"I must look a fright," Lillet said in a hoarse whisper. Her throat burned, her eyes stung, her nose was stuffed, and her head was pounding like an anvil beneath a blacksmith's hammer. No doubt her face was all blotchy, too.
Amoretta smiled at her. "Not at all, dearest." The smile, Lillet knew, was because Lillet had recovered enough to make a joke, however feeble, after spending the better part of an hour crying into her pillow. Amoretta had sat by her the entire time, holding her hand and gently stroking her hair.
"Thank you," she croaked.
Amoretta shook her head.
"No, not at all." She got up, walked over to the tea cart, and poured a cup. Lillet hadn't even noticed when it was brought in. "Here, drink this. It will help soothe your throat."
Lillet sat up and accepted the cup. It was an herbal blend, she realized from the fragrant smell, something soothing instead of energizing.
"Why shouldn't I thank you? You take such good care of me.." She sipped; the hot liquid felt good.
Amoretta, though, looked down and to the side.
"It's the least I can do," she said softly.
"Amoretta..." Lillet responded, realizing what was wrong. "It's not your fault."
"Not fault," Amoretta agreed. "It's not something that I did or failed to do, but it is because of me, because I'm not human, and you were hurt by it."
Lillet sighed.
"I feel so foolish. I mean, crying over the failure of an alchemy experiment."
There was a stirring from the foot of the bed and Grimalkin raised his head from where he had curled up.
"The loss of hope 'tis always painful," he offered, "and is as real a loss as more tangible ones." He began washing his paw with tiny flicks of his bright pink tongue. Amoretta reached down and scratched him behind the ears.
"He's quite right, Lillet. Isn't grief more about what people and things mean to us than for what is actually lost?"
Lillet nodded. "I suppose so. It felt"--she shook her head--"no, it feels just like our daughter has died."
"Daughter?" Grimalkin asked. "Did you not want a son?"
"All the mice bred from two females were also female. That's ridiculously unlikely in nature, so Dr. Chartreuse and I believe that part of what a child gets from its father is the possibility of being male. Which is one in the eye for all the men in history who get mad at their wives for 'not giving them sons.' So our child would...have been a little girl..."
She could feel herself starting to tear up again when the cat intercepted her with another comment.
"But I'd have sworn Tahlea called her pet a male." His confusion was self-evident even on a feline face; his wide green eyes blinked at her. Amoretta giggled in response.
"It's going to be a very confused mouse," she said.
"I know," said Lillet. "She didn't ask if it was a boy or a girl. We should tell her, but I don't think the mouse will really care if it has a boy's name."
Her gaze flicked back and forth between Amoretta and the cat, realizing how the question had deflected her emotions. Was Grimalkin just curious? Or did he do it on purpose? Or did Amoretta prompt him somehow? She didn't know, but she'd have wagered on either of the latter two explanations.
What a crazy little family I have, she thought affectionately. A homunculus with an angel's soul, the angel's pet devil, and an elf. Perfect for a magician, really, and she loved them all.
"Thank you both."
Cat and mistress glanced at one another.
"You noticed?" Amoretta asked.
"I'm supposed to be a Machiavellian political schemer, aren't I? If I can trick my enemies into tripping over their own feet by their own doing, I can at least notice when the people that care about me are looking out for my feelings."
Amoretta smiled, probably because humor was again a good sign.
"And are your feelings...?"
Lillet sighed.
"It's going to hurt a lot, for a long time." She released the teacup with one hand so she could reach for Amoretta; the other woman slipped effortlessly into her embrace. Lillet buried her face in Amoretta's hair, the delicate scent familiar and comforting. "But I'm really, really blessed, too. You make it very, very easy to remember that."
I've been given everything in my life I've ever wanted, she thought ruefully. I wanted to become a great magician, and I'm possibly as powerful as any since King Solomon himself. I wanted to help my family, and now my brothers are studying to become whatever they want to be in life while my parents could retire now if they didn't still enjoy running the farm. I have a home of my own that's as near as a palace to matter. I have wealth, I have social status, I have authority.
I have love.
I have someone who cares for me, who looks out for me, who dreams a dream for my sake instead of her own. And I've been gifted with the kind of power that lets me take a lover who's neither human nor male and live openly with her in the face of anyone's opinion.
It meant, Lillet realized, that this was the first time there'd been something she'd really wanted in life, something important, that she couldn't have. The idea made her feel a little guilty over her reaction.
It didn't make the sense of loss easier to accept, though.
Lillet stood at the sideboard trying to decide between bacon and sausage. She hadn't had much of an appetite the night before, when she'd taken dinner on a tray in her room, and her stomach was now reminding her that while the mind may have been in charge, the body had demands of its own to make.
"You eat a lot for breakfast," Tahlea remarked while helping herself to toast.
"And you claim that you're not as bluntly honest as Amoretta."
A faint blush stained her cheeks.
"I...didn't mean it that way."
Lillet grinned.
"I was teasing, silly. How did you mean it?"
"Well, you're a lot like Father; you get distracted by work and forget to take care of yourself sometimes."
"It's a researcher's curse."
"But you always eat a full breakfast. I've even noticed that when you don't eat well at supper Gaff will put out the kinds of foods you skipped for the next day's breakfast."
"It's a farm-girl habit," Lillet said.
"Oh?"
"My parents have a farm in this district. Chores start before dawn, so when you reach the breakfast table, you're already hungry, and you also need to fuel up to get ready for the day, So ever since I was a little girl I've always eaten large breakfasts. Since it's really more of a habit than a choice, I do it even when I'm distracted by something since following habits are the path of least resistance."
