“Then how?” Sepha asked.
As if he’d been dying for her to ask, the homunculus grunted, “Watch.” He stretched his hands toward the straw piled in the center of the alchem, as if warming them by a fire. Then a wild look came over his face, and he shouted something garbled and foreign, which was all the more terrifying in his guttural voice.
Sepha watched, transfixed, as the air closed around the straw like a curtain. It swirled like the haze that rose from the cobblestone streets on a hot day, then unfolded to reveal a small, gleaming lump of gold.
Sepha recoiled. Suddenly, the homunculus’s strangeness had a name. “Magic!” Sepha gasped. That wild, howling panic took over, and she scrambled to the cell door. “Magician!” she shrieked, pounding on the door, and then kicking, hurling herself against it. “There’s a magician in here!”
But the sounds were strangely deadened, and the door didn’t budge. No one came.
No one had come, and no one was coming.
Sepha turned and pressed her back against the door. The metal was a familiar coolness against her bare hands. Her eyes found the homunculus, and he smirked at her.
“Done?” he asked.
Forcing a bit of steel into her voice, Sepha said, “What do you want with me, magician?”
He held out his hands in a placating gesture. “To save.”
“Why?” Sepha asked. It was too easy, too fair to be anything but foul. “How did you even find me?”
“Wicking Willow,” he said, as if that was a real explanation. Then, “I save you.” He shrugged. “You help me.”
Sepha went still. “Help you how?”
“Give me firstborn child.”
The words threaded thinly through the air, flitting into Sepha’s ears and straight back out without staying long enough for her to comprehend their meaning. For a full minute, she and the homunculus stared at each other without speaking.
Then she said, weakly, “Whatever do you need a child for?”
The homunculus’s eyes made a full circuit of the room before he answered.
“This,” he said at last, thumping his chest, “not my body.”
“I don’t understand.” Sepha felt hollow. Brittle. Her voice ought to echo, to vibrate like a beaten drum, and she ought to shatter from the sound of it.
The homunculus growled, frustrated. “I … not … homunculus,” he said. Each word seemed to be more of a struggle than the last. He paused to catch his breath before continuing. “I … was … magician. I died. Came back. Need … body.”
“But—” Sepha began, and then stopped. A hundred questions vied for supremacy, momentarily rendering her speechless. “You came back? From the After?” she asked at last.
He nodded but did not explain.
“But you have a body already,” she said, gesturing at him.
“Limited,” he said, working his face into a disgusted grimace. “Dirty. Feeble.”
“But you took that body!” she said, a little more boldly. “What’s to stop you from taking another? Why do you need a baby from me?”
“Magic … has … limits,” he grunted. “Cannot take. Must be … given.”
“But you must know I can’t, I could never. And you, a magician—” Sepha sputtered. Trying another tack, she said, “I’m only seventeen. Who knows how long it will be before I have a baby? Maybe I never will! I can’t promise you something I might never have in the first place!”
“Die, then.”
He muttered at the small lump of gold and magicked it back to straw. With an arch glance, he muttered something else and opened a hole in the air. One of his legs had already disappeared through it before Sepha cried, “Stop!”
The homunculus smiled that brutal, bestial smile, and the hole disappeared with a sound like a breeze.
Sepha’s mind was starting and stalling, and she stood, mouth open, trying desperately to get her thoughts in order.
A magical contract. That’s what the homunculus was proposing.
Teacher had told them a hundred tales of what could happen to anyone foolish enough to bargain with magicians. As treacherous as the magicians who made them, magical contracts were loopholes wrapped in traps. They were power and control and mischief, chaos and tricks and deliberate misunderstandings. And since the homunculus—the magician—would be fulfilling his side of the contract immediately, he would hold all of the power. He could even change the terms, if he thought she was playing him false.
Not that she could play him false. Magical contracts turned people into automatons until they either met the terms of the contract or died. For there were only two ways to sever the bond that magical contracts created: fulfillment or death. And since magicians were so much more powerful than everyone else, the magician was never the one who died.
“There is nothing more dangerous than a magical contract,” Teacher had said, “and no one more treacherous than a magician.”
But if Sepha didn’t bargain with him, she would die, and the mill would lose its contract with the army. The mill would go out of business, and the town would lose its main source of income. She would be dead, and so would the town.
And she would never be a Court Alchemist or anything like it.
She had to make this work.
“You need a body,” she said at last.
He nodded.
“What if,” she said, “what if I can make one for you? By … by alchemy?” She wasn’t sure if it was possible and had never heard of anyone who’d done it before. But homunculi were the products of alchemy, weren’t they? And they were … alive.
“Human body,” said the homunculus.
“Yes.”
He stared at her, and there was something shrewd and cruel in his expression. “You will have firstborn child,” he said, pronouncing each word with a great effort, as if he wanted to get the terms of the contract precisely right, “in exactly one year. Create empty, living human body for me with alchemy by then, you keep child.”
At this, Sepha became thoroughly flustered and said, without thinking, “A year? But I haven’t even—” She paused, cursing inwardly, and continued, “I mean, I don’t even have a boyfriend. I’m not having a baby anytime soon, I can assure you.”
“I turn straw to gold,” the homunculus said, narrowing his eyes, “you will.”
Sepha opened her mouth to argue, to offer a new bargain, but then closed it again. The homunculus wouldn’t accept any other payment. She could tell by the set of his jaw, the ferocity of his gaze. It was this or no deal at all. A year to do this thing for him, or else her life would end at noon tomorrow, and Three Mills would go under soon thereafter.
But if she agreed, then having a child would be part of her contract. Meaning that if she didn’t want to have a baby a year from now, she’d have maybe twelve weeks to create a body before her contract forced her to do something unthinkable.