As Lord Prophet Leon and so many of my esteemed predecessors in alchemy have noted, the female mind is fundamentally different from its male counterpart. As such, the treatment of the madwoman constitutes a distinct and delicate art to which I have dedicated its own section. Where the masculine mind derives contentment from mastery and accomplishment, the feminine mind derives contentment from submission.
Thus, the ills of the female psyche arise from a rejection of the authorities within the subject’s life and may be treated with lobotomy, the correct application of which I have outlined in the pages herein.
—Archmage Lufred Ayerman, Medical Alchemy (272 of Tiran)
e Alchemy of Energy
he nightmares were not of Blight. Instead, the thing that stalkedT Sciona through the stacks was a slow and inexorable rot.
She gripped the leather spine of the Leonid and pulled it to her, sure that the light of knowledge would drive back the decay. But when she cracked the holy book open for answers, murky blood poured from the binding and stuck to her hands, coating her clothes so that they constricted around her, squeezing her muscles, searing flesh. Rot and worms crawled up her arms and burrowed under her skin. She tried to strip her clothes off, to rid herself of the filth, only to find that the searing stickiness had become one with the fabric and fused with her skin. As she tore the dress from her body, her flesh came away with it, pulling from her skeleton in putrid strings of sinew, all permeated with maggots. The bone beneath cracked and oozed the same deep red muck as the Leonid—because decay had come not just from the book but from Sciona herself. From deep in her marrow.
She woke screaming.
Alba was there every time, catching up her flailing arms and speaking softly, helplessly, in an attempt to make it better. “What can I do?” she said in increasing panic and then despair. “What can I do, Sciona? What can I do?”
“Tell me how to stop feeling this way!” Sciona roared, clutching her chest in physical pain, cold sweat sticking her nightdress to her skin, her fingernails raking the lace as she gasped for breath. “H-how do I stop feeling this way?”
There was no answer, of course. Every seeming way out ended in blood and horrors.
And Sciona’s mind was left crashing around its cage in agony. God’s great universe, which had once been so big and full of possibility, had narrowed to a trap.
“What can I do?” poor Alba was still asking the next morning as she sat Sciona at the kitchen table and tried to get her to eat. She had taken the day off work to be with Sciona, plainly terrified that she would come home to find her cousin splattered on the street below the window or hung from the rafters by a twisted sheet.
“Tell me how to stop this!” Sciona was still sobbing. Not to Alba. To God. To any soul in this Blighted universe who could possibly answer. “Tell me how to stop feeling this way!”
But even if Alba or God had had a response—a magic medicine to pour down Sciona’s throat, purge her memories, and quell the shaking—it wouldn’t be a solution. Not a real one, anyway. Because Sciona was a mage to her core. Her religion and treasured discipline hinged on seeking the truth. Washing her mind of knowledge would be a different kind of damnation, destroying any possibility of salvation.
“So how do I stop this?” Sciona asked her own internal monologue, her forehead ground into the kitchen table, hands clenched in her hair so hard her scalp went numb. “God, God, how do I make it go away?”
The answer was that she couldn’t. Not without letting go of the fibers that held her together. But the fibers were on fire, the poison stitched into her being. The sickness would kill her. The antidote would kill her. She screamed anew and felt Alba’s hand rubbing a circle on her back, her soft voice begging her, “Breathe, Sciona. Breathe, sweetheart, please!” Alba was crying now, exhausted from sitting awake with her disintegrating cousin.
Sciona barely registered Aunt Winny coming home hours later, didn’t process the conversation Winny and Alba had over her head, even as their voices rose in argument.
“A highmage she may be, but she is still just a young woman. She needs guidance from a man who knows better than she does.”
“Not like this, Mama!” Alba protested. “You’ve seen what their remedies do to people when they decide someone is too far gone to fix!
They won’t understand that she’s not broken. She’s just—Sciona.”
“Look at her, Alba. She’s out of control.”
“But they’ll ruin her! And for what? All that treatment they gave the baker’s boy and, in the end, it didn’t even stop him from…”
A fraught silence.
