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Read an Excerpt From Inkpot Gods by Seanan McGuire
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Alchemical Journeys
Read an Excerpt From Inkpot Gods by Seanan McGuire
Can the gods of today defeat the evils of their maker, or will the legacy of the most powerful alchemist the world has ever known be their undoing?
By Seanan McGuire
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Published on May 13, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Inkpot Gods, the fourth installment in Seanan McGuire’s Alchemical Journeys fantasy series, publishing with Tor Books on June 9th.
More than a century has passed since Asphodel Baker refined the process allowing her to imbue alchemically created life with power in a way no one else had ever been able to achieve. More than a century since she built the Impossible City on the ruins of Olympus, forging it from nothing more than imagination and spite, and penned it in plain view, enabling it to be read and cherished and believed by children the world over.And now, so long after her exit from the world, the descendants of her dark alchemy—who exist in a reality that inches ever closer to the hellscape of her imagination—step into a place of birth, of discovery, of horror, to make amends for the sins of the past.Can the gods of today defeat the evils of their maker, or will the legacy of the most powerful alchemist the world has ever known prove to be their undoing?
Wisdom
TIMELINE: 12:00 a.m. ET, JANUARY 7, 1865.
The news that Elisabet Turner is with child takes most who hear it by surprise, for it has long been understood that Elisabet Baker has never known, will never know, the touch of a man. Even the village drunks have been seen to pale and turn away when she approaches, refusing to meet her eyes for fear she might use a moment’s glancing contact to somehow make a claim against them, might find a way to call herself defiled and hence force them to her bridal bed. The chances might be slim, the likelihood low, but such is the reality of Elisabet Turner’s existence. Her own mother was ill while she was with child. It seemed all but impossible Elisabet should be born, even less likely that she should see adulthood.
Yet born she was, and grown she is, and from the swelling of her middle, pregnant as well, even as none might name the father. She is no witch. They are civilized people, living in a civilized time, and they no longer believe in such nonsense as women who dance with the Devil and set their names to his book in exchange for power. But if the Devil were to truly exist, and if he were seeking his brides as the old stories said, well. Elisabet Turner would no doubt be the first such recruit to reach for the pen, trading everything she was in the hopes of being repaid with some better circumstance.
Instead, she walks the world alone. Her parents are long since dead, and even if they had been among the living, she is an unmarried woman of twenty; she would only have been a burden upon their house. She is ugly by any standard, not blessed with pleasant or uniform features, with a comely voice or with a pleasing silhouette; to these early misfortunes she has sadly added two bouts with the pox, the second more violent than the first, leaving her complexion pocked and scarred. Port-wine stains that have been hers to bear since birth blotch the few patches of smooth skin which remain between the heavy scarring, and her right eye is a reddened, rolling horror, her brown iris floating in a sea of bloody sclera, pupil never fixing long on anything.
Her limbs are weak and twisted inward, making her unfit for farming or most forms of labor; her back is hunched, her mouth a ruin of snarled scars and missing teeth. She is ugly, without question, and those who would say ugliness is not a sin are first to sneer and turn away when she draws near, setting their eyes against God’s will. Her parents were farmers, and she was born a farmer’s daughter, destined for a life tithed to the land, but her mother’s brother lives in Boston, the distant, dazzling city; when her parents passed, he sent word that he would be glad to have her join him, to trade her muddy boots for dancing slippers and her planting tools for needle and thread. He would have made a lady of her, and gladly, in his sister’s memory. She sent her refusal not two days before her first bout with the pox, and by the time her strength returned, it was clear that the opportunity had passed.
They are civilized people, living in a civilized time, and still, no one likes to bring reminders of sickness into their home. To remember what the wind might carry is to invite it to blow in your direction, to kindle the embers of plague in the bosom of your own family. Her uncle’s invitation was rescinded before she had fully recovered.
And so it has been for all of Elisabet Turner’s life. One door closes, and two more follow in quick succession, while she stands and complains that she cannot leave the room. When she began to show the first signs of her condition, no one could believe it, and now, some three months on, they still can’t believe it, but neither can they deny it.
Perhaps Elisabet Turner is a witch after all.
