Preparation

“I retrieved the things you asked for,” Kai said with mildly hidden distaste.

Poppy looked up from a page which detailed how to distill a highly complicated potion. She’d brought Magick for the Predisposed down from the air duct that morning, and had been meandering through its pages ever since, absorbing the information.

“Was dog fur really necessary?” he asked as he shucked off his shoes at the door and peered into the cloth bag with a grim expression. “The kennel master looked at me like I was a madman.”

Poppy smirked. She could only imagine how the kennel master had felt, to have his future emperor come to him, asking for a pinch of dog fur. She hoped the man was at least smart enough to not ask questions.

“It’s absolutely necessary,” she quipped. “If I don’t make this potion exactly correct, down to the last follicle of dog fur, then it could possibly turn into something else completely. Who knows what the side effects of a badly-brewed potion could be. I may explode or something.”

“Explode?” Kai looked at her with eyes of horror.

“Not literally!” she exclaimed in exasperation. “Ugh. It’s like you know nothing about magic.”

“Well,” he sat down beside her on the carpet, set the bag down, “what are you looking at right now?”

Poppy propped her chin on a hand as she sat with her legs criss-crossed on the paper. “This is a potion that can turn the drinker into an osprey for precisely six hours. It’s very complicated, and requires more materials than ordinary.”

“Really?” he said with a raised brow. “That’s really interesting. I bet it would be a lot of fun, too.”

She sighed and narrowed her eyes at the paragraphs. “It would be, if the recipe wasn’t so damned intricate. Look here. It says once you’ve added the ground hawk feathers, you have to let the vial sit out in direct sunlight for nine hours. No more, no less. Do you know how difficult it’d be to keep that up for nine hours? It wouldn’t even be possible during wintertime! Not to mention, there’s another step that calls for tears of an owl. Do owls even cry?”

Kai blinked at the paper, seemingly not understanding a word of it. “I have no idea. Actually, I can’t read a single letter on this page. This isn’t in the common alphabet, is it?”

Poppy’s brows scrunched together in confusion. “What do you mean? This is the new language. If it was any of the old languages, it would have been burned decades ago.” Poppy observed the book, and clearly enough it was written in the new language.

“You really can’t read it?” she asked.

Kai shook his head. “Unfortunately not. It appears to be some sort of foreign language to me. There are a lot of strange, undecipherable squiggles.”

Poppy frowned at the book. “That’s very odd.” She could read the old language, the language of fae, just fine. So, naturally, she’d be able to identify this as such if that were the case. Poppy examined the letters with keen intent. They warped and shifted beneath her gaze.

She blinked, and the letters snapped back to place. “Very odd,” she murmured beneath her breath. It was like there had been a charm placed on the book so that certain people would be unable to read its contents.

“What’s odd?” Kai inquired, his shadow growing darker across the page as he loomed closer. Poppy waved him off.

“Your large, tree-like self is blocking my sunlight, Prince,” she said.

He backed off a bit, but Poppy didn’t miss the unintelligible muttering beneath his breath. They had promised to call each other by their names, but Poppy still found herself calling him by his title. She admittedly felt a tad awkward about the whole thing, so she figured she’d take baby steps.

Habits are difficult to break. It didn’t help that Poppy kept thinking back to how she woke up this morning a mere foot from his sleeping face. For a moment she’d forgotten about everything and just stared at him. Then she remembered who she was and pinched his nose until he woke up. The snorting sound he made had been hilarious.

She flipped through the pages. Every single one appeared to be in the new language; however, if she stared at any word for too long, the letters shifted and appeared to warp. Just as Kai had said, they looked like undecipherable squiggles. Then when she blinked or turned away, the letters flicked back to their original placing.

“How peculiar,” she said to herself. “No matter what page I turn to, the effects are the same. Why would the book be charmed instead of just being written in the old language? Was it a precaution against it being burned?” Poppy continued mumbling to herself until finally Kai cleared his throat.

“I’m still here,” he informed her.

