B1 Chapter 5: Sugar

The man on her back gathered enough strength to whisper, “In my pocket. Sugar cubes.” Then his head lolled again.

The woman didn’t hesitate. She shoved her hand into the man’s pants, pulled it back out, and jammed it into his pocket. She blushed at the mistake, and it almost slowed her down, but her fingers hit the hard little cubes almost at once.

The moment Gwendolyn reached the bottom step, a hand was already in her face, holding four perfectly glistening, golden-brown sugar cubes.

The horse’s demeanor changed instantly. The hunt left her eyes, and she focused on the treats like they were sacred. She licked up the sugar cubes in a heartbeat, then nuzzled her head into the woman’s chest with rough, happy force.

The shove jolted the woman and jostled the man on her back. It pushed them close enough to a cluster of precariously sharp, pointy sticks that her stomach turned. One more shove, and he would have been skewered.

Gwendolyn huffed, satisfied, and collapsed into a horse-shaped puddle as the fight went out of her.

The woman looked around the basement again and made a decision. The horse was the most comfortable spot in the room. She eased the man down onto Gwendolyn’s side. The horse didn’t protest.

She did, however, start chewing on his golden locks like they were one of her favorite treats. Looking at the chomped edges, they probably were.

The woman noticed, and she smiled.

“These two deserve each other.”

Then she looked at him properly, and the smile faded. His face was swollen, his breathing uneven, and his skin was flushed and tight from the number of stings and bites. It looked like he was having a terrible allergic reaction to the beetle bites, severe enough to make her stomach tighten. She wondered why he had gone so far for what she had mostly thought of as a prank. Now, she was worried. He had been earnest about it, and she couldn’t just leave him like this. If anything, she had to help. He still needed to make her the potion, after all.

She left him down there with the horse and stepped back upstairs, moving fast. She searched for anything labeled as a potion, a tincture, a concoction, anything that might save him.

The shop was full of things—well, half full. One of them might’ve been a remedy to the situation she found herself in.

Maybe one of the remedies would work, she thought.

She cursed herself again for her rotten luck. Witches were not good at healing people or anything of that nature. They excelled at killing things like pestilence and plagues, which was one of the reasons they were classified as a neutral path by the Codex and the Heroes Guild. Their work could tip either way depending on the perks chosen, and she had always taken the ones that caused the least harm.

She could deal with insects and sickness by eradicating them, but this was an allergic reaction. She had seen enough of those to know how deadly they could be.

She rummaged through the shop, ransacking it for anything that looked even remotely promising. When she couldn’t find a clear answer, she ran back down the stairs and started pouring what she had down his throat. Potions, remedies, concoctions, tinctures, all of it acted rapidly once infused with magic.

He had been right. He was a classically trained alchemist. The effects came fast.

Her fear only grew as his skin flushed beet red, then shifted again when she tried another. He turned bright yellow—not the slow, sick yellow of liver failure, but a vivid, almost glowing shade.

“Nope. Not that one,” she muttered.

The horse watched her in open confusion as she worked through potion after potion, concoction after concoction, tincture after tincture, remedy after remedy. The swelling from the beetle bites eased, but in its place came something worse. He looked healthier in one way and far more alarming in another. Potion sickness was setting in, and it was clearly her fault.

“Damn it,” she said under her breath. “Come on, Belladonna. If you kill him, you’re going to have to leave the village. There’s no way Millie doesn’t tell everyone, and the horse is definitely going to try to kill you, too.”

The man cracked his eyes open.

“Belladonna?” he mumbled.

She stared at him. “Yeah?”

He squinted at her, unfocused. “That’s a nice name. Not like mine.”

Then, he went slack again.

This time, his skin turned bright purple and broke out in spots.

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She reached for another bottle, but the horse knocked it clean out of her hand. When she reached for a second, the horse knocked that one away, too.

She looked up at Gwendolyn in disbelief. “Oh, so now you have opinions? He’s going to die if I don’t do something, and you’re stopping me.”

The horse whinnied once and tapped a bottle tucked under her arm. It was bright pink, flecked with black, with what looked disturbingly like an eye rolling around inside.

She frowned. “Why do I even have this?”

The horse whinnied again.

“Oh, what the hell,” she said. “I’m listening to a horse now.”

She cracked the tincture open and poured it down his throat.

The purple faded. The spots vanished. A healthy flush returned to his skin, and his breathing finally eased.

The woman looked at the horse. The horse looked back.

Gwendolyn tilted her head and gave her the most judgmental, I-told-you-so look a horse had ever managed.

She sighed. “You really are a smart horse. I get why he talks to you.” She paused, then added, “I guess I’m talking to you, too, now. Am I insane? Is this a hallucination? Did I poison myself this morning and this is all a dream?”

The horse whinnied, and it sounded a lot like laughter.

She smacked her cheeks with both hands and stood straighter. “Get a hold of yourself,” she said to herself, and then walked into the kitchen.