Page 31 of Inkpot Gods

And so he doesn’t see when, upon getting out of sight of the house, she shrugs her shawl off and hangs it on the skeletal structure of a nearby bush, turning toward the fence. Dried-out ivy clings to it, some of the leaves still a dark, waxy green, all of them laced with frost. Even in the absence of snow, the cold comes.

There is an old gate in the fence, half-covered by the ivy, long since locked by the groundskeeper and given over to the tangled, matted vines. She’s not sure her uncle has ever known the gate was there; it existed before he bought this house, and it opens onto a narrow stretch of green between their property and the next, a boxed-off remnant of an older arcade that must have been among the first structures in Boston before it was forgotten and left to fall to ruin. She discovered the gate through discovering the arcade, following the shapes of broken arches from the sidewalk to the back of the block, taking note of the shape they made between the houses.

She can escape from the property whenever she wants to, and only the fact that her uncle provides her with everything she could ever wish for keeps her from running. When she was Floretta, she would have run without hesitation, fleeing back to the forest and the doddering old priest who’d had the custody of her early childhood. Now, the gate serves another purpose.

As she watches, it inches slowly open, and a man—a boy—no, a man is revealed. His hair is black as midnight, spangled with specks of ice like tiny, shining stars, and his eyes are the color of the frost on the ivory, white layered over green. He’s wearing a summer suit, not at all appropriate for this weather, and his smile when he sees Asphodel is as warm as the summer sun.

“Hello, pretty sparrow,” he says, voice rich with the developing accent spoken in the bright young state of Maine, a region still finding its identity in the snowy lands below the Canadian border. It’s French and New England and a little bit of broad Appalachia. She thinks he sounds incredible. She could listen to him speak forever if she had the chance.

She’s not going to have the chance. She knows that, and she accepts it. For right now, she smiles and drops one shoulder, tilting her chin toward the other, the gesture practiced and coy and designed to show the long pale sweep of her neck, graceful and lethal as a swan’s.

“Hello, Charles,” she replies, smiling at him, and oh, it’s wonderful to stand out here in the crisp cold air and look at a boy—a man—a boy her own age, one with a broad chest and strong hands, who smiles at her like she’s a miracle he doesn’t deserve and never could. Her uncle wouldn’t approve if he knew, she’s certain of that: in his eyes she’s still seven years old and newly arrived in Boston, helpless and naïve and vulnerable to every danger the city has to throw at her.

Charles is no danger. He’s the son of a fur trader from the high border, raised in snow and timber, and the snow follows in his wake. He’s not the Winter King, not the king of anything, but he might have been in another lifetime, were the position not being so jealously guarded by the man who currently holds it. He’s handsome and he’s brave and he’s mostly human, and he recognized her as his equal the moment that he saw her.

Neither of them has any fear of a coronation, not in their lifetimes, and without a crown or a labyrinth to walk, he’s just a man. And there’s nothing of the supernatural about her, nothing of the alchemical, even if she sometimes feels the storm fronts passing overhead in the marrow of her bones, even if her skin sings when the lightning flashes. They’re perfect together.

Charles Booker is her first love. His name is thunder on her tongue, his hands are storms against her skin, and when she hurries to him in the shelter of the greenhouse, and he puts those hands around her waist, he holds her like she’s the most fragile, most delicate thing the world has ever known. He holds her like she’s precious.

She’s not used to that sort of treatment. She’s been a trinket to be traded and a pupil to be taught, but she’s never been a prize to be held on to. It’s intoxicating, thinking that she might have some value that’s intrinsic to her, that can’t be taken away. That this princeling, this scion of Winter, might be able to see what no one’s ever seen before.

Asphodel reaches up to trace her fingers along the soft skin of his cheek. He shaved before coming to see her—he always shaves before coming to see her, he has for the last six months, and she’s sure he’d keep doing it forever if he thought it would make her smile.

