Foxfire in the Snow

by J. S. Fields

The queen led me to the blankets, and I sat without being asked. I slipped, effortlessly, into the oasis the queen provided. The tension from the glacier, the tension in my muscles, my mind, evaporated. There was no magic about, for I felt no heat, but time seemed slower. Even my heartbeat calmed.

  “Sit with me tonight, my new alchemist,” the queen said. She wrapped the purple-and-red blanket about my shoulders, and her tenderness knit together so many wounds that still seeped in my heart. “Tell me about my daughter, and your journey here, and your pigments. Tomorrow, I’ll show you why you left home, and why you have no reason to return. An industrial revolution is beating at our borders, and I intend to welcome it, with you, and your alchemy, at my side.”

  Twenty-Five: Projection

  Mother had read me stories when I was little—before I turned from woodcutting. The most common were fairy stories about enchanted woods, and elves and snakes that talked, and old men who guarded magical glowing trees. The mystic nature of the forest had faded away as I grew older, but as I followed the Queen of Sorpsi across ashen earth and burnt grasslands devoid of trees, as we left Mother and the witches behind, all those old stories came back to me as the forest sprang back to life.

  The sky was just starting to peak with the oranges and reds of sunrise. Light caught on the dew and scattered rainbows across my legs. In only a few short minutes, saplings choked the game trail, and the bracken became high as my waist. We pushed through until hemlocks towered over our heads, and the scent of pinesap filled the air.

  Then we broke into a clearing, into another camp, and my world cracked apart again.

  Before me was an alchemical dream. My dream, now again, after a night spent with the queen. She’d talked to me for hours of alkahests and transmutation—never the guilders or the talks, but I’d been too caught in her words to ask. Now we were in a camp of metal poles and finely woven textiles. Small fires dotted the clear areas beneath several old oaks. Cauldrons hung over fires, and long tables took up the center of a ring of tents, covered in glassware and metalworking and slices of branches. Rolls of parchment and cords of wood lay stacked in heaps all about the camp. People milled about or hunched close to the earth, mumbling and mixing, the air thick with the smell of fish—the smell of my bone oil, in dozens of cauldrons.

  I had died, surely, or I was hallucinating. I had no idea this many cauldrons even existed, much less alchemists to work them. There had to be close to a hundred people about, all engaged in some form of alchemical pursuit, and they were all working with my alchemy. My discovery.

  Was this what Mother felt when a patron purchased a marquetry? When the queen commissioned an inlayed ceiling in the royal ballroom? The feeling of—of being valued, intoxicated me.

  “They’re yours,” the queen said. She swept into the center of the clearing and beckoned for me to follow her. “All of it is yours. Direct them. Command them. They follow your recipe.”

  My head spun, and it wasn’t just from the bone oil fumes. I needed a minute to respond. I knew what to do in a small laboratory, but with dozens of cauldrons and other alchemists?

  “Not enough?” the queen asked coyly. “Tell me what else you want, and I will find it.”

  “I want…” What I wanted at that exact moment was fresh air. The other alchemists here had much stronger stomachs than I did. I looked up, thinking I might be able to see where the fumes were the thinnest, and gasped at the thousands of pinecones dancing on the branches over my head.

  Except…they weren’t all pinecones. They were…amulets?

  “My queen?” I asked, pointing to an amulet hanging directly over me. There were so many of them! Heavy amulets that dragged down the branches. Tiny amulets that bobbed in the wind. All of them oak and graying, the same as the amulets from the lakes.

  How many years had it taken for the queen to dig up all of these old relics? How many more were there, waiting to emerge at the slightest hint of magic or alchemy? Was she actually using them as the old king had? And if so, what did they store?

  I slipped my hands into the deep pockets of my pants, attempting to ground myself. I’d forgotten about the stone Mother had slipped in there, and I’d been too tired last night to care what she’d been about. Now my fingers wrapped over a warm and slightly sticky oval clearly made from wood and likely no different from the hundreds that swayed above me.

  “Do you like them?” the queen asked. “Your mother found most of them. Her time away from you wasn’t wasted.”

