13. Lucy

M om always beat me awake in the morning. Her not being up before me on a night she didn't close up the tavern was a bad sign because that literally never happened before. Maybe when I was a baby and crying all the time, but not since I started sleeping through the night and not as long as I could remember.

I was pretty sure it was related to whatever was making her cough. I had time before I had to check on my experiments and open the tavern with Ollie. We weren't starving like some of Guttertown. People liked to fuck and drink. They could drink here and go fuck or fuck and then come here. Mom did some clever bookkeeping, so the Barons thought we weren't doing as well as we were when it came to the taxes they levied on the tavern.

I went straight to the kitchen and started scrambling some eggs. She needed to keep her strength up. We usually had leftover bread from the tavern. We took half a loaf home every night and sold the rest. I smashed some garlic and spread it with some butter on the bread. I made some herbal tea and orange juice and brought it to her in bed.

Mom looked paler than usual. I put my hand on her forehead. Did she have a fever? I hadn't learned to check a temperature like a mom yet. She hissed and swatted my hand away.

"You know better than to wake the women in our family up and you're too old for a nightmare."

Yeah, I did know better and usually these roles were reversed.

"It's morning and I beat you awake. You need to eat and keep your strength up."

"What?" she shrieked, trying to sit up.

Mom got dizzy and started coughing again. I handed her the cup of tea. Ugh. I hated this. My mom was the strongest person I knew, and I hated seeing her like this. She saw how I was looking at her.

"Relax. It's going to take more than a cough to kill me."

I made the gesture to ward off evil. Mom loved doing that. She'd say something just to watch me freak out and make that gesture, but it existed for a reason. You could talk curses and bad luck into existence. I also made a rude gesture with my middle finger because she was laughing at me.

"Language, my only child," she said, gripping my finger.

"It wasn't a word, it was a gesture."

"It's still rude."

" I'm rude."

"Were you rude when you dropped the soup off for Theda?"

Ugh. Mom knew all. Even when she was upstairs all day, she knew what I was up to. I brought the soup to Theda, but hadn't mentioned I took some to Theda because I didn't want to talk about Neco. I usually told Mom everything, but she always found out when I didn't want to tell her something. She had this way of asking me without making me feel like a liar.

"Only to Neco, but he deserves it."

"You know he doesn't."

"Oh, he does. And he was rude right back."

Mom just sighed.

"Am I being grounded again?"

"Yes! You overslept. You clearly need the rest. Ollie and I will work the tavern. Ronan has been helping."

"And your experiment?"

"I'm still figuring out how long to infuse the mango. Two days is not enough. I think a week is perfect, but I want to add other things to it. The taste isn't perfect yet. Then, I have to make enough to stock the bar."

"What have you tried so far?"

"I've got three jars. One is just mango, one is mango and apricot, and I have another with mango, apple, and nutmeg. The last one is the one I have the most hope for."

"Focus on the last one. It's a little more nuanced. It could become the signature drink of the Whispering Raven."

"You think?"

"I know, my one and only."

"I also think I could do something with it plain with tomatoes and stuff we have in the kitchen to make a savory drink."

"That's because you're my child. Go. Be brilliant."

"Rest," I said, kissing the top of her head.

My jars still had a few days. I just needed to shake them. I poured a little of the plain spirits into a glass because I was pretty sure I could introduce it with what I had planned. We shared a courtyard with the brothel. There were mango trees and vegetables and fruit out there. We had an arrangement to share as long as we didn't take too much. The Whispering Raven and the brothel both cared for it.

I picked a few tomatoes and set to work. Ollie came in after I'd smashed them in the mortar and pestle. He found me squeezing them through a cheese cloth into a glass. That beautiful face looked at me like I was utterly insane. Ronan came in right behind him. I knew both of them were about to give me all kinds of shit about this.

"That's fucked up Lance," Ollie said. "I know tomatoes are technically a fruit, but it's not the same as orange juice."

"Did you just wake up this morning and choose to drink a tomato?"

"It's not weird! Tomato soup is a thing."

"Yeah, but it's fundamentally different. It's not fucked up when you're eating it hot from a bowl with a spoon when it's got spices in it. You look like you're about to chug it plain from a tankard. It's not right. Did you catch a bedroom disease that messes with your mind? The healers can fix that, you know."

"Dick," I said, throwing a bar cloth at his face. "The new spirit I'm working on is pretty versatile. I'm still trying to figure out the sweet option, but I had this idea when I was making soup last night."

"You're going to make us drink it, aren't you?" Ronan moaned.

"Weren't you just saying the other day that you're my official taste testers?" I asked, squeezing a lemon into the glass.

"That was before you lost your fucking mind," Ollie said.

