Madly

To Juliet,

whose magical talent is to make things happen

Chapter One

Princess Evelyn

A TINY BEAD OF BLOOD bloomed where the knifepoint pressed against the tip of her finger. She held it over the rim of a glass vial and watched as the droplet fell, turning the liquid in the bottom from pink to a dark, inky blue.

Strange.

She'd always expected a love potion to be red, not blue.

Chapter Two

Samantha

THE DIRT CAKED ONTO THE curved glass surface of the jar is so thick, not even a hint of a label is visible. I give it a quick scrub with the edge of my sleeve before remembering Mum's stern warning not to keep ruining my shop clothes. Instead, I grab the rag I shoved into my jeans pocket this morning. Another vigorous rub reveals my grandfather's spindly handwriting, neat and precise except for where the ink has bled into cracks like fingers reaching out in the linen parchment.

Berd du Merlyn

“No way.” The words slip out as a sudden swell of excitement wiggles its way up my spine. I have to put the jar back down onto the shelf and take a few deep breaths to calm myself before I can continue.

“What have you found?” My best friend Anita looks over at me from her perch a few shelves over.

The two of us are balancing on ladder rungs three stories and thirty-six shelves high. We have a deal. Anita helps me with my huge, mind-numbing task of doing an inventory on my family store's thousands of ingredients and mixes, potions, plants, and wotsits. In return, I agree to go with her to watch the princess's eighteenth birthday concert on one of the big screens by the castle, even though hearing about her life makes me cringe. I've secretly packed a book in my bag, just in case.

I grin widely and Anita drags her ladder toward me. The tracks are old and clogged with dust, and even with the drops of oil I use to lubricate the wheels they still won't run smoothly.

I turn the jar in her
direction
. She lets out a low whistle. “Do you think it's real?”

“Who knows,” I say. My thumping heart betrays me. Every time I search these shelves, I feel like I'm digging deeper and deeper into a lost treasure trove, and one day I'm going to find something great. This could be it. “There's a plant I've read about in
Nature & Potion
that's known as wizard's beard. This could just be an old name for it.” Uses for wizard's beard spring into my mind before I can stop them: A key ingredient in potions dealing with shock—brew for five minutes in hot (but not boiling) water to help ease the sharing of bad news.
It's a relatively common ingredient, and wouldn't be that exciting a find.

If, however, this turns out to be real Merlin's beard—from the man himself . . . well, I suddenly know how we're going to pay for the leak in the roof I found yesterday (the hard way, with a wet head) which is now temporarily taped over with duct tape.

I web my fingers over the top of the lid and twist with all my might. There's a brief tug of resistance and then the lid jumps off the jar, along with a great puff of dust that explodes right in my face.

A hacking cough and frantic arm-waving disperse the dust, but my heart sinks.

Empty.

Anita pats me on the arm. “Something else to add to Kirsty's list?”

“Looks like.” I sigh, then take a pen out from behind my ear and jot down
wizard's beard
on my list of missing things to ask Kirsty, our Finder, to collect for us. And it looks like I'm going to have to find another way to fix that leak.

Sometimes, if I'm feeling romantic, I think about all the generations of Kemis that have stood on these rungs, how many great alchemists have studied these shelves.

But then reality hits: the store is falling apart, our supplies are diminishing, and we have no business coming in to change it.

It wasn't always this way. Kemi's Potion Shop was once one of the most prominent apothecaries in Kingstown. But no one needs apothecaries anymore. Not when they have the megapharmacies downtown selling synthetic versions of traditional potions for half the price. Now we're leftovers from a previous time. Relics.

Anita's dad also owns a potion store, specializing in mixing techniques from Bharat. When his apprentice left to retrain as an engineer, Mr. Patel decided not to hire another—even though Anita offered to give up her place at university to take over. When he retires in a couple of years, he's going to close his shop for good. Another apothecary bites the dust, while Kemi's Potion Shop clings on for dear life.

Mr. Patel is lucky. At least he's chosen to close his store, so he has some measure of control. A familiar pit opens in my stomach as I wonder what will happen to me when our time runs out.

Anita slides back along the shelves to where she'd last been working. I try to drum up some enthusiasm for the task again, but it's disappeared into the ether like the dust motes from the empty jar.

“Oh my god, Sam, look at this!”

“What?” I scramble my way across to her. What could she have found? Sphinx breath? Or maybe even a dragon's tooth?

She thrusts her phone in my face. Onscreen is Princess
Evelyn posing inside one of the grand palace ballrooms. “The Princess is wearing the same Prime Store dress to her eighteenth that I wanted to buy for the summer ball! Great, now it's going to be sold out everywhere,” she pouts.

