The Scent of Revelation

Tinzee Harshaw always said the tannery smelled like a dare.  Not a welcome one—more like a promise the air made to your stomach: We’ll see who gives first.  Still, she loved the place.  The vats steamed in fog-thin ribbons.  Racks of hides leaned like hymnbooks airing their last notes.  And on the water's edge from the millrace, a lattice of willow sticks ticked softly in the current, releasing tannins the color of old tea.

She was making rounds for the Temple-Library—checking a shipment of vellum—when the gaggle of young bards arrived in a glitter of sound and bravado.  Seven of them, gold rings chiming, boots too clean for Evenshade’s honest mud.  They’d marched in from Berdusk with their lutes on their backs and praise on their tongues for the “learned hush” of the village.

“More hush from that group might be pleasant,” Tinzee heard the tannery master mutter, stirring a vat with his oar.

 The troupe’s leader, a tall girl with a laugh like spun-glass windchimes, introduced herself as Vella.  She did the talking.  But one of her fellows—slim, auburn-haired, eyes bright as wet copper—kept letting his gaze snag on Tinzee the way burrs mean to.  He played a cittern idly while Vella spoke to the tannery master about leather dyes and performance rights at the Rusted Crown.

“You're an apprentice?” he asked Tinzee at last, the phrase sugar-dipped.  “Or just inspecting the stink?”

“Both, I suppose,” Tinzee said, because honesty was quicker than cleverness.  “It’s a tannery, not a perfumery, but truly it's hard to avoid it.”

The others chuckled.  Copper-Eyes grinned too wide, like he’d been waiting for the line and got the wrong cue. “Charmed,” he said, then leaned closer and sniffed theatrically.  “Noisome.  That’s the word, isn’t it?  One wonders if your village baths are merely decorative.”

“Same could be said of your manners,” Tinzee said, cocking an eyebrow.

He bowed as if she’d awarded him a laurel.  “Thalen,” he intoned.  “Thalen of Many Verses.”

“Tinzee,” she answered, then let the silence lie there, companionable to her, prickling to him.

He took a step back as a journeyman shouldered past with a basket of iron clamps.  Tinzee watched Thalen’s foot angle away, a dancer dodging a nail.  Then the cittern’s note wobbled.  His hand had brushed a clamp and his smile thinned, almost brittle.  People flinched from iron for lots of reasons—bad memories of shackles, a smith for a father, too many failures casting holding spells—but Thalen’s flinch wore the exactness of habit, like the edges of a polished coin.  Where the clamp kissed his knuckle, a pale crescent rose, then vanished when he flexed.  He shook his hand once—too quickly for pain, too precisely for accident—and reset his smile.

“Performance tonight,” Vella called across the noise, rescuing the moment. “At the Rusted Crown. Your Temple-Library’s a marvel; we bring songs that won’t offend its silence, I promise.”

Tinzee smiled. “Then you’ll do most of your singing in the street.”

They laughed, including Thalen—too loud, a beat late.

It would have ended there, a memory filed like a leaf pressed in a book, if the troupe had kept their music to their own business.  But late afternoon, Tinzee ran an errand through the Temple-Library’s eastern stacks and found two acolytes stalled in the scriptorium doorway, staring dreamily as Thalen finger-picked a tune by the open window.

“What was I—” the elder acolyte whispered, then blinked and wandered away, forgetting the bundle of quills in her hand.

Tinzee stood still.  She had heard lullabies that soothed, laments that cut, and a sword-chant that made a man throw down his blade and weep.  Music had many uses.  But this tune didn’t break or mend—it rubbed.  Like salve on skin, smoothing attention in one direction while the other hand reached in another.  Thalen’s other hand was indeed busy, turning a page on a chained folio he had no leave to touch.

Tinzee cleared her throat. “Songs are for listening,” she said. “and books here are for asking.”

He pretended not to hear and played on, mouth curving. The chain clinked against the desk. Outside the window, the wind licked at the trees, impatient.

Tinzee stepped forward until her shadow took the page.  Up close, his eyes weren’t copper; they were a green so bright it leaned toward yellow.  So strange.  He smelled of crushed thyme and…old cocoons?

