Chapter 18 #4
And it’s worth it. For a life of alchemy, it’s worth it.
The carriage rattles to a stop. Asphodel looks out the window, takes note of the large house in the distance and the otherwise-empty beach, and nods to herself.
It’s a pleasant afternoon in May: the absence of beachgoers is its own testament to the man who agreed to help her with her task today.
He must have done something to discourage them, to leave her with the space to do her work.
Opening the door, she uncurls herself from her seat and steps out into the open air, bringing her basket of tools with her. Miss Cottingsly follows, her own bag hanging loosely in her hands.
(It had to be Miss Cottingsly, and not her uncle or one of his allies.
Auf are neither alive nor dead, but a strange and impossible third thing, making them difficult for many incarnates to see clearly.
She’ll need Miss Cottingsly before this day is done, if she’s estimated her next steps correctly.)
They walk until they reach a flat stretch of high, rocky ground, with the beach spread out beneath them, waves beating ceaselessly against the shore.
It’s beautiful. Asphodel can appreciate that.
She opens her basket, removes the jar of iron shavings, salt, and dried rosemary, and carefully casts her compass ’round, drawing a perfect circle more than six feet in diameter.
It uses up every speck of the material she prepared, exactly as it was intended to do.
The wind blowing off the sea doesn’t disturb so much as a single grain of salt.
Once her careful blend of summoning agents falls, it stays precisely where she put it, as if she had buried a ring of magnets under the top layer of the soil.
The circle cast, she sets up her candles, eight in total, and lights them all from a burning bundle of dried, rolled grape leaves.
When the last candle is lit, she drops the burning leaves into her bowl of bronze, picking up the bottle of wine that dates to the beginning of Boston’s drought. “Great Dionysus, god of epiphanies, father of wine, he who comes, I entreat you to join me here.”
She tips a measure of the wine into a silver cup, and an equal measure into the bowl, extinguishing the last of the flames with a hiss.
“I am but a humble mortal soul, and I come to beg you for your wisdom and your insights, to solve the puzzle which now plagues my kind. Answer me, if my offerings seem sweet, and let me drink deep of your brilliance.”
She waits, expectant, and the world teeters on a razor’s edge, silence broken only by the crashing of the surf. The moment passes. The flames still burn, but the air remains the same, the sky is unchanged. She looks to Miss Cottingsly, silently pleading.
The auf shrugs. “Suppose he didn’t like what you were offering. You have two vintages left to hand; see if he might prefer drinking one of those.”
Because Miss Cottingsly exists in the strange hinterland between the living and the dead, she can speak during the summoning ritual.
Asphodel can’t, unless it’s to entreat, to cajole, to continue what she’s already begun.
Until the gods answer her, or don’t, she’s trapped in the text of a play she didn’t write, whose lines she’s only half-memorized.
Hand shaking, she puts down the bottle of wine and picks up its twin, an older, dearer vintage.
Not too dear—she’s only twenty-six—but dear enough that her uncle frowned when he realized she would need it, and that he wasn’t likely to get any measure of it back again.
It had taken some quick talking to convince him that it would be an offense to the god she was trying to summon if she brought a decanter when the whole bottle had been available.
The cork comes loose easily enough, and she waves the bottle to let its scent pass into the air before adding a solid measure of wine to both the bowl and goblet.
“Gentle Dionysus, lord of revels, I stand beside the sea and call you for reasons both sacred and mundane. The rain has stopped in the city of Boston. Our flowers die, our fruits wither on the vine. I need your aid, you who knew the gentle Hyades, you who danced beside them in the rains they called, to bring back what we have somehow lost.”
The pause is longer this time, a drop of silence spreading slowly from the center of her circle like a ripple through standing water. Asphodel holds her breath until it, too, breaks and fades away, and she stands alone.
“One vintage left,” says Miss Cottingsly, and her voice is almost mocking, cold in a way Asphodel has never heard before.
“I have offered you wine both sweet and aged,” says Asphodel, voice somehow remaining steady as she sets the second bottle beside the first and pulls the knife from inside her vest. Its edge is very sharp indeed, and looking at it makes bile rise in the back of her throat, sharp and burning and terrible.
“I have but one bottle left to open, and it is the bottle only I can pour.”