She peered over her shoulder. “Oh, yeah.” He made a face at her and she snorted. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just that this book appears to have some sort of charm placed on it. It’s preventing you from reading it, while making itself legible only to me.”

Poppy continued flipping through the pages, scanning for any abnormalities. “Did your people burn only books with the old language, or also books with unidentified origins?” she asked.

Kai settled onto his stomach beside her, elbow on the floor and hand propping up the side of his face. “We only destroyed books with faerie origins. If any book contained languages such as these, they’d probably be considered from a foreign country and left alone. The old language is very specific in how it’s drawn, so that uniqueness allowed us to decide which books would be burned. Not that I would personally ever burn a book,” he added.

Poppy’s mouth quirked. “It’s fine, Prince. I don’t believe you’re anything like your ancestors. In fact, the reason why you’re so tolerable is probably due to the elven blood.”

“I’m not quite sure if that’s a compliment.”

She shrugged. Her fingers ran out of paper to flip through, and she hit the front of the book. The first page was made of courser material than the rest of the paper, and it read, “This book belongs to:”

Poppy glared at the page.

“What is it?” Kai asked, peering at her face and then the book.

“That’s my name here on the page,” she said and pointed to the line in which the book’s owner was meant to write their name.

“And I’m guessing you didn’t write that?” Kai questioned incredulously.

She just shook her head. “Can you not read this either?”

He stared at the print for a moment. “No. It does look more handwritten than the rest of the book, though.”

Poppy frowned and clenched her hands together in a thoughtless habit. Somehow, someone cast a charm on this book to only allow her to read it, unless someone besides herself could also read it. After all, only she and the prince had tried.

Although, with her name magically appearing in the front, this made her theory of only herself being able to understand it grow stronger. After all, it seemed this book was very much directed towards her. But could another member of the fae also comprehend it? If this were the case, perhaps Kai’s elven blood was too diluted.

“If you clench your hands any harder, I think you’ll lose all feeling in them,” the prince observed. “Relax, Poppy. Despite the peculiarity of all this, I highly doubt this book was meant to harm you.”

She looked at him. Grimaced.

“What?” he asked, suddenly defensive.

“My name didn’t sound natural at all coming out of your mouth.”

He looked at her as if she were a particularly frustrating child. “At least I’m trying,” he argued, his face the color of peonies. “I haven’t heard you say my name once.”

“And it’s going to stay that way!” Poppy quipped. “I refuse to say Kai until it sounds natural.”

“If you say it like that, it’ll certainly never sound natural,” he pointed out and sighed. “You say it like it’s the name of someone who disgusts you.”

“I do not!” she exclaimed. “Just forget about it. Show me this dog fur you swept up.”

“I didn’t sweep it up myself.”

“Good to know.”

Poppy mentally patted herself on the back. She’d changed the subject.

He gently laid out the contents of the bag, which included dried rosemary, lemon rinds, pine tree bark, moldy paper, walnut shells, and of course the dog fur.

“This truly is an odd assortment,” he stated,

Poppy jerked her head. “Potions typically contain outrageous and sometimes redundant ingredients. I recall one potion requiring breath of the brewer, which basically means I would just have to blow air into it. It doesn’t make sense, but magic isn’t really something which is supposed to make sense. It defies physics, after all.

“I’m sure the scientists of your people were relieved once magic was outlawed,” Poppy added with a smirk. “They don’t like things they can’t understand.”

Then again, magic can only be understood by realizing it’s impossible to fully comprehend. It’s alive and ever-changing, much like fire. It’s funny how humans love fire and its warmth yet fear magic like the plague.

“So are you going to tell me what these ingredients will be used for?” Kai asked.

“It’s a surprise,” she smiled distantly, her mind full of increasingly funny scenarios. Before she drank vnuembr, she had to make sure the timing was right. Perhaps she’d scare the designer shoes off him and hide in his chambers before jumping out at him. She grinned, thinking about the expression he would make.

This was an opportunity she wasn’t about to waste, so she wasn’t afraid to fantasize like a child.