“What brings you to this book—this book wrapped in keeping-chains?” she asked.

He glanced at her challenging visage, smirked, and finally shut the book. “Merely admiring the calligraphy.”

“The calligraphy to admire first,” Tinzee said. “is on the notice in the entry hall. The one that says No browsing without a librarian.”

He spread his hands in apology so crisp it had to be rehearsed. “We’re guests, not thieves.”  He plucked a final chord and the air seemed to hold it, too long—like wet cloth refusing to dry.  “A better mood,” he said, and brushed past her.  He did not touch her—he seemed careful not to—but Tinzee felt a pressure slide around where he wasn’t. As if he’d moved the shape of the room.

Her satchel hummed in answer, a soft, fretful sound from the stitched charms in the seam—the way they did when she walked near certain mushrooms or the whispering oak by the old mill. She rested a hand on the leather.  “I agree,” she told the charms, softly.  “And we’ll keep an eye on him.”

She spent the rest of the afternoon doing nothing special: noting that Vella crossed the bridge twice with the troupe’s papers while Thalen took the long way along stepping stones, never setting foot on the iron-pinned planks; remarking how Thalen’s compliments landed like coin tricks—flash in the palm, gone a heartbeat later; watching a younger bard’s face smooth out during a practice song until he forgot his own verse.

By early evening, Evenshade smelled properly of supper and road dust.  The Rusted Crown filled like a sail.  Tinzee sat near the door with her one earring catching candlelight, the other ear bare to hear the room.  She liked street songs when the street moved indoors—tavern benches, elbows, the democratic press of bodies and gossip.

Vella’s voice poured like good broth.  The troupe followed.  Thalen’s cittern wove between them, nimble.  The audience leaned into the music and into each other.  Tinzee leaned the other way, toward the door where night air yoked the dinner delights of the inn next door and the wet chill of the river.

When the set ended, Vella bowed and announced a midnight piece to be played under the Temple-Library’s east windows—“a meditation,” she promised, “to honor Milil.”  The crowd murmured approval.  Tinzee felt the turning of certain gears inside that sentence.  Midnight, under the scriptorium’s east windows, where the chained folios lived, where a ladder reached a shelf with a cedar chest of unbound leaves, where the night watch paced the west side by habit—

Tinzee clapped like everyone else and went out before the next song began.

The tannery vats steamed quiet under stars.  No crowd here, just work.  She found the master leaning on his oar, considering a shallow trough where a tincture cooled: willow and oak bark, a sliver of dog-lichen, stale urine, three drops of something Tinzee could never coax the master tanner to reveal.  The mixture broke fine glamours the way soap broke grease—no magic, only chemistry and patience.

“Odd time for a visit,” the master said without looking up.

“Need a bucket of your worst,” she said.

He smiled without his mouth, head still down, but with upturned eyes. “Worst?  I wasn't aware of a competition.”

“This one is strong enough to breaks glamours, is it not?” she added, and he nodded, understanding the distinction.

By the time Thalen’s “midnight meditation” drifted across the square, Tinzee had one bucket of foul tannery mixture balanced by two others—river water to rinse, and a cleaning tincture.  She tucked a sprig of yarrow behind her ear because it brought butterflies and it didn’t complain about smells.  Then she walked back along the winding path beside the Temple-Library, where iron nails glinted along the shutter frames like a row of small moons.

The troupe stood in a half-circle beneath the east windows.  Vella’s shoulders were tight; leadership sat heavy when your friend’s tricks ran ahead of your consent.  The younger bards looked dreamy, staring ahead and oblivious of an audience.

Thalen plucked his first note.  It was a good note, Tinzee was charitable enough to admit.  The second note took the shape of the first and made a lattice. The third carved a small absence in the air, a place for a hand.  Thalen reached up through a window.

Tinzee let the bucket swing.

It wasn’t graceful.  The splash was chaos and triumph and ancient kitchen curses.  The slosh of the mixture caught Thalen’s shoulder and hair and face.  It sheeted down his cittern in a wet shade of brown that no cloth ever once chose to be.  The smell rose like a heaving cistern.

