The Scent Sense

When Chris meets someone in the book, their scent is often the first thing he notices. It isn’t perfume or soap. It belongs to the person themselves, and it says something about who they are.

A scent can change with someone’s mood. When Retia is afraid, her scent grows sharper, and Ahra’s takes on something sour when he is nervous. If the scents vanish, as they do one night on the test island, it is as if someone were putting out the lamps in a house.

The characters’ scents

• Ahra: warm bark, freshly cut grass and something like honey, only greener.
• Retia: salt wind, cold stone and wild roses from a rocky coast.
• Haltora: iron, night air and embers that smoulder.
• Edrin: candle wax and old parchment, like a room someone has just left.
• Arvia, Retia’s mother: freshly baked bread, warm linen and garden flowers.
• Surain: wet earth, animal fur and old metal, like a fire that has gone out.
• Nihil: cold and sharp, like winter wind over bare iron.
• Maka: like Ahra’s, but deeper and older.
• The woman at the fire on Borgsted Banke: sunlight on old stone, so faint it can hardly be sensed.
• Professor Arcanus: layered and manifold, with copper at the bottom.

Copper in the air

The power itself has a scent too. Dherak smells faintly of copper, and that scent hangs over all of Déynáir.