She walks the village streets during the day, pays for meat and milk with coins scrabbled from what little remains of her family fortune, and sets her eyes toward the horizon, watching the sky as if she seeks to steal its secrets for herself. She sighs longingly at the sight of clouds, but says nothing to anyone that might answer why. The villagers watch her and mutter among themselves, trying to figure out whether she understands her condition, whether she knows why her body is changing. Only the village priest is brave enough to approach her directly, and afterward, he claims not to remember their conversation in any true detail, only to know that Elisabet is under no circumstances to be troubled or forced into accepting charity.
“She is serving in an older story than her own, and how she has the telling of it will determine all our fates and futures,” he says, which seems queer indeed coming from a man of the cloth. The villagers whisper about it behind closed doors, but they’re far enough from the city that finding a replacement is all but unthinkable: he’s their priest, he keeps them in the eye of God, and he will keep them so until the end of everything.
They ask no more questions. Elisabet Turner is with child. She will bear her infant when the time is right, as people have done from the beginning even to the end of time. This will not be changed by questions, and so her neighbors fall silent, forming the hush before the sermon, and they wait for the miracle to arrive.
* * *
Elisabet Turner is no witch. She has never signed the Devil’s book, never held his pen beneath the summer moonlight, never shed her clothing to dance around the fire. She would have done all those things, had she been but asked, but no one has ever thought to ask her such a thing. She is a living afterthought, a woman well accustomed to being ignored by all around her. She has no powers beyond those natural to a young woman raised in the farmland of Massachusetts, her back to the wood and her face to the sky.
She knows herself well enough that certain sentinel truths are etched firmly in her mind: she knows she is not lovely, that any chance she may have had at loveliness fled forever when she fought her first battle with the pox. She knows a third bout would kill her, without question. She is lucky to have survived the first, much less the second. The scarring she carries runs far deeper than the skin alone. The secret, hidden parts of her body are just as riddled with the damage done by the disease, and they will fail her if forced to face another challenge.
She knows God has no plan. Because despite everything she’s been through, everything she’s survived, she is not yet a bad person. She speaks no lies against her fellows, commits neither crime nor sin, save perhaps for the crime of ugliness, which some seem to fear as the greatest sin of all. If God had a plan, if her suffering were to serve some grand design, she would surely have seen signs of it by now. There are a thousand tiny signals before the spring. A quickened egg will show a venous system when held before a candle. But she watches the world she walks through, and she sees no signs of God’s design, nor indications of His existence.
She has seen other signs, however, signs that would surely see her condemned to death by hanging, were she to speak of them in another’s hearing.
She has seen women who walk through the woods in the deepest part of winter, their arms bared and their hair so full of ice that it gleams like a cloak of diamonds across their backs. She has seen men who walk in summer, their heads bare to the sun, trails of flowers growing bright and shining in their wake.
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Inkpot Gods
Seanan McGuire
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Seanan McGuire
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She has seen the people stepping out of the sea with scales across their chests and webs between their fingers, and seen the women who ride down on shafts of moonlight when the moon is full and true and centered in the sky. She has seen the smooth-limbed, sexless youths who dance by starlight, their steps so light as to not disturb the evening dew.
Elisabet Turner is nothing particularly special. Just a woman who has survived her share of hardship, who has tried to cling to her virtue as she walks the long, inescapable road between birth and dying. But as some people who are pushed to the outskirts are wont to do, she has learned to pay attention, and she has seen more than she was, perhaps, intended to see.
She isn’t sure that she believes in God, but she believes in gods. She knows they walk the world, pagan things from before the Bible was set in stone.
She knows one of them came to her in the guise of an early winter storm, and when he shook the lightning from his hands and the thunder from his voice, he was a handsome man to look upon, his skin smelling of petrichor and the electric burn of static, his body no more clad than any other storm. She knows he looked upon her ugliness and didn’t shy away, didn’t behave as if she were anything other than a woman, as if he were anything other than a man. He took her in his arms and took her to the bed she had always known as lonely, but would forever after know as a place of love and delicacy.
He loved her gently, carefully, as a man may love a woman, and when his lightning pierced the flesh of her form, the storm was all. She had never in her lifetime feared the rain. After that night, after those hours in the arms of that storm, the rain is a sacrament to her, as holy as any communion.
