by Sam Gayton
“Make them as long as you can,” said Lettie.
“What are we using them for?” Noah asked.
“We’re going to make a balloon,” said Lettie.
Blüstav laughed above them. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but you need more than vines to make a balloon. You need something that floats.”
Lettie looked up at him.
At once his laughter died and his face cracked. “No,” he said.
“Yes,” said Lettie.
“No,” said Blüstav again. “No, no, no. I’m not a balloon, I’m a person!”
“You float,” said Lettie. “That’s good enough.”
“But I don’t like heights!” the alchemist wailed. “Floating ten feet off the ground is terrifying enough.”
“Will these do?” said Noah, looking exhausted. Thick green foliage curled around his feet.
Lettie smiled. “Perfect.”
“You can’t do this!” Blüstav roared.
“Yes, I can,” said Lettie.
And she did.
Up and Away
It was a glorious dawn; the sea was golden with the rising sun. Lettie and Noah had worked quickly, and in a matter of minutes the balloon was ready. It was simply a net of vines—a sort of hammock—strung around Blüstav’s legs and arms. Onto this, they threw the open, empty suitcase. That was their cockpit. There was no rudder and no ballast, so there was no way of going left or right or up or down. Lettie would trust everything to the Wind.
The Wind, as far as she could tell, was excited and anxious. It kept tugging at her, as if to say Hurry, hurry, hurry! Well, they were ready to leave.
Now that it was light, they could see the Bloodbucket behind them, coming up fast, engines roaring. It was going to be a close thing, indeed.
“Get in!” said Noah, stepping into the suitcase.
Lettie tested the vines. They were strong. They would hold. The most dangerous thing would be if the Wind grew too excited and blew them out of the hammock by accident. Lettie wound her arms and legs around the vines and held on tight.
“Ready!” she said above the ever-increasing roar of the Bloodbucket’s engines.
Noah grew a jagged thorn from his shoulder and began to hack at the lead buckles of the suitcase that kept Blüstav anchored down. One clattered free, and they lurched five feet upward.
“One more to go!” yelled Noah.
“Hurry!” Lettie shouted. The Wind screeched around them so hard it made her ears ache and her teeth rattle. She could see the steam-powered harpoon gun bolted to the Bloodbucket’s prow. Blubber Johnson was loading a harpoon, and the Walrus was aiming her bazooka straight at them. But then, at last, Noah pried away the last lead buckle. It fell with a splash in the sea, and suddenly they were flying.
Lettie’s stomach lurched as they soared into the sky. She looked behind her where the furious faces of the crones grew smaller and smaller.
Above, Blüstav’s coat bulged and strained, the snow cloud soared. Lettie wondered what the alchemicals were that made it so much lighter than air. She decided to ask Ma when she finally saw her again.
“We’re safe!” said Noah, his leaves turning toward the sun. “And it’s good to feel warm again.”
They climbed higher and higher. Now the clouds were close enough to touch. Below, the sea was laid out like a very blue tablecloth, constantly wrinkling then smoothing out. Upon it Lettie saw the Bloodbucket, tiny as a toy, and the wide, white V it made through the sea as it followed them.
Lettie took out her telescope. Pulling it open, she looked to the deck of the whaling ship and began to giggle. The giggle grew, and before she knew it, Lettie was laughing so hard the suitcase had nearly turned over.
“Careful!” cried Noah.
Lettie fought back the giggles, which nearly overwhelmed her again. She put the telescope down and wiped her eyes.
“Sorry, Noah,” she said, gasping for breath. “You’d be laughing too, if you could see them.”
“Who?”
“The Goggler and the Walrus. They’re on the Bloodbucket, looking up at us. They’re so furious, the Walrus has torn up her wig again and the Goggler’s stomped on her scopical glasses.”
Noah giggled. “Now what are they doing?”
Lettie gasped. “They’re turning on each other. The Goggler’s kicking the Walrus in the shin! Oh, it’s vicious! The Walrus is hopping about, eyes popping, chins wobbling. You can see she’s not in that much pain, though. She’s biding time, coming up with her revenge! The Goggler’s turned to storm off.”
