Page 9 of Inkpot Gods

“He’s a stern master, and he keeps his household with a firm hand; Miss Cottingsly is his eyes and ears belowstairs, and you can’t say anything around her that you don’t want getting back to your uncle. She allows no secrets to linger in her domain.”

Floretta says nothing, waiting for more.

“As to his profession, he’s a scientist of sorts. He doesn’t like it when others interfere with his business. He’ll tell you more when he thinks you’re ready to hear it.”

“But I’m here now.”

“So you are, young miss,” agrees Deborah. “And as presentable as we’ve given you the tools to make yourself. Come, have a seat at your dressing table, and I’ll brush out your hair for you. You have such lovely hair, it seems a shame to let it tangle and snarl as you have. Let me take care of it.”

Floretta is tired and scared and alone. She allows herself to be directed to a seat in front of a large silvered mirror, sitting pliantly while Deborah collects her brush and moves into position behind her, beginning to gently coax the knots out of her hair.

“As to why your uncle wanted you, I would lay a guess that it’s because he considers you to be already his own. He has no other living relatives, and has never taken a wife. There’s power in blood relation, and he wouldn’t want that power loose in the world when it could be safely contained inside his walls. Consider it a compliment of sorts, that he would want to keep you close enough to keep you safe.”

“He’s not my father, though.” The statement is also a question, and a test, sounding out the waters of her confusion for any deeper drop-offs, any hidden dangers.

“No, he’s not.” Deborah sounds so sure that Floretta relaxes slightly, letting her half-formed worry go. “Even if he were the sort of man who would press himself upon his own sister’s child, he’d never be the sort of man who could leave his own child behind. When he received the letter from your village, he had no idea what it might be about. I heard him discussing the matter with Miss Cottingsly, and while your mother’s name was mentioned, it was in the context of debts or inheritance, although he thought both quite unlikely. It seems that he was wrong. You are a debt and an inheritance at the same time, something to care for and comfort, which could bring either great good or great ill upon his house.”

Deborah doesn’t sound like she cares which of those two choices should come to pass; her voice is serene, her hands steady as she runs the brush through Floretta’s hair, pressing a little deeper with every careful sweep.

Floretta lifts her eyes to the mirror, watching the woman behind her. Deborah is paler than most of the women in the village, protected from the sun as she is by the walls of Uncle John’s house; no laboring in the fields for Deborah, with her soft hands and unbowed back. Her hair is ash brown, and her eyes are a deep, almost muddy blue. She’s no great beauty, no temptation to a man who lives alone, and she holds herself less like a servant than she does like a traveling ambassador from some far-distant land.

It’s that paradox of carriage that puts courage into Floretta’s tongue. “I saw you glowing last night. Why were you glowing? How were you glowing? No one glows except for the winter women, and they never come inside houses where they might get warm enough to thaw.”

A stutter as the brush catches in her hair, Deborah’s hand slipping on the handle before she recovers herself and takes a deep breath. “The winter women?”

“They come out when the snows fall, sometimes. There was one for a long time. She had black hair, like broken ice, and she walked and didn’t leave any footprints behind. She went away last winter, and the new winter woman is blonder than anyone else I’ve ever seen, so blonde it’s like her hair is all the way white, and she still stumbles sometimes. She still leaves footprints behind.” How Father Clemence had scolded her when she’d pulled him out into the field to see! The winter woman’s feet had been substantially larger than Floretta’s own, but that hadn’t stopped the good father from accusing Floretta herself of running barefoot through the snow when she’d breathlessly pointed at the prints, pressed deep and crisp into the surface of the snowbanks.

“Anyway,” Floretta continues blithely, not seeming to notice that Deborah has stopped brushing her hair, is standing frozen behind her. “The winter women glow, sort of silver-gold. You were glowing just silver. I thought I was imagining it, and then you came closer, and I wasn’t imagining anything at all. Why do you glow? Are you a winter woman?”

“I am not a Seasonal Incarnate,” says Deborah, sounding choked. “And I understand why your uncle wants you, if you can already see them. Most people can’t. They fit into the places where the world bends, and they’re invisible unless you’re looking from the right direction. Usually, the right direction has to be taught.”

“It can’t need to be taught to everyone, or no one would have been able to learn so they could do the teaching,” says Floretta, reasonably enough. Her reflection blinks wide, guileless eyes at Deborah. “Who taught you to look?”

Deborah swallows, hard, her throat working in the mirror before she puts the brush down and steps away from Floretta. “No one had to teach me. People like me, we just have to … open our eyes.”

“People like you?”

“People who glow.”

“Oh,” says Floretta, and that seems to be the end of that. She slides from her seat, turning to face Deborah. “I’d like my breakfast now.”

Deborah nods and leads her from the room, then down the stairs to the kitchen. They don’t talk, but she can feel Floretta’s eyes on the back of her neck, measuring and weighing her in a way she’s not entirely comfortable with. There’s a sharpness to the child, one that reminds her of ice in winter, frozen ponds ready to swallow the unwary whole. Floretta seems sweet and innocent, but appearances are all too frequently deceiving. There’s no telling what this child will be, given a little time in her uncle’s company.

Deborah only hopes that she can help to guide Floretta down a kinder path than the one she fears awaits her.

She can only hope that both of them survive the guidance.

John has been in the parlor for some time.

On any ordinary day, he would have finished his breakfast and gone downstairs to begin his work for the day, not seeing the surface again until lunchtime, assuming he didn’t work straight through to dinner. He does, sometimes. He’s a single man who has yet to go the Pygmalion route for finding himself a life’s companion, and while he may one day weaken sufficient to become a sculptor, that day is not yet here.

Instead, he’s sitting at the table waiting for his newly found niece to descend, his eggs getting cold and gummy and his coffee drunk down to the dregs, beginning to wonder whether he made a mistake in bringing her back here. Her fear and confusion had been well apparent during their drive, her eyes darting to the windows like a trapped animal, like she thought she could wiggle free and escape. And then she had been in his home, small and grubby and out of place in his parlor.

But Miss Cottingsly had seen what he saw when he sent the girl to see her in the kitchens. He spoke to the housekeeper this morning, when she brought him his breakfast, and she confirmed his suppositions. “Power, yes,” she said. “Such power as I’ve rarely seen in a grown alchemist, much less in a child. She’ll be able to remake the world when she’s old enough to focus her will and understand what she’s asking it to do. I don’t know where she could have come from, but there’s a touch of the otherworldly about her. I’m sure you noticed.”

“I did,” he lied. He hadn’t. He’d seen the power in her small frame, the potential to change the world, but not its possible origin. He had assumed, foolishly it seems, that the power was passed down by her mother, that Elisabet had been a potential alchemist in her own right. He never met the girl, after all. She could have been virtually anything and he would never have known.

“I’ll have her properly trained by summer’s end,” she said, confidently smug as only a woman who knew her power and position could be. Miss Cottingsly is one of his proudest creations. The mind of the women she had been before her deaths, the soul of a beast, proud and faithful and willing to die in the defense of what she considers her own. She doesn’t remember what she was before she met him, what she could have been had she survived to live her petty human lives; he broke down and remade her in the image of his own needs, and she serves now, content with the only life she can imagine.