She knows he was gentle, and that when he left her where she lay, he left a storm cradled in her womb, where it sparks and stretches still, wind and rain and lightning all growing together, bound in flesh and silence. She will be a mother, and all because a storm took pity on her and came down from the heavens to claim her as his own. She will no longer be alone.
All she has to do is wait.
* * *
The second day of July is wading through the golden hours of morning, and Elisabet labors in her agonies on that same bed, holding tight to the ropes which bind her wrists and keep her from keeling forward, unable to find another ounce of fight in her fragile skin. The midwife is a stranger to their village. She rode in three nights prior with a caravan of traveling folk, and while her hands are gentle, her voice is strange, thick with an accent Elisabet doesn’t know.
Not that she’s been listening to the woman’s voice much for the last fistful of hours. She pushes when she’s told to push, she breathes when she’s told to breathe, and she screams when she’s not told to do anything at all. She knows something is wrong.
Then, without warning, the woman is at the head of the bed, her mouth near Elisabet’s ear. “We told him, when he found and fancied you, we told him your body was not as strong as it would need to be to survive the cost of his attention. We told him you would not survive. But he has never been one to listen to those he considers less than his equals, and he took you for his lover all the same.”
“My… storm,” gasps Elisabet, catching the midwife’s meaning. “Not… sorry.”
“Ah, good. That is better, then, if only by a small degree: it means you may not regret the price you pay.” The woman leans closer still, her dark eyes fixed on Elisabet’s. “The labor does not go well. You know that, yes?”
Elisabet is no fool. She’s known for hours now that things are not proceeding as they should, that her child is not to have an easy entrance to the world. She nods, saving her breath for another scream.
“I came at your lover’s request, because those who labor are my domain; it is my duty to do for you what little I can. But at this stage, what I can do is very little. I can save one of you. Both is beyond me.”
Elisabet gasps, struggling to breathe, fighting to understand. “Which one?”
And the stranger smiles, sorrowful as a Sunday, and inclines her head, dark hair falling around her features like a mourner’s veil at a funeral. “That, my little love, is for you to decide.”
Elisabet gasps again as she understands the choice before her, the offer that has been made. “Why?”
“That question could have a thousand meanings, and we don’t have a thousand years. Why did he choose you? Because he could. Because he knows our time is over, fading into antiquity and shadow, and when he finds the strength to appear before a comely maid, he feels compelled to do so. Why did he leave you with child? Because such encounters will always birth new life. Why should you choose to live? You are young, Elisabet Turner, and the world is wide. You could have a marvelous future, and leave this place so far behind you that it echoes only in the deepest of your dreams. You could be happy. I know that doesn’t sound real right now, but I swear on my mother’s name, you could be happy. You could shine like a star, if you chose to live.”
Elisabet is past speaking now, her throat stopped with pain, her breath committed to moving sharply in and out as she struggles to keep living. Still, her eyes plead with the stranger, who sighs and nods.
“Why should you choose to let your infant daughter survive in your stead? Because you have always wished to be a mother, and if you choose her, you will die knowing that your dream came true. Because she will be exceptional, bright and brilliant and blazing. Children of storms always are. She will change the world, Elisabet. Not in the same ways you would, but in ways that it will never forget.” She pauses, then adds the words that she knows will seal Elisabet Turner’s fate: “She will be remembered.”
Elisabet nods fiercely, and manages her final word, a question: “Name?”
And the stranger, who could interpret that word in two directions, chooses the easier answer. She has been speaking hard and terrible truths since her arrival, even if she can’t control how Elisabet will hear them: this time, this last time, she will speak the softer truth, the one which changes nothing at all.
“Ilithyia,” she says, and moves back to the foot of the bed, resuming her position.
Elisabet’s labor, which began upon the stroke of midnight, ends at the stroke of noon the following day, taking her life with it into nothingness after twelve hours of agony. Her daughter, newly born and still wet with blood and amniotic fluids, wails her existence into the air as Ilithyia extracts the placenta from Elisabet’s cooling body and separates the infant from the organ which sustained her until this moment.