“I doubt she’s going to—” Noah began.
“Wow!” yelled Lettie. “Out shoots the Walrus’s hand! I thought she only moved that fast for cakes! She’s hoisting the Goggler up by the ankle, the old bag’s screaming and struggling to get away, but she’s helpless. The Walrus is holding her up over her head, and . . . and . . . and she’s dunked the Goggler headfirst!”
Noah grinned. “Into the sea?”
“No, into her own tea-filled head! Like a cookie!”
And together Lettie and Noah laughed and laughed and laughed until they ached with relief. They were free. They were together. They were safe.
When it became clear that the vines were holding, and once the Wind had died down a little, Lettie began to relax. It was peaceful up here. She cradled Da in her arms—she wasn’t having him fall from her pocket and into the sea. From this height, his glass would shatter. She felt sick thinking of all the times in the past day where she might have lost him forever. Holding him up to the sun, she looked for any cracks in his glass. There didn’t seem to be any.
“I wonder when Da will change back,” she said to Noah.
“I should think it will be a while yet,” he answered. “He swallowed that alchemical. The Walrus and the Goggler only got it on their skin, and they’re still changed.”
“He looks a little shaken,” said Lettie. “He’s all fizzed up.”
Noah smiled. “I know how he feels. I’m glad he’s all right, though.”
“I’m glad too,” said Lettie fiercely, and she meant it, which surprised her. “I thought he was nothing but trouble; I was wrong. He’s also my da, and that means something. Even if he’s a bad da most of the time, it still counts.”
“He’ll be better when he changes back, Lettie. I know it.”
“I know it too!” she said passionately. “He’d better be better, for his sake. It’s the first rule of alchemy, Noah: things change!”
Noah raised his eyebrows. “You sound angry!”
“Of course I am! Angry at him. And worried, and guilty, and frustrated . . . but I love him too. That more than anything.” She cradled Da and said it again, in case he hadn’t heard. “More than anything.”
“I hope he was listening,” said Noah, laughing. “Even though he doesn’t have ears.”
Lettie smiled. Noah was one of the wisest people she’d ever met, but he was forgetting that there are some things you don’t need to hear. Some things you just know, and love is one of them.
They rose into the clouds, and for a long time saw nothing but mist. The Wind died down and they drifted for what seemed like hours, faces clammy and clothes damp and chill. Lettie couldn’t even see Blüstav above them, although she heard him sneezing.
“I have the most dreadful cold!” he wailed.
“That’s what you get after freezing yourself for ten years!” Lettie called back. He wasn’t getting any sympathy from her.
After that, Blüstav kept a sullen silence.
“Do you think we’re almost there?” asked Noah.
“I think so,” said Lettie. “Wherever there is.”
She fizzed with excitement. They were close to Ma, so close. It was another one of those things she just knew.
It grew darker all of a sudden, as if they’d passed into shadow. The mist thinned. Lettie held her breath. Something was about to happen.
With a sharp lurch, the balloon stopped moving. Lettie reached into her pocket to clutch Da
as they hung suspended.
Blüstav cursed as the nimbostratus rumbled a peal of thunder. “Why have we stopped?” he said. “Have we hit a snag?”
“Yes,” said Noah and Lettie together. They were staring at something emerging from the mist like a black bubble.
“What is it?” Blüstav called.
Lettie rubbed her eyes. The vines had caught on a huge iron cauldron, with a pair of bellows underneath for lighting a fire.
“Touch it,” whispered Noah. “Make sure it’s real.”
Slowly, Lettie reached out her fingers, leaning as far as she dared from the canopy, and touched the bellows. They were real. It was all real.
Once, Lettie would have exclaimed: “This is impossible!” But the events of the past two days had convinced her that “impossible’ no longer existed. She simply didn’t believe in it.
Instead, she said: “But what does it mean?”
“What does what mean?” Blüstav asked in exasperation.
“Work the bellows,” said Noah. “Let’s clear this mist and see where we are.”