The crowd didn’t have time to gasp.  Thalen did something more telling: he hissed, high and keen, a sound that wasn’t built for human throats.  His handsome lines went watery, then wavered.  Where the tincture struck, his skin mottled like dark riverweed laid on green glass.  The emerald-gold of his eyes flared and flattened, pupils going to pinpricks.

Tinzee threw the second bucket—river water—a mercy to keep him from scalding, and the third—clean tincture—across his hands as he clawed for the cedar chest’s ledge.

The noise that erupted wasn’t music. It was as if a wasp's nest had been asked to scream an orcish poem.  The troupe staggered as if woken early from a hard nap.  Vella grabbed at her own wrists.  “Thalen,” she said, and there was grief in it, and something like relief.

He tried to run and hit the iron-rimmed window shutter with his shoulder.  The iron sizzled where it touched his tincture-wet skin, and now his outline slid again, trying for the shape that fooled most eyes most days.  It couldn’t hold.  What showed instead was neither man nor monster—something in between, river-born or river-borrowed, with the fineness of a reed flute and the temper of a pike.  He stared hard at Tinzee and a thin membrane flicked across his irises like a second thought.

“You,” he said, not with a bard’s projection but with a hush like a breeze through reeds.  “Herbwitch.”

“Field sage,” Tinzee corrected, because words mattered, even now.  “Leave off your larceny.  Those books won’t be traveling with you.”

He gave the Temple-Library window a glance that looked like a prayer and then a calculation.  “You would foul this place to catch me?”

Tinzee shook her head. “Only your glamour,” she said. “The library knows the difference.”

Behind her, the night watch arrived with the Watch of the Scroll’s iron badges dark in the torchlight.  Vella put her hands up at once, not in surrender but in apology.  “We didn’t know,” she said to the watch, and then to Tinzee, “I suspected, I think, but—he saved our shows, drew crowds—” She winced at her own honesty.  Tinzee nodded. It was hard to give up a friend who brought you adulation, let alone bread. 

They backed Thalen—not-Thalen—toward the Market.  He tried to move through the line of iron-headed nails as if the space between them was wide as a road.  It wasn’t.  He hissed again, tasting the tincture on his own skin, and in the end he did the least theatrical thing he’d done all day: he fled, diving for the water of the millrace with a sound like a page torn exactly along its fold.

The crowd let out the breath it had been tricked into holding for a very long time.

Vella bowed—not to the audience now, but to Tinzee.  “How did you know?” she asked, voice raw.

Tinzee set the empty bucket down and let the tannery’s smell stand around her like a banner no one envied.  “I didn’t see,” she said. “But I felt.” She tapped her satchel where the seam-charms hummed, calmer now.  “And I just can't seem to leave things I don't understand.”

Vella laughed a broken little laugh that had nothing to do with applause.  “We owe you.”

Tinzee shrugged. She adjusted the yarrow behind her ear, which had listened to everything and passed judgment on nothing, as plants do.  “Bring a real meditation next time,” she said.  “And wash that cittern with vinegar…."  She paused, laughing, "and a strong vow!”

The tannery master, who had arrived with a saunter, sniffed the air with professional pride. “Fine work,” he said. “Stink and salvation, all in one bucket.”

Tinzee wrinkled her nose, finally letting herself be a little human about it. “Noisome,” she agreed. “The word is noisome.”

She watched the river and millrace for a while in case they sent anything back.  They only sighed against their stones, promising nothing, carrying everything.  When she finally headed home, she spoke softly to the willow by the path, thanking it for its bark, and to the yarrow for listening, and to the solitary earring that had stayed put through the ruckus.

“Next time,” she told it, “I'll remember to bring your companion.”

The earring did not answer.  But the night air did, shivering with a chord that was only a little dissonant.  Tinzee smiled at the smell no perfume could disguise—and at work done to keep worse things from happening.  That scent had saved her friends tonight and saved the books, and it had made a point so plain even a braggart could understand it.