Page 33 of Inkpot Gods

Slowly, he says, “You spoke to the usual array of young ladies, and a few newer ones who’ve only recently joined the social set. But I don’t recall any young gentlemen catching your attention. Was the boy working as one of the servers?”

“Perish the thought.” Asphodel wrinkles her nose. “He was in the rolling chair parked near the fence. He was a charming conversationalist. His parents had sent him to the city to stay with a business partner of his father’s while he recovered from a summer illness. It had left him weakened and all but comatose until the weather began to turn.”

John’s eyes widen minutely as he realizes what she’s alluding to. “Is that how you knew he was a candidate for the Winter throne?”

“Indeed,” she says. “The current King shows no signs of stepping aside, but still the season prepares its scions. Charles had the potential to serve the Winter. He was closely tied enough that he sickened when the weather warmed, and was only restored when it cooled again.”

“Asphodel…”

“He was a handsome young man.” She watches as Miss Cottingsly carries him over to the kitchen table and dumps him there. His blood will soak into the wood, but he’s far from the first corpse to be deposited there. “He said sweet things and admired my hair. You never admire my hair.”

“You’re my niece. As long as you’re presentable, I have no cause to admire your hair.”

“He charmed me. I was charmed. I appreciated the opportunity to be charmed. It happens so rarely.” She finally turns back to her uncle. “He was tied to Winter. Winter is a season, and seasons come with their own weather patterns. I set him to the question of why it never rains in Boston. I told him the truth: that you would give him your blessing to court me in the open if he could find that truth for me. He tried his best, but it seems a scion of Winter is not up to the question. When he failed, as I had known he must, Miss Cottingsly secured him for your use. His parts won’t be as powerful as the Winter King’s would have been, but they should still have their properties. Perhaps he can help us with the question after all.”

“Perhaps,” says John, voice turning thoughtful. “He didn’t test your virtue or dishonor you?”

“I’m not compromised if that’s what you’re asking,” snaps Asphodel. “My virginity is intact, and the only kiss he gave me, he offered as he died. I’ll bottle it before lunch. A maiden girl’s first kiss, with a son of the seasons, must be a powerful trinket for your collection, no?”

“Not powerful enough to forgive you meeting with him without telling me.”

Asphodel’s expression melts into dewy-eyed dismay. She clasps her hands under her chin as she stares at her uncle. “I only wanted to make you happy,” she says. “He was willing to do what I asked because he liked me. He didn’t know you, and what he did know—that you were a powerful alchemist, associated with the American Congress—frightened him. I give you the body of the man I was falling in love with, I offer you my first kiss, and you’d be angry with me for not telling you my plan when your presence would have ruined it? Uncle, I don’t understand. You say I can’t be an alchemist because I’m a woman. Now you don’t want me to be a woman either! What can I be?”

“You can be serious for a moment,” he says. “We both know you’re not actually upset right now.”

She drops her hands and her expression at the same time, returning to the cool, assessing look that has become her default. She’s not his daughter, but sometimes he thinks she might as well have been. Sometimes he’s so proud of her that he could burst.

“Better,” he says. “I don’t disapprove of your plan, or of its results. I do disapprove of you going behind my back and involving my staff with something that could easily have become dangerous. Do we know if he told anyone about you? If someone will come here looking for him now that he’s gone missing?”

“Yes, we know, no, he didn’t, and no, no one should come looking for him here.”

“You sound very sure of yourself.”

“I am.”

“Very well, then. Clean yourself up and meet us down in the basement. It seems we have a Winter scion to dismantle. It’s best done while the blood’s still fresh.”

Asphodel actually bounces onto her toes at that, delighted beyond suppressing her response, and rushes over to kiss him on the cheek before she spins and runs for the hall.

John waits until he’s alone with Miss Cottingsly and the corpse, then turns to his housekeeper. “Well?”

“I watched her the whole time,” says Miss Cottingsly. “She was as careful as she says she was. The girl has a deft hand with deceptions. I might consider putting bars on the windows if I were you. She knows what waits her in two years’ time, when she’s old enough to enter society and thus the market. You won’t let her be an alchemist, but you’ve left her suited to very little else. She’ll be trying to find a way to change the future, lest she wind up an alchemist’s wife when she’d rather be the hand that holds the wand.”

“Alchemy is not wizardry,” he scoffs. “What we do isn’t magic. It’s science. Magic cannot raise the dead, nor make a person from the pieces those same dead leave behind. If I were a wizard, you wouldn’t be here.”

“How gingerly you sidestep my point,” says Miss Cottingsly. “Yes, you made me, and a clever job you did of it. I can’t remember the women I was, not even in my dreams. But I know you got the idea of me from that Shelley woman’s book. How can you be so sure women have no gift for alchemy when you made one from another woman’s blueprint?”

“Shelley was no alchemist,” says John. “She wrote what her husband ordered her to write.”

“She outlived him by thirty years. Don’t you think that if he had been the alchemist, he would have been able to stop himself from drowning? You see what you want to see, much as this poor boy did.” She gestures toward the body of Charles Booker. “It may serve you just as well if you’re not careful.”

“That’s enough out of you,” he says sharply. “Do your job. Get the corpse to the basement. And never tell me how to raise my niece again.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, and bobs a quick curtsey before she moves to retrieve the body. John Baker rolls up his sleeves and follows her down to the basement, where the work can properly begin. The dissection will serve him best if the body is yet warm when it begins.

There is so much work to be done.

The improbable road reached the base of the mountain and began to snake gently upward, following the curves and dips of a natural pathway worn into the stone. The group continued to walk along it, allowing the road to lure them up and away from the ground. They had gone perhaps twenty feet up the side of the mountain when Soleil made a small sound of discontent.

Jack turned to look at her. “What is it?” he asked.

Wordlessly, she pointed to the ground beneath their feet. Jack looked down.

The path they walked along was glittering black stone. The improbable road, fickle as ever, was gone, and they walked now without its iridescent guide to see that they reached the right destination.

Unlike Soleil, who remembered so little of the world that she might as well have been a stranger like Avery or Zib, or Niamh, who came from a place so deeply drowned that she had never had purposeful need of the improbable road, Jack had been raised to respect and revere the road, which was the only true connection between the Kingdoms that could be accessed by those too common to carry a crown. The Kings and Queens could go where they liked, as could their Pages and consorts; the Great Owls were all but a law unto themselves. For everyone else, there was the road and only the road, and all else might as well have been stories and lies.

To see the road desert them now sent a shiver of cold slithering down his spine to wrap around his stomach, tight and constrictive as a hungry serpent. Jack swallowed and kept walking. Zib was not yet heavy in his arms, and the Palace of the Queen of Wands was as yet up ahead, still unseen. If the road had left them, either it disagreed with their destination, or it felt that they no longer needed its guidance.

Jack had no way of knowing one thing from the other, and so he continued onward, trusting the road not to have left them walking into danger. The improbable road had no true loyalties save to the Impossible City, which was its source and destination. They sought a place to care for Zib, yes, but they also sought the missing Queen of Wands at the request of the Great Owls themselves, and a way to access the Impossible City. Without the Queen, the City would fall to war, and the road would suffer as much as anyone else. He had to trust the road.

They all did.

—From Under the Smokestrewn Sky, by A. Deborah Baker