So Lettie began to move the bellows up and down—which was tricky to do without falling out of the hammock—and slowly the room (for it was a room they were in) began to clear.
“But this is impossible!” said Blüstav when he saw where they were.
Lettie looked around in wonder.
They were in a laboratory—a laboratory made of ice, with tall ceilings and veins of æther running through the walls. There was a tall, open window behind them—it was through there they had drifted.
No wonder it grew darker all of a sudden, Lettie thought. We went inside!
The cauldron and the bellows were in the middle of the room, and climbing up each of the four walls were shelves of empty bottles, boxes, and vials. The floor was strewn with old paper and books.
Lettie rolled out of the suitcase and her feet hit the floor. Noah followed. They went to the window and looked through with hearts racing.
Until that moment, ice to Lettie was ugly and treacherous. It froze up windows and stopped her from seeing outside for days at a time. The ice she knew was ugly; muddied brown and gritted gray; sullied with silt, grime, kitchen grease, coal chips, and beer. Never had it occurred to Lettie before that ice might be beautiful.
“Oh,” was all she could say.
The laboratory was carved atop a giant iceberg. Below them were wild white crags and the jewel-blue sea. Rising above were shimmering domes with stairways winding up to windowed spires, all of it glinting in the sunlight. Lettie’s eyes filled with tears. Not just because the iceberg was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, but because she knew that Ma had led her there.
The Wind was all around her, ruffling her hair as if to say: Look where I brought you! Aren’t you pleased?
“This is my ma’s laboratory,” whispered Lettie. “The one Blüstav told us about. The place where she made snow.”
“It’s magnificent!” said Noah with a huge smile, his biggest since Leutha’s Wood sank. “Whatever the Wind wants you to find, it’s here.”
Lettie nodded, suddenly nervous. It had been such a long journey: she had traveled by boat, raft, and balloon. She had been colder than she could ever have imagined and seen her da turn into a beer bottle. She had given a ship wings and walked across the waves without sinking. Now she was about to discover the truth about Ma and where she had been all these years, Lettie was sure of it. Soon she would know everything, at long last.
What she wasn’t sure of, what she wasn’t sure of at all, was whether she was ready for the truth. Maybe it wasn’t the truth she wanted. Maybe the truth was sad or terrible in ways she couldn’t possibly imagine.
She turned to Blüstav, snagged on a chandelier. There were lines on his face that Lettie had never noticed before. He had been electrocuted so many times now that all his hair stood on end and little sparks flew from his mouth as he breathed. He looked terrified.
“She’ll be here,” he said with a gulp. “And she won’t be happy with me.”
Lettie glanced toward the door, waiting for Ma to arrive, but her mother appeared exactly the same way she had disappeared, ten years ago: through the window.
This is how it happened.
A sudden gust of air brought a flurry of clothes flying in the window. There was a brightly colored tartan scarf, a leather hat with goggles attached, a long blue coat buttoned up to the neck, and a pair of brown Wellington boots. The Wind brought them in and whirled them around the room, knocking over armchairs and pots, and tossing old yellow stacks of paper into the air like confetti. Then the boots landed on the floor and began hopping to the window, where Lettie was standing. One boot jumped on top of the other and kicked it shut. The latch closed with a click, and the Wind ceased. All the clothes fell to the floor in a heap.
Lettie looked on, openmouthed, as the Wellington boots hopped back over to the pile of clothes, which began assembling itself into a person. The boots crawled under the coat, which stood up and put the leather hat with goggles where a head ought to be. The figure wrapped the scarf around its neck and marched over to Lettie, pulling out a pair of patchwork oven gloves from the coat pockets. She—for it was unmistakably a she, despite being completely see-through—plucked two invisible things from Lettie’s fingers and dropped them into each oven glove. Then the oven gloves moved, and it was obvious to Lettie that now they had a pair of hands inside them—invisible hands, but hands all the same.
Then the person leaned down to Lettie and gave her a huge, wonderful, overwhelming hug. All of Lettie’s sadness and loneliness was squeezed out of her, and she hugged the person back, because it was Ma. She knew it. She just knew.
