Education #4
But the princess in a storybook will have a happy ending when all is said and done, and Floretta no longer believes that is a possible ending for her.
She goes through her days in dry, rainless Boston, looking out the windows of her uncle’s house, waiting for the hour when all will begin to turn in her direction, and nothing changes but the lessons she is offered day after dusty day.
Miss Cottingsly is not her only tutor, or even her primary, although she has her share of lessons with the hard-eyed housekeeper; a man scarcely old enough to carry the title comes twice a week to teach her sums, and a woman slightly older comes as often for comportment and Latin.
Why her uncle feels she needs to learn Latin is unclear, but she knows enough not to argue with him.
Arguing with him only shakes the walls and reduces her dinners to dry meat and plain boiled vegetables, still eaten at the table in full view of his seasoned and gravy-moistened feasts.
No. She has been here long enough to learn the virtue of staying silent and going along with what’s expected of her, and what’s expected is that she attend her lessons and learn the things he sees fit to have her taught.
If that means dead languages and scientific concepts not normally considered appropriate for a girl of her age—a girl of any age, really—then that’s what she’ll do.
She will be his niece, she will be his protégée, and she will learn what she’s offered.
Those days turn into weeks, until one night she sits at her dressing table brushing the tangles from her hair and sees Deborah step into her bedroom with an armload of fresh linens, glowing as silver as starlight in the mirror.
It’s a mellow, lambent light, and it has no business coming from a human skin.
She hates it, and she covets it, and she doesn’t understand how Deborah can have it when she can’t.
It doesn’t seem fair, that some people should glow when others don’t.
It doesn’t seem, maybe, like those people are actually people, if they can do things that people aren’t supposed to do. Envy and disdain hatch in her heart, terrible sisters that can prepare a body to do almost any terrible thing, if they’re given the room to stretch and grow.
She turns to face Deborah, and the light is still there, still steady, still pouring from the older girl like honey from a beehive. She frowns. “Deborah.”
“Miss?”
“You’re glowing again.”
Deborah blinks and straightens, and the glow dims but doesn’t die. “I’m sorry, miss. It’s not exactly something I can control.”
“Why do you glow sometimes? My uncle says you have to answer me when I ask you things. He says I’m going to be the mistress of this house someday. That means you’ll answer to me, and I want to know. Why are you glowing? You said you’re not one of the winter women. What are you?”
“I’m the moon.”
It’s a small answer, simple on the face of it, and yet it’s large enough to change the world. Floretta frowns. “How can you be the moon? The moon is in the sky, and you’re in my bedroom. It doesn’t work.”
“I’m not always the moon, only sometimes.
I’m a minor moon goddess, Selene. I shine in the dark places, and sometimes I open doors into the space between our world and the center of the universe, so that I can shine on the heart of reality and keep it beating properly.
Olympus calls me home when there’s need of me. ”
“Olympus is real?”
“Yes, and no. It’s not a place the way Boston is a place, but it’s a sort of impossible city where the forces that control everything around us can gather and keep the world turning.
It’s where the rules are made. It’s where I belong.
I just can’t go there more than once a month, when my Lunar’s heart is full and shining through my skin.
I’ll go there tonight, and I’ll shine and shine and shine until it hurts me deep inside.
That’s why I glow. Because I’m the moon. ”
“I don’t like it,” says Floretta sharply. “People shouldn’t be moons.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” says Deborah. “I was born like you, and then one day Selene woke up and told me that I was also going to be her. Like with the winter women. You said the one near your village had changed, that the new one left footprints in the snow. That’s because the old one died, and someone new had to become the winter in order for the seasons to keep turning.
The world is a lot stranger and more structured than you realize. ”
“If you’re the moon, why are you here?”
For the first time, Deborah looks truly uncomfortable. “Everyone has to be somewhere, even the moon,” she says, deflecting.
Floretta is not to be dissuaded. “Yes, but why here?”
“Your uncle is a … a powerful man. He studies a branch of science known as alchemy. Do you know what that is?”
Floretta has heard the term before. She nods.