“Did you find what I asked you for?” she asks, barely managing to mask her eagerness.

Charles’s perfect lips draw downward in a frown. “I asked everyone who might know, all the Jennies, all the Jacks, and none of them could tell me anything about why the rain avoids Boston,” he says. “I even tracked down an incarnation of Artemis, running wild through the woods near my family’s home, but she couldn’t tell me anything worth hearing. She said the sky over Boston was forbidden to everything but the Moon until the storm settled. But the trouble is that there’s no storm. I have no idea what’s going on.”

Asphodel sighs. It couldn’t have been this easy. She’d known that from the beginning, but still, she’d allowed herself to hope, if only for a moment. If he could solve the storms, end the drought, then he would be useful enough as he is. As a man. As the man she loves. He’s young and he’s strong and he’s earnest and she wants to spend her life with him, and she knows she can’t possibly do that, that it was never an option, because she needs him for other things.

“Oh, Charles.” She slides her other hand up to join the first, so that her palms cup his cheeks, her fingers spread out like she’s trying to hold his entire face at the same time. “You promised you would find the answers I was looking for.”

“And I tried, sweet love, I tried,” he says, grasping her wrists and pulling her closer to him. “I asked everyone I could think of, without alerting the alchemists.”

Asphodel grimaces. She wanted to do this the easy way. Uncle John says that’s her greatest weakness, aside from her sex: she always wants to do things the easy way when she can, like hard work is some sort of danger to be avoided as often as possible. Having Charles find the reasons behind this unholy drought would have been easy.

If he can’t … she loves him. She loves him with the bright, fierce passion of a girl who has never loved anyone like this before. She loves her uncle in a distant, almost clinical way: she loves Miss Cottingsly the way a person might love a dangerous animal, a dog inclined to biting or a wolf brought in from the wilds. But Charles she loves as a woman loves a man, and it’s such a new experience that she wants to savor it forever. She wants to keep him.

She can’t keep him.

She draws him down for a kiss, their first, her lips pressed soft and warm to his. He tastes like maple-sugar candy made in the first snows of winter, and he pulls her closer still, holding her tight. As he does, she moves her foot, heel coming down on the small stick she placed there earlier this morning. The sound it makes is terribly loud in the cool, still air, and he jerks away, eyes searching the garden around them for some sign of an observer, some hint they’re not alone.

“Asphodel?” he whispers.

She keeps her chin raised and her eyes on his face. His sweet, perfect face. “Yes, Charles?” she asks.

“Your uncle … he doesn’t suspect us, does he?”

“No,” she says, and she speaks with absolute honesty—her uncle has nothing to suspect. Her uncle knows about Charles, knows about the potential Winter she’s been courting under his nose, knows she would never have told him had she not been convinced he was going to fail in his quest to bring back the rain. They have an agreement, she and her uncle. If Charles came back with answers, he would be spared.

Sadly, he did not. Sadly, she will have to bid her sweet love farewell.

“Good.” He exhales, offering her a wavering smile. “I do not like to speak ill of your family, for I know you care for him, as he cares for you, but … alchemists are dangerous creatures, my darling girl. They think themselves lords of reality on the basis of a few lines of text written in their books, inkpot gods who would control or unmake us all upon their whim.”

“Inkpot gods, are they?” she asks, and she can’t keep the frost from her own voice at that question. He hears it—apparently even sons of Winter can be chilled, under the right circumstances—and reels back, looking at her with wide, bewildered eyes. How like a calf he looks, when he stares at her like that. She was a village girl once. She knows what it is to live with barnyard animals.

She can’t imagine loving one.

“Petty tyrants railing at reality’s laws, I suppose?” She lowers her hands from his face, jabbing a finger at his chest. “You are speaking of my uncle, good sir. If you truly wished to marry me, as you have said you do, you would have to gain his blessing. And with the way you speak of him, I wouldn’t dare to bring you before him to request it.”