by J. S. Fields
“He was my future,” I said, too softly for anyone to hear.
“He was my mother’s guild alchemist.” Magda draped his belt back over his hips and arranged the pouches in a neat line by his face. “He’d never left the capital, at least not in my memory. There’s no reason for him to be out here.”
“Well, that does explain his clothes.” Sameer picked at the edge of Master Rahad’s green hood. “No fur in the hood or the body of the cloak. He has no mittens, and his boots are worn and not insulated. No wonder he froze to death. He was an idiot.”
“He was anything but.” Magda sighed and pushed her own pad into the cave. I wanted to do so as well, but I couldn’t stop staring at Master Rahad’s body, and his empty pouches. “Perhaps it was snowsickness. But that doesn’t explain why he was here to begin with.”
“You’ll get no answers from a dead man,” Sameer called from inside the cave. “Sleep. We can give Sorin a stick to poke him with in the morning.”
I didn’t rise to the bait. Master Rahad was dead. There was nothing to go home for, now, and no reason for me to continue on this stupid trip, either, outside of my promise to Magda. Did Sameer have to be so callous? Did he see so many bodies up here that he’d become numb? How many of those bodies were guilders, I wondered, as I let Magda lead me into the cave. It was marginally warmer in there, with the help of the heat from the thermal lake and the natural windbreak. She rolled out my pad, and I sat heavily, my eyes planted on the body.
“Don’t give up hope,” Magda whispered as she crawled into her pad and wrapped her body around mine. “We will figure out what happened. Remember, there are other alchemists. I’ll help you find another master; I promise.”
I closed my eyes and settled against her. Magda’s arm wrapped around my waist, and though my body stopped shivering, all I could think was that at the rate we were finding bodies and addled minds, by the time we found an answer, I might very well be the last alchemist in Sorpsi.
*
I awoke to an overcast sky and drops of seashell-pink ice around my pad. The skin on my arms was rough with scabs, but I hadn’t managed to do much more than superficial damage. I sat up, let my cloak fall from my shoulders, and took a minute to breathe, deeply, purposefully. To try to relax into the moderate warmth of the cave and our shared body heat.
“Good morning.” Magda turned over and rubbed her eyes. I yanked my sleeves back down and offered her my hand. She smiled as she took it and sat up. “Better this morning?”
I let out a long sigh. “Master Rahad’s body is outside, likely frozen to the glacier, and Sameer is an ass. No, I am not better. But I suppose I will have to be.”
Sameer rose as well, reattached his cloak, and slid out of our wave cave. “We can’t take him with us, so say your goodbyes. We have a long day of walking ahead. We’ll stay on the glacier’s edge most of today. Move to the ground if you can, as we’ll make better time that way, and it is safer.”
Goodbyes for a man I’d barely known but whom I’d fantasized about since I was ten. Goodbyes for a future I was likely never going to see. I crammed my pad back into my pack and sighed silently about another day spent with tiny steps, and Sameer, and his anger. “I’ll be ready in a moment. I need to relieve myself.”
Sameer waved me off. I stood and looked for a natural formation that might give me privacy on an otherwise white, snowy plane when Magda approached.
“Magda, please,” I said without turning around. “I’m tired, and my insides are knotted enough. Any more and I will dissolve like paper in water. Leave it alone. I just want to find Mother and go home.”
“Home? To Thuja?” There was so much surprise in Magda’s voice that I turned. She had worry lines across her forehead and a mark on her cheek from where her cloak had bunched during the night. She was unkempt, her hair escaping its normally tight braids, and her clothes wrinkled. The knot inside me softened.
“I don’t know. But I suspect Mother will move to the grandmaster’s building. She was his heir.”
“And this?” Magda asked, cupping one of the pouches on my belt. “Will you go to her, or to the alchemists, when we return? Or something in between?”
So we weren’t, in fact, talking about alchemy. It was an inevitable question. It wasn’t like I was unused to it, but the whole thing was incessantly exhausting. I pushed her hand away. “There is nothing between. I hate that word. I am whatever I am, but I’m not some halfway point between only two options. Maybe that makes me a bastardization. Like those pseudoalchemists who only use chemicals. I don’t know.”
