The Arrogant King and the Sazerac
I gathered the last glasses they had left and rinsed them lightly under the running water.
"So that should be the end of the schedule... except it isn't. Will you be coming back tonight?"
I tossed the question out lightly as I dried the glass. Momiji, halfway through smoothing her clothes into order, paused and smiled.
"For as long as I remain here, I have no duty that races against every second. My only task is to let the hot spring loosen a body gone stiff, and to steady a breath that has fallen out of rhythm."
Her voice was calm, and exquisitely composed.
"But if the drink you pour is this refined, then asking for another glass in the quiet of the night would not be unwelcome."
She met my eyes across the counter and inclined her head, just slightly.
"Once the sun goes down, the noisy ones may well descend and raise another commotion. Leave a seat open, so I may wet my throat in peace before they arrive."
Remembering the pirate captain Grace had hauled out earlier, the noisy ones did not sound like a joke.
"I'll remember."
At my short reply Momiji smiled, faint and unhurried, and turned away without a trace of lingering. The hem of her kimono whispered over the floor, and her back receded down the wooden corridor beyond the lobby.
Crystal's storm of chaos, and then Momiji's elegant exit. Only then did the morning's test, which had raged through so brief a span, come fully to an end.
I set the glasses and tools back in their proper places on the counter and quietly looked over the empty lobby. The wide, still lobby of the hot-spring resort was so silent it was hard to believe a pirate captain had been shouting here only moments ago. I wiped the water from my hands and let out a short breath.
Since dawn the sanctuary had been smashed to pieces, I had been flung into the heart of a northern blizzard, and on top of all that I had endured Grace's exacting test. A storm of a morning had swept through and gone, and the back of my neck ached with a dull, heavy stiffness. Grace would be busy looking after Crystal for a while. I thought I might slip into the staff break room and close my eyes, if only for a moment.
I set the towel down and was just about to turn when it happened.
Step. Step.
Someone was approaching. The gait itself was neither loud nor heavy, but the pressure those footsteps dragged through the air was heavy enough to feel wrong. It did not feel like a guest walking in. It felt like someone overwhelming was looking down on me as they drew near.
I turned back toward the counter on reflex, and my eyes met those of a woman who was already seated on a bar stool, staring straight at me.
What caught me first was a jacket—not flashy, but old-fashioned and stately. Beneath it a uniform strained with a fullness she could not have hidden if she tried, and long black hair spilled down over her shoulders. What stopped the breath in my throat, more than any of that, was her gaze: the arrogant, absolute look of a king surveying subjects prostrate beneath the dais.
If Momiji had carried the spirit of a warrior, keen as a honed blade, the woman before me subdued everything around her simply by sitting there.
A magical girl...?
No. She looked far too imperious, and far too dangerous, to be called by that word.
Under a tension that threatened to choke me, I forced up a service smile and opened my mouth.
"Welcome. The Witches' House... ah..."
The painfully cheesy greeting Shinano had drilled into me back at the sanctuary slipped out on its own, then snapped off at the tip of my tongue. Before the high-handed air rolling off the woman in front of me, a cheap little joke about witches felt miserably small, and ridiculous.
Watching my clumsy mistake, her red lips rose, slow.
"The Witches' House."
A low, antique voice settled heavily over the counter. She propped her chin at an angle and let those pitch-black eyes travel over my face, as if I were something interesting.
"A welcome most irreverent and vulgar, unfit for receiving Us."
"Ah, I'm sorry. That's how we greeted people where I used to work. Lady Shinano kept making me say it..."
At the name that left my mouth, her long brows twitched, faint. The killing intent pressing down on me withdrew, and a cold smile spread in its place.
"Shinano Catus. The magical girl who hides behind the Association President and plays at being a cat."
She leaned the ample chest concealed beneath her jacket at an angle against the counter and crossed her legs with elegant ease.
"If that one is involved, even a farce this crude becomes understandable. We heard a report that a new temporary servant had arrived. We did not know he would be one of her lackeys."
She tapped the solid wood of the bar with a leather-gloved finger.
Tap. Tap.
The sound, falling at even intervals, pressed strangely on me behind the counter.
"Very well. The crime of displeasing Us shall be set aside, as mercy for one sacrificed to that cat-maid's eccentricities. That you were unprepared to attend a king, We shall forgive—this once."
She lifted her chin with arrogant ease and looked down at me.