“I can't believe you're actually going to the summer ball.”

“Yeah, well, not all of us shun boys for potions, like some people I know.”

“Very funny. You don't have a date, though, do you?”

“I'm lining up my suitors like I'm Princess Evelyn herself, just waiting for my perfect match.” Anita flicks her long glossy black hair, then sticks out her tongue.

I throw my cloth at her and she giggles.

“So who's your bet for her date tonight?” Anita asks.

“What do you mean?”

Anita rolls her eyes at me. “Come on, if you're going to force me to help with your inventory you have to make it a bit fun for me. I'll go first, I think it'll be Damian.”

“No way. The royals would never let the princess marry a pop star. It'll be Prince Stefan from Gergon. It'd be good for diplomacy.”

“Well, that's boring. Ooh, I know. Zain Aster.”

“You think?”

“Why not? Arjun says all anyone at uni can talk about is how good friends he is with the princess.” Arjun is
Anita's brother, two years older than we are. He and Zain had been in the same year at our school. “Have you seen Zain around lately?” Anita wiggles her eyebrows suggestively.

“That's all in your head, silly. Zain Aster has no idea who I am.”

“If you say so.”

Chapter Three

Princess Evelyn

HER HEART POUNDED AS RENEL, the most senior advisor in the royal household, announced Zain's arrival. Around her neck was a silver heart-shaped locket, which she clutched tightly between her fingers. Yet the moment she saw him, she felt all her nerves and tension ease away. She even giggled as Zain strolled straight in as if he owned the place, bypassing her spluttering advisor.

“Evie!” He walked right up to her and wrapped her in his arms. He wore a musky, trendy cologne, with chemi­cal undertones from the lab.

“You've dressed up for the occasion,” she whispered, placing her fingers lightly on the textured shoulder of his dinner jacket.

He laughed. “Well, it's only the biggest party of the year, and I have to look good for the ladies.” He started dancing on the spot and mimicked popping his collar.

“You scrub up okay, I suppose,” she said in what she hoped was a normal tone, even though his words had been like miniature daggers to her heart.

“Renel, a moment?” she asked, and waited for the beak-nosed advisor to leave the room.

“You look insane!” Zain said, stepping back and holding her arm out to admire her.

She did look good. Her long blond hair was tied back from her face, a ribbon straining to contain the loose tumble of curls, and her stylist had embedded feather-light wisps of gold amongst the strands. Her floor-length dress, made of periwinkle blue sparkles, floated around her lithe frame. So many designers had begged for the commission to style her for her eighteenth birthday party. She'd chosen a local designer, stocked on the high street—a decision called “bold” and “courageous” by the media. She'd just liked the dress.

The locket was the only accessory that didn't match. But it had its own purpose. And now it was time.

“Drink?” she asked, cursing inwardly as her voice squeaked. She crossed to a small table by the window.

“Of course!” Zain replied.

She smiled, then turned her back on him to pour wine from a delicate crystal carafe into two of the finest goblets in Nova, with beautiful pewter bases polished to a mirror shine. With one swift movement, she opened the locket. Deep indigo powder fell into the
bottom of his glass, dissolving into the dark red liquid.

She examined the glasses closely and breathed a sigh of relief—they looked identical. She waited for a beat, but he didn't question or confront her. All was going according to plan.

“To falling in love?” she proposed.

He took the glass from her outstretched hand and clinked it against hers, smiling.

“To you, Princess.”

“To us.” It came out as barely a whisper as she lifted the goblet to her lips and watched him do the same. Then she closed her eyes, threw back her head, and downed the wine in a single gulp. It slid down her throat as gently as honey. A warmth rushed through her body, coursing through her veins until it felt like her fingertips and toes were on fire and her heart would explode with happiness.

Her eyelashes fluttered open.

And staring into the cool blue eyes reflected in the silver base at the bottom of her goblet, she fell madly, deeply, and irrevocably in love.

Chapter Four

Samantha

THE BELL ATTACHED TO THE shop door jingles, then abruptly snaps off its hinges and tumbles to the floor. I sigh, opening my notebook to another list: “Things to Repair.” I scribble down
entrance bell
underneath
leaking roof
.

Looking down from the ladder, I spy the sweep of my mum's skirt as she comes out of the back room to greet the customer. My view is blocked by one of the big wooden beams that crisscross the higher levels of the store, supporting the vast expanse of shelves.

Snippets of conversation drift up from the shop floor, the sound bouncing off the hundreds of glass jars. “No trouble, Moira dear . . . pay us next week.”