Magda’s eyebrow quirked up. “There’s no law against being…what you are.” She reached for my arm, but again I pulled away.
“Except being like this hurts people.” I pointed at Sameer who was some distance off, relieving himself. Magda scoffed.
“He’s angry at inheritance laws. At Amada. Not you, not really. And I, Sorin, I want to get to know you because childhood caricatures are clearly not working.” The smile that played at her mouth was hesitant. Inviting. I struggled against my rising desire to kiss her, right there on the glacier. Gods, she was trying, but it felt like kilometers between us. “Please?” she asked.
“I have a gender,” I whispered, although I don’t know why I cared if Sameer overheard. If anything, it would save me from additional awkwardness later. “It’s not yours, or his, and neither is it wholly made up of those two options.”
I reached up to her face and ran a finger across the rough, weathered skin of her cheek. The heat of the smithy and years riding with the Queensguard had molded her with a strength and purpose I envied. I wanted to see myself mirrored there—a master of alchemy, the weathering of my skin informing my trade. Even more so, I wanted to see her understanding of me. Of who I was, who I had always been but, as a child, had been unable to express.
I trailed my fingers down her neck to her collar, the fine leathers and cottons she wore still smooth despite the mud and ice. I stopped at the top of her breasts, catching their subtle push forward. I lingered under the clasp of her cloak and let my eyes travel back down to her breasts. There was where we could never be the same. There was something I desired, had desired since the moment sexual feelings blossomed, but which was also an unabashed indicator of femininity.
“They suit you,” I said, finally raising my eyes back to Magda’s. “Breasts— On me, they clash.” It was more complex than that, of course, but I didn’t know how to explain that Magda’s hands would be welcome on my chest, that, in fact, when I looked in a mirror, nude, I saw nothing out of place. Rather, it was the reactions of others when they saw my breasts, their assumptions of gender, that hurt.
Magda took my hand from her cloak clasp and wrapped it in her own. She didn’t speak, but she brought my roaming finger to her lips and kissed it. I wanted to melt in that moment, into her, into the glacier. She didn’t understand; I could see that in her eyes, but the confusion didn’t seem to matter to her either. I wished to sweep the entire issue aside. To just kiss her, or rest my head on her shoulder. How easy it would be to tell her I was a woman. That there were no barriers between us, cloth or otherwise.
How easy, and how utterly violating.
A skittering, slipping sound came from Sameer’s direction. Magda and I turned, my hand falling from hers, to see Sameer kick a cream-colored lump of what looked like cloth into the lake.
I hadn’t realized how still the glacier had become until Magda’s voice broke through. “Did you just drown a blanket or something else that could have helped us keep warm? Are you an idiot?” She stormed toward Sameer, around the thin, jagged circle of water near where we had slept. The area was just as small in the daylight as it had been under the stars, perhaps some ten meters across. “Lake” was a very generous term.
“We should go.” Sameer tried to move past her, but Magda grabbed his arm.
“What did you put in the lake?”
“Trash. Nothing more. People shouldn’t leave things on the
glacier. Nothing decays at these temperatures.”
Magda dropped his arm, pushing it away as she did so, and called over to me. “Sorin, would you come over here please?”
My stomach jumped. I’d no need for another lake, enchanted or not. “I didn’t see what it was either,” I said cautiously. “Maybe we should just—” Magda’s look shut my mouth. I picked my way over to her and a scowling Sameer.
“Ask the lake,” she commanded.
I crossed my arms over my chest and blinked. “Ask…the lake? Ask the lake what?”
“For the fabric,” she responded, her voice filled with frustration.
“Magda, I can’t. I’m not a witch. I can’t make the lake vomit something from inside it!” I chose to ignore the lake that had offered me the amulet. That had been an isolated incident, surely.
“Would you please just try?”
And risk having another dead hand rise from the water? There was no way I was going to seek that out.
