by Sam Gayton
“Can’t you change them into something harmless?” said Lettie. “Like squirrels?”
“Or cushions?” suggested Noah.
Ma smiled. Lettie could tell because her goggles lifted up.
“It’ll take them time to find us,” she said. “And even when they do, we’ll be safe. The doors to the staircase are still frozen shut, I should think. Let’s see if I’m right!”
She ran through the door. Lettie and Noah followed, dragging Blüstav along by the vines that were still wrapped around him. He trailed after them, bumping his head on every door frame and snagging on chandeliers. But he didn’t moan once: he was too afraid of Ma.
Lettie ran faster, trying to keep up, but she couldn’t help glimpsing into each doorway she rushed past. And there were dozens. One room held a great silver spinning wheel, all bent and twisted. Another room held a collection of glass tubes in the shape of bells, but most of them had been smashed. Then they came to the blue doors encased in ice that Blüstav had frozen shut with æther, years before.
“See?” said Ma. “We’re safe.”
“You mean trapped,” muttered Blüstav. “There’s no way out.”
Ma turned to look at him, and he fell silent.
Lettie didn’t care about the doors. She just wanted an explanation. Ma knew it too.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go back to the laboratory, snuggle in those armchairs, and try to forget who might be coming up the stairs. I’ll explain, and Blüstav can get the tea.”
So the four of them went back to the laboratory, where the armchairs were waiting. Noah grew tea leaves and cinnamon for the cauldron, and Ma lit the tinder underneath. Soon the fire was roasting. After hours up in the freezing clouds, Lettie felt the damp seep out of her at last. She wriggled deep into her armchair and marveled at how the room stayed frozen, despite the fire.
They hadn’t any water, so Ma broke a window pane and left the icy shards in the cauldron to melt. Blüstav floated above, stirring with his spoon. Then Lettie dipped the mugs into the cauldron and handed them to Noah and Ma, who didn’t drink the tea, but took a straw from her coat to suck up the steam. Noah and Lettie leaned back in the armchairs, and sipped and sighed, and were happy and warm at last, at last.
“Tell it, Ma,” said Lettie. “Tell the story of snow.”
“It’s not snow’s story,” said Ma. “It’s yours. But first things first: Where’s your da?”
Lettie took Da from her pocket and showed him to Ma.
“Oh, my love,” said Ma sadly. “You’ve really let yourself go. How did that happen?”
“Blüstav did it,” said Lettie.
“I’m not talking about that, Lettie. I mean before he turned into a beer bottle. How did he get to be so bad at looking after you? He made your life hard. You weren’t the landlord’s daughter; he was the landlady’s father.”
“Yes,” said Lettie, slipping Da back inside her coat pocket to warm him up again. “I’m his landlady and I’ll look after him forever.”
“You won’t have to,” said Ma sternly. “He’ll have to change, Lettie. We all will, if we become a family again. Would you like that?”
“More than anything,” Lettie answered. “Can it really happen, though?” she added. “We haven’t been a family for such a long time.”
Ma was silent for a moment.
“You still love your father, don’t you?” she asked. “After everything he’s done?”
Lettie felt the weight of Da in her pocket and nodded.
“Then it can happen,” said Ma emphatically. “Becoming a family . . . now that’s alchemy beyond what I know. Beyond what anyone knows. But I’m sure it starts with love.”
Lettie smiled. She was sure of that too.
“But you mustn’t think it will be easy, Lettie. Love makes things possible, not easy.” Ma sipped her tea thoughtfully. “Now I’m ready to explain,” she said after a time. “I had to wait until you all had your tea, you see; for it’s a bitter story, and it’s good to have a cup of something sweet in your hand when you hear it.”
The Making of Lettie Peppercorn
The truth is Lettie wasn’t born the way other babies are born. She was special; she was different; she came out of a cauldron one Sunday afternoon. Teresa reached in, lifted her out, and there she was—a beautiful baby, made with alchemy and love. She had wide, wonderful eyes. They opened, and looked straight at Teresa, who said:
“Hello, Lettie Peppercorn. I’m your ma.”