Aunt Winny said tightly, “That was different. And this can’t go on. I’m getting the doctor.”
When the apartment door closed behind Aunt Winny, Alba grabbed Sciona’s shoulders with new urgency and shook her. “Sciona, do you hear me? Do you see what’s happening?”
Sciona stared through her cousin, too exhausted to respond.
“Mama has gone for a medical alchemist. Don’t you have any reaction to that? Don’t you understand what that means?”
“Does it matter?” Sciona breathed, her voice barely a croak.
“Bite your tongue, Sciona!” Alba gripped her cousin’s face between her hands hard enough to hurt—to yank Sciona to the present for a moment.
“Listen!”
“What?”
“You need to pull yourself together! If you’re still like this—out of control—when the doctor gets here, you know he won’t give you a choice whether you accept treatment or not. If he decides you’re a danger to yourself, he’s going to come back with assistants to hold you down.”
Dimly, Sciona understood that Alba was right. Sciona might stand on a knife-edge between hells—knowledge on one side and nothingness on the other—but an alchemist would pull her firmly to the side of nothingness whether she consented or not. And the local doctor didn’t live far. Sciona
didn’t have much time to get her feet under her…but how? How when there was no solid ground? How when everything that once gave her strength had turned to Hellfire?
“I don’t know what you’re going through, Sciona, but I know one thing.
I know there’s no one else who can do what you do. Not your teachers, not your peers, not even the mages who came before you.” Alba’s words were coming out breathy and rushed like she thought that if she just spoke them fast enough, they would mass in some kind of shield between Sciona and her darkness. “So, just don’t…” She pulled Sciona into a hug, all but smothering her against her shoulder. “Don’t even think about leaving us, you understand? By hurting yourself or by letting some alchemist muddle your brain. You’re too precious—to me, to Mama, to Tiran.”
“To Tiran…” Sciona murmured into Alba’s shoulder. The words were so bitter now they made her gag.
“Yes, my love,” Alba said, mistaking Sciona’s disgust for skepticism.
“You’re the first female highmage in history, for Feryn’s sake! There’s no one else in this city or this wide world like you.”
Except the meidrae of the Kwen, Sciona thought, who are all gone thanks to the work of my predecessors. My heroes.
“You’re something special, Sciona.” Alba, as usual, was just casting clumsily around for the right thing to say, but there she had at least hit on something true…Sciona was something different from the mages who had preceded her. She had skills they didn’t, knowledge they didn’t. “Are you really going to let some doctor take that away from you?”
No, Sciona realized. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
Accepting treatment would be conceding that some man—some regular graduate mage—knew better than she did, that he had the right to erase her.
Even after everything else in the world had collapsed, an invincible shard of Sciona’s pride remained. That was where she found her footing, on her deepest of vices as a woman. It was damning proof of every disapproving comment anyone had ever made on Sciona’s character—perhaps even proof of her insanity—that her ego persisted absent any delusions of virtue.
“So, what are we going to do?” Alba asked.
“I…” Sciona didn’t know. What could be done? What could she possibly do with the soul-destroying knowledge she had uncovered?
Alba’s question was more mundane but also more immediate: “Sciona, what are we going to do about the doctor?”
“Right.” Sciona blinked as Alba’s words finally broke through the haze of blood and became real.
If Sciona failed to turn the alchemist away, she would lose the ability to face any of the demons on her own terms. And facing the horrors of knowledge on her own terms was still, somehow, less frightening than the idea of being washed from existence, her brilliance and knowledge and pain forgotten—like the work of so many mages’ wives and meidrae before her.
“I’ll handle the doctor,” Sciona said. She pressed her palms to her eyes and unsurprisingly found them swollen and pulsing from the hours of tears.
“Could you do something for me?” she asked, still unsure if she could physically stand without support.
“Of course!” Alba said in a cautious breath of relief. “Of course!
Whatever you need!”
“Could you get my robe?”
