But—
But just now, beneath the wind’s kiss and the silver-strewn sky, far out of reach of Father’s hissed accusations, Sepha wasn’t so sure.
Her mother had been desperately sad and had done her very best for as long as she could. She’d been alone and without help, and had felt, that day, that her only option was to jump. Leaving Sepha, at six, motherless.
But not at fault.
Something inside Sepha, something that over the years had grown brittle, suddenly heated, melted, cooled, hardened. Became something sharp, but strong; something not likely to shatter.
The wind picked up again.
Tears were streaming down her cheeks now, soft and slow. The wind licked across the streams, laying cold tracks down her cheeks.
The roiling something stirred, and Sepha felt an inkling.
Think of when you felt the most peaceful, he’d said.
The River Guterahl, Sepha thought immediately. It had been quiet but for the sound of the water. The cool mountain breeze would muss her hair, reminding her that there was a whole world beyond the confines of Three Mills. Sepha swallowed.
Think of when you felt the most alive.
The cliff overlooking the sea. She’d been cooped up for weeks, and the open air, the ocean’s forceful wind, had let her breathe down to the bones.
The most powerful.
With a pang, she remembered the night of the cleptapods’ attack. The chaos, the fury, the power. The wind.
Wind.
The word clunked into place in her mind, a keystone settling into an empty slot, holding the rest of her in place. Sepha lifted a hand and felt the wind sift through her fingers. Her roiling beast shifted and purred.
And some dark place inside woke up, enlivened, and glowed luminescent.
She was an aeromancer.
Sepha smiled and felt as if she’d never smiled before, not like this. She stood on top of the crate, pulled herself onto the huge shipping container behind it, and stood up into the full force of the ocean wind. She threw her head back and her arms out and let the wind wash over her.
Her roiling beast, that moody and temperamental thing, bubbled up beneath her skin, yowling and purring and rubbing against her shins, catlike and powerful and impossible and hers.
She stood there for a long time, alone but not alone, glorying in the wind and the beast it had so unexpectedly awoken. Unwilling to go back to her small berth and shut herself off from the life-giving wind, she lay down right where she was.
Her thoughts, after a while, turned to Ruhen. He’d said it wasn’t hard to figure out what another person’s source was, if you watched them. And gods, had she been watching him!
It wasn’t observing that was a violation, after all; it was talking about it. And if she could figure out her own source, she could figure his out, too.
When was Ruhen peaceful?
After a few minutes of mulling, she decided he’d been peaceful at the cliffside.
She couldn’t rightly know when he felt the most alive, but she did know when he’d seemed the most powerful: the night of the cleptapods’ attack.
Could he be an aeromancer, too?
No; the thought struck a sour note.
She thought for a long time until at last she remembered the train. The desert. The place where Ruhen had seemed the least alive.
The desert was very dry.
She lifted her head and looked around at the vast, empty sea.
I like the water, he’d said at the cliffside. And he’d said he was heading for the Guterahl, the day of the Willow, to be near the water.
Water.
Ruhen was a hydromancer.
And he’d been dropping hints for weeks.
The realization settled in, rounding out her knowledge of Ruhen, and she smiled. Ruhen was a hydromancer. She was sure of it.
The sky was alive with stars and the waxing light of the moon. The Dear Lady churned steadily through the water. The wind teased Sepha’s hair, slipped through the open slice in her shirt, skimmed along her skin.
She knew where she was. She knew what she was. And she knew what Ruhen was, too. The gods could take the rest.
Over the next two weeks, Sepha spent all of her free time practicing with her roiling beast. It was like starting at the Institute all over again, teaching her body to move through the morning evolution and react during sparring matches. Only now, she was working blindly with an uncooperative beast, with no Destry to help her.
Although her beast drew power from the wind, it wasn’t limited to manipulating air. Sepha found that her beast’s abilities weren’t a matter of possible or impossible; they were only a matter of enough energy or not enough energy. Her beast could manipulate air and hardly expend any energy at all. But when it came to manipulating heavier things, her beast had to work much harder. Its energy would noticeably deplete, and only the wind would replenish it.
