The Lady Alchemist Read online

  A sticky silence welled up above the sounds of wind and rainfall as Sepha and the man stared at each other.

  He looked twenty or so, hardly older than Sepha’s seventeen-nearly-eighteen. He was tall and broad, with brown skin and dark hair that curled in loose spirals despite the heavy rain. And his clothes, dark and drenched, plastered against him—and his eyes, brightly black and rimmed with long lashes—and his lips, full and upturned—

  Sepha’s cheeks went crimson.

  Don’t be stupid! snapped a snide voice inside Sepha’s head. She ran a hand through her wet, clinging hair, feeling foolish. The man looked away.

  “A Wicking Willow!” he said, sounding as if he was half in shock. Sepha thought she might be, too. Her body felt loose, and her mind was sluggish, snagging on unhelpful details. Like the clinging weight of the man’s drenched gray shirt.

  “Do you—” Sepha started, but it came out hoarse. She tried again. “Do you think the magician is still around? The one who made it?”

  Not that she’d be able to run, even if the magician was nearby.

  “I didn’t see anyone but you,” the man said. He smiled weakly, a glimpse of crinkles beside his eyes, and added, “I might’ve thought you were the magician, but then you were almost eaten by a tree.”

  Sepha let out something that might’ve been a laugh if she hadn’t been so out of breath. If she hadn’t just almost died. “No, I’m not a magician, of course not,” she said. “I’m an alchemist.” Everyone knew that alchemy and magic didn’t mix.

  The man laughed too. “I know,” he said. “The axe.” He blinked and looked at his empty hands. “I must’ve dropped it.”

  Sepha waved off his apologetic glance. Nothing mattered less right now than a lost axe.

  With a groan, the man stood. Sepha took his offered hand, and he hauled her to her feet. “Thanks,” she murmured, craning her neck to look at him. She could see now that his eyes weren’t quite black. They were an indeterminate color something like tarnished silver, a smooth and shifting dark gray. A gray that matched the roiling thunderheads overhead.

  She knew him, she realized. Well, she recognized him. He’d appeared in town a few weeks ago and always seemed to be hanging about the library. She had consequently never spoken to him.

  Sepha realized that she was still holding his hand and abruptly dropped it. Her cheeks heated.

  Those thunderhead eyes shifted to a point on her forehead and widened. “You’re bleeding!” he said. “Are you all right?”

  His hand froze in the air near her face, as if he were fighting an impulse to wipe the blood away.

  “I’m fine,” Sepha lied, raising a hand to her forehead, where the offending blood was trickling toward her eyebrow.

  The man briefly frowned as he noted her lie and decided to let it be. “Ruhen Salmarre,” he said instead. “That’s my name, I mean.”

  “I’m Sepha. Sepha Filens.” The pain in her ankle was a dull ache. There would probably be an enormous bruise there, marking where the root had grabbed her. “Do you think it got anyone before we—”

  Sepha couldn’t bring herself to finish the question.

  Ruhen gave a helpless shrug. “No way to know.”

  The rain fell harder, and an icy wind reminded Sepha that she was drenched, cold, and far from home. The Magistrate was bound to think she was ridiculous for doing her demonstration in such a … state …

  Sepha’s face went very hot, then very cold.

  Her demonstration!

  “I have to go,” Sepha said. If she was late, Father would be furious. Furious. “Sorry. Thanks.”

  “Is something else wrong?” Ruhen asked, sounding alarmed.

  “No. Yes. I have to go. Sorry.”

  Sepha turned toward town and broke into a lopsided sprint, leaving Ruhen behind.

  The Magistrate was touring the mills. And the fate of Three Mills depended on the Magistrate’s favorable opinion.

  Sepha had to get back for her demonstration. No matter what.

  Sepha launched herself through the double back doors of Mill Facility A and slammed them shut behind her. For a moment, she stood in the growing puddle of her own drippings, reveling in the fact that she was inside and out of the torrential rain.