Before Lettie, Teresa had waited ages for a baby.
“Why is it taking so long?” she asked.
Everyone had a different answer: Doctor Nickles recommended more tests, Reverend Gumpfrey recommended more prayer, and page sixty-four of Sister Mary Bruise’s All You Need to Know about Your First Baby recommended more waiting.
But Teresa had had enough of waiting. She was desperate. And she said so.
“I’ve had enough of waiting! I’m desperate! Henry, pass me my cauldron, please!”
“You’re going to make a baby using alchemy?” asked Henry.
“Yes, I am.”
“Is it even possible?”
Henry was right to wonder. All the other alchemists were only interested in turning lead into gold. None had ever imagined making a child. There was no recipe for such an experiment. Teresa would have to make it up as she went along.
“Of course it’s possible. I made Periwinkle from a pebble last spring.”
“Yes, but this is different. This is a child.”
“You’re right, Henry. It is different. You’ll have to help too.”
Hardest of all was knowing where in the world to start. Teresa and Henry spent long nights discussing all the hundreds of possible materials from which Lettie could be made.
“How about wood?”
“No, wood is too spiteful. It gives you splinters.”
“Gold?”
“Don’t be silly, Henry. A child made from gold will grow up to be a spoiled brat!”
“Water?”
“We don’t want a crybaby. And the sea is always changing, which means she’ll be moody. Oh, it seems like whatever we choose is wrong!”
They went through a thousand possibilities, and none of them seemed right. The problem was this: Teresa wanted to create Lettie, not design her. She wanted Lettie to grow up and decide herself just who she was going to be. She had to be free to carve out her own life.
Then one day, Henry read a line aloud from page eighty-one of Sister Mary Bruise’s All You Need to Know about Your First Baby:
“When a baby is born, its life is a blank slate.”
“That’s perfect!” Teresa clapped her hands and kissed him.
“A baby made from slate?” said Henry.
“Don’t take things so literally, my dear, have a bit of imagination. We’ll use a bit of granite, some flint, a bit of beach shingle . . .”
And so it was decided that Teresa and Henry’s baby would be made from stone.
Of course, a baby made from stone would have some of its qualities. And, sure enough, when she grew up Lettie proved herself to be dependable, resourceful, stubborn, and patient. But she was also able to sculpt her own destiny, which is the most important thing about being human.
Michelangelo was a sculptor who said once that when he looked at a stone, he saw the sculpture inside it. All he had to do was take away the bits that weren’t needed. It was just like that with Lettie. Teresa looked at the stones around Barter and saw a child within them, patiently waiting to be given life.
It may have seemed to Lettie that her ma had never been part of her life. But Teresa was the one who lifted her from the cauldron. She was there when Lettie took her first step, and spoke her first word (it was “Dada,” which made Teresa secretly jealous). The three of them lived days of buttered toast and tea, lullabies and bedtime. Teresa was amazed by the alchemy Lettie had brought into the White Horse Inn: Henry had changed into Da, and she had changed into Ma.
It started when his claws turned gray. Da didn’t even notice, but Ma did. She spent every waking moment studying Periwinkle. She counted his heartbeats, measured his breaths and studied his symptoms. She recorded every change in his body as it grew flatter, heavier, grayer. By the end of the week she had come to the inescapable conclusion that her alchemy, no matter how brilliant, was leaking away. Periwinkle was turning back into stone.
But why was he changing?
It took Ma another week of tests and observations before she had the answer: it was Albion. It was the land of slate and cobbles and granite that surrounded Periwinkle. Every slate roof, cobbled street, granite wall, and shingle beach called out, “Change back, change back, change back . . .” It would be a gradual process, but after many years, Periwinkle would turn back into a stone.
And if Periwinkle was petrifying, then that meant Lettie could too.
