The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 802

Patricia had seen the tremble go quiet. Her smile thinned, and she snapped her fingers without looking round.

"Waiter. Take my cousin a glass of water. From the house." She filled a fresh glass from her own jug, her back to the judges, and her right hand passed over it once, as if brushing away a crumb. "Poor thing looks dreadful."

The masked waiter took it on his tray. Halfway down the room, he breathed in. Violets.

Reeve's drops had always smelled like that. For two years they had gone up the tower stairs once a month in a brown bottle, forty dollars at a time, and a girl had gone a little further into the dark with every one.

At the side table he poured a fresh glass from the judges' jug for Serena. The violet glass went back beside Patricia, in place of her own. Nobody ever watched the waiter.

The woman judge in the grey coat leaned forward, fascinated, murmuring as Serena poured blind with her eyes shut.

"Mineral. She's taken the cold mineral first. Now moss. Now that grey sweet one. Nobody ever uses that one, Ms. Vale, it's too strange." A pause. "And the leather. Only one drop of it. One drop."

"Why one?" Natasha asked, without looking away.

"Because it isn't leather to her," the woman judge said slowly. "I think it's rope. Too much and you're in a ship's hold. One drop and you're standing on the dock."

"How do you know it's rope?"

"I don't," the woman judge said softly. "She does."

Serena was in the tower, on the last night of the dark.

Halfway through the hour, a smell came across the room and stopped her hands.

It came from Patricia's bench. White blossom over cold earth. Violets, almost, and under them something like a closed door.

Her mother had made it the winter before she died, and had never named it.

Rosalind had always said a winter was the hardest thing to make, because it had to smell of an ending and of a promise at the same time. Most perfumers only ever managed the ending.

Serena opened her eyes.

Patricia was pouring it. Gram by gram. From memory. Fast and sure.

"That's hers," Serena said. Her voice came out very low and very clear in the white room.

Patricia didn't look up. "What is?"

"What you're pouring. That's my mother's last winter. That's from the third blue notebook. The page with the pressed violet in it."

The room went quiet. Even the judge stopped whispering.

"It's called Patricia's Winter," Patricia said sweetly, still pouring. "I've been working on it for a year. Ask anyone at home."

"Ask anyone at home," Serena repeated. Tears were running down her face now. She didn't wipe them. "That's what you always say."

"You're crying on Halcyon's floor, cousin," Patricia said softly. "It's very embarrassing."

"I'm working," Serena said, through her tears.

"It looks like crying."

"It's both," Serena said quietly. "You should try it sometime."

By the windows, the waiter's hands closed on his silver tray until the rim bent.

"Miss Serena Tiffany," Natasha said, very evenly, from the long table. "Are you accusing your cousin of something? In my laboratory?"

Every pen stopped.

If she said yes, it would be a blind girl's word against the house's best nose, and Patricia would cry, prettily, and they would believe the tears.

"No, Ms. Vale," Serena said calmly. "I'm not accusing anyone."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Telling you what it is," Serena said quietly. "You have a nose. Your chemists have noses. You'll smell the rest yourselves."

Patricia laughed, light and brave. "She's upset, Ms. Vale. She's always been jealous of my winter."

"Your winter," Natasha repeated, without any tone at all.

"Mine."

"Noted," Natasha said, cool as glass, and her breath barely moved.

Serena went back to the dark.

With eleven minutes still on the clock, she put the stopper in her flask and laid both hands flat on the steel.

"Miss Tiffany," Natasha said, surprised. "You have eleven minutes."

"I know."

"You don't want them?"

"If I touch it again, I'll spoil it," Serena said quietly. "Some things you only make once."

The woman judge came down the room, dipped a paper strip, and closed her eyes.

"Well?" Natasha asked from the table.

"Rain," the woman said softly, eyes still shut. "Rain on an old wall. And someone's coat, drying by a fire."

Natasha took a strip herself and breathed in once. Something moved in her cold face, and was gone.

"Tell me what's in it," she said, very low.

Serena looked at the flask.

"Rain on stone," she said slowly. "Cold rain. The kind that soaks into old walls until they smell like the sea. A rope in the yard below, wet, creaking when the wind moves it. Salt on the air. And cedar." She stopped. "Somebody came into my room that night, Ms. Vale. In the tower. The last night I was blind. I wrote on his hand, who are you, and he said nobody, a dream. He smelled of cedar and salt and old wool. In the morning I could see."

Nobody in the room moved.

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