She lays the edge of the blade against the smooth plane of her forearm and presses down, hard enough to split the skin, drawing a line of brilliant, gleaming red from elbow to wrist. The pain is almost secondary to the shock of the moment: she has cut herself, sliced into her own body like a butcher might cut into a lamb, and like the lamb, she bleeds.
She can’t bandage the wound until the ritual is over.
She just has to hope the answer comes quickly, before she passes out from blood loss.
Miss Cottingsly has assured her that she can patch any injury “like new,” and that there’s no way Asphodel will die from something as simple as a slashed forearm, but it’s hard to believe that when she’s bleeding everywhere how is there so much blood? How is this happening so quickly?
But she is her uncle’s niece, and she’s been training for this moment for as long as she can remember, even if neither of them truly understood that was what she was doing.
She tilts her arm so the blood drips down into the bowl of ash and wine, then shifts the goblet to her other hand, dropping the knife in the process, and bleeds into it as well.
The wine swallows her blood without a trace, red meeting red, unchanged.
This time when the bell of silence rings, it spreads and keeps spreading, swallowing the world. Everything seems to slow, even the waves growing still. Asphodel’s head spins from the blood loss, and she feels drunk despite not having tasted a drop of wine.
Someone comes walking down the beach below.
It’s a woman, wearing a long, diaphanous gown that whips around her like seafoam, tangling around her legs as she begins climbing the shallow hill toward Asphodel’s circle.
As she draws closer, Asphodel can see that her hair is dark and her skin is pale, unfashionably so; she must have never seen the sun.
Her dress is as white as the foam that it so resembles, and does her no favors in either cut or color; she is a washed-out ghost, a drowned girl gone walking.
(In later years, when her days are consumed by the Up-and-Under, Asphodel will look at her own descriptions of the Drowned Girl, Niamh, and see this moment again. It will not make her heart any softer … but she will write a kinder ending for her Drowned Girl, and she will be glad of it.)
Asphodel-now, Asphodel-bleeding, Asphodel holds her breath and watches the woman come, unwilling to be the one to break the silence.
The stranger does it for her. “Well met, alchemist,” she calls, as she approaches. “You called?”
“My lord?”
The stranger’s laughter is a bell ringing in the darkness.
“No,” she says, once her amusement has passed.
“I am not my student-nephew, who brings the wine, who brings the brightness of true thought. I am nothing half so great as he. But you called him on our behalf, and I am come, as you requested, to see what you desire.”
Asphodel’s entire body feels light, the blood dripping from her arm taking all her weight with it. “You are one of the Hyades?”
“My name is Phaesyle,” says the woman. “We all have names. We’re not just the living embodiment of rain, you know. They name the Horae, but we’re lucky to get a number, much less the personal touch of our own—”
“Thank you for answering me,” says Asphodel. She isn’t sure how long she can stay upright, but she’s sure that once she collapses, whatever she’s done here will be undone. “Do you know why it doesn’t rain in Boston?”
“You mean you don’t?” Phaesyle’s astonishment is entirely unfeigned. She gestures toward the goblet in Asphodel’s hand. “That’s for me, isn’t it? Give it here. I need a drink if I’m going to deal with this.”
Asphodel holds the goblet out in offering. “Come and take it,” she says.
“Come into your circle, you mean? Little alchemist, how foolish do you think we are?” Phaesyle gives her an indulgent look. “But then, you’re bleeding more than you intended, I think, and you’re no real threat to me now. And I want a drink.”
She steps into the circle, hand outstretched for the goblet. Asphodel passes it to her, and watches as the Hyade drinks it dry in one long swallow, not pausing to savor or to breathe.
“Better,” says Phaesyle, dropping the goblet to the ground. She eyes Asphodel. “I find it hard to believe that you don’t know. Have you never asked yourself where flowers come from?”
“My lady?”
“They follow the rain,” says Phaesyle. “They come after the storm. You came after the storm, little flower, when he lay down with your mother and claimed her as his own. We’re distant cousins, you and I—very distant, because you were born in mortal flesh and embody nothing but yourself, while I have lived for centuries in one skin after another, moving between embodiments as the need arises. ”
“I don’t understand. What are you…?”