Page 50 of Inkpot Gods

“Then you should have told the suitors as much,” she says, smoothing down her jacket with her hands. “While I won’t disabuse you of your beliefs, I suggest you not fall back on the idea of virgin sacrifice as your solution if you want it to do anything other than leave you with bloodied hands and one less niece. You could follow the example of Miss Cottingsly and make an auf of me, but I doubt you’d appreciate the results. Everyone would notice, and an auf can’t be trusted in polite society the way I’m expected to be.”

“Reckless girl,” he says, sounding almost amazed. “Did you spoil yourself on purpose?”

“I am not a piece of fruit, to be so easily made rotten,” she says, tartly. “And no, I didn’t lay with the men you found for me to spite you, or to damage them. I did it because I wished to, and they wished me to, and between us we found a place where wishes were made true. I have no regrets, but no, Uncle, I didn’t look to the future and ask myself how best I could be protected from you deciding to murder me in order to bring back the rain. I’ve lived my entire life without much rain. I see no reason to die for it now.”

“Asphodel…” He rubs his face with one hand, shoulders suddenly slumping. He looks very old in that moment, very old and very defeated. “Child. I have done my best to do right by you, but you make it very difficult at times.”

“Doing right by me would mean allowing me to study alchemy, as has always been my purpose and destiny,” says Asphodel hotly. “Only allow me the use of your lab, and of Miss Cottingsly, and I’ll prove to you that I have discoveries to add into the Great Work. Allow me to show you to the light—”

“What light?”

“The light of true enlightenment, which shines within us all.”

“You are a woman, Asphodel. It’s time you admitted how that limits you, and where it will restrict you from your mad aspirations.”

“It doesn’t have to!” she very nearly shouts.

He flinches back, startled. She takes several deep breaths, calming herself by what appears to be sheer force of will, then looks back to his face.

“I would be far from the first,” she says. “Hypatia, Pandrosion, even Circe. They were all women, and they made great contributions to the alchemical world. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Her discoveries in the school of takwin have changed everything. Her books are enlightening and invigorating at the same time, like lightning striking the mind. Only America refuses to see the contributions of the female of the species. But American alchemists are perfectly happy to build upon the discoveries of women. They stand, as we all do, upon the shoulders of giants, and they refuse to admit that some of the giants might be different than themselves.”

John takes a deep breath, and then another, finally looking up at the ceiling for a long moment before looking back to her. “You’ve been practicing that speech for some time, I think.”

“Several years,” she admits.

“And you’re not, I must admit, entirely wrong. America is somewhat backward in certain areas when compared to the remainder of the world. Can you blame us? We’re a young nation. We need our women dedicated to the bearing of infants and the education of the children, lest the fragile identity we’re building for ourselves come to pieces in our hands.”

“I have never been the mothering type,” says Asphodel, somewhat stiffly. “That deep inadequacy in my character has been the end of several courtships, and yet it remains, as insolvable as the secrets of alkahest. I will never play the part you would assign to me. Allow me to do what I was made for.”

“The Congress will never admit you,” he says. “Even if you sway me to your delusions, they’ll refuse you admission.”

“But you could train me.”

He scoffs. “Fine, then, niece. I’ll give you a sennight, and a challenge, as used to be customary when considering the taking on of an apprentice. It wouldn’t do to allow any nobleman’s son to buy his way into an unsuitable service, after all. The aspirants were expected to prove themselves with some great act of alchemy before they could be trained to even-greater heights.”

“What do you want me to do?” asks Asphodel, although she already knows: this is a formality, an opportunity for him to offer her some less-impossible task.

But there was never going to be another task. Her whole life has been moving toward this moment, like a comet spinning along its preordained path. She is unsurprised and not at all disappointed when he looks at her, hands clenching even tighter, and says the only thing he could possibly have said:

“Bring back the rain.”

A week’s time is barely enough to purify lead or turn flowers into glass. It certainly isn’t enough time to remake the weather, especially not when this is the only way she’s ever known it to behave: her own beliefs are working against her, telling her that there’s nothing wrong. Alchemy is often the art of wishing for impossible things, but always limited by the imagination of the alchemist.

So she tries to think of rain, of times when she’s seen it fall, felt it striking on her skin. She tries to think of a world where rain comes commonly, and not less than once a season, or not at all. She tries and tries, and all she finds is the drought that has been her entire life.

“Why did it have to be rain?” she demands, turning on Miss Cottingsly. The old auf has been locked in her uncle’s basement lab with her for the better part of the week, patiently doing whatever has been asked of her, fetching and carrying, bringing Asphodel book after book from her uncle’s library. She has no opinions of her own, no aspirations, and no skill for alchemy. She is the living, breathing equivalent of a block of lead: inert, stable, and thus ideal for assisting someone else.

Auf are normally used as guards and hunters, weapons to be turned against the world. Watching Miss Cottingsly in the lab, it’s difficult not to wonder how many of them would serve better as laboratory assistants. Asphodel is already mentally sketching new processes for their construction, new ways of refining them into something more stable and less terrible, capable of serving as an alchemist’s right hand—perhaps even capable of becoming alchemists in their own right.

But all that will have to wait, until she’s proven that she has the right to make such plans, that she’s allowed to learn.

“Rain is an important part of the world, miss,” says Miss Cottingsly, unfailingly polite. It’s difficult to remember a time when she resented Asphodel’s presence in her household. “We need it so things can grow. Plants, children, animals. Without it, we’re just holding ground until we all fade away.”

“How can he think I have any connection to the missing rains? I’ve never done any workings that should have affected the weather, and I don’t remember it raining even when I was a little girl in the forest.”

“That’s exactly why he thinks so, miss. There was rain in Boston, before you came. I believe the alchemists are starting to think there would be rain again, if only you would go.”

“So it’s something in my flesh?” Asphodel looks down at herself, immodestly dressed in one of her uncle’s shirts under a heavy canvas apron. Her skirt is long enough to be decent, but stained and tattered at the hem. “Not only am I a woman, but I’m, what? A storm-repellent?”