—
Sciona was aware that she looked perfectly insane when the alchemist arrived, her feet bare, her short hair disheveled, white highmage’s robes pulled over her white nightgown—a seething tangle of static energy barely holding the shape of a woman. She heard the alchemist before they saw him —the creak of the door, then his deep voice conversing with Aunt Winny’s softer one in the next room. Trying to breathe slowly, Sciona leaned back in the kitchen chair and idly picked a snarl from her hair.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Alba whispered as the voices drew closer.
Before Sciona could answer, Aunt Winny said, “She’s just in here,” and pushed the kitchen door open.
“Miss Sciona,” the new voice said with the detached calm that was the trademark of a medical alchemist.
“My name is Dr. Mellier. I’m here to diagnose your condition and give you something to make you feel all…” The purple-robed alchemist trailed off as Sciona stood and faced him in her white robe.
“Dr. Mellier.” Stepping around the table, Sciona was relieved to find that her legs indeed held her up. “A pleasure. I’m Highmage Sciona Freynan.”
The smile froze on the doctor’s broad, bland face. He turned to Aunt Winny, and his jaw worked uselessly for a moment before he managed,
“Madam! Is this a joke?”
“No, Doctor!” Aunt Winny looked stung.
“You didn’t think to tell me that your niece was Highmage Freynan?”
“I—I didn’t think it mattered,” Aunt Winny stammered, going slightly pink with embarrassment. “Yes, she is a mage, but she’s also my niece, and she’s been in so much pain these past two days. Please, would you just sit down with her? Try to treat her?”
The poor doctor seemed unsure what to do. He looked several years older than Sciona—despite the alchemical oils he had clearly rubbed into his hair and skin to mitigate the effects of age and stress—so, still young for an alchemist of his standing. Statistically, it was possible that he had never encountered a younger woman who outranked him in magic.
“It’s fine, Doctor,” Sciona said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“You are?” Mellier glanced back at Aunt Winny. “You told me she was
raving, distraught.”
“She is. I mean—she was.”
“Shall we go somewhere private, Doctor?” Sciona suggested.
“Wait,” Alba said, so tense she had started to look quite ill herself. “I think I should go with you.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Sciona gave Alba’s arm a squeeze to let her know that she had the situation under control. “Follow me, Doctor.”
In her room, Sciona dragged her chair from her desk to the bedside.
“Have a seat.”
She waited for Dr. Mellier to settle in the chair. Then, instead of sitting on the bed like a patient should, she strode to the open window and perched on the sill, the straight drop to the street at her back.
“What are you doing?” Mellier started to rise, but Sciona held up a warning hand.
“One step and I’ll throw myself onto the street.”
All the color drained from Mellier’s face. “You’ll what?”
“You know from my auntie that I’ll do it. She must have told you I had to be physically stopped from jumping earlier. You may be able to save me,
but only if you do as I say.”
“Miss Freynan, please!”
“You treated what’s-his-name, didn’t you?”
“Who?”
“You know…” Sciona gestured vaguely in frustration. “The baker’s first son, Ansel’s older brother, the barrier guard.”
“Carseth Berald?”
Sciona snapped her fingers. “That’s the one. He jumped to his death during the course of your treatments, didn’t he?”
“Is that what this is about, Miss Freynan? Was he a close friend of yours? A paramour?” Mellier must have missed the way Sciona choked, nearly laughing aloud, because he pressed on in absolute earnest. “Please understand that there was nothing I could do for him. When I met him, he was too far gone to be saved.”
“I don’t care about that,” Sciona snapped. “I bring it up because I doubt your reputation can afford another dead patient—let alone a highmage.”
As the words sank in, Mellier dropped back into the chair.
“That’s better,” Sciona said. “Stand up again and you’ll have a dead patient. Call for my family and you’ll have a dead patient. Interrupt me and you’ll have a dead patient. Understood?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“It’s not ‘Miss,’ it’s ‘Highmage,’ ” Sciona snapped. “Try that again.”
“Yes, Highmage.”
“Very good.” Sciona leaned into the heels of her hands on the windowsill and slung one leg over the other. “Now, to be clear with you, Doctor, there is no tool or concoction in your case to treat me. I think we are probably in agreement about what I need to repair my mind. That is a
reason not to die, yes?”
“Right,” Mellier said uneasily.
