EMBER’S POV

The recipe is winning, and I am losing, and I have been losing for three hours.

It’s spread across the desk in the east library, the cracked page and the apothecary’s neat waxed parcels and my own notes, which have gone from tidy to unhinged somewhere around hour two.

And I have gotten precisely nowhere, because the last ingredient is still just a smear of coded shorthand and a word I can almost read and never land, and every time I think I’ve caught the shape of it, it slides off the page like a fish off a hook.

Eastern. Restricted.

I know what the Pennys told me....