Chapter 29
Death
Miss Cottingsly is dying.
There’s almost certainly another word for the process when entropy comes at last to consume an auf, making a victim of someone who has already been victimized by nature itself, winding down the artificial clock of the pulse and pulling the lightning from the lungs, but Asphodel doesn’t know that other word.
She only knows that Miss Cottingsly has been her companion longer than anyone else, that she never gave Asphodel away to an unfamiliar uncle or demanded she change her name for something more alchemically acceptable.
Her memories aren’t so rose-tinted as to paint Miss Cottingsly as her only ally, but in some ways, she feels the old auf is the only person who’s always cared for her as herself, not as a useful tool or an alchemical potential.
And now she’s coming to pieces under Asphodel’s hands, the immutable bonds that formed her fracturing and falling away.
And there’s nothing Asphodel can do.
Eliza is still thriving. She talks and grows and changes and learns just like an ordinary little girl with no lightning in her heart or borrowed blood running in her veins.
If Asphodel hadn’t been there when it happened, she would swear the child had never been resurrected, that Eliza was perfectly natural in every way.
The nature of her resurrection makes her an auf, a useful tool with little free will of her own.
The nature of her existence makes her something entirely new.
In a world of scholarship, Eliza is her own field of study, her own specialization.
Asphodel supposes the Congress was right about one thing: every mother, back to the beginning of humanity, must have felt in some way like an alchemist when they called life out of the void, when they walked the border of death and snatched a new soul from its cold hands.
She didn’t carry Eliza with her own body, but she may as well have done.
Eliza looks at her as she imagines normal little girls must look at their mothers, with love and trust and unearned faith that Asphodel can change the world in whatever way she needs it to be changed.
And while Asphodel is more than willing to try for Eliza’s sake, she finds that she still prefers to change the world to suit her own desires; she’s more interested than ever in putting forth a version of the world that meets her needs.
And any world that meets her needs must by necessity have Miss Cottingsly in it.
She supposes she came to love the old auf at some point in their relationship, imprinting on her as a cygnet swan may imprint upon a chicken.
They’re different in every way that matters, but Asphodel was a child in need of love, and Miss Cottingsly was a constant: sometimes that can be enough.
Her uncle could still find them if he wanted to.
They haven’t traveled so far from Boston as would be wise, but have returned to the village of Asphodel’s earliest childhood, to the dilapidated house that was once her mother’s.
The villagers eye her with suspicion unallayed by the fact that some of them remember her—not so many as she would have expected.
She’s forgotten, during the long, safe city years, how dangerous it can be in the wild country.
Father Clemence is more than ten years gone, stolen away by a fever, and a young priest who doesn’t know her either by name or by history occupies his house. She will never walk those halls again.
She came here to decide what she’s going to do next, now that the Congress has rejected her, now that she’ll have to find a future for herself, rather than allowing them to hand her one.
With every day that passes, Miss Cottingsly fades, Eliza thrives, and Asphodel becomes more determined to show those bastards in the Congress the error of their ways.
She will be the greatest alchemist this world has ever known.
She will earn and honor the storm inside her, and she will change reality to suit herself.
The American Alchemical Congress has made a terrible mistake in rejecting her.
It wasn’t their first, and it won’t be their last, but it is the mistake that makes everything that is to follow entirely inevitable.
Their deaths, when they come (in the far, far future, at the hands of a man she has not yet constructed, but is drawing ever closer to creating), will be entirely due to how they’ve treated her.
They may never understand. It won’t matter. They’ll die either way.
It is late afternoon, the sunlight through the windows buttery gold even after passing through the dust that chokes the glass.
(Miss Cottingsly would normally have scrubbed them clean within an hour of arriving in the house, but her decline began almost immediately after leaving Boston.
Asphodel almost turned back when she realized what was happening; only Miss Cottingsly insisting that going back to her uncle would do nothing to change what was happening to her kept them moving forward, away from the Congress, seeking safety.
