The Vessel of Ra

Chapter One: The Apothecary

Venice, October, 1837

This had been the best day of Lucy's life, and since it was her last day alive, that was important. On October 31, the birthday of all Binders, she would turn sixteen. In three weeks, on that day, she would fight Ra. He would win, and Octavia would kill her.

"There," said Lucy. She gestured with a black-gloved hand toward San Marco.

Lucy liked using the Italian name, although Badeker's travel guide was clear about the Venice landmark being called Saint Mark's Square―emphatically clear. The shadows and reflections of buildings twisted in the canal, shadow and reflection blurring into luminous puddles. Her breath caught in her throat and her eyes stung.

The gondolier indulged her with his singing. He thought she was a child because she was a little person. People could only tell her hands and head were large if they looked closely. However, Binders felt wrong to people, so they often didn't look too closely. She watched the gondolier's strong back as he moved his pole through the murky water, maneuvering the boat across the Grand Canal.

Lucy had decided to change everything.

The canal flooded into the square, up toward the flickering street lamps. Even though her skirts kissed her ankles, they would still be weighed down by acqua alta, the fall flooding that invaded all of Venice. Many tourists stayed in boats or wore rubber boots, complaining about the wretched flood and the smell of the ocean. Lucy trailed her hand through the water. On the surface it looked clean, but underneath the canals laid rot and decay.

The gondolier secured the boat and Lucy handed him florins, lopsided coins that filled her palm.

"You be safe?"

Lucy couldn't quite tell if his words were a caution or a question.

"Si," she said. "I will be safe." Even though she knew there were thieves and revelers out at night, they could not harm her. Ra was watching and he would never allow anyone else to hurt her.

Overhead, Ra screeched and plucked a pigeon from the air, its feathers floating down like snowflakes. Other birds rippled away from the attack as Ra pinioned the unlucky bird on the top of a street lamp and gouged out its eye with a needle sharp beak. He flung himself and the bird's corpse back into the sky, up to the roof of San Marco, where other pigeons were nonchalant, accepting the danger had passed and fate had been kind to them this day.

She could not see Ra on the roof, but she felt his appetite as he devoured the bird. All day Ra had drifted in the sky, watching her give money to children, indulging in gelato, losing herself in the stone alleys of unknown neighborhoods. Now the day was over, the day in which Lucia Klaereon had been someone else, someone with a future.

She waded from the boat and into the square. An Austrian soldier frowned at her.

When Lucy had first arrived in Venice, she decided San Marco would be the place. She liked to see people live and live well, compared to the austerity of her life in Hathersage. San Marco was unlike any place she could ever have imagined herself. Among these crowds, she imagined herself jeweled and coifed, a normal girl. The idea made her warm.

Ra swooped over her, his crop distended with the bird he had gorged. Lucy started, but she realized tonight, Ra couldn't harm her more than she meant to harm herself.

San Marco's Basilica glowed. The water in the Grand Canal reflected lilies of light, flowers from the revelry in the square. Now, people celebrated in the water and in the square, although in acqua alta the two were almost the same thing.