Ruhen watched her practice, occasionally offering suggestions, but mostly leaving her be. He seemed on edge during her practice sessions, and Sepha could see why. She was beginning to sense the enormity of her roiling beast’s power. She spent half her time worrying she’d sink the whole damn boat and the other half glorying in the shock of sudden power.
And all the while, in the back of her mind, were the guilt and hate and sorrow that drove her. The undead magician had killed Destry. He’d killed dozens of other people, too, probably, but he’d found Destry because of Sepha. He’d been able to kill Destry because she’d left the Institute to protect Sepha. Destry would never be the Magistrate because of Sepha. Because of the magician.
Now that Sepha had her roiling beast, she could kill him. She knew she could. As soon as she could wrangle it into obedience. Powerful as it was, it was dreadfully unreliable, and she could never quite get it to listen.
She needed more practice. And then a bit more—and a bit more.
On the day of parting, nine weeks after the night in Cell Two-Seven, the Dear Lady slowed to a stop about a mile offshore. In the distance, a wall of mountains rose abruptly from the water. They were blue through the mist that obscured them and seemed strangely unfriendly, as if they’d turned their backs to the sea.
As the Dear Lady’s ropes and pulleys lowered the Institute’s boat into the water, Captain Ellsworth leaned over the side of the Dear Lady. “Sepha!” he shouted.
“Sir?” she shouted back, confused. They’d hardly spoken since the magician attacked, partly because Ellsworth never seemed to be saying quite what he wanted to say.
“Tell Ipha I said hello!” Ellsworth bellowed, and Sepha gaped up at him.
“You knew her?” she shouted, too shocked to say anything else. The Institute’s boat hit the water with a loud slap.
Ellsworth grinned in triumph with an I thought so expression, but his smile faltered. Henric, oblivious or belligerent, turned on the little boat’s engine. Sepha could barely hear Ellsworth’s voice above the roar. “Tell … Blackpool … alive!”
Sepha turned to Ruhen. “Did you hear that?”
Ruhen shrugged and shook his head.
“Me, neither,” Sepha said, and gave Ellsworth a shrug and a wave. Ruhen sent his steady magic out to detach the Dear Lady’s ropes from their boat with a low, garbled word.
“Who’s Ipha?” Henric asked from Destry’s erstwhile seat.
As if she was going to tell Henric about her mother. “No one.”
Ruhen lifted his eyebrows in a silent question, and Fio muttered, “Really?”
Sepha mouthed, so they could both see, “My mother.”
The wind was stronger on the small craft than it had been on Our Dear Lady, but it was wetter, too, and it wasn’t long before Sepha was completely encrusted with sea salt from the damp breeze.
Sepha forced herself not to think about Mother, and how Captain Ellsworth had known her well enough to see her features on Sepha’s face. They were almost to the Spirit Alchemists�
� Sanctuary, which meant that she had to keep her wits about her.
Destry had said the Spirit Alchemists were likely to know where the undead magician had come from, after all. This was no time for distractions, and thinking of Mother had never done her much good.
Henric steered the boat along the base of a tall, smooth cliff, looking for the access to the Spirit Alchemists’ hidden cove. When a narrow inlet appeared, Henric deftly navigated into the pinch. The tight waterway, after a claustrophobic minute, opened into a small cove lined by more of the sheer, tall cliffs. Sepha followed the cliffs up until she saw the chill blue sky high above. She couldn’t see a fortress or another way out. The cove seemed like a dead end.
Across the cove’s calm waters, a pair of small boats were docked along a narrow wood-planked pier. Ruhen and Henric briefly allied to dock and moor the boat, and they all clambered out.
The cove was a quiet, lifeless place, as still as the field of dead trees around the Wicking Willow. A chill spread through Sepha. This place felt wrong—almost wrong enough for her to want to risk the Military Alchemists, risk the magician stealing her firstborn, rather than linger where she could sense danger and death and blood among the stones.