A groan escapes me before I can help it and I ­scramble down the series of ladders as fast as I can. Even so, I don't reach the ground floor until the door snaps shut on Moira's oversized behind.

“Mum, honestly!” I head over to where I've laid out the mixes due for pick-up that week. Sure enough, Moira's entire monthly prescription is missing. I bash the button that opens the till and all that's inside is the float: the pathetic array of coins left in the drawers every night and a dusty fiver so torn and faded I bet it isn't even legal tender anymore.

“Moira's seventy-three. You know she can be forgetful.”

“What, so forgetful she leaves her purse behind every single time?” I mumble. It's no use bringing up this argument with Mum. She sees the good in everyone. The trouble is, at seventy-three, Moira is probably one of our youngest customers. No, really—the only people who choose us over one of the megapharmacies are the old folks who refuse to trust the synthetics. And I can tell from the way Moira stops just around the corner from the store to double- and triple-check her prescriptions that she knows exactly what she is doing whenever she comes into Kemi's Potion Shop.

The thought makes me angry again. “This is supposed to be a business.”

“Sam! How many times do I have to tell you not to talk to your mother that way?” Dad strides in through the door in the shelving that leads to Granddad's lab, smoke billowing onto the shop floor before he manages to close it again. Granddad is concocting this week's mixes for our (admittedly very small) client base. A
smidgeon of guilt tugs at me—I should be in there helping, like a good apprentice.

Dad wraps an arm around my mother's waist and kisses her on the cheek. I smile, unable to stay annoyed for too long about Moira. And it's nice to see my parents so happy: Mum in her bright lipstick, long skirt, and flower-print top, Dad staring at her like she is still a beautiful young woman way out of his league. And technically, she is way out of his league. She is Talented—a class of society with the ability to channel magic through an object. She's only got a low-grade ability, and her object—a divining rod—sits on top of her bedroom dresser gathering dust. But she's Talented all the same. She could have married into another Talented family and had lots of Talented babies. But instead, she fell in love with my dad, and Dad is ordinary—someone with no access to magic. Just like me.

Being ordinary is what makes us great alchemists. Our lack of magic means we can work with magical ingredients without risk of taint or contamination. But it's not the only factor. What makes the Kemi family special is our unrivalled skill in the alchemical arts—to know by feel the recipe of any potion, to tease out the properties of each ingredient, to understand the mysteries that go into building a cure.

In my dad's case, the gift of alchemy skipped a generation, so he could never become his father's apprentice.
But if he's ever felt any disappointment at not having potion-making skills, he tries not to show it. Instead, he works as a bus driver around town. Ordinaries dominate any job that requires interaction with technology—pilots and computer engineers are, for the most part, magicless. Mum works in the store but also took a second job teaching music at Molly's school, so we have a bit of extra income coming in. But despite both of them knowing how bad things are with the business, neither will let me do anything other than be an apprentice to my granddad.

Because when you have the Kemi gift, you have to use it.

When I can coax it out of him (and often only after I've scrubbed clean the lab), Granddad tells stories about how our ancestors were once the official potion-makers to the royal family. Now it's ZoroAster Corp., the top synth manufacturer in Nova, which holds that honor. They took it from us when the founder of ZA Corp., Zoro Aster himself, won the last Wilde Hunt to occur in Novaen history. Wilde Hunts were these intense competitions between alchemists, established by the first Novaen king, King Auden, to find the best cures whenever one of the royal family was in mortal danger. King Auden had a legendary hunting horn said to be made from a prehistoric creature that had its own form of Talent. The horn itself was definitely imbued with
magic—it called alchemists to the hunt and determined the winner by turning gold if the correct potion was submitted.

The prize of winning a Wilde Hunt was a pot of gold crowns and, even more valuable, an immense share of the royal magic. For alchemists, who were almost exclusively ordinary, the dose of magic was invaluable. That didn't mean Talenteds didn't try to win the competition.

And Zoro was the first Talented to succeed. He used his winnings to set up the first ever synth lab, producing synthetic potions for every ache, pain, and ailment and changing our industry forever. In one fell swoop, he not only took the Kemi royal commission, but doomed the ancient art of potion-making in which we were expert.

Wilde Hunts are a thing of the past now. The royal family is so well protected—they have the best doctors, highly trained bodyguards, the Novaen secret service— that mortal danger is very hard for them to come by. They turn up at events, sure, to open hospitals and hand out honors, but not much else. Once it became clear the king and queen were only going to have one child, and Princess Evelyn was their sole heir to the throne of Nova, they did everything in their power to ensure nothing could ever happen to her.