“To that end, I need another advanced magic practitioner to sit right there”—she pointed to him as if to fix him in place—“and let me talk through this conundrum, mage to mage, until I have my reasoning straight.
If this conversation goes well, I’ll sing your praises to anyone who asks.
But breathe a word of what I say here outside this room, and I will end your career. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes, M—” He caught himself. “Yes, Highmage. Of course we should talk about what is troubling you. But once I’ve made my diagnosis, you must let me treat you.”
“All right, so you don’t understand,” Sciona said wearily. “You are not here to give me a solution. I assure you, you are not equal to the task.”
“It is my job to provide a solution for you, Miss—Highmage. You may be immensely talented in the field of energy sourcing, but the greatest of mages are not immune to evils of the mind.”
“Oh, I’m very aware, Doctor.”
“Then you must also be aware that, as a female, you face unique mental challenges that do not afflict your colleagues. Mania is tragically common in women, especially those of intelligence unnatural to their sex. With respect to your brilliance, Highmage, you are not stable.”
“No,” Sciona laughed. “No, I’m not. But let me pose you a question that’s been troubling me for hours: Must I forgo brilliance—no, not even brilliance; must I forgo any sort of intelligence, must I forgo the baseline mental functions that come with being alive—for stability? What is the point of stability, then, Doctor? What is the point of anything?”
“To fulfill your God-given role as a woman, of course,” he said with irritating confidence. “To be a positive and pleasing presence to others, your husband, your family.”
“Except that I’m not anyone’s wife,” Sciona said, “nor am I anyone’s daughter, really, and I’ve never been very good at pleasing. The things I have to offer are greater than that.”
“Ah,” Mellier said with a sad and knowing nod. “This is a classic example of how dangerous it is for a female to pursue a career like yours.”
He kept up that air of paternal confidence—as though that would disguise the fact that he was reciting Ayerman verbatim like any University student could. “It’s understandable, with a mind as great as yours, that you have aspirations beyond your sex, but the scientific truth is that these pursuits unsettle your mind and defy your nature.”
“Do they defy my nature, Doctor?” It was an honest question.
As far as Sciona could remember, from the first time she had grasped the concept of magical power, her academic aspirations had been the crux of her being. If there was a version of her that yearned for motherhood, subservience, and domestic life, it had never made itself known—and she knew for certain now that it never would. What woman with a heart could settle into a home full of magic-powered appliances and push out future mages for her mage husband, knowing what Sciona knew?
“All I know is that if you make me a stable woman now, Doctor, you destroy me. You destroy any chance at salvation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I may not be a medical alchemist,” Sciona conceded, “but on the highmage track, one does complete fundamental courses in every magical discipline. I know the remedies you have in that case for women like me.”
She nodded to the leather briefcase resting at the doctor’s feet. “They’ll make me lethargic, make me compliant”—amenable to the evil all around her. “You will slow my brain, and, failing that, you will destroy it.”
Lobotomy was Ayerman’s recommended treatment for women experiencing “fits of emotion,” a condition Sciona had always thought disturbingly broad.
“I fear you may not have understood your fundamental medical courses, then. If you had, you would know that my work is not to destroy but to improve.”
“Meaning you make docile housewives of discontented women.”
“Precisely.” Mellier smiled as though Sciona had just paid him a compliment.
“Right,” she said coolly. “The problem is that I have a presentation before the High Magistry in four days. If you’re here to improve my mind, then surely, you would have no reservations sending me to present before the Council under the influence of your remedies?”
“Well—no, Highmage. But if your condition is as serious as your aunt says, you should spend the next week resting under close professional supervision. There are ninety-nine other mages in the High Magistry, are there not? Men with more resilient minds than your own. Surely, they can proceed in their business without you?”
“I’m afraid not,” Sciona said flatly to quell a laugh of indignation. “My role in the coming meeting of the Magistry is rather distinct. I wouldn’t expect you to understand—especially when I consider that letting you lead this conversation has taken us all of nowhere.”