Ma wrote down her thoughts in a note. She called this one:
WHY PERIWINKLE IS PETRIFYING
Hold two identical glasses in your hands. Fill one with water and leave the other empty. Put a single ice cube in each. Wait, and watch.
What do you see?
Very quickly, the ice cube in the water melts away to nothing.
This demonstrates exactly what is happening to Periwinkle: surrounded by stones, he is slowly disappearing.
From that day forward, stones became Ma’s enemy. She searched for ways to get rid of them, to keep them as far from her daughter as possible, before she too began to petrify.
“There has to be a way,” said Ma, sitting down to think. “There has to be.”
And there was.
It just hadn’t been invented yet.
That night Ma packed her suitcase, popped Periwinkle on her shoulder, and climbed from the window of the White Horse Inn, looking for Blüstav. She found him in his laboratory, still sitting in his chair. Almost as if he had never moved.
At the time, she had thought him a little pathetic, to wait for her like a dog. But, of course, he was sitting, patient as a spider; ready to strike, ready to deliver his terrible revenge.
The two of them went out into the ocean, to create a laboratory atop an iceberg. Inside, Ma wrote down the recipe for snow: the invention that would save her daughter’s life. Ma’s invention was very simple. She designed snow to be a blanket: a blanket to cover up the stony ground. A blanket for Lettie, so that she might be free to walk the earth and never be afraid of petrifying. Ma ordered Blüstav to collect up all the ingredients, then she set to work.
Every day and night for a year Ma worked her alchemy. She spun her silver wheel and she sewed her needle of frost, until the night when snow was finally finished. Ma put down the recipe, looked up at the nimbostratus she had made and smiled: it was done. Now she could leave the iceberg laboratory and take the snow cloud home.
And Ma would have done just that, had she not made one, terrible mistake.
She fell asleep.
When she woke up in the morning, she was filled with horror. Blüstav had stolen snow and escaped. He had broken the silver wheel and smashed the glass bells. He had taken every alchemical and frozen the doors shut with æther. The handle and hinges were blue with ice that would hold for a thousand years. There was no escape, save the window and the sheer drop to the ocean outside.
Thankfully, Blüstav had left the paper and pencils. And so Ma sat down, and ordered her thoughts by jotting them down:
HOW I GET SNOW BACK
1. I need to escape
2. I have to find Blüstav and the snow cloud
3. By the time I get out, he could be anywhere in the world
4. So I have to be quick
5. And I have to be everywhere at once
By the time she had written her third thought, Ma decided the quickest way to find him would be to change herself into air.
Ma, in her laboratory of ice, floating on the waves, wrote her daughter a note. It said:
LETTIE—THESE THINGS YOU MUST REMEMBER:
1. I’ve gone away to save your life
2. Until I return, you are in danger
3. The danger is inside Albion
4. Don’t set a foot upon Albion, for it can kill you
5. I love you, and I’m coming back
She never explained her plan to Da: he would only worry, and try and persuade her to find another way. But there was no other way.
Ma tied the note to Periwinkle and watched him fly off to Barter. Then she turned back to her cauldron and started, once more, to work her alchemy.
She began by skimming æther from overhead storm clouds, using a kite she had made from book pages and string. For a whole day she purified the æther in pots and pans, and distilled it twenty times until it was clear and syrupy, like liquid glass.
On the second day she ripped open her mattress and pillows, for the feathers, and burned them into a powder to dust the æther with. She hoped to capture from the feathers an essence of lightness and gliding. Then she strained the whole thing through a copper gauze. The clear liquid now had a silver sheen. Ma had to weigh her iron cauldron down with bricks—without them it would float fifteen centimeters from the ground. She was pleased.
For all of the third day she let the mixture simmer in the cauldron, while she stirred in a pot of strong glue (Ma wanted her new body to stick together, after all, and air is notoriously slippery) with a silver spatula.
