Chapter 18
Courage
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.”
“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.”