Page 49 of Inkpot Gods

“Wimp.” Erin sounds almost fond. She turns back to Lilianne, huddled on the desk. “Hey. Alchemist. Come over here.”

“No,” mumbles Lilianne. “You’re a scary lady.”

The blood loss is clearly getting to her. She’s barely holding herself upright without Smita there to lean on. Smita shoots Erin a half-panicked look. Erin, for her part, only sighs.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m definitely a scary lady. I’ve worked hard to cultivate my reputation as absolutely terrifying, and I don’t like you. You lured my friend into a dangerous place, underground, and I found her huddling in a situation straight out of a horror movie. So I very much want to be scary at you. But Smita wants us to help you, and that means I need you to come down from that desk. She’s already cold. I want to get her out of this water as fast as I can, before something happens and she goes down. I can’t carry you both out of here.”

“Please, Lily,” pleads Smita.

Lilianne slowly uncurls from her huddle, scooting down the desk until her feet are dangling in the water. Some of the blood that’s managed to soak into her jeans spreads out around her ankles in an expanding ring of red, and Smita tenses, waiting for the surviving etiäinen to appear and yank her under.

Nothing happens. Erin reaches out, grasping the sides of Lilianne’s chest, and lifts her down into the water as gently as she can. Lilianne grunts, the motion probably putting pressure on her injured shoulder, but she doesn’t struggle or try to pull away, and under the circumstances, that’s the best Smita can hope for.

Together, the three of them wade to the stairs, where Artemis is waiting to help them back up onto dry land. She looks at Lilianne’s injured shoulder and wrinkles her nose in clear disgust, then looks around the lab. “They must have a first aid kit in here somewhere,” she says, and it’s so ordinary, so predictable a reaction to the situation around them that all Smita can do is laugh until she cries.

She keeps crying when the laughter stops. In the moment, it feels like the right thing to do.

Courage

TIMELINE: MAY 11, 1891.

Asphodel lounges on the settee in her uncle’s parlor, waiting for him to come home and rage at her for spoiling another potential match. Eight years of trying to get her married off to one of his alchemist peers, to settle her like a cuckoo in someone else’s nest, and all he has to show for it is a string of broken contracts and an increasingly aged and insouciant niece who insists on calling herself his apprentice to anyone who slows down enough to listen. It doesn’t matter how many times he tells her that women can’t be alchemists. She points to her experiments, to her research, and asks him why not, over and over again, like her stubborn refusal to accept reality can in the end remake the universe.

But then, isn’t that what alchemy is? It’s an effort to remake the universe, to tame it, to turn its own systems of belief tame and grasp them with a human hand. The incarnates are errors, aberrations. Through the act of intentional creation, they can be purified and brought properly to heel, with the guiding hands of the alchemist to keep them moving in the right directions. Asphodel’s refusal to be directed toward some less weighty future is a sign of the alchemy in her veins, the science in her soul.

If only she weren’t a woman. She’s often considered the portions of the Great Work that would allow her to make herself over as a man, to slide into the ranks of the worthy as one of their acknowledged own, but she’s never been able to bring herself to act in that direction. For one thing, while she’s met souls whose final form did not suit the body they were born to, she isn’t among them: she is a woman born and a woman bound to be, with a woman’s heart and a woman’s yearnings. She would make a miserable man, no matter how much she worked to play the part.

No, that happy resolution is not for her. She’ll be a woman and an alchemist both if it kills her. She’ll change the world on her own terms, and let anyone who says she can’t be damned.

The front door slams as her uncle makes his entrance, and she sinks a little deeper into the settee, savoring her last moments of peace before he thunders through and tears everything asunder. His heavy footsteps draw his path along the hall.

Asphodel waits until he draws almost level with the parlor before she calls, sweetly, “Is all well, Uncle?”

“You know full well it isn’t,” he snarls, shifting his trajectory to storm into the room, where he stops and glares at her, eyes dark with irritation. “The Congress is debating what’s to be done with Boston. It hasn’t rained in more than a year.”

The rains, which had come sporadically when they came at all, dried up entirely following Asphodel’s nineteenth birthday. For seven years, Boston has been dryer than a desert, watered only by the winter snows, which fall more thinly than they once did, and by the occasional, incredibly dear downpour. And now it seems that even those have stopped.

“What do you mean, what’s to be done?” asks Asphodel. “It’s a city. Thousands of people live here. We have water from the rivers, which still flow as they ever have, down to the sea. There’s nothing to be done with Boston! Even if we didn’t have the rivers, we’d have the harbor. Saltwater can be purified with very little effort. Tell the Congress that if something must be done with Boston, they should set themselves to the challenge of removing the salt from the harbor. We’ll have enough to drink for a century’s time, and the seas will be none the less for the exchange.”

“Oh, I see,” says John, coldly. “And the farmers? The people whose gardens are too far from the river to haul the water to their thirsty roots? The firetrucks and the farriers? We need more water than the rivers can provide.”

“Find a better rainmaker.”

“There are none left willing to tend to Boston. We’ve exhausted our supply.” His hands flex at his sides, opening and closing and finally balling into fists. “Perhaps I should have been listening to them long since.”

Asphodel, with the hard-won ear of a prey animal for a predator’s approach, sits up straight, shoulders locked into a precise line. She vibrates like a finely tuned harp string, caught in the moment, stiff and unyielding. “What do you mean, Uncle?”

“I mean that since the first, they’ve been mentioning that the strangeness in the weather has some connection to you, niece. That you have a tie to the missing rains. There have been suggestions, in the past. I could send you back to the village where I found you—”

“You wouldn’t,” protests Asphodel, horror audible in her voice. She begins to rise, hands raised in supplication. “I wouldn’t know how to survive in such a place, in such a wilderness. You’ve domesticated me, Uncle. You can’t be cruel enough to throw me back to the pigpen you pulled me from. If that was your intention, you should have left me from the beginning, let me grow into a woman who could survive in such a place, not taken me as a toy to be discarded when you tired of me.”

“I’m not tired of you,” he says, wearily. “I’m attempting to save my city, regardless of whether it’s worthy of being saved. I could send you back, or I could offer you up as a virgin sacrifice to the skies, slit your belly to read the answers in your entrails, and let death void whatever hold you have over the missing rains … What’s so funny?”

Because she’s no longer holding her hands up to ward him off; she’s holding them over her mouth, like she can’t contain her mirth through any other measure. Dropping her hands, she shoots him a look made of equal parts amusement and exasperation.

“Uncle, I’m twenty-six years old, and you’ve been throwing me at every eligible alchemist on the Eastern Seaboard since I made my entry into society. Do you truly think I would still qualify as a virgin sacrifice?”

He scowls. “I think you’re a good girl with a proper upbringing who would never shame this house by dallying with a suitor while unmarried.”