“On the contrary, Highmage, I think—”
“No, that’s the problem, Doctor,” Sciona said in frustration. “You don’t really think anything. Because you don’t listen. You’re not taking the information coming out of my mouth and processing it. You haven’t seriously engaged a single question I’ve posed. All you seem capable of doing is bludgeoning me with textbooks—ones I’ve already read, I might add. So, for now, you just listen while I do the thinking.”
“That’s not—”
“Not your strong suit, I understand, but don’t worry. I’ll start with the terms of your discipline, so you’re not confused.” And so Sciona could set a solid framework for her salvation. She was not good with the humanities, after all. If there was a way out of this darkness, she had to build it from what she knew: magic and science. “As an alchemist, you siphon matter
and transmute it into new forms.”
“Yes, of course.”
“There’s considerable power in that,” Sciona went on. “At your best, you can break down poisons, rendering them benign. But a given matter
sample is limited in its nature and potential. It must either be dangerous or benign, poison or remedy, and, depending on its composition, there are finite ways you can transmute it.”
“Yes, Highmage. These are all very basic alchemical principles.”
“I know,” Sciona snapped. “I’m reviewing the 101 material to make sure you follow as we get more abstract.”
“Excuse me, Highmage! I have never in my life—”
“My magical specialization is trivially similar to yours,” Sciona forged on, worried that if she let the doctor slow her with his insipid interjections, she would lose the tenuous lifeline forming up in her mind. “Where you siphon and reapply matter, I siphon and reapply energy. Now, you are limited here by your role as an alchemist. Beyond your personal limitations as a stringent adherent to Ayerman, matter is inherently limited in its potential applications. Energy is not.”
“I don’t know that my discipline is limited.”
“Stop interrupting me, Doctor. We’re getting to the good part.”
“The good part?”
“Yes! Here, we come to the decision point. Because here, we have my current affliction. Here, we must conceptualize this horrible feeling inside me in one of two ways: as a problem of matter or a problem of energy, as poison or power. I got stuck conceptualizing my condition as an alchemist would, in the limited terms of matter—as poisonous decay stitched into my flesh, inseparable from my body and not transmutable to something less insidious. I know this is an underpinning of medical magic. It was in the texts you and I both studied, so this was the cage I put around my mind.
And I was trapped, just like you are.”
“How am I trapped?”
“When you apply alchemical theory to psychology, you confine yourself to the characteristics of your patient’s emotions, just like you confine yourself to the nature of the matter you siphon. You ask yourself: How can I chemically transmute this sadness into happiness, this manic woman into a submissive one? How can I transmute Carseth Berald into the boy his
parents loved? How can I transmute a soul as I would a toxic chemical compound?”
“That is how medical alchemy works, Highmage. Of course we seek to transmute the darkness of the soul into light.”
“Ah, but what happens when you run into your limits?” Sciona demanded. “For example: When the darkness is born of irrefutable truth?
What way is there to transmute that darkness except to spit in the face of God and lie?”
“I…” The doctor’s perfectly trimmed brows furrowed. “I’m not sure,” he confessed. At last, a flicker of introspection!
“And therein lies the problem with alchemical thinking! I know this feeling in me can’t be transmuted into something positive any more than I can be transmuted into a temperate housewife. But who said we must treat
emotion as matter, Doctor?”
“Archmage Ay—”
“Ayerman, obviously.” But if the father of Tiranish magic could be wrong, so could the father of medical alchemy. “My point is: What if we don’t treat emotion as matter? What if we treat it as energy? Not as a poison, limited in its potential, but as a power source, infinite in its potential?”
“There’s no precedent for that.” Dr. Mellier looked deeply unsettled.
“It’s not in the teachings.”
“No, but there’s ample precedent outside the teachings. Consider: this irrepressible energy you call mania. I’ve always had that. Now, maybe it is a defect. Maybe it isn’t good for my body or my tender female soul, but it can’t be transmuted into womanly subservience because it fundamentally lacks the necessary characteristics. Maybe there really is nothing an alchemist can do to remedy mania short of destroying a woman’s mind. But I’m not an alchemist; I’m an energy siphoner! And an energy siphoner can apply mania to greatness—which I have. Obviously.” She spread her arms to indicate her white robe.