Guttertown had a sauce made from vinegar and anchovies. I added a few dashes with a little horseradish. Ollie and Ronan looked like they were about to faint. I tossed in some salt and pepper and gave it a stir.

I trusted Ollie and Ronan, but I also trusted myself. I sampled my creations first. I would have done it even if they weren't looking at me like I was asking them to drink piss. It was good. It was savory, and I knew the spirits would get people nice and drunk.

"Drink up or you're banished from being my taste testers. And I'll tell Mom you aren't allowed to be hers, either."

Ollie snatched the glass and glared at me.

"Rude."

Ollie looked like I was about to ruin his fucking life, but he wasn't about to lose his taste testing rights. It was one thing to lose them from me, but Mom was a much better cook than I was and you never wanted her to take them away. She liked Ollie and Ronan, but she was in labor for ten hours with me. She'd always side with me in public and call me out in private if she didn't agree with me.

Ollie downed half of it in one go, set the tankard on the bar, and had to think about it for a minute.

"Okay, so I'm man enough to admit when I'm wrong. That's delicious and I'm feeling the spirits with just half the tankard. If we can actually get people to put alcoholic tomato juice in their mouth, this would take off. But you have to admit, Lance, that it's fucking weird."

"Seriously?" Ronan said, draining the rest of the tankard. "Okay, so yeah, that's great, and it hits you pretty hard, even with just a little bit of it. But it's going to be a weird sell. It's either going to need a badass name or you're going to have to say it's soup that fucks you up."

"You're the creative one. Get creative because I'd just go with alcoholic soup," Ollie said.

"My forte is creating, not naming. This one is all you, buddy. Make it good."

"Guttertown doesn't have fancy books, but we do like our oral stories. The legends about the knights rescuing the damsels don't hit the same in Guttertown. Our women save themselves for the most part and we all know if the knight showed up here, he'd just shit on us like the rest of Nestran.

"No, we need a good old-fashioned Guttertown legend. The one every child knows. The woman in the mirror. She's supposed to come if you say her name three times in the dark. You give her a name and she'll go to a mirror in that person's house and brutally murder them for you. Guttertown justice. The drink is red like blood. It can only be called a Bloody Mary. That's the name that's going to get Guttertown to take a chance on it."

We'd all stood in front of the mirror and tried to call Bloody Mary down on someone. The night everything exploded with Neco, I started my period, and found out I was really a girl with the worst possible Baron as a father, I tried for five straight nights to summon her to kill Folcard. Oddly, I never wanted to send her after Neco. I hated him but I didn't want him dead.

There was magic in Nestran. People could set things on fire with their minds or shift into animals. People like the Barons had been trying to control and steal that magic for a long time. We were just trying to survive in Guttertown and eventually realized there was no magic mirror woman coming to save us.

But still, everyone in Guttertown knew and feared her at one point and I had made a very red drink.

"It's perfect," I said.

"Do you have enough of your spirits to make this drink tonight?" Ollie asked.

"I'm calling it vodka and no. I've been working on the spirit for a while. It doesn't need to be aged in a barrel, but I'm seeing if it gives it unique qualities if I do. I've got seven barrels of it I can't open yet and one that I already have is being used to figure out the infused recipe."

"How long?" Ollie asked. "The Bloody Mary could bring in a lot of money once it catches on. Some of the people who buy spirits when they should be buying food would buy it because it's not just empty calories like ale and the people who buy both would drink it because it's delicious and pretty fucking strong."

"We can open two of the barrels to start serving it, but we're going to have to figure out an easy way to make the base."

"Then, we need to start planning. The Madame loves tomatoes and if you use all the ones in the courtyard, she's probably going to send some of her scarier relatives after us. My uncle will probably let us rent a plot on his farm to grow tomatoes and what we need for your spirits. If we use his workers to tend to our crops, we're going to have to chip in to pay them.

"That'll solve the supply issue, but we can't crush and strain tomatoes for every drink, so we'll have to make that part beforehand. You also need to teach me the recipe since I'm the one slinging drinks. Leave talking it up to me. By the time it's ready to debut, people will have been asking for it for weeks."

Yeah, I believed that. Ollie wasn't just beautiful. He had a silver tongue. I was shocked I hadn't spilled my guts to him that I wasn't a boy because everyone else told them their secrets and he always repeated them to me. Which was why I never told him I was a girl like Mom constantly told me I should do.

First things first. Ollie was a wonderful cook once he mastered a recipe, but he usually fucked up several times before he got it right. That probably should have annoyed the shit out of me since we were running a business, but Ollie was Ollie. He could nearly burn the tavern down and you'd think it was adorable.

It was very annoying because I knew I should have been pissed.

"Gather round because you're about to learn how to make a Bloody Mary," I said with flourish.