Chapter 29 #2
“I still don’t understand what I did.”
“You bled, Asphodel. The lightning in the storm and the lightning inside you came together, and like a cuckoo laying its egg in a cowbird’s nest, you made something new.
Eliza is gone. The girl who lives inside her skin now has no memory of her.
But that doesn’t make your achievement any less brilliant. ”
“If I’d managed to bring her back as an ordinary auf, could you stay?”
Miss Cottingsly sighs. “I know you too well, sparrow. Killing the girl won’t restore Eliza’s sympathy, and even if it did, I’ve lasted this long because of the living.
An ordinary auf wouldn’t be able to anchor me here.
Let go. Fly free, and be brilliant—and don’t offer to kill gods for anyone else.
You did it for the Congress. That was a time too many. ”
Asphodel glances away, and doesn’t mention Deborah, little moon goddess bleeding silver and scarlet beneath the stairs.
Lunars are barely gods, anyway. They’ve traded away most of their divinity in their endless bid to remain manifest in a world that’s rapidly outgrowing them.
Lunars don’t count. No more than the seasons do.
“The girl is all you have now,” says Miss Cottingsly. “She’s your first cuckoo. Watch her, study her, understand her—and for the love of the art, don’t lose her. Do you know where she is now?”
Normally, Asphodel would see the trap in Miss Cottingsly’s question.
But right now, she’s exhausted and she’s grieving—not just the impending loss of her companion, but the loss of the life she had planned for herself for most of her life.
She’ll still be an alchemist, but she won’t be a Congressional alchemist. She’ll have to forge her own path, unsupported and alone.
She’s been unsupported before. She’s been alone. She killed a goddess with no one beside her but an auf, she brought back the rain, and she can do this. She can.
Asphodel rises. “I’ll go find her,” she says. “Rest. We’ll talk more when I return.”
Miss Cottingsly nods approvingly, but doesn’t say anything, only watches as Asphodel walks away, plucking her shawl from the chair beside the door as she makes her exit.
Once she’s alone, the old auf closes her eyes. “It’s time to fly, sparrow,” she says. “It’s time to burn everything those terrible men have done to ash and dust, and see it scattered before you.”
Then she sighs, one final time, and exhales.
She doesn’t breathe in again.
Asphodel steps into the sunlight, blinking rapidly as she waits for her eyes to adjust. The air is crisp and chill, September’s weather all too aware of its position in the hierarchy of the year.
Winter will be here soon enough, and her memory of the winters of her early childhood, while fuzzy, tells her it will be even more brutal than the snows that fall in Boston.
Without the brick walls and gas heaters to break the back of the cold, the winds are free to rage, the snows to sear.
She hasn’t heard anything about a coronation since she served her young lover up like a lamb for the slaughter.
The old Winter King still sits astride the throne, and he’s unlikely to hold her killing of a potential heir against her.
Given the way in which the seasons keep their house, he may honestly have seen it as a favor, something done to court his good graces.
He’s unlikely to target her for special torments just because she baited the trap.
Still, Eliza has very little experience with anything.
She remembers speech and some of her letters, can move and play and curtsey as prettily as any child, but she remembers nothing of her life before the lightning.
She’s a blank slate waiting to be scribed, and she’ll be a perfect canvas for what Asphodel intends.
Or will she? Asphodel herself illustrates the problem Eliza will face: the world is still balanced against the feminine sex, is still inclined to see them as lesser due to the accident of their birth.
Eliza will make a poor apprentice-heir, because the doors that are closed against Asphodel will also be closed against her.
If Asphodel wishes to plan for the future, she’ll need to make herself a more-fitting avatar, a man with the same cuckoo’s nest inside his soul, who can carry her alchemy into the bright and distant world to come.
She walks around the house, consumed with thoughts of everything he’ll need to be, everything he’ll need to do in her service.
His body won’t be assembled for another month, pieced together from what corpses she can cobble, what slivers she can steal, but in many ways, this is the moment when James Reed is born: he will be her first intentional cuckoo, her first studied creation, and he will be the one to show the Alchemical Congress the scope and severity of their errors. One day.