  The mill, usually frenetic with metallic clangs and orange-white sparks escaping from the huge furnaces, was silent but for the dull roar of the rain pounding on its sagging roof. In what was surely both a first and a last, Father had given the millers the morning off. The consideration was less for the millers’ sakes than for the Magistrate’s. When in full operation, the mill was dangerous. Even Father would rather lose a day’s production than risk injuring the Magistrate.

  Sepha wrung out her hair and the heavy, wet fabric of her sweater and pants, scraping off the worst of the mud. She combed through the razor-straight length of her hair and wove it into one long braid. As for her forehead … she could only hope the rain had washed away any remaining blood.

  Smoothing out the wrinkles from her sweater, Sepha took one deep breath, then another. She forced the thoughts of vivid purple leaves, pulsing gray roots, and hissing amber acid from her mind. Instead, she set her mind on the demonstration. The contract. Saving Three Mills.

  Sepha squelched past the hulking tanks that normally made the air shimmer with the heat of the molten metal they contained. Today, though, they were cool and empty. Beyond the tanks were smelters and racks of fully worked metals awaiting shipment, and past those was Sepha’s haunt: the Alchemical Stations.

  When Father had pulled her out of school for good—she’d had no mind for letters or numbers, all of which refused to stay still on the page long enough for her to read them (Teacher had called it “word blindness,” while Father had called it “mind-boggling stupidity”)—she’d become an apprentice to the mill’s alchemists. It had been hard work for a twelve-year-old, but it had been a blessing in the end. If she’d stayed in school, she would’ve had to wait years to learn alchemy. But she hadn’t had to wait, and because of what she’d learned at the mill, the Magistrate was now here.

  Sepha heard the whispers just as she rounded the last storage rack and smiled with relief when she saw who waited for her.

  Every last miller was there, in full defiance of their unasked-for day off. This demonstration was too important to miss, so they’d come here, unpaid, to see what would happen. Sepha’s throat started to ache. What with running late and almost dying in the forest, this was exactly what she needed. Support from her friends on the most important day of her life.

  The millers had formed a perfect arc around the enormous transmutation alchem Sepha had chalked onto the ground. It had taken her hours because she’d had to consult a drawing every step of the way. A huge slab of steel was inside the alchem, just where she’d placed it yesterday. Good.

  The squelch and squeak of Sepha’s boots was the only sound in the world as she hurried over to stand between the millers and the alchem. They all murmured with either relief or annoyance as she took her place in front of them.

  “Sepha!” hissed Renni, the alchemists’ foreman. “Where have you been? And what’ve you been up to? You’re—” the woman gestured helplessly. “You’re covered in mud!”

  “No time to explain,” Sepha whispered back, forcing a smile at Renni. “Has the tour started yet?”

  “It’s just about over,” Renni said. “I don’t like to think of what would’ve happened if you’d gotten here any later.”

  They both shuddered.

  Then there was no more time to talk, because Father’s voice carried to them from somewhere just past the racks.

  “And over here, Madame Magistrate, are the Alchemical Stations.”

  Everything inside Sepha went quavery at the sound of Father’s voice. It slunk across the room and settled between her bones, where it resonated with the snide voice inside her mind—the Father that berated her when Father wasn’t there to do it himself.<
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  Half a second more, and Father himself appeared, ushering forward a man and a woman.

  The moment Sepha saw her father, she felt the too-familiar sensation of shrinking within herself. Her heart didn’t plunge when she saw him; it diminished.

  She watched as his eyes fixed on the millers behind her, then flicked over her, his mouth settling into a scowl. Her muddy clothes weighed a thousand pounds. Why had she come straight to the mill? Surely it would’ve been better to stop at home first, to change. Surely being late would’ve been better than being filthy! Why hadn’t she thought of that earlier?

  You never think, that’s why, drawled the snide voice. Stupid, worthless girl.

  Father would make her pay for this later. But now was not the time to think about that.