"But a second mistake will not be tolerated. Set before Us something fit to wet Our throat."
Those pitch-black eyes aimed straight at me.
"Should you offer anything beneath Our station, not even Shinano's nameplate will keep you safe."
"Yes. I won't allow even a single mistake... I'll prepare something with a deep history."
At my answer she slowly lowered the hand that had been propping her chin.
Meeting her with Crystal's or Momiji's kind of wit and play would never work. Was this the case Grace had warned me about? At a time like this, rather than shaking a shaker or showing off some flashy technique, I had to go straight at it—the same way I had when Grace put me to the test.
I turned back and took the bottle of absinthe from the liquor cabinet. I filled a clear glass with ice and began to stir it lightly with a bar spoon, dropping the temperature until the glass was thoroughly cold.
Clink. Clink.
In the quiet lobby, the cool sound of turning ice spread. Her pitch-black eyes followed every movement of my fingertips with relentless focus. Next I took out the cognac meant for her and set Peychaud's bitters, with their distinctive red, beside it on the bar mat.
"Oh..."
A very short, interested sound escaped between her red lips.
"Chill the glass, lay a sharp scent over it with absinthe, then center it with cognac... To choose one of the oldest cocktails."
An interested light stirred in those pitch-black eyes.
"It seems your answer—something with a deep history—was not a shallow boast from a silver tongue."
She folded her arms inside her jacket and leaned back against the chair, just a little.
"Had you clumsily mixed gaudy colors, or shown off some ridiculous trick, We would have hurled that glass to the floor at once. We despise, above all else, vulgar things that slight the fundamentals and wear nothing but surface glamour."
Her gaze passed once over the label of the cognac on the counter, and over the bottles of red bitters.
"Yet you seem to possess both tact and knowledge. Putting a clever one to use is, even for Us, a rather pleasant thing."
She propped her chin again and looked down at me.
"Continue. We shall watch to the end, and see whether your straightforward method can satisfy Our high discernment."
To read the combination of bottles set before her in a single glance—she was no ordinary opponent. Overseas, the Sazerac was well known as a classic of long pedigree, but to ordinary people, and to magical girls who had only just come of age, it was unfamiliar territory. I had taken her for nothing more than a willful, arrogant ruler. She was a formidable foe, and deeply versed in liquor. She might even be my natural enemy: the sort of guest I liked to tease and joke with.
Instead of answering her provocative praise, I moved my hands in silence.
I emptied the ice water from the thoroughly chilled glass and poured in a very small measure of the absinthe I had ready. With a snap of the wrist I rolled the glass in a circle, coating it in a thin film of absinthe, then discarded what remained without hesitation. I brought another glass and dropped a single white sugar cube into it. A few drops of vividly red Peychaud's bitters, a few drops of water, and then I began to crush the cube with the back of the bar spoon, working it with care until the sugar, soaked through with red, was ground completely against the bottom and dissolved like a sticky syrup.
Once the sugar had vanished I poured in the cognac, the heart of the drink, and filled the glass to the brim with ice. I set the smooth, rounded face of the bar spoon flush against the wall of the mixing glass. Flicking only the joints of my fingers, I spun the spoon in a circle, and not even the sound of ice striking glass escaped. Under the dim light, liquid tinged with red whirled without a sound.
"Control that suppresses even the unnecessary noise of the process. A different order entirely from third-rates who make a racket, drunk on surface glamour."
The leather-gloved fingers that had been tapping the counter at their leisure came to a stop. Those pitch-black eyes were fixed on the cognac quietly taking the cold inside the glass.
"How one handles the fundamentals reveals the depths of the person. That motion—making no sound at all, refining only the essence—is more than enough to please Our eyes."
Inside the mixing glass, cognac, bitters, and sugar had blended in perfect proportion and grown cold. I set down the bar spoon and took up the strainer. Into the glass sufficiently perfumed with absinthe, I strained away the ice and poured with care. Amber liquid touched with red slipped into the glass as if gliding, and the herbal scent peculiar to absinthe rose over the counter together with the deep aroma of cognac.
I picked up a lemon peel I had cut in advance and twisted it lightly above the glass. Fine citrus oil, invisible to the eye, scattered across the surface like a sprayed mist. I added no ice. I set the finished glass on a coaster and slid it before her, because that was the most perfect of the old ways.
"A Sazerac. The most classic of the cocktails."