In other villages, at other bedsides, she might hurry, might even flee at this stage, aware that someone will be coming to point a finger and seek someone to blame. Here, now, she attends to the body of a woman barely shy of accusations of witchcraft, misliked and likely to go unmourned by her neighbors. The only question is the baby. She can leave her here, count on these people to do the right thing by the girl, or she can claim to have lost them both and vanish into the wilds with the child swaddled in her own arms.
There is temptation in the thought of taking the child as her own. The girl has as yet done nothing wrong, has had no opportunity to grow into anything more than a squalling infant, made entirely of possibility and unspent potential. Ilithyia told only the truth when she said Elisabet’s daughter would change the world, that she will be remembered: she has never once lied to a mother in childbed, and she won’t allow this girl to change that fundamental part of her. The girl will change the world. But if Ilithyia takes her now, that change will be kinder, will claim fewer lives.
So much hinges on this choice. She reaches for the child, is on the verge of lifting her from the mattress when someone hammers on the door, and the voice of the village priest calls, “Elisabet? I heard the silence. Are you well?”
Ilithyia looks over her shoulder in surprise, and when she looks back to the child, the future where Ilithyia took her is gone, replaced by a single shining road of iridescence and impossibility stretching into the unvarying future.
“Very well, then,” she says, and swaddles the baby with quick, well-practiced motions, lifting her and carrying her to the door, which she opens easily.
The priest looks at her with wary grief. He knows, already, in some terrible way. He knows, and she knows the village will take his acceptance of the dead woman’s child as proof that he broke his vows. He’ll raise her for seven years, then send her to her uncle’s in a vain attempt to restore his honor. It won’t work. It never does.
“I was unable to save the mother,” says Ilithyia, and hands him the girl, who quiets at once when he pulls her to his chest. She stares at him with her unfocused eyes, and he stares back. Ilithyia wonders how much of his future he sees in that child’s gaze, and whether it changes anything.
She rather thinks it doesn’t.
She walks away, and no one stops her. No one ever does. The afternoon is young, and she has very far to go to make it back home to Olympus.
Logic
TIMELINE: 4:18 p.m. ET, JULY 11, 1872.
It has been seven years since the death of Elisabet Turner. Most unmarried women who died in childbirth would have been forgotten long since, or mythologized into cautionary tales to offer to the youth: See? they say. This is what happens when you sin. This is how the Devil claims his own.
Most unmarried women were not Elisabet Turner. She had never once even hinted as to the identity of her child’s father, and had been so unfortunate to look upon that the thought of a passing hunter or Frenchman down from the Canadian territories forcing himself upon her had been simply beyond consideration. The only man anyone could remember her spending much time with was the village priest, Father Clemence, and he had always been a man of unshakable faith.
Then she had passed, and he had taken in her daughter as a foundling, even giving her his own surname to carry—as a man might do when faced with his own bastard. The whispers grew louder after that, and only continue to swell year after year. Floretta Bearse looks nothing like her mother. She looks nothing like Father Clemence, either, but people seem content to overlook that as they murmur about whether the priest’s ward might not be his child by blood as well as by baptism.
She is straight of spine and long of limb, tall for a girl of her age, with a face like the flower that is her namesake, ever turning toward the sun. Her features are sweet, her voice melodic, and despite the questionable status of her birth, more than a few of the village sons have begun to look at her with approval. Perhaps that, atop everything else, is why so many have begun to gossip about her origins.
It might be a kinder world if she were to be allowed to remain Floretta Bearse, a copper-haired child picking wildflowers in the shadow of the Massachusetts forest, unaware of storms that walk like men, of midwives who appear from nowhere and offer impossible choices. She would grow up clever but ordinary in the shadow of those trees, would marry and have children in the common way, and all the changes she was destined to force upon the firmament would go unmade.
But Ilithyia would be a liar, and if there’s one thing gods can’t stand, it’s being turned into liars. The future is seen: the future is set. Some things, once set in motion, cannot be turned aside.
Floretta is running through the fields when a half dozen of the village men come to her adoptive father in his office, forcing their way past the closed door with claims of concern for his spiritual health. He is the spiritual center of their community. If they worry that there might be rot at the root, it is his duty to soothe them, and so he welcomes them inside.