And it was wonderful.
“Turn yourselves from dead stones into living philosopher stones!”
Gerhardt Dorn, Philosophia Speculativa
CONTENTS
1. Ma
2. The Making of Lettie Peppercorn
3. The Thief, the Liar, the Cheat, and the Clam
4. Lettie Peppercorn Stitches the Waves
5. A Mighty BOOM Interrupts Dinner
6. Noah Will Come
7. Justice Is Served
8. The Awful Loneliness Returns
9. A Top Hat Wishes to Be Borrowed
10. The Great Experiment Begins
Epilogue: Once, in Baveria
Ma
The next moments passed in a slow blur, like they do in dreams. Beyond Ma’s arms nothing seemed to exist. To Lettie, those arms were the edges of the world.
“Is this real?” she whispered, afraid that it wasn’t.
“I’m here,” Ma answered. “I’ll never leave you again.”
“It feels like a dream, though.”
Ma let go of Lettie at last. “You’re wide awake,” she said, giving her daughter a playful pinch on the arm. “See?”
Taking a handful of string from her coat pocket, Ma began to tie up her sleeves and feet, as if she were making herself airtight.
“I always knew you’d come back,” said Lettie, trembling. “But why do you look so . . .”
Ma laughed. “Mysterious?”
“Invisible,” Lettie admitted. “And strange.”
She took a step back. Something was troubling her. “Ma?”
“What?”
“You ought to give me a kiss.”
“I ought to,” said Ma. “But I can’t.”
“Why not?” asked Lettie, a lump in her throat.
Ma sighed and finished tying her oven glove at the wrist. “There’s a reason, Lettie, but it’s wrapped up in a story . . . a story that stretches back thirteen years, to before you were born.”
“I already know how you made snow to save me,” said Lettie. “And that Blüstav stole it and marooned you here.”
“There’s more,” said Ma. “Blüstav told you how it all happened, and I, as the Wind, made him tell it truthfully. Now I’m going to tell you why.”
“Be quick!” Lettie be
gged. “Leave out the boring bits.”
“I will, Lettie—but not just yet. There’s someone I need to deal with first.”
Ma raised her head to look at Blüstav. He was trying to swim away from her, through the air, doggy-paddling toward the window.
“Blüstav, stop!” commanded Ma. “You stole my snow. Lettie’s snow.”
Lettie had never seen the alchemist so red in the face. His hands groped at the air, like he was searching for an excuse. He blinked and ran a sweaty palm across his forehead.
“I, ah . . . I thought you’d just make some more,” he blustered.
“And how could I? You broke all my instruments! Stole my alchemicals! Trapped me here! Oh, Blüstav,” said Ma sternly. “We really have to do something about that imagination of yours, your lies are so predictable! Stealing snow was your revenge, wasn’t it?”
Silence.
“Wasn’t it?” Ma repeated firmly.
Blüstav nodded and drifted to a stop, a few feet from the window.
“Sorry . . . ” he mumbled.
“It’s not me who has to forgive you,” said Ma. “It’s Lettie. It’s her life you put in danger.”
Lettie saw now how powerful an alchemist Ma really was: in just a few words, she’d transformed Blüstav from an arrogant con man into a shy, awkward child. And he actually sounded sorry!
With Blüstav dealt with, Ma turned her attention elsewhere.
“You must be Noah,” she declared, marching over to him. She held out an oven glove, and he shook it. “You’re the best friend my daughter has ever had, Noah. I should know, because I found you! A boy who follows the wind without asking why, that’s who you are. I searched the whole world over for you.”
Noah and his flower blushed red as a rose.
Ma laughed. “Now, what shall we do about those old crones? I passed their ship on the way here.”
“Are they still after us?” said Lettie in dismay. “I thought they were busy fighting each other. Why don’t they just give up?”
“Because money makes people mad, Lettie. And the idea of more money . . . well that just feeds their insanity. More, more, more. That’s all they think of now. Snow has made them dangerous.”