my sweat, the calcium oxide had already begun to slake. It boiled against my flesh in tiny, invisible blisters, turning the moisture of my pores into corrosive alkaline heat.

If I poured cold water over it, the hydration reaction would spike. The lime would cook the meat right off my collarbone before I could wash it down the drain.

I kicked the heavy oak door of my wash-alcove shut with my heel.

The small stone chamber sat tucked behind the primary mash tun, reeking of damp stone, lye soap, and old copper. On the wooden shelf above the slate basin sat my bench-tinctures: high-proof alcohol, willow-bark extract, sulfur salves, and three flagons of raw, unpasteurized cider vinegar.

Acid halts base. It is the first rule of the boiling floor.

I tore the sweat-soaked collar of my linen tunic down to my ribs. The cloth stuck to the red, weeping rash blooming across my chest. I didn't wince. Pain in Hrafnsker is just another measurement of temperature, and right now my skin was sitting at a lethal one hundred and forty degrees.

I grabbed the stone flagon of vinegar with both hands. I soaked a clean rag in the sour, pungent liquid, gripped the edges, and pressed it directly against the center of my throat.

A hiss rose from the fabric. The sting went straight to my molars. It felt like someone had laid a red-hot branding iron across my jugular and leaned their full weight on the handle.

My teeth clicked together. I forced my lungs to draw air through my nose, slow and steady, counting the seconds against the pulse hammering in my temples. One. Two. Three. Four.

The alkaline heat began to break. The acetic acid neutralized the slaking lime, turning the searing burn into a dull, throb of raw flesh.

I dragged the soaked rag down across the ridge of my collarbone, scouring away the white crust before it could burrow into the deeper tissue. My hands shook, but only from the adrenaline. Master brewers who shake because of pain do not keep their fingers long enough to earn a copper spanner.

A master brewer who works in Hrafnsker simply learns to enjoy the vinegar.

I dropped the rag into the slate basin, reached for a jar of sheep-tallow balm, and paused.

The scent of the vinegar mixing with the bitter residue of powdered lime in the enclosed stone room carried an unmistakable undertone: sharp, acidic, metallic, and hot.

It was the exact smell of Hrokkr's high conservatory five years ago.

·  ·  ·

I was fifteen, and Vargun was twenty-three.

Back then, the old monster kept his private botanical stock locked in the iron-ribbed glass pavilion perched atop the western ramparts. The compound's regular garden grew cabbage, leeks, and bitter winter greens to feed the garrison. But the high conservatory grew the patriarch's poisons: black nightshade, weeping hemlock, and three terra-cotta pans of crimson krov-root fungus.

Without the spore-dust scraped from dried krov-root, the primary metabolic mash could not convert complex maltose into the stabilizing compound that kept Hrokkr's altered garrison from tearing their own jaws off.

Hrokkr kept the only key on a chain around his neck. Anyone caught within ten paces of the conservatory door after dusk was stripped, flogged, and thrown into the lower oubliette until their joints froze.

Vargun had come for me at midnight.

He didn't knock on the door of my apprentice cot. He simply kicked the latch open with an iron-toed boot, grabbed my braid in his fist, and dragged me out into the freezing draft of the gallery. He wore no armor, only a stained leather gambeson and two bone-handled gutting knives strapped to his thighs. His eyes were wide, dilated by the early stages of metabolic hunger, burning with the feral edge that always made the garrison guards step back into the shadows.

"Up," he had whispered, his hot breath smelling of raw mutton and dried thyme. "The old man is passed out drunk on spiced hydromel. His watch-dogs are sleeping at the gate."

"If he catches us, he'll hang me from the well-crane," I said, stumbling against his shoulder as he hauled me up the spiral stairs.

"If we don't get the crimson mold, your mash stalls tomorrow noon," he answered, his fingers biting into my biceps through the rough wool of my tunic. "And if the mash stalls, I will tear this garrison apart with my bare teeth. You first, little brewer."

He picked the padlock of the glass pavilion with the tip of a rusted bodkin in less than ten seconds.

The interior of the conservatory hit us like a swamp. Humid, suffocating heat radiated from charcoal flues buried under the slate floor. The air was thick with the reek of damp loam, decaying moss, and the sulfurous bite of forced fungal growth.