  I pulled my hand from my pocket and wiped off the alcohol residue. “You needed her magic? To pull the amulets from the glacier? Why couldn’t you do it yourself?” I asked sourly.

  The queen chortled. “I have a queendom to run.”

  I flexed the hand Mother had fixed. As interested as I was in the queen’s version of alchemy, reminding me of my mother and her frequent trips turned my mood further south.

  “Why bother?” I asked as I moved to the center of camp, next to a long oak table littered with amulets releasing so much heat they’d scalded their outlines onto the wood beneath them. “The magic is mostly gone, isn’t it? And we can make ethanol easily enough.”

  “Ethanol. Yes, hmm.” The queen led me to the table in the very center of the clearing. A tall glass beaker sat on it filled with a clear, syrupy liquid that I knew far too well. Three triangular amulets weighted it at the bottom. The queen plunged a pair of metal tongs down into the solvent and pulled out the smallest one. A tall alchemist in Queensguard red toweled the wood dry, then handed it to the queen. She let the amulet swing down from her hand, the wood suspended on a thin string.

  “We’ve decided to call it pyridine,” the queen said as I leaned in to inspect her amulet despite its smell. “Although if you’re opposed to the name, we can change it. Bone oil sounds too…sinister.”

  “That depends on what you use it for.”

  “Yes, well, aside from its unique solvent properties, pyridine is an excellent lubricant between magic and alchemy. Between a number of things, really. You solved a very large problem for us, Sorin.”

  The lightness I’d had since meeting the queen, since spending the evening talking about the academics of alchemy, began to drift away. Why did it have to be magic? Why did it always have to be magic?

  “So you are using them for magic.”

  “I’m using them for storage,” the queen said flatly. “Would you put your ridiculous grudge against magic away for a moment? You’re speaking with Amada’s voice.” The queen’s tone was cool as she let her fingers rest on my shoulder. One came up and brushed my neck, over the irritated lines of the tattoo. I winced and pulled away. I didn’t need the reminder. The skin still stung, and it’d be years before I could forget the feeling of the bone in my skin.

  “I’m not afraid of magic because of Mother.”

  The queen’s voice turned sharp. “Will you make excuses for her your whole life? Were you ever going to grow up and do anything of your own?” She pinched the top of my binding through my shirt. I tried to jerk away, but she’d dug her fingernails into the cotton, and there was an instant pull against my chest. I stilled, and fumed. Whatever her business in alchemy or magic, it had nothing to do with my binding.

  “You let her, and this, be an impediment when both were well within your sphere of control.”

  This time, I spun hard enough to tear her hand away. I slapped at her fingers, my teeth ground so tightly together I couldn’t speak.

  Warmth fled her face.

  “Your future is here, Sorin.” She held out the amulet.

  And because I’d spent years following rules, and Mother, and Magda, and because I didn’t think I could survive having another pillar from my childhood taken from me, I stepped forward and touched the damn thing.

  “What are you storing? Tell me the truth,” I said, though I could barely hear my voice over the sounds of the mortar and pestles and boiling cauldrons.

  The queen softened again. The tension around her eyes and mout
h drained away until she looked like a mother, not a monarch. My heart wouldn’t tolerate being tugged in another direction. I needed her endgame before the fumes of the bone oil ate away my senses.

  “I’m ensuring our history isn’t lost. I’m protecting the guilds since they refuse to protect themselves.” Her voice lowered. “That’s important to you, too, isn’t it?”

  I looked up into the queen’s eyes. “Your Majesty, our guilds are dying. Dead. Old magic won’t save them. People have to care about the skills guilders offer. Their work has to be valued. Nothing else is likely to help.”

  The left side of her mouth twitched. “The guilds have been dying for a long time, alchemist. But the skills of the guilders haven’t been lost.” She tossed the amulet to me, and I caught it, though the wetness made it slippery. “The one in your hands, in fact, came from the grandmaster of glass.”

  I dropped the amulet. It slipped underneath the leaves of a bunchberry, its string coiling on top of the short sedge. “Inside the amulet?” I croaked. My hands were wet with bone oil. Too much on my skin and I would pass out. What in the name of the gods was the queen playing with?