The house is still a wreck. Asphodel has no skill at house-cleaning, and Eliza is too young and too recently returned from the dead to have the knack.) Eliza is somewhere out in the fields behind the house, running wild through them even as Asphodel once did.
Miss Cottingsly is resting in the single narrow bed, not seeming to mind the dust or the smell of mouse droppings.
“There must be something I can do,” says Asphodel.
“There isn’t.”
“But there is. There always is. I can … I can go hunting for the current incarnate Winter. The seasons don’t die, they cycle. They come back again.”
“You can’t steal me a seasonal crown, and I wouldn’t wear it if you could. I’ve been dead longer than you can imagine, sparrow, and I’m ready to rest. I’m ready to see my families again.”
Asphodel pauses. “Miss Cottingsly … do you remember who you were?”
“Not as complete pictures. I’m more like …
like a patchwork quilt, bits and pieces sewn together, remembering the colors of the whole they once belonged to.
I remember three distinct wedding days, to three different men.
I remember the births of what I believe were all my children.
I remember two of my deaths. And I remember other things, little scraps of all those women.
They would never have been friends, when they were alive.
They had different religions, different ideas about the world …
but they learned unity, when they woke up and they were me.
They’re fading away now, one by one, like candles blowing out in the night.
Soon they’ll all be finished, and I can rest.”
“I don’t want you to go!”
“Oh, sparrow, we all have to go in our time. Some of us get a chance to come back, in one way or another. I did. I’ve lived more than any ten women could wish for, and I’ve seen things change in ways a hundred women couldn’t even begin to dream.
I’ve seen you come, and you’re going to remake the world.
I know you are. Maybe what you make will be kinder.
Maybe it will be crueler. Either way, the men who make monsters like me will burn, and that’s all I can really hope for. ”
“Why— Was my uncle doing something special to sustain you that you never told me about? Do you need a new heart? New lungs? Human blood? Gods’-blood?
” Asphodel hasn’t summoned a god since Phaesyle.
She knows enough of divinity to fear the wrath of Dionysus should she ever remind the pantheon that she exists.
Her father may have been enough to buy her a single indulgence, but that mercy won’t extend to a second sacrifice.
And she doesn’t care. If Miss Cottingsly says a sacrifice will sustain her, Asphodel will lure any god her companion chooses down from the heavens and slit their throat with a smile. She’ll do anything to stop the inevitable from unfolding.
“It’s not so simple, child,” says Miss Cottingsly.
“So make it simple,” snaps Asphodel. “I’ve created life itself! I’ve reshaped the world according to my own desires. I can keep you here with me.”
“It’s the life you’ve created that’s allowing me to die.”
Asphodel freezes, feeling her heart go cold. “What?”
“I lied to you when I told you all my grandchildren were already gone. Eliza—the one who lived before the grave—was my last grandchild. Surely you guessed we were connected in some way when I led you directly to her body. I already knew that losing her would let me go. The sympathies have been snapped. Her father is dead. Her mother’s blood is none of mine—I would have called her a daughter had I lived to see their wedding, and maybe that would have been enough, but I was dead and gone before they even met.
I never knew her, and so she couldn’t feed into the universal affection it takes to stabilize the ordinary dead in this world. ”
“Why did you…?”
Miss Cottingsly turns her face toward Asphodel, and there is a kindness to her expression that violates a hundred years of common wisdom regarding the auf. Even with the sympathies broken, she looks at Asphodel like she cares about her.
“You needed a fresh body, and you needed something to strive for,” she says.
“I could offer you both, and I’ve seen the storm raging in your heart.
I already knew some of what you would be capable of.
I may never have known the girl in life, but I still cared for her in death, and you were her best chance at coming back. ”
“You drained her veins yourself. You pushed the blood from her body.”
“I did. It was necessary for the resurrection to succeed. You made something new, Asphodel. You created life. You didn’t just write about it.
Your quill was dry when you set it to the paper, and still, you scribed a symphony.
Let the rest of them play. Those inkpot gods are going to regret shunning you. ”