Page 13 of Inkpot Gods

“I see,” says Floretta. “I won’t tell.”

Deborah breathes a sigh of relief and returns to her business. She doesn’t see the way Floretta is watching her in the mirror, the sharp focus in her eyes, the way calculation has chased away wonder.

Even the moon doesn’t know everything. The world would be so much simpler if it did.

The next morning, Floretta goes to breakfast armed with questions. She waits until her uncle is seated with his own coffee in hand to offer up the first of them, looking at him with wide, innocent eyes as she asks, “Uncle John, what’s an alchemist?”

He almost chokes on his coffee, stopping himself at the last second to spit and sputter, catching his breath. He stares at her as he does.

“Where did you hear that word?” he asks, finally, and there’s a condemnation in those words, a complete willingness to destroy whoever may have told her what he is.

Fortunately, Floretta has an answer: “Everyone in the house says it, when they think I’m not listening. What does it mean?”

“An alchemist is like a scientist and a philosopher at the same time. It’s someone who looks at the world and thinks, ‘I could improve on this,’ and then does it. We use science and art and philosophy and magic, and we blend it all together into a weapon and a tool and a transformation. We’ll control the universe one day, when we’ve bent enough of it to our designs, and we’re the reason reality doesn’t pick itself to pieces.”

“You make embodiments?”

“No. Embodiments are primitive, involuntary things, like bits of grit inside oysters turning into pearls. They’re reality exuding stopgaps against the tides of chaos that would sweep everything good away.” He pauses then, gaze sharpening. “What do you know about embodiments?”

“I know the winter women sometimes walk in the snow outside the village where I used to live,” she says. “And the summer men, but they’re harder to see. They don’t walk barefoot through the snow. I know some people are also the moon, and I’m not.”

He goes very still, gaze sharpening still further, until his attention is a knife ready to flense the flesh from the world. “Do you know anyone who’s the moon?”

Floretta is silent for a moment, considering her reply. There’s a world where she lies, where she chooses to protect Deborah at a potential risk to herself. Father Clemence’s daughter would have chosen to exist in that world, would have tried so hard to be good and live up to his expectations of her that she would have put herself into harm’s way to keep the housemaid safe.

Father Clemence’s daughter didn’t have terrible hatchlings tearing at her heart, whispering to her about how she lost everything when she was snatched away from him—everything—and how it’s not fair that Deborah should still get to shine. That she should have what Floretta can’t, and that she should be so very clearly something Uncle John wants, something he needs more than anything. Father Clemence’s daughter was wild, but she was never jealous.

Not like Floretta.

This isn’t the world where she lies. She left that world behind some time ago, and she doesn’t have a path back. This is the world where an alchemist came and swept her away from everything she’d ever known, the world where she’s being shaped, one carefully sculpted lesson at a time, into something she wasn’t. She’s always been the daughter of a storm. It’s only since she’s come to Boston that she’s started learning how to hold back her squalls and take her time. She’s learning to calculate, going from natural disaster to unnatural disaster through the slow, ambient alchemy of her uncle’s house.

“I do,” she says.

His brows lift. “Who?”

“I’m not sure I remember.”

He scowls as he looks at her. “What do you want?”

“I want friends my own age, and I want to see them at least twice a week. And I want to play in the park. I’m tired of being locked up inside and never seeing the sky.” She looks at him with calm calculation. “I think you could give me those things without changing whatever it is you’re trying to do with me.”

(She doesn’t know it, will never know it, but this is the moment when he stops looking at her as a potentially useful tool and begins looking at her as his presumptive heir. She has it in her to be powerful, and he’s seen enough over the past months to know that she’s clever. Until this moment, he wasn’t sure she could learn how to focus that cleverness, or that she would ever find a way to reach past biddability for the fierce self-interest he’ll need her to have if she wants to thrive in the world he occupies. That she might not care about that world has never occurred to him. It certainly hasn’t occurred to him that she might one day want to burn it to the ground.)

“I think those things can be arranged, for the clever niece who handed me the moon,” he says.

A flicker of the girl she’d been growing up to be shows in her eyes. “You won’t hurt her, will you?” she asks.

Uncle John takes a great, ponderous breath. “Of course I’m going to hurt her,” he says. “If you know enough to know what I am, what I do, I can’t understand why you’re even asking me that question. A moon isn’t really human; none of the Incarnates are. They’re universal impulses walking around in human skins, like scarecrows that have torn themselves loose from their fields. They’re a collection of useful parts and pieces, and I have a use for each and every one of them. I’m going to hurt her. If you’re very good, and you don’t have any further objections, I might even let you help.”

Floretta considers this for a moment, weighs the promise of his approval against the sound of Deborah’s laughter, and comes to a conclusion that was inevitable from the moment she decided to tell her uncle what she knew: “All right,” she says. “I’ll tell you.”

He smiles, and keeps smiling as he receives the name.

He’s still smiling when night falls, and he waits for Deborah in the upstairs hall, a silver rope in one hand and a sharpened razor in the other. He ties her wrists as she screams, and no one in the house comes to her rescue.

When he drags her to the room at the bottom of the stairs, the room that is always locked, the room she has never entered in her employment here, it is to find Floretta already waiting, seated primly on a stool at the very back of the room, her hands folded neatly at her knee, watching the door in wide-eyed silence.

Deborah catches her breath, and begins to beg. “Floretta, please,” she says, words quick and tight with panic. “I don’t know what your uncle is doing, I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing, but you have to help me. You have to tell him that this is wrong. Please, Mr. Baker!” And just like that she’s back to begging John directly, jerking on her bonds and struggling to get away. “I won’t tell anyone, I swear. This can be our little secret. I won’t say anything.”