Not this day. On this day, Asphodel hurries around the house and out into the meadow, where she sees Eliza in the distance, standing at the edge of the open space, in the tangled shadows of the trees.
The child has a stick in her hand, and is using it to prod at something unseen.
Asphodel heads unhesitatingly toward her, gathering her skirt in her hands to keep herself from treading on the hem.
As she draws closer, she sees what the girl has found: a rabbit, its neck clearly broken and its gut ripped open, stirred up by some predator’s claws. Eliza is poking her stick into the remains, watching the flesh and organs move around it, a look of intense focus on her face.
“Eliza,” says Asphodel.
The child raises her head and slowly blinks, catlike. There is no guilt or confusion in her expression: her knowledge of good and evil have been lost along with everything else, and she has no cause to question what she’s doing. Not until Asphodel teaches her she should.
Asphodel intends no such thing.
“What do you have there?”
“A rabbit.”
“Did you see what killed it?”
“A hawk.”
“Some of the organs are missing. Would you like to know the names of what’s still there?”
Eliza nods.
Asphodel reaches for her stick. “May I?”
After only a moment of hesitation, Eliza gives it to her, and Asphodel begins using it to indicate the organs remaining inside the bodily cavity, laying a name to each of them.
Eliza listens intently, as a normal child might listen to a bedtime story.
When Asphodel finishes, Eliza reaches out a hand, silently requesting the return of her stick.
Asphodel gives it to her, and watches as Eliza begins to indicate and name the organs, following Asphodel’s lead.
She doesn’t get a single scrap wrong. When she’s done, she looks to Asphodel for approval.
I can do this, thinks Asphodel. I can raise up a full intrusion of cuckoos and set them on the Congress, and they’ll regret that they ever turned me away. I can make their world my own.
“Very well done, Eliza,” she says. “I think you’ve earned an extra serving at supper tonight, don’t you? You’re a growing girl.”
“Can we eat the rabbit?”
“No,” says Asphodel. “It’s been dead on the ground long enough to cool, and we’ve stirred its guts up with a filthy, filthy stick.
I can set some snares tomorrow, and we’ll have rabbit for our supper later in the week, but this one, I think we leave to the forest as a thanks for giving us such good shelter. ”
Eliza considers her words, then nods gravely and tosses the stick aside before reaching out for Asphodel’s hand.
Asphodel allows it, twining her fingers with the girl’s own, and they walk side by side through the field behind the house where Asphodel was born, together as she was never able to be with her own mother, silent in their respective thoughts.
The first sign that something is wrong comes when Asphodel opens the door to the house and is met with a silence so profound that she can’t pretend there’s anyone else there.
The comforting presence that even an auf can generate is gone, replaced by stillness.
Letting go of Eliza’s hand, she walks alone to the bed where Miss Cottingsly has been declining, holding her breath and her tongue alike as she waits to see what she’ll discover.
When she steps around the end of the bed and sees what awaits her there, a small sound escapes her lips, even as tears cloud her eyes. She claps a hand over her mouth, simply staring.
“Del? What is it?” asks Eliza.
Working hard against instinct, etiquette, and grief, Asphodel forces her hand down. “Miss Cottingsly has gone,” she says.
“Oh. Will she be back soon?”
“I don’t … I don’t believe so,” says Asphodel.
The remains in the bed are not those of a singular woman, but a horrific patchwork of five different women in varying stages of decay, mixed with pieces of animals, stitched together with a practiced hand.
She didn’t know auf reverted to their component pieces when they died.
Presumably, that was one of the secrets she would have learned in the last two years of her apprenticeship, the things that would have grounded her in her art and granted her the title of alchemist in the eyes of the Congress.
Miss Cottingsly, the woman and the working, is no longer with them. What she’s left behind is what’s unneeded, ready for disposal.
“Oh. What are we going to do now?”
The question gives her a moment of pause. Asphodel raises her head, looking at Eliza, and slowly, terribly, she smiles.
“Whatever we decide,” she says. “But first, fetch me a shovel from the shed. It seems I’ve something to dispose of.”