Anita touches my arm; she's followed me down from the shelves. “If we don't get a move on, we're going to be late.”

“Oh, sweetie, yes—you don't want to miss the start!” Mum is not-so-secretly in love with the royal family, and piles of glossy magazines are stuffed onto a ledge beneath the shop till. She keeps them out of sight from my granddad, who burns them in the lab's oven if he finds them. “You can tell me all about it when you get back.”

“You know I'm not good with who's-wearing-what-­designer and who's-arrived-with-whom and all that stuff.”

“Take lots of pictures, then,” she says with a smile. “Molly will want to see them.”

“Molly will have a much better view than me,” I say. Molly is my sister, and although she's only twelve, she's our family's hope. She is Talented, having inherited it against the odds from Mum's side of the family. When her Talent was first detected, I asked her what it felt like. In her cute, eight-year-old way she said it was like swimming in a stream of magic. Now that she's twelve, she'll soon be able to channel that magic through an object, like turning on a tap.

It's why my parents have been so happy lately. Molly's Talent test results came back sky-high. She's going to be strong. She can have a real future, one that's not dependent on a store that's going out of business. But to ensure that future, she needs to go to a special Talented school, and that costs money. Lots of money that we don't have, and won't have if Mum keeps giving away
all our potions for free. Every spare penny goes toward Molly's education, making sure she has every opportunity. I could resent her for it, but I don't. She's a much better investment than me.

She is up at the castle already, on a day out with her Talented friends.

“Try to make sure Sam has a good time, won't you, Anita?” Mum shakes her head at me, her hands on her hips.

“I'll do my best, Mrs. Kemi.”

Before Mum can delay us any more, I step out onto the street. The old wooden sign bearing the faded Kemi crest creaks above my head, and I skip out of its way on autopilot, convinced that one day soon it's going to come crashing down.

Anita links her arm in mine, and we follow Kemi Street out of the alchemist district. Kingstown is built on the remains of an extinct volcano, an imposing castle perched at the very top. Many of the oldest and most beautiful buildings in Kingstown stretch down the hill from the castle, along a wide high street known as the Royal Lane. The rest of the city spreads out around the hill, a sea of modernity around the island of old buildings.

The Royal Lane is already packed with people on their way up to watch the party. The normally bustling stores that line the street have closed early for the night, but large screens play a constant stream of advertising for
everything from the newest fashion, to the finest wands, to the most advanced synths.

“Samantha Kemi,” a voice says, deep and strangely familiar.

I spin around abruptly, bumping into a couple who had been walking hot on my heels. It clearly wasn't them calling me, and I mutter an apology. As they scurry away, I notice that the woman's dress morphs from rose pink to crimson and back again. Glamoured. I feel a stab of jealousy. I'll never be able to afford any glamoured clothing. I catch Anita's eye and we both roll our eyes as if on cue. “Talenteds,” she mutters.

“Did you hear someone call my name?” I ask Anita.

She shakes her head, and when I don't hear it again, we keep walking.

We pass by a bus shelter, where an animated screen flashes an image of Princess Evelyn swirling in a glittering blue evening gown.
TONIGHT: PRINCESS EVELYN TURNS EIGHTEEN! TUNE IN TO ATC FROM 7 P.M.
Everyone who's not up at the castle with us will be glued to the cast, including my mum.

The crowds thicken, even though the party isn't due to start for another hour, and we're forced to stop by a small army of police on horseback.

“We should've left earlier,” Anita says, craning her neck to try to see over the sea of people. “I heard most of our class got invites to the actual party in the palace.”

“At the castle, you mean.”

“No, I mean at the palace. Up there, somewhere,” she waves her hand vaguely above our heads. The castle in Kingstown is the royal family's official residence. But their real home is Palace Great, a glamoured castle, rumored to be hidden in the skies above Kingstown, although even on a cloudless day there's nothing to be seen.

“Only the Talented people in our class, then.”

“Okay, I'll give you that.”

There's a great sound like a thousand trumpets blaring. I stop in my tracks and cover my ears with my hands. Has the concert started already?

“Are you okay?” Anita asks. She grabs one of my hands and I think she's afraid I'm going to run away back home and break my part of the bargain.

“Did you not hear that?” My ears are still ringing from the noise.

“Hear what?”

“Samantha Kemi,” says the deep voice again.

“What? Who keeps saying my name?” I spin around, frustrated, as if someone is pulling my ponytail and then running away.

Anita frowns. “I didn't hear anything, Sam.”

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spy the bus stop ad. The Princess in her beautiful glittering dress is gone. In her place is the king of Nova.

And he's looking right at me.