“And now we go up,” Henric said, his words barely penetrating the deadened air. They’d barely spoken since he’d attacked her, and he’d grown moodier every day. A few times, he’d approached Sepha and opened his mouth, as if to say something, but he never did. He always walked away instead.
Sepha thought he might have wanted her to chase after him. But she never did.
And now he was walking away again, around the water’s edge toward the face of the cliff. Then, impossibly, he continued walking up it, his legs obscured by jutting angles of stone. Curious, Sepha followed and saw that the stairs were little more than a groove cut along a natural indentation in the cliffs. To her right, the cliff sprang up into the sky, and to her left, an irregular lip of stone came up to her thigh, effectively hiding the stairs from the view of anyone standing on the pier.
The safety of the Sanctuary was questionable, the connection to the Magistrate too direct. But Sepha wasn’t strong enough to fight off all the Military Alchemists—yet—and there might be answers here about the undead magician.
It was bigger than just killing him. Someone had summoned his soul from the After and set him loose on Tirenia, and she had to find out why. Even though the Magistrate wanted her dead, even though Henric was … Henric. The magician-homunculus was a murderer. Sepha would stop him and everyone who’d helped him.
So onward she went, with Henric, Ruhen, and Fio, into the Spirit Alchemists’ Sanctuary.
Even though she had a feeling that whatever was ahead was more dangerous than what was behind.
The four of them labored up the stairs. About three-quarters of the way up the cliff, the stairs turned sharply into the guts of the cliffside and flattened into a wide tunnel. The tunnel was rough-hewn stone, lit periodically by naked bulbs strung along the ceiling.
It was quiet in the tunnel, and cool, and dim. To one side, a few corridors intersected with their own. The other side was smooth and uninterrupted but for the line of copper piping that emerged from the wall and continued along its surface.
“The Spirit Alchemists made this?” Sepha whispered into the silent air. The tunnel had an old feel, as if most of the people who’d walked through it had died a long time ago.
Without turning around, Henric grunted, “It’s been here for ages. Aunt Isolde found it. Decided to use it.”
His clipped tone forestalled any further conversation.
The corridor finally opened into a large room with a high ceiling, dark marbled tiles, and twisting, decorative columns. Tall, paired bookshelves stood sentry on either side of high, narrow doorways in three of the room’s walls. The fourth wall was of raw, gray stone, and there was an irregular, glassless window that opened out over the cove. From the pier, it must look like a pock mark on the face of the cliff.
“Is that you, little Hen?” came a woman’s surprised voice from beyond one of the doorways.
Henric flushed and looked studiously away from Sepha and Ruhen, who were suppressing small grins. “Yes, Aunt Isolde,” he said, a strange hush to his normally loud voice.
There was the sound of soft footsteps approaching, and the Magistrate strode into the room.
Not the Magistrate, Sepha reminded herself, even as her heart beat a terrified rhythm. Her identical twin.
Sepha frowned as she stared at the woman, searching for differences between her and the one who’d stolen her life away. The Magistrate, she remembered, wore glasses; this woman didn’t, which allowed Sepha to see that her eyes were the same blue as Destry’s. This woman’s hair, a mess of mostly gray spirals, was much longer than the Magistrate’s. But for those two details, she was the Magistrate’s mirror image.
“To what do I owe the pleasure, little Hen?” she asked, appraising Sepha and Ruhen with her head cocked to the side. Then her eyes flicked to Henric, and she grinned. The smile did nothing to warm up her expression; in fact, it made her face look sharper, more calculating. “I suppose I shouldn’t call you that anymore, should I? Come here, Henric, and let me look at you.”
Henric obediently strode over to his aunt and submitted to her scrutiny. “Well! What’s ailing you, then?” she said, seeming to have noted his dampened spirits and more-than-usual scruffiness.
“Destry is dead,” Henric said. “She died at sea on the way here. I haven’t been able to contact Mother yet.”
With hardly a flick of her eye, Isolde said, “Well, we can take care of that easily.”