On the fourth day, she added a spurt of steam (for motion), an ounce of quicksilver (for speed) and three sticks of liquorice (for taste, seeing as the mixture had to be swallowed.) She poured it into a tiny vial and stoppered it with a cork. Then she shook it as vigorously as she could and left it on the side to settle.
On the fifth day she rested. And on the sixth day Ma unstoppered the cork, put the vial to her lips, and took the tiniest sip.
The mixture worked.
It was the strangest sensation: similar to what a tree must feel in the autumn when the leaves drift off its branches.
Ma felt bits of her body start to glide out of the laboratory window. Her fingers first, then her toes. She looked down, and they were no longer there. She felt them, though, they were caught by the wind, right this moment they were being tossed around the iceberg by the sea breeze.
Ma held her hand to her face and watched it slowly dissolve. It joined a thermal and rose up through the clouds . . . Ma could not even gasp before her lips flew out the window along with her ears, to join an air current heading north.
But as Ma’s body turned to air, it did not stick together . . . it scattered across the world, taken on the winds. Already her lips and ears were halfway to the Pole, while her fingers were part of a hurricane headed to the East.
The last thing Ma thought before she evaporated completely was that she should have used more glue.
Over the years, while Da grew unlucky and Lettie grew up, Ma flew in one hundred pieces, as part of storms, gales, and breezes, to every corner of the world. And all the while she searched for Blüstav. Her ears listened for him in the many taverns of the world. Her eyes searched for him across oceans and skies. Her fingers felt for him in crowded streets.
She found him wandering the courts of continental kings and queens, selling snowflakes as if they were diamonds. As soon as she caught him, Ma faced another dilemma: now that she was nothing but a breeze, what could she do? What power did she have over Blüstav, who was flesh and blood?
Not much, but a little.
Not much, but enough.
Ma found she could move Blüstav wherever she wanted, like a piece in a chess game.
What, after all, is the wind except for movement? When the wind blows, it says to you, Move with me, move. It is impossible to resist: little by little, it sweeps you along. And that is precisely what happened to Blüstav. He never felt Ma’s hands and feet, but every time they swept past him they elbowed, nudged, poked,
and kicked him up the bottom, all the way back to Albion. Step by step, without even realizing, Blüstav headed away from the royal courts, toward Barter.
Slowly, slowly, slowly . . . Ma led him to the doorstep of the White Horse Inn. It took ten years, but eventually he arrived, asking for a room with a draft.
Ma’s plan was simple: she was the Wind, and she was everywhere. Once Blüstav brought the snow cloud back to Lettie, Ma could take hold of her daughter and guide her to the truth.
Of course, things hadn’t gone quite as she had intended. Some very nasty old ladies had nearly ruined everything, and slippery Blüstav had nearly gotten away twice. All of which was why Ma had also led a third person toward the White Horse Inn; someone who could help Lettie if she got into trouble; someone who would follow the wind without asking why . . . a green-eyed boy with a stalk on his shoulder.
Yes, it was no coincidence at all that Noah happened to be there the night Lettie’s life changed forever. Ma had led him across oceans to the White Horse Inn for one reason only: to be a best friend.
As soon as Blüstav arrived at the inn, Ma began to put herself back together. It was no easy task. She had been tumbling around the world in one hundred pieces for ten years, and she might have done so forever, if it was not for a pair of oven gloves in a Baverian bakery. Her fingers suddenly fell into them as they flew through the town of Blokkenborg.
Suddenly, Ma found she could move them where she wanted. The feeling of freedom was indescribable. Her fingers crawled through the town, with all the market goers screaming and diving behind the baguettes, until they reached a clothes stall. They took a pair of trousers from the rack and dragged them into a nearby forest. Ma knew her legs were about to pass through there, she could feel them. And when they did her fingers held the trousers in just the right place, and in they slipped, a perfect fit.
After that, Ma’s legs gave her fingers a lift, and hopped to Venice, where her feet were running through the canals.