“I think I prefer bold. Or impetuous,” she said, and he laughed.
They smiled at each other for a moment, and then the silence went heavy and serious.
Ruhen spoke first. “The tether isn’t gone.”
Sepha shook her head. “I thought it would disappear. I don’t know how it could’ve stayed, if the contract is gone.”
“I told you I didn’t think it was from the contract,” Ruhen said, smiling a little. “It’s too big a magic. The contract only needed physical intimacy. It wouldn’t need so tight a binding.”
“What could it be, then?” Sepha asked, leaning closer to press her forehead against Ruhen. “Neither of us made it happen. Neither of us asked for it.”
“I don’t mind it,” Ruhen said, shifting Sepha so that she sat on the floor between his legs, cradled sideways against him.
“But you didn’t choose it,” Sepha said.
Ruhen grinned. “I didn’t know it was an option.”
Sepha let loose a laugh and snaked her arms around Ruhen’s waist.
Above them, the storm was wild as ever. In the clearing, the homunculi danced. And in the dimness of the shrine, Lael and Amin sat palm to palm, keeping vigilant watch over Sepha and Ruhen.
During the daylight hours, the cleptapods sunned themselves beneath the surface of the water. Clinging to the towering sea stacks, they inspected their armor with slow precision, adjusting misaligned bones with elaborate patience. At night, they abandoned the forest of rocky outcrops to hunt.
Which was why, if she wanted to move from one sea stack to another, Destry had to wait until nightfall.
Over the past three nights, with nothing but rainwater and her own will to sustain her, she’d struggled toward the outskirts of the sea stack forest. Along the way, she’d had to ditch all of her ammunition and most of her metal, including the cannon that had kept that cleptapod’s beak from crunching her to a pulp. She’d spent her nights climbing and diving and swimming. Her days, shivering and feverish atop pillars of stone, hiding from the tentacled herd.
And while she hid, she hallucinated.
The first day, she’d seen a fish, or a whale maybe, leap out of the water, spread its wings, and fly toward the shore. Next, she’d seen mountains nudge up over the horizon, only to disappear the next morning. Then, when her fever got much worse, she’d imagined that she could sense an aliveness to the land, the water, the air. A sort of hum. A sort of meditativeness that made her feel as if the sea stacks were half a moment from deciding to be something else entirely.
Her stomach was a pit, her head a blacksmith’s forge. Her arm was a needling heat hanging limp from her shoulder.
Destry had survived three nights on the open sea.
She was not likely to survive three more.
Acknowledgments
This book has been a dream for so long that it’s surreal to be writing my acknowledgments. I am so grateful that this book is a real, physical thing, and I am so thankful that you picked it up and read it!
So many people have been involved in the creation of this book. I have to start by thanking Doug Torrance and Chris Biernacki, whose relentless pursuit of something better was an inspiration to me when I was thinking about diving into this whole writing thing; and another thanks to Doug for selling me a laptop at a ridiculously low price because you knew I needed one if I was ever going to actually write anything. This book is my something better, and I wrote the first drafts of it on that laptop. Special thanks have to go to Sarena Straus and Will To, who read this book in its most undercooked form and gave me the feedback I needed to turn it into a Real Story. Millions of thanks to Hannah Rosser and Jeanette Foxx, who beta-read for me not once, but twice; and to Justin Rosser and Jordan Klefeker, beta-readers extraordinaire, thank you! To my good friend A. A. Woods, thank you for beta-reading, providing critical feedback, and commiserating, but especially thank you for your kindness at the pitch conference where The Lady Alchemist was born—without your suggestions, I don’t think this concept would’ve come to me. To my grandparents, Elizabeth and Richard, your support and encouragement have meant the world. Thank you.
I’d like to thank my agents, Gabbie Piraino and Rebecca Strauss. Gabbie, you understood the heart of this book from the very beginning, and you helped me take the story in the direction it needed to go. And you sent me pictures of the pupper, which was almost as important. Rebecca, I am so grateful that I get to work with you. Thank you for being such an amazing sounding board!
So many thanks to the entire Month9Books team! Working with you has been wonderful. Thank you for guiding me through the publication process for my debut book! I’d specifically like to thank Georgia McBride, Emily Midkiff, Jennifer Million, Nicole Olea, and Danielle Doolittle. You all made this book possible!
To James, my husband with the 72% cacao eyes: without you, this book would only be an idea. I started writing this when our kids were ages two and one, and if you hadn’t pushed me out of the house or made sure I shut myself in a quiet room to write, I never would have gotten anywhere.
Final and biggest thanks to my God, who (among many other things) reminded me of this dream of mine and gave me the strength to pursue it.
Samantha Vitale
Samantha Vitale has an insatiable hunger for two things: big challenges and amazing stories. When not working at her highly technical day job, she can be found devouring books or writing new ones of her own. She lives in Virginia with her husband and their two small humans.
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The Lady Alchemist Page 33