  With a bracing breath, Sepha shifted her focus from Father to the woman beside him. The woman was tall, with spiraling gray curls. She surveyed the room through thick-rimmed, circular spectacles and walked a half-step ahead of Father, as if she was the one who owned the mill instead of him. Sepha didn’t need to ask to know that this woman was the Magistrate, the nameless ruler of Tirenia.

  Born to leave her identity behind when she assumed her place at the head of Tirenia’s government, the Magistrate was something more than a figurehead but something less than a Queen. It was the Magistrate’s job to make the difficult or unpleasant decisions that Tirenia’s court officials were unwilling to make. In fact, if even part of what Sepha had heard was correct, the Magistrate had a penchant for making very unpleasant decisions, indeed.

  But now was not the time to think about that, either.

  Sepha’s eyes slid past the unfamiliar man beside the Magistrate and landed on the tiny man who stood beside him. This little man was hardly bigger than a toddler, and his face was frozen in a small, placating grin.

  A homunculus!

  Sepha had heard of them before but had never seen one. Homunculi were proportioned exactly like normal adult men but measured no more than three feet tall. They said that alchemists made them, that they were perfectly obedient servants. They also said that homunculi could not think, speak, or choose. Homunculi were soulless, were walking, breathing tools, and Sepha thought they were fascinating.

  “This is my daughter,” Father said, gesturing at Sepha. He seemed to chew on the word daughter before spitting it out. He frowned fiercely at Sepha, but continued in his cheeriest tone, “Are you prepared to do your demonstration for Madame Magistrate?”

  “Yes, sir,” called Sepha, cringing at the waver in her voice.

  The heavy rain pounded against the mill’s leaky roof as Father and the Magistrate’s retinue approached Sepha and the millers.

  Then they were there, on the opposite side of the alchem. Sepha shifted a few steps to the side so she could see them over the hulking block of steel in the alchem’s center. Father was glaring harder than ever, and it took her a moment to understand why. With a start, Sepha remembered her manners and dropped into a deferential bow. “Madame Magistrate,” she said as she straightened, “if you please, I am ready to begin my demonstration.”

  “At your leisure, I’m sure,” the Magistrate said, and the man beside her laughed.

  Everything seemed to tip toward Sepha as if she were the low point in the room. Father’s glare had leached all of her confidence away, and she wanted to disappear.

  But this demonstration was something only she could do. It was all up to her, and she would not fail. She could do it, starting with the speech she’d memorized.

  “Today,” Sepha began, “I will show you how Mill Facility A takes common steel and transmutes it into tirenium, the strongest alloy in the world. As you know, nothing but a weapon made of this selfsame metal can pierce it, and nothing but the hottest fires can melt it. Until now, alchemical production of tirenium-reinforced equipment has been too expensive to perform on a large scale. As I’m about to show you, that need no longer be the case.”

  Sepha paused, expecting some sort of response, even a nod, but everyone just kept staring at her. She pursed her lips and continued. “Between us, you see an unshaped piece of unrefined steel. When I am done, a portion of it will be transmuted into tirenium, and the rest will be transmuted into other alloys as necessary. I will then transform and conjoin these materials to form the shell of a full-scale army tank. I will accomplish all of this with the transmutation alchem you see before you. As you will see, this sort of production will save on weeks of labor and consolidate production of major army equipment to us, your sole manufacturer.”

  She got a response this time, even though she hadn’t been expecting one. The bald, bearded man beside the Magistrate exclaimed, “Preposterous!”

  Sepha opened and closed her mouth, unsure of what to say. Father, surprisingly, interceded for her. “You won’t be saying that in a moment!” he cried. It seemed as if he’d been expecting this sort of reaction.

  “I tell you, it cannot be done!” cried the bald man. “Transmutation alchems are designed for the express purpose of transmuting one material into another. They cannot be used for multiple transmutations at once, nor can they be used to transform or bring about any other changes in materials! The very idea is unthinkable!”

  Sepha was well aware that most of what she did was supposed to be impossible. She also knew that none of the other millers had ever been able to perform multiple exchanges with one alchem all at once, like she could. But, impossible or not, she’d done it. A lot. And she didn’t like being called a liar.