At first they speak in vagaries and pleasantries, skirting around the subject they have all come here to discuss. None of them wishes to be the one to bring up the true reason for their visit.
“If you’ll forgive me, I have a sermon to prepare for this weekend—” begins Father Clemence.
“The girl is wild, Father,” says one of the men, almost frantically. “I was never one of those who thought Goody Turner guilty of witchcraft. She was a simple soul who never did anyone any harm.”
And yet you use an archaic title for her, a title most commonly associated with tales of witches, thinks Father Clemence, and holds his composure.
“But the girl,” continues the man, and the others nod, murmuring their ascent. “Her mother was sickly, yet she has never ailed a day. She runs wild when not at her lessons, with no woman to teach her the proper way of things. She lures our daughters from their chores into the fields.”
“She means no harm,” says Father Clemence, voice hot and tight with anger. He isn’t any louder than he would normally be; his control is better than that of the men before him. But he’s lived with the girl for seven years, and he knows her better than he knows anyone else in his parish, knows her fears and her fantasies. He knows these men are here out of fear and concern mixed in almost equal measure, which forms a slurry of something similar to but not entirely like love. And he knows he’s going to lose this battle. He was expecting to lose it years ago, is lucky to have gotten nearly seven years.
(He is also, although he doesn’t realize the true relevance, the only one of them to know the truth of Floretta’s parentage, or at least to know that he is not, could not be, in any version of this world, the father. He chose the priesthood out of both a true higher calling and a distaste for the company of women; were he stationed in a larger city, he might have betrayed his vows by now with one of the lithe and laughing boys who haunt the taverns and the public houses. But here, in the tight tangle of a small village, he’s been able to remain pious and pure. Elisabet Turner was no temptress, and even if she had been, he would have been above temptation. No, he took the girl out of a feeling of obligation not because he had sired her, but because he had somehow allowed one of the most vulnerable among his flock to be led astray. Someone got Elisabet Turner with child, and her halting, incoherent confessions of sin and selfishness had only left him afraid that his stewardship had allowed her to be preyed upon by something far beyond his ken.)
“Now,” says one of the men. “She means no harm now. But Father, surely you can see that the child of an unmarried woman will present an unfair temptation to our sons as they grow. She cannot be compromised, cannot be defiled, for she is already marked by the circumstances of her birth.”
Father Clemence is distantly relieved that the man has avoided the word “tainted.” Once they begin to speak of taint as if it were something that could truly be carried by a child, there is no defense he can offer. Not as a man of the cloth, and not as the moral center of this village. “What would you have me do?” he asks instead, and his words are a thin film of earth and root above a great muddy sinkhole, a hidden horror into which children can tumble and be lost forever. He sounds hollowed out.
“Her mother, Goody Turner… she had an uncle,” says one of the men, and the future is set.
God help them all.
John Baker is precisely the sort of man Boston was constructed to create, a hard-pressed diamond formed from good New England coal. He’s everything Elisabet was not, tall and strong and straight as an arrow, with a spine that could easily have been sculpted by God himself. Despite his age—he must be in his early sixties by now—his hair is still thick and lush, a dark copper shade that mirrors without quite matching Floretta’s. The resemblance between them is stark enough to illustrate their differences.
This is not a man inclined to smiles and softness and the gathering of wildflowers. And while it might seem reasonable that a grown man would have different interests than a little girl, there are men who walk in the world with an air of wonder about them, a softness which says they would pick wildflowers, were that an option. There are men who have clearly remembered how to dream.
There are also men who have remembered but conceal that knowledge behind a veil of hardness, a shale crust spread across their wonder and their whimsy. John Baker is not such a man. He has pressed himself into the shape he wanted to wear, has molded himself like marble, and there is nothing left of him that does not serve a proper purpose.
He looks around with cold eyes as he steps out of the carriage that has brought him here, to this small village in the shadow of the Massachusetts trees, where his sister lived her short and difficult life before she was consigned unto the soil, where his niece did the same. He is here because he has been summoned—summoned, him, like a common assistant! No one here should have any authority to call for him, and yet they did, and so he has come, out of curiosity as much as pride. He would like to know why they think they have the right to interfere with his business, before he burns their bucolic little hamlet into ashes.