"Find it," Vargun muttered, shutting the iron-framed door behind us until the latch clicked. "Five minutes before the guard-relief crosses the wall."

"It has no leaves," I told him, dropping to my knees on the wet flagstones between two rows of earthenware pots. "It grows in the dark beneath the lower benches. If you break the skin of a live cap before it dries, the airborne spore will paralyze your diaphragm in thirty seconds."

"Then don't break the skin."

He stood over me in the darkness, a looming shadow against the frosted glass of the roof. Outside, torchlight flickered along the parapet walk. Booted footsteps echoed against the stone—two guards on rounds, their heavy halberds scraping the granite.

Vargun dropped down beside me in the narrow gangway between the planter boxes.

He was so close his chest pressed against my shoulder. The heat coming off him was immense, a roaring furnace fueled by the accelerated metabolism Hrokkr had carved into his blood. I could hear the rapid, heavy thud of his pulse in the hollow of his neck.

I reached under the damp timber staging, my bare fingers searching through the rotting peat. My nails struck cold terra-cotta.

I felt the velvety, bulbous surface of the fungus. Three mature caps, swollen with dark crimson spore-veins, smelling of rusted iron and sour wine.

"I have them," I whispered.

I slid my bone knife under the roots, prying the first cap free without puncturing the delicate membrane.

Above us, the iron latch of the conservatory door rattled.

A guard was testing the handle from the outer parapet.

Vargun didn't reach for his knives. Instead, he grabbed my shoulders, spun me around in the mud, and slammed my back flat against the iron framing of the planter box.

His body pinned mine to the cold metal. The sheer weight of him drove the air from my chest. One of his heavy, calloused hands clamped over my mouth, suffocating any gasp before it could leave my lips.

His face was an inch from mine. Through the humid dark, his pale gray eyes were wide, feral, and utterly fixed on my face.

The guard outside rattled the latch a second time, cursed under his breath, and kicked the iron kick-plate. The glass panes above us shuddered.

Vargun didn't look toward the door. He didn't look toward the window. He stared down into my eyes, his chest rising and falling in violent, ragged strokes against my ribs. His thumb pressed hard into the corner of my jaw, forcing my head back against the iron rim.

I didn't cower. I gripped the wooden handle of my bone knife in my right hand and pressed the blunt pommel directly against his ribs, right over his spleen. If he made a sound, I would shove it between his ribs.

His breath caught. His mouth twitched into a vicious, silent line.

The footsteps outside finally moved away, fading down the wet flagstones toward the western battery.

The silence that followed was louder than the boots.

Vargun removed his hand from my mouth. He didn't pull back. His knuckles slid down the side of my throat, tracing the rapid beat of my pulse with deliberate, possessive pressure.

"You didn't scream," he murmured, his voice a low vibration against my jaw.

"I'm not stupid," I whispered, my teeth bared. "Get off me, Vargun. The caps will bruise."

"You belong in the dark, Thjora," he said, his eyes darkening to slate. "You smell like copper and yeast. You smell like my survival."

Before I could bring the knife up between us, he grabbed my jaw in his hand, tilted my face up, and smashed his mouth down onto mine.

It wasn't gentle. There was no softness in Hrafnsker, and there was no tenderness in the patriarch's bastard son. It was a collision of teeth, pressure, and raw hunger. His mouth tasted of salt, iron, and the bitter sulfur of the greenhouse. His tongue forced past my parted lips, claiming the inside of my mouth with the same ruthless certainty he used to take weapons from dead men.

I didn't yield. I bit his lower lip hard enough to draw blood.

He let out a low, sharp sound in the back of his throat, but he didn't pull away. Instead, his grip tightened on my hair, pulling the roots until my scalp burned, drinking the copper tang of his own blood from my lips.

When he finally broke the kiss, a thin ribbon of crimson connected his split lip to mine.

He stared down at me, his chest heaving, his thumb wiping the blood from my chin and smearing it across my cheekbone.

"Mine," he whispered, cold and absolute. "Every drop you brew. Every breath in your lungs."

"I am nobody's," I told him, spitting the taste of his blood onto the flagstones between his boots. "Now carry the mold before I leave you here to rot."

·  ·  ·

The latch of my wash-alcove clicked.

The heavy oak door swung open with a slow, grinding screech that brought me instantly back to the present.