"I see. It's sweet, though, how he takes care of you."
"Well, like he always says, where would we magicians be if we didn't have elves to handle the details for us?"
Though Lillet and Amoretta typically preferred to breakfast on the garden terrace, with their guests joining them they'd moved inside since the dining room was better suited for serving food. Dr. Chartreuse was the last to arrive and his rumpled clothing suggested he'd stayed up all night. There was a fevered brightness in his eyes, and he eagerly rubbed his hands together as he approached the table.
"Miss Lillet! I believe that I--"
Tahlea, though, ruthlessly cut him off.
"Food, Father!" She pointed to the sideboard. "You've obviously been up all night, and you have to take care of yourself."
"She's definitely your sister, Amoretta," Lillet said with a grin.
"If our loved ones won't look out for yourselves," Amoretta replied, "then we'll just have to do it for you." She stabbed her fork into one of Lillet's sausages and held it under the Mage Consul's nose until she obediently took a bite.
"Aw, you two are so cute," Tahlea said, slipping bacon under the table to Grimalkin. Lillet grinned and Amoretta smiled shyly.
Chartreuse returned to the table with a well-laden plate and a steaming cup of coffee. Under Tahlea's watchful eye, he consumed a good half of what was before him before he tried to speak again. Lillet put away most of her own breakfast while waiting, but she had to admit that she was eager to hear the news. If Chartreuse had been up all night working, then there was really only one thing he could have been working on, and if he had news that he was excited to tell her...
The stirrings of hope gave Lillet a faint fluttering in her stomach. She told herself not to get too excited yet, to wait and hear the alchemist out before making judgments, but it was hard to keep calm since the topic was so close to her heart.
At last, Chartreuse cast a meaningful glance at Tahlea, who smiled and nodded; he'd apparently eaten enough to satisfy her concerns.
"I've been thinking over our problems from yesterday, Miss Lillet," he began again. "Indeed, I've been working on them all night, as Tahlea observed."
"It shows," Lillet said. "I'm familiar with the symptoms myself, of course."
"The problem is that Amoretta is a different form of life than you are. Between us we managed to carry out your plan, to use a man's seed as carrier for a woman's natural qualities so that a child would express the traits of two mothers. However, this did not work for Amoretta because of her inhuman biology. For example," he gestured at her plate, which bore the crumbs of a single croissant, "she eats considerably less than a human because much of the energy sustaining her life comes from the magical reaction within her flask instead of from food."
"I know that," Lillet said, perhaps a bit more sharply than was necessary due to her impatience.
"My apologies; the habits of being a professor have grown on me, I'm afraid," he said, looking a little sheepish.
"It's all right." Surprisingly, it was Amoretta who'd spoken. "I've missed most of what's happened, so it's good to hear it put into words, even if I understand roughly how things have gone already."
"Thank you."
Lillet told herself to relax and took a bite of melon.
"What appeared to be inescapable truth," Chartreuse continued, "was that as a homunculus it was impossible for Amoretta to reproduce. She is not found in nature; her existence is as a crafted thing rather than as a product of the world as it is. This is why I could only make her existence a lasting, stable one by building her around a pre-existing core, a creation of God's rather than my own."
Lillet traced a fingertip along the back of Amoretta's hand where it rested on the table.
"But you no longer believe that to be inescapable?" Lillet asked.
"Well, yes and no. As far as biologically, no, that isn't something that can be changed. A homunculus is not a human. But I also realized that making a child from Amoretta's body isn't exactly the goal in any case."
"Then what is the goal?"
"To make a child as if it came from Amoretta. Consider your method. We do not actually use the blood from the female that replaces the father. Instead, we alchemically change the seed of a male so that the elements of heredity within it exactly match those of the 'father' female. Thus we do not use the actual body of the woman but only an identical copy of it. So as I see it, what if we took the process a step further? Yes, Amoretta is not human, but she does possess many qualities a human possesses: the shape of her face, the color of her hair, the pigmentation of her skin, the tone of her voice, and so on. Thus, what I thought was, if there were a way to transfer the equivalent of those qualities to a human blood sample--yours, I believe would be best so no third person would be involved--and then use that sample with our existing process. The result would be a child that would be, say, two-thirds yours and one-third Amoretta's, but nonetheless a child born of the two of you."
Lillet's heart rose with hope, but she also perceived the flaw immediately.
"There's a problem, though. We don't know how heredity works, so adjusting my blood to match Amoretta's traits can't be done the way we change the seed to match the blood sample. That's a matter of copying: make A conform to B. But we can't do it for Amoretta because her body doesn't have human biology. We'd be saying 'change A to be what it needs to be to make it equivalent to B to the extent applicable.' At that point, you're no longer manipulating nature. That extra step isn't working within nature's laws any more, but directly transforming the matter of the universe in accordance with your will."
She paused, waiting to see if he'd considered that point and, if so, what his solution was.
"I agree. Glamour and alchemy cannot accomplish that task. It can only be achieved at our present state of knowledge by sorcery."
"Which as I've already said, I don't want to use for this. To put my child's existence into the hands of a devil, even in such a small way."
Chartreuse sighed.
"I feared such would be the case, but I felt obliged to mention it, since it is a solution to the problem that would work."
Lillet nodded.
"I'm glad you did. It's just...I don't trust that I can keep tight enough control over a devil on a matter this important. It's not something that I can settle by balancing probabilities or weighing risks versus rewards. The only way it could work is if I found a devil that I could not only control, but trust."
"A difficult matter indeed, given the nature of devils."
Grimalkin meowed from under the table and butted at Tahlea's leg in hopes of another treat.
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