“Sameer?” I asked, thinking he might confirm the ridiculousness of the request, even if only to get us moving again.
“It’s just a blanket, Royal Daughter. If we’re going to get off the glacier by nightfall, we need to move, or we could end up like your dead alchemist.
“It was more than one blanket, and all of them looked identical. Like they’d fallen from a pack of yet more identical blankets.” Magda took a threatening step toward Sameer. “Forget the snowsickness. What is going on in the glacial towns? Do you have factories up here too? Is that how they made it into Miantri? Is that why all my guilders are here?”
“What the glacial people do is not under your purview, Royal Daughter.” Sameer spat the words into the wind. “We’re not bound by your guilds, nor your laws. That Iana came from our land but chose not to include it in the three countries when she defeated the old king and divided up his territory was her decision. You are her descendant, but you have no say here.”
Magda spun to me, speaking through clenched teeth. “I want to see those blankets, Sorin.”
It was an order, but I couldn’t follow it. I did not want to put my hands in that water. Did not want to touch the magic-infused relic of the old king’s reign, did not want to see body parts reaching for me, and did not want to see another lake spread open before me like a bride.
“I can’t, Royal Daughter. I won’t.”
“Damn it, Sorin!”
“No!”
Magda stomped her good leg in frustration. “You’re the only one the magic responds to! I need to see those textiles!”
I wrapped my hands in my cloak to keep them from my arms. The command in her voice was hard to ignore, and she knew that. I swallowed my apology because I wasn’t some Thujan villager she could command at will, and I spoke to Sameer instead. “Sameer, were the textiles factory-made? Just tell us.”
“Yes.” He said it defiantly, with unblinking eyes. He was challenging me. Challenging Magda.
“How many factories are there on the glacier?” I asked.
“Dozens. More. Factories with power looms, factories with metal lathes for making threaded screws. Factories that can mechanically separate cotton. Every one of them is staffed by guilders who are tired of not having work, who are tired of seeing their guildhalls close. Guilders from Puget, from Eastgate, and especially from Sorpsi. Apprentices, journeys, masters, and even some grandmasters, I’ve heard, have come through this way. They don’t all make it, as you’ve seen, but some do. Some did. They’re all seeking what is new. They don’t care about old secrets anymore. They refuse to be left behind by mechanization.”
He might as well have slapped me again. Slapped the both of us, for Magda took a step back, almost into the lake.
“No.” Magda had her hands over her mouth and nose. “You’re a guild master.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
Magda looked incredulous. “This doesn’t matter to you?”
“Why would I use a treadle machine when I could use a steam-powered one? Why should Sorin cut veneers by hand? The queen may have some notion that the guilds are infallible, but some of us refuse to be left behind by history.”
“You don’t care about tradition?” Magda pressed her hands into her braids now, alternately clutching and rubbing the strands. “Our history?”
Sameer looked pointedly at me. “Tradition is clearly flexible.”
Everything inside me felt numb. There had been a person, then, in that lake. There was likely one in this one, if not more—some poor guilder following false promises. Or maybe Mother was in this lake, although I doubted she’d flee the life she’d been so devoted to. And Master Rahad was here. Dead, and my future with him.
“The factories are inevitable, then?” I asked, my voice flat.
Sameer shrugged.
“You’re a part of this, aren’t you?” Magda asked Sameer. She looked dazed. I helped her sit on the ice and knelt next to her. I felt dizzy, and the wind was whispering to me again, about Thuja, and safety, but I didn’t listen to the words.
“I travel to Miantri when they need a textile guilder for festivals. For tradition. I don’t haul factories on my back. People talk. They visit. They spread ideas. I don’t know where your queen is, but I doubt she is working as a laborer in a factory. This isn’t anyone’s fault; it’s called progress. If you wanted to save the guilds, you’d work with the new technology, not against it. It doesn’t have to be a choice—fine embellishment and skill over mass production. We can have both. There’s more than one option. Gods, there’s more than two options, even.”
