Page 32 of Inkpot Gods

“Sweetest, I—”

“I am not an alchemist, but only because their precious Congress has no room for women. It’s not my fault I was born a daughter when I could have been a son. Would that I were a man. I would dip my quill so deeply into the inkwell that there would be no other gods before me, and woe betide the man who rose to challenge me! But no, I must be a woman, and so they forbid me the art of alchemy, and I am reduced to lesser arts. I am reduced to you.”

She steps back then, and if his absence is a blow to her senses, hers is a knife to his throat. He gasps as if suddenly deprived of air, his hands opening and closing on nothingness.

“Sweetest?” he halfway whispers.

“I love you, Charles,” and it thrills her to say it so baldly, to offer the truth so boldly to the universe. “I have loved you since first you smiled at me, and this winter has been the sweetest I’ve known in all my sixteen years. But I played at flirtation because I needed to know why it will not rain, and you are inhuman enough that it seemed you might bring home the answer. You did not, and so it seems I must be quit of you.”

He gasps again, his mouth remaining open in a silent scream. Asphodel looks at him impassively, watching as a bright red flower unfurls its spreading petals on the breast of his summer suit. He follows her gaze to his chest, and for a moment, he can only look bewildered. She’s not even sure he knows that he’s bleeding.

Then Miss Cottingsly pushes him forward, off the blade of her knife, and he crumples to the ground like so much discarded washing, a heavy bag of meat and bones and stillness. The diamonds in his hair begin to melt as soon as he falls, reacting to the lingering heat of his body.

Asphodel sighs.

“Take heart, sparrow, he was never the one for you,” says Miss Cottingsly. The old housekeeper’s voice has warmed considerably from the days after Asphodel’s arrival; she speaks now like she actually cares about the girl, like she would be unhappy if something were to harm her.

That’s the only thing about her that’s changed. While Asphodel has gone from child to blossoming young woman, and her uncle has begun to gray at the temples, Miss Cottingsly remains precisely, stubbornly the same. Asphodel suspects she knows why. She’s seen the stitches at the housekeeper’s wrists and running down the back of her neck, seen the places where the skin has been patched so smoothly that there is no scar.

“He was so nice, though,” she says plaintively.

“The frozen boys always are,” says Miss Cottingsly. She rolls Charles’s body over onto his back, then bends to hook her arm around his chest and hoist him up onto her shoulders, holding him as easily as a sack of flour. She either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that he’s leaking blood onto her shirt. “Did he find what you were looking for?”

“No,” says Asphodel mulishly. “He said no one had the answers we needed.”

“Chin up, Delly. It was a clean kill. He didn’t suffer, and now your uncle will have something to keep him occupied until the thaw.”

Asphodel sighs again as she turns away from the sight of her suitor slung across the housekeeper’s shoulders. She feels so full of sighing that she might as well be the winter wind incarnate, even though she knows there’s no such easy path for her. Even though she understands her own humanity. “And it’s always best to buy his patience when it’s available for sale.”

“Clever girl,” says Miss Cottingsly appropriately. She starts across the yard.

Asphodel follows after, hurrying until she’s walking ahead of the other woman, as befits the lady of the house. Manners, after all, must be observed.

If John Baker is surprised by the speed with which Asphodel returns from her morning walk, he manages to conceal it quickly. He’s less successful at concealing his shock when Miss Cottingsly appears with a dead man slung across her shoulders, barely two feet behind the remarkably calm teenage girl. He rises with unseemly haste, pursuing them down the hall.

He reaches the kitchen door just as Asphodel pulls it open, her head half-turned toward her shoulder as she continues saying something to the housekeeper. “—and find him. Please wait here until I do. I want to explain.”

“Explain what, my dearest darling niece?” asks John, and is gratified when she jumps, letting out a small, squeaky shout of surprise. He looks at her calmly, waiting for her to compose herself.

Miss Cottingsly bustles inside, the dead man he saw through the window still across her shoulders. He’s wearing an unseasonal dove-gray suit, and there’s a spreading bloodstain on the back, making it more than obvious how he died. John frowns, sharply, eyes darting over the body and dismissing it as irrelevant to the situation.

Which seems slightly ridiculous, because the entire situation is about the corpse right now.

“Uncle, I—” begins Asphodel.

He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I’ll ask the questions and you’ll answer them, do you understand? Nod if you understand.”

Asphodel nods.

“Who was this man?”

“The potential Winter I told you about. His name is Charles Booker,” she says, trying not to wince at the past tense buried in her uncle’s question. “He’s the son of a fur trader from Maine. Relatively well off, enough so that his parents intended he should enter society to seek a wife, but not so wealthy as to be quickly or easily missed. He has a tendency to wander off when he’s supposed to be looking after his father’s interests. Anyone who expected to see him today will take his absence as a sign of distraction, rather than foul play.”

“How do you know him?”

“I met him at Grace’s garden party at the end of the summer. You were there.”

“Yes, I was.” John frowns, casting his mind back to that day. As always, he spent most of the gathering watching Asphodel closely, keeping track of the people she spoke to as well as the ones who seemed to take too close of an interest in her. Their family relationship means he doesn’t have Father Clemence’s social issues: it’s right and reasonable for a man to take in his own niece, and there’s nothing salacious about it. But it does mean that protecting her virtue is one of his primary concerns at almost all times.