The Alchemist's Daughter by Eileen Kernaghan

Author:Eileen Kernaghan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV037000, book
Publisher: Thistledown Press
Published: 2014-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

At first, there was only darkness — a hot, smothering, inky blanket, clogging her mouth and nostrils, lying like a dead weight upon her chest.

Then the visions came.

Out of the black depths of her fever crawled a crude, misshapen mannequin forked like a mandrake root, a charred black rotting thing reduced to the barest semblance of a man. In horror and disgust she tried to flee as it staggered towards her on its half-formed limbs, but her feet were mired in wet clay, and she could not move.

All at once the darkness rolled back and the world was flooded with a luminous ice-cold light. A gibbous moon hung low on the horizon. Sidonie reached out and seized it with both hands but like quicksilver it slid from her grasp. And then she was walking through a vast arched space where rooms endlessly unfolded into other rooms. Everywhere there were mirrors, and in each one, other mirrors were reflected, infinitely receding.

She found herself in a library, where every book was written in some indecipherable foreign script; where gramaries, herbals, works of mathematics lay scattered beneath her feet like broken tiles.

Bells chimed a long way off, and she knew she was late for a wedding, though whether it was her own, or Lady Mary’s, or the Queen’s, she could not recall. Seized by a feverish urgency, she hurried from room to room. The corridors were lined with statues of heraldic beasts — leopards, panthers, griffins, dragons. They snapped and snarled at her as she passed.

Now she came to a walled garden where a copperhaired woman sat by the edge of a pool. Her skin was as pale as milk and her gown was the red of cinnabar. She looked up at Sidonie with topaz-yellow eyes. “They call this chamber Paradise,” she said. “Sidonie Quince, where is my gold?”

Lost in her fever-dream Sidonie rushed on, until she found herself at last inside a cavern with curving walls and roof of glass, walled round with flame. She could not breathe in that furnace-heat. It seared her skin, set her hair aflame; her flesh dripped away like tallow. And there in the midst of the flames stood a lion with a burning mane and wings as red as pomegranate seeds. She leaped astride his back, clutched his fiery mane. Together they broke through the walls of glass, soared higher and higher, until they flew into the golden mirror of the sun and were consumed.

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