  “I’ve practiced this a hundred times, sir,” Sepha said to the bald man. One of the millers behind her said, “And I saw it with my own eyes!”

  Father scowled at Sepha as if it were her fault that the miller had spoken out of turn.

  Sepha swallowed. Forced her voice to be calm and even. “I promise it can be done.”

  It was only then that Sepha saw the man’s ring. Thick and golden, it bore the stylized A of the Court Alchemists’ Guild. He was a Court Alchemist, and if he was part of the Magistrate’s retinue, he must be a good one.

  Her cheeks heated.

  Ignoring the fact that she’d just corrected a Court Alchemist, Sepha knelt beside her alchem and took a deep, steadying breath.

  With the millers crowding around as they always did and the mill’s familiar scents of scorch and smoke and metal and rot, Sepha could almost pretend this was just a normal day. Just another lunchtime game, where the millers tried to stump her, and she tried to amaze them.

  She could do this.

  Her fingers were already just so, her eyes closed in concentration, when the roof gave a deep, creaking groan.

  A drop of water splashed onto the rim of her alchem. Sepha looked up and barely had time to leap aside before the section of roof directly above her alchem cracked open like an egg. The millers shouted and scrambled away as a torrent of water crashed down around them. The deluge obliterated the alchem’s chalked lines and nearly drowned the Magistrate’s tiny homunculus, who hadn’t moved to avoid the water. No one had told him to.

  Sepha stood, spluttering, and found herself face-to-face with the Magistrate, who looked speechless with rage.

  “I can fix it!” Sepha cried, thinking wild thoughts of chalk and diagrams and textbooks to consult. “Just give me a little time!”

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  With an infuriated glance at Father, the Magistrate turned away, bidding her Court Alchemist and homunculus to follow with a terse, “Come.”

  Father opened and closed his mouth helplessly for a moment before he rounded on Sepha. “If you don’t save this, so help me, you’ll wish you had died that day!” He curled his lip at her, daring her to speak.

  She didn’t. She couldn’t.

  Instead, she scrambled after the Magistrate, feeling frantic, stupid, desperate. After everything she’d gone through to get here this morning, her demonstration had been ruined just like that!

  And w
orse, far worse, worst of all, Father was angry.

  At her.

  She didn’t catch up to the Magistrate until she was already outside. The Court Alchemist was holding an umbrella over the Magistrate, and the edge of it was funneling water onto the homunculus’s head.

  Still muzzy with shock from the Wicking Willow, Sepha shouted, “Wait!”

  The Magistrate spun on her heel so quickly that Sepha nearly collided with her. “I don’t wait, girl.”

  More terrified of Father than the Magistrate, than anything in the world, Sepha said, “Yes, I know, and I am so sorry. But please give me another chance. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

  “The Magistrate is not interested in more promises,” the Court Alchemist said. His mouth twisted in disgust. “Especially not from a con-girl who cannot even draw her own alchems!”

  Sepha went crimson. Apparently, Father had told them the humiliating truth that Sepha couldn’t draw her own alchems unless she traced them. Apparently, Father had thought this was necessary information for the ruler of their entire country to know.

  “If I were you,” the Court Alchemist continued, “I would be grateful to have been prevented from proving myself a liar. I would take this as a sign, and I would shut my mouth.”

  He should shut his mouth!

  “I wasn’t lying,” Sepha snapped. She directed her gaze at the Magistrate, forcing herself to ignore the Court Alchemist. If Sepha didn’t fix this, she’d be better off finding another Wicking Willow than facing Father’s rage. “Please. If you give me one more chance, I can show you.”

  The Magistrate looked, if anything, angrier than before, and Sepha saw the contract and Three Mills’ future slipping away. She saw the work drying up and the mill growing emptier every day. Saw the people she’d grown up with leaving by train, saw the flowers in their window boxes going gray. Saw how angry Father would be if all of this happened because of her.

  The words came rushing out before she could think them through.

  “You can even set the terms,” Sepha said. “I can make anything from anything.”