  “Just his skills. Not the man himself. We have had the knowledge to transfer skills, obviously, since our last king. Iana herself committed the spell to paper. But what good is transferring skills, even if you concentrate them in a few individuals? People die. They leave. They’re too unreliable. No, what was needed was storage. An extraction if you will.”

  She took my hands in hers. I hadn’t realized I was shaking.

  “You used my bone oil,” I stammered, “to do this? To…to rape guilders of their skills and…store them?” She might as well have stabbed me with a magic sword. The queen had taken my work, my life, and transmuted it into this perversion.

  The queen tsked as a cloud of emotions raged across my face. “We store them for people who are loyal. Like you. Like Amada. Let the factories come. We can have the best of both. These skills are for people who will help me build Sorpsi into a powerhouse of trade. We are in a bit of a bind, however. We can get the skills transferred in, you see, using your pyridine and the old king’s magic, but we can’t quite seem to get it back out. That will be the first task for my new master alchemist.”

  “This…” I looked up at the swaying amulets above me, all glinting in the scattered sunlight. There were hundreds suspended in the trees. Thousands. I felt heavy. I thought I might fall into the earth and be consumed by soil and fungi.

  “Your logic is flawed,” I told her, told my queen whom half an hour ago I’d have followed off a cliff. “None of this helps the guilds. None of this helps the census. Losing guilders means losing boundaries. You should be at the treaty talks.”

  “It doesn’t make sense because you don’t understand it. You’re caught up in Magda’s disdain for our old king and your mother’s sense of guild loyalty.”

  “I’m caught up in not repeating history!” I yelled, loud enough that the alchemist at the cauldron to my right looked up, startled, before the queen waved her back to work.

  “Shut those voices out. The guilds are dead. There is nothing to be done about that. Guilders have been fleeing the three countries for years. Now they’re paying a toll before they leave. I won’t lose generations of knowledge because we can manufacture nails on a machine.”

  Bile rose in my throat. Guilders heading to the glacier, the queen trapping them and taking their skills and leaving them to wander and die, forever missing part of themselves—because of my bone oil.

  I rubbed my forehead and looked away from the queen and the amulets, to the tree above me. The breeze rippled the branches of the tall oak, rustling the brown leaves that still clung to their beds and knocking swaying amulets against one another. I tried to count them, but there were too many strapped across tree boughs, scattered on tables, littering the ground near my feet. There weren’t this many grandmasters, or masters, or even journeys in Sorpsi.

  “They’re not just from your queendom, are they?”

  The queen looked at me, and as I met her gaze, a smile crept across her face. “No. They’re not. Just in case something changes. Just in case the guilds try to recover in Puget and Eastgate. We have everything now, my alchemist. Every skill, every trade, every craft. Sorpsi is safe.” She stepped into me and lifted my pouch of elf’s cup with one long finger. “I need another bone oil, Sorin. You will find me one, to get the skills from these amulets so we can give these skills and this knowledge to people who truly deserve it.”

  She couldn’t be serious. This would destroy the guilds faster than factories ever could. Industrialization was terrifying, but it wasn’t…it wasn’t guild genocide! I wouldn’t be an alchemist if it meant ripping people apart. The queen was no better than my witch mother. This entire forest was poisoned. Sorpsi was poisoned. Magda had to be told.

  “I’m not an alchemist,” I said. I felt defiant. Brash. Like all the words and all the anger I’d pushed aside when living with Mother were scrambling back to me, demanding to be voiced. I put my hand over my woodcutter’s guild mark. I would not be forced again into something I was not.

  The coldness of iron swept into the queen’s voice. “This wouldn’t be just your own laboratory, Sorin, or a building of laboratories. If you can pull the skills out from these amulets, you could rebuild the guilds however you wanted. Change their layout, give yourself all the skills you could never master. You could be grandmaster of them all.”

  She was delusional. The heat from the amulets, the smell of the bone oil, and the ambient magic had boiled her mind.