“Alchemists know a great opportunity when it’s presented to them.
It’s why he wanted you. There’s something about you, Floretta.
I just don’t know exactly what it is.” Deborah’s voice turns achingly sincere.
She means what she’s saying, every nonsensical syllable of it.
“But something about you is born to moonlight and starlight, snowfall and sun. You’re not an embodiment. You have our fingerprints about you.”
“And you’re here because my uncle wanted you?”
“Your uncle doesn’t know about me, not in the way you mean,” says Deborah. “He can’t know about me. Alchemists … when they know about something, they want to own it. They want to take it apart and make use of it.”
“So he could use you?”
“He could. And he could probably kill me in the process. You can’t tell him about me.”
“Then why would you tell me?”
“Because you asked. And because if I’m going to trust you—and I want to trust you—I have to start somewhere.
We’re watching your uncle because something great and terrible is going to begin in this house.
We want to be here when it happens. If you’re willing to help us, we could stop whatever it is from hurting anyone who hasn’t already been hurt. ”
Floretta considers this a moment, then turns back to the mirror, resuming the slow detangling of her hair. “I understand,” she says.
“So you’ll keep my secret?”
“Will you take me to Olympus with you?”
“I can’t. You wouldn’t be able to survive the passage.”
“Oh.” Floretta continues brushing. “It’s not fair to ask people for favors you aren’t willing to return.”
“If you tell him what I am, he might hurt me. If I take you to Olympus, I will hurt you. They aren’t the same favor.”
“I see,” says Floretta. “I won’t tell.”
Deborah breathes a sigh of relief and returns to her business. She doesn’t see the way Floretta is watching her in the mirror, the sharp focus in her eyes, the way calculation has chased away wonder.
Even the moon doesn’t know everything. The world would be so much simpler if it did.
The next morning, Floretta goes to breakfast armed with questions. She waits until her uncle is seated with his own coffee in hand to offer up the first of them, looking at him with wide, innocent eyes as she asks, “Uncle John, what’s an alchemist?”
He almost chokes on his coffee, stopping himself at the last second to spit and sputter, catching his breath. He stares at her as he does.
“Where did you hear that word?” he asks, finally, and there’s a condemnation in those words, a complete willingness to destroy whoever may have told her what he is.
Fortunately, Floretta has an answer: “Everyone in the house says it, when they think I’m not listening. What does it mean?”
“An alchemist is like a scientist and a philosopher at the same time. It’s someone who looks at the world and thinks, ‘I could improve on this,’ and then does it.
We use science and art and philosophy and magic, and we blend it all together into a weapon and a tool and a transformation.
We’ll control the universe one day, when we’ve bent enough of it to our designs, and we’re the reason reality doesn’t pick itself to pieces. ”
“You make embodiments?”
“No. Embodiments are primitive, involuntary things, like bits of grit inside oysters turning into pearls. They’re reality exuding stopgaps against the tides of chaos that would sweep everything good away.” He pauses then, gaze sharpening. “What do you know about embodiments?”
“I know the winter women sometimes walk in the snow outside the village where I used to live,” she says. “And the summer men, but they’re harder to see. They don’t walk barefoot through the snow. I know some people are also the moon, and I’m not.”
He goes very still, gaze sharpening still further, until his attention is a knife ready to flense the flesh from the world. “Do you know anyone who’s the moon?”
Floretta is silent for a moment, considering her reply.
There’s a world where she lies, where she chooses to protect Deborah at a potential risk to herself.
Father Clemence’s daughter would have chosen to exist in that world, would have tried so hard to be good and live up to his expectations of her that she would have put herself into harm’s way to keep the housemaid safe.
Father Clemence’s daughter didn’t have terrible hatchlings tearing at her heart, whispering to her about how she lost everything when she was snatched away from him—everything—and how it’s not fair that Deborah should still get to shine.
That she should have what Floretta can’t, and that she should be so very clearly something Uncle John wants, something he needs more than anything.
Father Clemence’s daughter was wild, but she was never jealous.
Not like Floretta.