Alchemists
an excerpt

She walked into the farmhouse kitchen without knocking; her grandmother was busy cooking, as usual, and turned in surprise and delight when Ailith came in.

"Ailith!" she cried, putting down the cake she was mixing and going to embrace the girl. "What a nice surprise."

"Good morning, grandma," Ailith smiled.

"Anselm!" Hannah called out. "Ailith's here!" She turned back to her granddaughter. "So what brings you to our part of the world?"

"Oh... I had an argument with mum. Again. It's the wedding... they're pressuring me to get married now."

"Well, dear." Hannah looked sympathetic, but more than a little firm. "It is a mother's job to worry about these things, you know. Don't be too hard on her."

Ailith was about to say how she didn't care if it was her mother's job, and couldn't her mother just stop doing her pathetic interfering job, and didn't the woman have enough to worry about with five other children? But her grandfather came in from outside at just the right moment, and gave her a look which she understood to mean that there wasn't much point in saying any of those things - which she knew was true, and she didn't really want to cause another fight, so she bit her tongue.

"Grandpa!" she said instead, a genuine smile touching her lips now. "How are you?"

"Oh, very well, very well," he said, stomping his mud-caked boots across the kitchen floor to come and hug his granddaughter.

"Anselm, why don't you take Ailith out and introduce her to your visitor?" Hannah suggested. "We've about an hour before lunch is ready. You will be eating with us, won't you, Ailith dear?"

"Yes Nana," Ailith agreed. Her grandmother was the best cook in the world, so there were bonuses from running away from home.

"So who's come to visit?" Ailith asked her grandfather as they walked outside. She had thought she knew all of her grandparents' friends.

"He's a very old friend of mine," Anselm replied, somewhat mysteriously. "He's out in the workshop."

Ailith had loved her grandfather's workshop as a child - floor to ceiling with oddments of all sorts of things that he had collected over the years. As a very small girl she'd liked to hide for hours, under his desk or in a cupboard, where she knew she was unlikely to be found - and if he did find her, he never turned her in to frantic parents and curious siblings.

Then, one day when she was about nine, Ailith had managed to break one of her grandfather's many bottles of strange liquids, and had cut herself on a shard of glass. Anselm had applied a foul smelling, stinging ointment to the wound, and said that he wouldn't tell her parents if she didn't, which had seemed fine - but the door to the shed was always locked after that, and Ailith hadn't been in there since.

Today however was different - the door to the workshop stood wide open, and a quiet whistling came from inside.