Prospero Regained by L. Jagi Lamplighter

had gotten his way, was priceless.
    As we crouched together beneath our makeshift tarp, the silvery light of the tiny star illuminating our faces, I thought of my brother Theophrastus who had left the family for decades, allowing himself to suffer and grow old, due to his fear that continued exposure to magic would damn him.
    “Does Theo know all this,” I asked, “about there being hope, even in Hell?”
    “I do not know.” Gregor’s long hair rippled over his broad shoulders as he shrugged. “Why?”
    I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry. “Someone should tell him.”

CHAPTER
    FIVE
    Some Are Born with Souls …

    “Your turn to take the star.” Malagigi extended the silver spark toward Mab, who sat hunched down upon the floor between the seats of the broken gondola, doodling in his notebook.
    “I don’t know about this,” Mab muttered. “I’m not like the rest of you … I don’t got one of those soul things.”
    “Excuse me?” Malagigi inclined his ear.
    “He’s not a human,” Erasmus explained from where he lay on his back now, his arm and staff extended outside our hideout. “He’s an Aerie Spirit, one of the servants of my father, the magician.”
    “You mean, like my elementals?” Malagigi’s features lit up. He leaned toward Mab, his face appearing more substantial in the silvery light. “Do you know that God will grant you a soul, if you ask for one in prayer? My master in the Brotherhood of Hope explained this to me. I told my elemental friends and one of them, a sylph, was granted a soul!” He frowned, absentmindedly brushing at the anchor symbol upon his shoulder. “The others would not ask.”
    Mab frowned dubiously and pulled his hat lower over his eyes. He turned to me where I sat cramped atop one of the gondola benches, my head ducked to avoid bumping the robes that made up the roof above me. “Is that true, Ma’am? Can a creature without a soul be granted one?”
    “It can,” Gregor responded before I could answer. “Father once told me he believed putting Aerie Ones into bodies might make it possible for them to acquire souls.”
    “What!” I cried, leaping up. My head pushed upon the robes above us, causing acid that had pooled in the folds of the fabric to stream down on all sides.
    “Why would that be?” Erasmus poked his head up. “Elves have bodies, and they do not have souls.”
    “It was not the body per se,” Gregor called back, “but the interaction with mankind. It was living among human beings and interacting with us that Father believed would bring about this transformation. Elves do not live like men. Nothing in their society—if you can even call it that—encourages compassion, consideration, love, or good deeds.”
    “Really?” I sat down again, hard.
    The world seemed to spin around me—or maybe it actually was spinning—as this missing piece fell into the puzzle that was my father’s secret plans. So, Aerie Ones could gain souls! Was that why Mab and Caurus seemed so civil, while Boreas—who dwelt in a body but seldom interacted with men—did not?
    Mab had not been civil back in his windy days. The Greeks had considered the Northeast the worst of all winds, and sailors knew to fear the notorious Nor’easter. Could the Aerie Ones who interact with humans on a regular basis be joining the Company of Men, of which Astreus had spoken—a term he had used to refer to a gathering of human beings, the way one might say, a pack of wolves or a herd of deer.
    My thoughts returned to the cavern of naked Italians beneath Logistilla’s house—bodies I suspected Father had instructed her to create for the purpose of housing Aerie Ones. Could Father’s plan be to give souls to all the Aerie Ones? Was such a thing possible? Had he hoped they would gain souls before he was required to free them at the end of their thousand years of service?
    What of the oreads and the oni ? The sylphs and the salamanders? Could they gain souls, too, if they