“Ah, excellent! Dash the lavender! I can always make more later.” She stepped past the curtain and snapped it shut behind her. “Let’s have a look at her.” As Petra walked forward, the woman pointed at Susana. “You! Go find something else to do! Shoo! Get out of my laboratory!”
Susana gave Petra a look that said “Sorry, but what can I do?” and scurried out of the Dye Works.
“Now, now, now. What have we here?” The woman stepped closer to Petra, but kept a distance of two feet between them. “Hands!”
Uncertain, Petra stood still.
“Hands, I say! Hold them out.”
Petra lifted her hands and began to extend them toward the snowdrop-white woman.
“Not so close, cellar brat! There. Now flip them over. Ah. Good hands. Very good, I believe.” She turned her attention to Petra’s face. “Decent color. The nice pink of country life. You’ve got a healthy look about you.”
“So I’ve been told.” Petra thought of Harold Listek’s ramblings. “What are you wearing on your face?”
“And the girl’s polite, too!” The woman’s eyes were two foggy pools behind the glass, but Petra thought she saw an eyebrow quirk. “They are spectacles. Are there no spectacles in your hinterland of a home?”
“What are they for?”
“For? They help me see, obviously. But these are no ordinary spectacles. Come here.” She pointed Petra toward a table and tapped a metal pot filled to the brim with liquid. “What color is that dye?”
“Blue.”
”‘Blue,’ she says!
Try again.”
“Um, light blue?”
The woman whipped off her glasses and plunked them on the table. “Pick them up.” They were heavy. “Now look.”
Petra hooked the wire stems over her ears and gazed into the bowl. The liquid was swarming with spots of colors—bits of pink, streaks of white, sprinkles of green, and a nice fat glob of violet.
“You see?” crowed the woman. “There you have the exact proportions of the different colors that go into making that particular shade of blue. You may very well say that the bowl holds light blue dye, but think how many light blues there are! A robin’s egg, a spring sky, and an aquamarine are light blue. But what a difference lies between the colors of all three!”
Petra watched the colors surge and mingle like strange fish. “It’s amazing.”
Perhaps the woman recognized in Petra’s voice the true ring of someone who can judge good work and beauty, for she nodded. Petra placed the spectacles back on the table. The woman blinked, her eyelashes fluttering like two small dusty moths. Then she put the spectacles back on, turned to Petra, and paused.
She was looking into Petra’s face so intently that the girl felt uncomfortable. But after a few seconds the woman averted her stare and twitched her mouth. As odd as it may seem, Petra felt as if she had passed some exam without even knowing what she was being tested for.
“I suppose they told you all loads of jibber-jabber about how I’m an old banshee who eats servants alive and has burning-acid skin.”
If Petra had been intimidated by Susana’s reports, she didn’t feel an ounce of fear now. Maybe this was because when she had gazed through the woman’s spectacles, she felt as if she were at home, as if she were visiting a colleague of her father’s. So she said, frankly, “Yes, they did.”
“Well, it’s all true. Except the part about eating you alive. I promise I shall just fire you in the good old-fashioned way and maybe throw a pot of something at your head while I’m at it. No hard feelings, you understand. That’s just the way things will be.”
“As long as you don’t mind if I throw something back, I can live with that.”
“Cheek! Sauce! You’re lucky that a touch of my hand could make the skin peel off your face, or I’d box your ears for that.”
“So your skin really does ooze acid?” Petra was fascinated.
“What do you think I need an assistant for? Of course, it’s not the case that my skin is always acidic, or I’d be wearing no clothes and there might not even be a floor beneath us, for that matter. Right now my skin is in a low-acid phase. But sometimes I have acid attacks, and it’s difficult to say when they’ll come. That’s why the wires and frames of my spectacles, certain bowls in this room, a chair behind that curtain, and the doorknob are made of adamantine.” She noticed the stunned look on Petra’s face. “Oh, I constantly forget how many imbeciles lurk in this benighted pile of rocks they call a castle. Adamantine is—”
“The strongest metal on earth,” Petra breathed.
“Why, yes.” The woman did not hide her surprise. “But what would you know of it?”
How could you have missed that the doorknob was made of adamantine? Astrophil lectured.
Why are you accusing me? How could you have missed that? Come on, Astro, she thought defensively, the doorknob was covered with enamel paint. But she did feel a little foolish, for if she had not been so distracted by looking through the spectacles, she would have recognized the dull, dreary color of the stems.
“Adamantine is indestructible,” Petra said out loud. “Swords made from it can’t be broken or blunted. The metal can’t be melted down. It’s very difficult to find, and almost impossible to forge, which makes it—”
“Cost more krona than you can shake a stick at. Exactly. And while the prince values my talents, he’s not going to foot the bill for every tool and bit of furniture in my laboratory to be made of adamantine. I could pay for it myself, of course, but why should I? Still, you have no idea how maddening, how heartbreaking, it is to achieve the perfect shade of coral orange and have the bowl suddenly melt in your hands. The dye splatters everywhere and is lost, or the acid gets into the dye and it turns black. So that’s where you come in. You take my instructions. You be my hands.”
“But if the doorknob is made of adamantine, why do you have two? The iron handle is unnecessary, isn’t it? Even if you touch the red knob, the adamantine would absorb the acid. Everyone else can use it.”
The woman was scandalized. “But it is my doorknob! What makes you think I want everyone to use it? Do you have any idea how many times a day you swampy servants wash your hands? I’ll tell you: none! You’ll use the iron one, you will!”