Indigo

“Be Indigo,” Mikhael had told her, pressing a cold glass vial into her hand. “Neither blue nor violet, difficult to distinguish. Be a shapeshifter, an invisible color.”

She wondered if he had survived that night, if he had taken the very advice he’d given her and run, become indistinguishable, or if he’d taken the other thing, the last resort. She doubted both; Mikhael was a warrior. He would have fought, and he would have likely died doing so.

She was not a warrior. She had run, and hidden, and ignored the presence of the final option tucked away in a small drawstring bag at her belt as much as possible. And then, when she had outpaced the swords and torches and realized she had nowhere to turn next, she met Syntyche.

Syntyche lived alone at the edge of a small village outside the capital, and she drew her own conclusions about the ill-provisioned, footsore girl who wandered into her life and claimed “Indigo” as her name. Perhaps they were correct, perhaps not; either way the old woman did not ask questions or venture guesses. Indigo was grateful, and doubly so when Syntyche claimed her as a niece sent to learn herbalism.

She taught her the uses of anise, the treatments of germander, how to guess a dose of opium poppy so that a patient slept deeply through pain but would wake again once it had passed. She instructed her in the creation of tonics and poultices and antidotes, the identification of poisons and the poisonous parts of otherwise beneficial herbs. She showed her, by example, what it truly was to be invisible, a person existing on the fringe of society, at once vital and ignored, needed and reviled, powerful and denied.

Indigo learned.

Soon she knew not only how to bind wounds, but also the worst ways and places to cause them. She knew not only how to relieve an accidental poisoning, but also how to create a poison and secrete it so that it could not be detected until it was too late for help. She knew not only how to be important, required, invited, but also how to be invisible, intangible, forgotten.

And when the traitors, the invaders, had need, Indigo came to the palace a humble herbalist. She mixed them tonics and toxins alike, blending these into boiling kettles of herbal tea – tea she tasted herself, having balanced poison with preventative antidotes she had already taken in private – and when the night had passed Indigo was gone, and Iolanthe, once Princess and sole remaining heir of the stolen throne, had returned.