Sepha could hardly keep her jaw from dropping. That was her reaction to her own niece’s death? Not even a moment of grief, of regret?
Sensing Sepha’s gaze, Isolde said, “I apologize for my nephew’s rudeness. Henric, introduce us.”
Henric swallowed, took one quick breath, and said, “This is my aunt Isolde, who is a Spirit Alchemist and matron in charge here. Aunt Isolde, this is Sepha, the Lady Alchemist who is actually an alchemancer, and her magician friend, Ruhen. Sepha used magic at the Institute in front of everyone, which is why we came here.”
“Henric!” Sepha gasped, too shocked to say anything else. Henric hadn’t given them the choice of telling Isolde what they were. He’d laid them bare without any consideration. Ruhen was clenching and unclenching his fists, as if fighting a very strong urge to throttle Henric with his bare hands.
Isolde raised her eyebrows and looked at Sepha and Ruhen again. This time, her gaze seemed greedy. Sepha’s beast roiled protectively up, and she tamped it down. Destroying the Sanctuary would make for a decidedly bad first impression.
“Really?” Isolde said, pressing her lips into another unpleasant grin. “An alchemancer, you say? I suppose that explains the contingent of Military Alchemists that’s been toeing the border since last week.”
Sepha’s face went very hot. “There are Military Alchemists here? But I never saw anyone following us!”
Isolde shrugged. “You came here by boat. They came here by train. By far the faster mode of conveyance. They probably could’ve been here sooner, but there has been quite an uprising in Tirenia of late. Probably kept them busy or at least upset the train schedules. Don’t worry, though; they can’t come here without my permission. And I won’t give them permission.” She paused. “I am, of course, assuming you’re here for asylum.”
The Military Alchemists were outside, not far off. They had come here by train. They had known where she would go, and they’d gotten here before she had.
So much for her clever plan.
Sepha swallowed.
It was fine. Everything was fine.
It had to be.
“Well, you lot seem set up,” Henric said, avoiding everyone’s gaze. “Aunt Isolde, I assume my old room is free?”
“By all means,” Isolde said, still eyeing Sepha. Ruhen eased forward so
he was half in front of Sepha. Fio was shifting his scowl back and forth between Isolde and Henric, unnoticed by either of them. “I will need a word with the Lady Alchemist and her companion before I can allow them to stay here.”
“Do what you will,” Henric said and, without so much as a glance at Sepha, disappeared through the door to her left.
That sense of wrongness, of danger, was so strong Sepha’s roiling beast reacted again, prowling beneath the surface of her skin.
But Destry had known Isolde and had still agreed to come here.
The Spirit Alchemists might be dangerous, but Sepha was more dangerous than any of them. Let them think her cornered; let them underestimate her. She had come here for safety and for answers, and she would get what she’d come for.
The room was quieter without Henric in it, and it was a moment before Isolde spoke. “Come with me into my study,” she said, and returned to the room from which she’d come.
After sharing a steadying glance, Sepha and Ruhen followed Isolde. The study was much like the room they’d just left, except it was rather smaller and possessed several large, overstuffed chairs. Against the wall opposite the study’s window, a dark curtain obscured a shallow alcove.
Isolde gestured them to a love seat, which groaned as Ruhen sat down. His weight turned the flat surface into a steep grade, so that Sepha had to lean away to stay upright.
Fio, who had agreed to play the servant-homunculus until they knew what sort of people the Spirit Alchemists were, stood just inside the study’s threshold and didn’t say a word.
Isolde sat across from them. She stared at them over the tips of her steepled fingers as if they were contraptions with cogs and wheels and moving parts, and she was determined to figure out what they were for.
When she spoke, her voice was as decisive and forceful as the Magistrate’s. “It’s curious that you’ve come here. Why not go to ground? Would anonymity in a small town not have been the safer option?”
“I wanted—I mean, I had hoped …” Sepha paused in what she hoped seemed an emotional way. “Destry meant to talk to her mother, once we arrived here. She wanted to convince her I was still useful. I hoped that was still possible.”
The Lady Alchemist Page 25