John Baker was never a man who took easily to being challenged or presumed upon in any way, and the slow death of his entire family has only reinforced his desire to be the master of his fate in all possible ways. He does not want to be here. The letter he received, from the village pastor no less, did not properly explain why he was needed, or why it should matter that he appear in person. Elisabet is dead. He knows that much, was sent the news some years back: there is no good reason for his presence.
He closes the carriage door, the sound sharp and foreign in this miserable place, and waits for someone to come and tell him why he’s been disturbed.
A door opens, and a thin, sandy-haired man in clerical vestments steps out, squinting in the thin sunlight that manages to break through the clouds overhead. Between the weather and the trees, John’s not sure these people have ever truly seen the sun. It would explain the obvious poverty of the land, the way the fields lie half-fallow in the autumn air.
(The true explanation would be harder for him to understand, or to accept. Gods have always walked the world, have always spread their seed where it may not have been wanted, and have always abandoned the gardens they plant in such a manner. Elisabet’s storm had no more loved her than a mountain loves a songbird. He had seen her from a distance, the broken, ugly girl who saw more than most of her kind would ever dream, and he had desired her, and then he had taken her, and that had been enough. Had she lived, he would not have magically returned to be a father to her child; he was always going to leave her. Her daughter, though… her daughter was a different, even older story.
Elisabet Turner was the lover, for a night’s duration, of a god. Her daughter was the child of one. Floretta would always be special in some regards, always be watched by distant, questionably approving eyes. The sky had been clouded almost since the moment of her birth, her father’s domain watching over her. Those clouds saw every slight she received from the villagers around her, every moment of rejection, every cruel comment delivered to a child too young to fully understand them. The storm did not punish, not directly. But the clouds blocked the sun and the rain did not fall, and the crops withered on their vines. The land had been sour since Elisabet Turner’s death, and because a storm is not properly a father, the god who had sired her child didn’t understand that all he was doing was making things worse for the girl he was trying to protect.)
John stays where he is, impatient but unwilling to approach the priest, unwilling to seem like the petitioner here, when he has been summoned. Still, he’s relieved when the priest sees him and turns in his direction, moving with reasonable speed across the cracked and oddly muddy ground. How it can be dry enough to crack and muddy at the same time is a small mystery, one that must remain unanswered evermore, for the priest is growing closer, a look of strange reluctance on his face.
“Mr. Baker?” he asks, and his voice is suited to his figure, slight and weaker than it seems like it should be.
This is their man of faith, the spiritual center of their community? This is the man who sent for him?
John Baker sticks out his hand with a strongman’s confidence. “Father Bearse?”
“Most call me Father Clemence,” says the priest, taking the offered hand and shaking with surprising strength. “But yes, I am Clemence Bearse.”
“And I am John Baker.”
Silence falls between them, less companionable than inevitable. Father Clemence recovers his hand, shaking it as if to restore feeling to his fingers.
“I wrote to you,” he says. “I was hoping you would answer my invitation.”
“Is that what you call it? It sounded more like a summons as it was written.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” says Father Clemence, uncomfortably. “I was hoping to catch your attention, sir, and knew I would need a compelling argument to draw you from Boston to our little village. None has seen you here since—”
“Since my sister’s death, I’m well aware,” says John, brusquely. “I had no intention of ever returning to this place. I still don’t understand what drew her to settle here, so far from everything she’d known.”
“She was a pious woman who raised a pious daughter. You should be proud of her, and find joy in her memory.”
“I find joy in her memory, but not in her choice of habitat. Why am I here?”
“Your niece, Elisabet—”
“Is as dead as her mother. I remember that as well. I am not so callow a man as to forget my losses, even as I was unable to attend her funeral. I sent money. If this is about some unpaid debt Elisabet left behind, I have already done my duty by the girl.”
“She did leave something behind,” says Father Clemence, with deep and evident discomfort. “It was not a debt in the material sense, but in the spiritual sense, for do we not all owe faith unto our families?”
“What are you on about?”
“Your niece died in childbed.”
John Baker goes very still. Someone happening upon the scene might be forgiven for thinking the priest was in conversation with a statue, and not a man of flesh and blood.
