The Alchemy of Stone - By Ekaterina Sedia Page 0,47

to wait until darkness.”

“Great.” Niobe smiled. “Where do you want me to sleep?”

Mattie knew how to make beds, but she wasn’t in possession of one. She decided to create a nice soft bed for Niobe in the warmest place, by the kitchen hearth—the nights were still occasionally nippy. Besides, it would be as far away from the bench as the apartment allowed, and Mattie did not want Niobe disturbed by Mattie’s nocturnal work.

She found a couple of quilts given to her by grateful but poor customers, and collected most of her dresses into a heap. Once she covered them with the quilts, the bed acquired quite satisfactory appearance—not of poverty but of whimsy. Mattie liked that, and so did Niobe.

The sun was still high enough in the sky, and they walked to the market to buy some provisions for Niobe. As they browsed, Mattie noticed a few suspicious stares in Niobe’s direction, and a few merchants refused to trade with them outright.

Niobe just shrugged, even though Mattie guessed that the deepening of the color on Niobe’s cheeks meant that she was more perturbed than she showed.

Nonetheless, Mattie led her to the booth that sold a good variety of herbs, and tried to distract Niobe by explaining how one decided on the plant’s usefulness. “You see,” she pointed at the dried plant with purple flowers, “its leaves are heart-shaped, which means it is suited for heart trouble.”

“Are you referring to the actual heart, or love problems?”

“The latter,” Mattie said. “See? Its shape is not of a real heart but of its symbol.”

“Symbol of a symbol,” Niobe muttered. “I see. What about this one?”

She pointed at the glass jar filled with fresh flowers, plump and red, their three petals dripping with nectar. “That’s for the liver,” Mattie said. “See the three lobes?”

“And this one?” Niobe picked up a dried stem clustered with strange fruit—brown and transversed with fissures. “Brain problems?”

Mattie nodded. “That is its signature, yes. Every plant has one. The plants with red sap are used to purify blood, the ones with yellow sap—clear out urinary infections, and so on. See, it’s easy. It’s getting to the potent chemicals inside them that is hard.”

“I see,” Niobe agreed. “Every plant has medicine, as long as you can figure out how to get to it.”

“That’s the tricky part,” Mattie agreed. “This is why it is essential to keep a journal and record every transformation, so if you find something you can recreate it and share it with the rest of the society.”

“If I want to.”

“If you want to.”

“Are you going to buy anything?” the woman who owned the booth asked. There was no open hostility in her voice, and her face expressed carefully cultivated indifference.

“Just a bunch of maiden’s hair and two of bladderwort,” Mattie said. She paid for her purchases. “Thank you, Marta.”

Marta muttered an acknowledgment under her breath, and Mattie and Niobe traded looks.

“Let’s go home,” Niobe said as soon as she picked up a loaf of bread and some olives. “I’m getting tired of all the hostility.”

Mattie nodded that she agreed. She hadn’t realized how rigidly she had held her back, how taut the springs of her muscles were. Just being outside was tiring to her; she could not imagine how Niobe was able to hold up, with her weak flesh body. And she had been enduring it far longer than Mattie.

Mattie took Niobe’s hand in a gesture of support.

“Don’t,” Niobe whispered. “You don’t want to associate with me like this. It’s dangerous.” But she didn’t take her hand away.

“I don’t care,” Mattie whispered and twined her fingers with Niobe’s, metal against flesh, springs against bone.

The night falls, and we hear the girl calling us, and we leap over the chasms that open below our feet at the precipitous drop-offs of the roofs. We hurry, and we rehearse our story in our minds, and yet there’s hope swelling up in our hearts, subterranean. A secret hope that the girl will throw the window open, her blue porcelain face as expressionless as ours, and tell us that we don’t have to fear time any more. We suppress the hope, and we mutter out loud, no no, it’s not going to happen. She just wants to hear our story, and we will tell it to her. Listen.

We run up the fire escapes and slither across the walls, we leap, we run, we crawl and finally we reach the high window, warm yellow light spilling from it swarming with fluttering of white moths;