“We’re going to lose Sorpsi because of that progress!” Magda raked her fingers over the ice, then punched it. I tried to lean in to take her hand, but my thigh slipped across the ice. My fingernails tore as I dug for purchase. I slid back, down across the slush, and into the lake.
I gasped. The water felt too warm, and the smell of it fizzed in my nose. I took in large gulps of air, convinced at any minute that a hand would drag me down under. I scrabbled at the slushy shore.
“Sorin!” Magda had my wrists a heartbeat later before the warm water made it past my waist.
Something firm and round connected with the bottom of my foot, and I yelled. “Get me out! Please! Magda! Sameer!”
With Sameer’s help Magda pulled me up the slush bank, my clothes dripping that stupid magic water that evaporated in steaming clouds the moment I was out of it. I shivered, then sneezed, and my shaking had nothing to do with the temperature.
“How have you survived woodcutting all these years?” Sameer asked, exasperated, as he wrung water from his sleeves. Water that wasn’t evaporating from him, though I was already completely dry.
“I’m sorry!” I pointed to the lake—the suddenly frothing, swirling, vortexing lake that was pushing an oval thing toward me on an unnatural wave. I reached for it this time, determined to throw the amulet as far as I could, or at least have the satisfaction of smashing it on the ice before the lake presented me with any other “gifts.”
“I’m sorry about the guild law, and about Amada, and about falling into an enchanted lake, which was clearly not planned.” I wrapped my fingers around the amulet, pulled it from the water, and thrust it toward Sameer. “Here! Didn’t you want one of these last time? This, this stupid piece of…”
Wood.
Not metal, or stone, or even glazed ceramic.
Guilders, and bodies, and enchanted lakes fled my mind. The rational side that sounded too much like Mother took over.
“It’s red oak,” I said, dazed, as I turned the amulet over in my hands. “Were the witches uniformly simple? What moron uses porous wood for holding magic and alcohol in a lake? These were supposed to store magic.”
“May I see it?” Magda asked. She was far too calm noting the utter failure of magic and wood anatomy in my hand. Too calm noting how she’d been ready to strangle Sameer only moments ago.
“Magda, it’s a red oak amulet.”
“S
orin, I don’t know what that means.” She held out her hand. “It’s an important piece of Iana’s history—my history—and it would be nice to see it before Sameer and his factories erase everything.”
“They’re just factories, Royal Daughter.” Sameer took the amulet from my hand and tossed it at Magda’s feet. “And that is just transmuted wood.”
“The…wait, what?” I blinked at Sameer. “Transmuted wood? Alchemists made this? Red oak is porous. The magic would have seeped out. This isn’t storage; this is a…a wooden tea bag. Alchemists aren’t this dumb.”
“But witches are?” Sameer asked, one eyebrow raised. Magda stifled a laugh.
I rolled my lips in, then blew out a puff of air. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
Sameer balked. “You are not this ignorant. Lakes have been opening up to you since we arrived. You’ve triggered magical foxfire everywhere we’ve walked. Did Amada not teach you anything about basic history? Do you cherry-pick what you want to hear?” He pointed south, back toward Miantri. “Do you think the villagers chased you out because they were bored and had nothing better to do? Do you think foxfire glows for everyone?”
“Sameer,” Magda cautioned, though her voice sounded more tired than irritated.
“No.” Sameer kicked the amulet. It skittered to the side of my boot. “With all that time alone in the woods, studying and reading and woodcutting and dreaming of alchemy, you have to have thought about the parallels. Or, damn it, look around you, at how every earthen thing seems to bend natural laws when you’re around.”
“They’re different. Magic is…alchemy is…” My face felt flushed. I balled my hands into my cloak and glared at Sameer. “Alchemy has rules. Alchemy doesn’t distort the natural order of things! Alchemy doesn’t…” I couldn’t find the right words. I wanted to say that alchemy didn’t try to take your breasts, or pretend to be your mother in a frozen forest, but that sounded petty and not at all logical.
I looked to Magda for some confirmation or backup, but her eyes were on the ground, on the slick of ice beneath us. That stung.