  “You have to be joking.”

  “No one would question this.” She eyed my chest.

  Damn her! My anger bled into tightness, and my arms tingled. I rammed my hands into my pockets, raking my nails over the wood of the amulet instead of my skin.

  “Help me crush Puget and Eastgate. Make the three countries one again. Redefine yourself. Redefine alchemy if you’d like. I don’t care. Call yourself whatever you’d like, but help me.”

  I swept the amulets from the table and spat upon them. “You are killing people, and you’re using my bone oil to do it!” Every centimeter of my skin itched. Dozens, maybe hundreds of guilders broken apart, changed, having their sense of self stripped from their core. I had betrayed those guilders. I had failed them, and I could feel their pain—Watchara’s pain as she cradled a violin she would never again play—in my chest. I could feel it under layers of cotton binding that reminded me with every step of the path I’d been meant to take.

  “I will never make another solvent.”

  The queen’s smile turned smug. “No? What if I offered you Magda?”

  My hands had been in tight fists, rammed into my pockets to save the skin of my arms. Now my fingers went slack. My lips parted, and I felt blood rush to my face as I remembered how Magda had looked, sitting on the edge of the bed. The curve of her arms. The softness of her hair.

  I would melt here, like dew on sorrel if the queen pressed about Magda, even if she was bartering her daughter against the souls of the guilds. So I forced myself to remember Magda’s eyes when she had seen my breasts. I forced myself to relive the apprehension and anxiety that cut deeper than her words ever could. I used the emotions as a shield, for I had no other weapons.

  I turned from my queen, and the forest of amulets, and walked away.

  Twenty-Six: Congelation

  “You aren’t curious about the recipe?” the queen called as I reached the edge of the clearing. “When you storm back here with my daughter and her righteous anger, how will you reverse this for the guilders that still live?”

  Damn it, and damn her. I stopped just before the ground transitioned back to snow.

  “Explain the reversal.” It sounded like a command Magda would give, and as I said it, I realized I could never bring her back here. What was to stop the queen from taking Magda’s skill if she displeased her, or to force Magda’s participation? Magda’s life wasn’t d
efined by the smithy, but she did love the fire and the hammers. And she could no more survive having that ripped from her than she could her sarcasm or her assertive presence.

  “You can’t see very well from there.”

  I turned on my heels, but I didn’t walk back. Fear, or guilt, or shame, or some other emotion that didn’t belong inside me held me in place. It seemed safer here, too, on the edge of the magic’s influence, than standing in the middle near a table of amulets. “I can see well enough.”

  The queen clasped her hands in front of her body, lacing her delicate fingers together. “Well, I suppose for this demonstration, you are correct. Lovely. Amada!”

  From the east side of the clearing, Mother and Walerian emerged, dragging a gagged, bound man between them. This time, there was no hesitation. I recognized his mop of black curls immediately.

  “Sameer!” It was a whisper, born more from shock and fear than a need to stay quiet, I think. What in the name of the gods was he doing here? And if he was here, where was Magda? Not in this camp, surely. Not bound and gagged, at the mercy of some alchemical witch and an amulet, right? Right?

  Sameer looked up and screamed at me through his gag. Mother dropped him at the queen’s feet, and he stood, shakily, his face hot with rage. I forgot about the amulets, and alchemy, and the queen’s promises. I ran to him and stripped the gag from his mouth, then pried at the rope on his wrists.

  “Amada, just untie the man,” the queen said, laughing. Walerian knelt and cut the length of rope tied around Sameer’s ankles as I slid the rope from his wrists.

  The instant his hands were free, Sameer pushed me back, hard enough that I stumbled onto my rear. “Run!” He grabbed the front of my tunic and bolted, half dragging me behind him.

  “Sameer, wait!” I tried to pry his fingers away as I stumbled by his side, but Sameer didn’t even look back.

  “Debate later. Run now!”

  “Sameer!”

  “Now!”

  I stopped clawing at his hand and focused on running. “Is Magda here too?” I asked as we left the clearing, and green sorrel once again covered the ground beneath us. “How did you get here?”