In his stillness, his resemblance to Elisabet is easier to see. They have the same coloring, and his handsome features are a more refined version of hers, which were never beautiful, but had a certain striking harshness to them, one which translates better to a man’s face, unkind as they might be for the world to say. The world has never been particularly focused on kindness. Nor has it been particularly focused on reality, and while there is no true reason that the shape of a brow or the angle of a nose should be more suited to a man than to a woman, people often see them that way, and their seeing is often enough to reshape the world.
Father Clemence looks at John Baker’s stillness and is relieved. The man’s obvious distress is not showy or loud, but he’s been a priest long enough to have seen grief in all its many forms, from the keening wail of a mother burying her son to the quiet weeping of a husband burying his wife. He knows sorrow when he sees it. He sees it now, and that seeing awakens a small kernel of hope in his heart, a belief that his dear Floretta will have a safe harbor waiting for her in her uncle’s arms.
He would be horrified if he could see John Baker’s heart. John’s stillness is not sorrow, but calculation, the frantic freeze of a man running numbers against the future and coming up with answers he doesn’t fully understand. Any grieving he was going to do for Elisabet was concluded years ago, when she refused his invitation to Boston. In his eyes, she had died long before her body ceased to be the house where she dwelt.
John takes a breath after what seems like an interminable time, and says, in a voice like a tomb door slamming shut, “The babe died with her, of course, or you would have called me long since. Have you found the man who defiled my niece? She would have invited me to her wedding, had she enjoyed one.” Unspoken is the fact that any celebration larger than a roast chicken and a honeyed cake would have been funded by his accounts: he had never subsidized Elisabet’s hardscrabble days, but he knew his duties as her closest male relation, and he would have fulfilled them, had he been called upon to do so.
Father Clemence shakes his head. “No, Mr. Baker, I’m afraid the father of Elisabet’s child was never identified. She refused to say, even unto her deathbed.”
“I see.”
“As to the babe, we did send word.” Once, by post, in an unremarkable envelope which had gone mysteriously astray before it reached its destination. Gods can interfere in more than rain, and in the beginning, Elisabet’s storm had been content to see her child stay in the shadow of her mother’s bones. “You never replied. I assumed, at the time, that you didn’t have an interest. I apologize if I was mistaken.”
John’s gaze sharpens. “The child lived?”
“She did.” The admission is simple, small, and drops like a stone into the still waters of a well, sending ripples swinging wide but making not a sound. “I have sheltered and kept her these seven years. She has her letters, reads both English and Latin with reasonable skill, and can do her sums well enough to keep a household, when the time comes for her to set out on her own. She is a biddable child, clever if a bit wild, and has been one of the great joys of my life.”
“I see.” John scowls at him a moment, making it clear without saying so directly that he believes the man is lying when he claims to have sent notice of the girl’s survival. He won’t question the word of a man of the cloth, but he can say it with his eyes. “Then why, if you thought I had no interest in my own kin, have you chosen to contact me now?”
“Well, Mr. Baker, she is approaching seven years of age, and some among my congregation begin to question the appropriateness of her dwelling in my household.”
For the first time since this conversation began, John is startled enough to bark a quick, sharp laugh. “You mean they don’t like their priest living with a girl he’s not related to? Might tarnish your holy virtue?”
“She’s not old enough yet for anyone’s virtue to be at risk, but yes, there are some who would prefer I avoid even the impression of impropriety,” says Father Clemence, stiffly. “Floretta has been a great comfort to me in these hard years. The harvests have been lean, you see, and the village suffers so as our larders run bare—”
“Floretta? Did Elisabet name her that?”
“No. My housekeeper did. Floretta Bearse is the only name she has ever known or answered to.”
John wrinkles his nose in evident distaste. “We’ll fix that soon enough,” he says. “No niece of mine will face the schools of Boston with a name like Floretta.”
Father Clemence droops, even as relief blossoms on his face. “You’ll see to her care, then?”
John scowls. “Of course I will. She’s my niece. She should have been with me from the beginning.”
“Indeed.” Father Clemence nods. “Then we see the world set right.”
Excerpted from Inkpot Gods, copyright © 2026 by Seanan McGuire.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Inkpot Gods</i> by Seanan McGuire appeared first on Reactor.
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