“None of what you’re saying is consistent with Ayerman’s model.”
“No, it’s better than Ayerman’s model!” Finally, finally, Sciona’s prison was splitting open as she put the thought into words. After drowning for so many hours, she could breathe. “You see, in my model, the nature of the emotion isn’t important, just as the nature of the energy one siphons isn’t important. Only the power. If I just think of this problem like an energy siphoner, I don’t need to stop feeling this way. I just need to take control of the energy the feeling has created inside me. Then it won’t matter what’s in my heart.” She put a hand to her chest with passion where before there had been only pain, fingers clutching the front of her nightgown as she finally drew a deep breath. “What I’m experiencing—this evil feeling—doesn’t have to matter if I can just do tangible good with it. Maybe Heaven isn’t out of reach.”
“That is not how God measures goodness, Highmage.”
“Not the god of Tiran, no,” Sciona said, “but some god somewhere.”
“Highmage Freynan, if you speak heresy, I am legally obligated to treat you for mental instability.”
“On the contrary, Doctor: all this—everything that’s happening to my mind—has been in pursuit of Truth, the holiest of God’s ideals. This feeling is energy, and this hollow in me is just…” What had Thomil called it? “The
valley,” Sciona whispered. “Vakul.”
“It’s what?”
“Waiting for the river.” Sciona smiled. “So, in the end, my dear cousin was onto something. The question isn’t: How do I stop feeling this way?
That’s stupid. I can’t. The question is: What can I do with this feeling?
That’s something I can work with—because I’m not bound by limitations of matter, or sex, or Ayerman’s Godforsaken model. I can do anything I want.
Anything! If I just find the right action spell.”
“What does your affliction have to do with action spells?”
“God, you’re obtuse,” Sciona muttered under her breath.
“Excuse me?”
“I thought that, as another advanced magic user, you’d make a serviceable stand-in for my assistant, but, God, it’s no wonder the baker’s
son jumped to his death. You must be the dullest conversation partner I’ve ever met!”
Except that wasn’t true. Dr. Mellier was a typical conversation partner for a mage of his standing, no different from the prescriptivist snobs who had attended the University with Sciona. There was a reason that, before Thomil, she had rarely bounced her ideas off anyone. After just a few months in the High Magistry, she had let herself forget that, outside the ranks of Tiran’s top innovators, a man could get to a very high level of magic without ever having an original thought.
“Highmage Freynan, I have never been spoken to this way in my life!”
The doctor grabbed the back of his chair as if to stand, but Sciona held up a finger, and he faltered.
“Think about your career, Doctor. And don’t be upset. You’ve done
good work here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this talk has been helpful. It’s made me realize something.”
Generic magical platitudes weren’t going to be any help on the path ahead of Sciona. If she was going to move forward, she needed an incisive tongue to prick her onward, to cut ruthlessly into her ideas until she knew all their
weaknesses. She needed Thomil.
A little shudder ran through her.
“What’s the matter, Highmage Freynan?” Mellier asked, clearly worried that any shift in her demeanor meant she was about to drop backwards to her death. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”
“You have a vial in that case for transmuting a man’s hatred to some
other sentiment?”
“That’s not how these treatments work.”
“See what I mean?” Sciona scrunched her nose. “Alchemy? Not the best model for treating emotional woes, is it?” Dragging a hand over her tired eyes, she let out a low groan. “I guess I have to figure this one out on my own too.”
“What one?” Mellier asked, and this time she couldn’t fault him for being lost.
“You’re free to go, Doctor,” she said instead of wasting any more breath explaining herself. “And don’t worry. I won’t try to hurt myself again.” Not physically, anyway. Her next conversation with Thomil would surely not be
painless.
“How can I be sure of that?”
“Because I have work to do.”
Thomil said a woman was weighed at the gates of Heaven by her actions and their impact on the world. Well, Sciona was going to leave an impact. Whatever happened next, whether it led to Hell or Heaven, she was going to have a hand in directing it. Sick or sound, good or evil, she was still Sciona Freynan. And Sciona Freynan didn’t slow down.
Sciona Freynan would be remembered.
