Everything That Burns

by Gita Trelease

  “Unless you let them in, the house’s magic will keep them out,” Blaise said. “It would take a siege engine to break its walls, and by then, I assume, you would have escaped.”

  It was hardly reassuring.

  He peered down the hall. “Is the library that way?”

  As they walked, Chandon asked, apprehensively, “Have you seen the latest anti-magician pamphlets? The worst ones—cowardly anonymous ones—have a bird for a printer’s mark. All over Paris they are calling for our deaths. Or at the very least, demanding that people turn us in.” That night at Bellefleur, he’d put on a good show for them all—courageous, determined. But it was even getting to him.

  “It’s already happening,” Camille said. “They dragged a jeweler from his shop at the Palais-Royal. A woman had accused him of using magic to cheat customers. She was so pleased to see him brought low.”

  “The Comité,” Chandon fumed, “has no scruples. And they give those who hate an excuse. The guards carry signed warrants with a blank space to fill in whatever name is needed on the spot—they have carte blanche. Truly we have no time to waste.”

  “Blaise,” Camille asked, “you haven’t come across any leads in your shop?”

  “Yes and no. I’ve bought crates and crates of books these past weeks. It takes time to go through them but as to the blur … so far, nothing.”

  The house was still and quiet as they climbed the stairs. Too quiet, Camille thought. But not for long, because as they stepped onto the second-floor landing, a door in the far wing of the house slammed closed.

  “Interesting.” Blaise seemed utterly unperturbed, as if he did this kind of thing every day. Perhaps he did, handling the magical texts and grimoires that came through his shop. Old texts, reeking magic and stirring under his hands as he paged through them. Chandon, however, had gone quite gray.

  Matter-of-fact, Blaise asked, “How many books are in the library?”

  What had she glimpsed the last time she was in the dim, shuttered room? Shelves packed with books like lice on strands of hair. Paintings. A statue of a deer. Strange papers. “I don’t recall, exactly—perhaps a hundred?”

  “You haven’t examined them?” Blaise asked, mild astonishment in his voice.

  She glanced at Chandon. “I was frightened. And they resisted me.”

  “Bespelled,” Blaise said, hurrying. “It’s close now, isn’t it? I can hear the books.”

  Soon they stood in front of the library’s heavy oak doors. Medieval carvings crawled across them: snakes coiling through bare-limbed trees; men and women with gaunt torsos that ended in flipping fish tails; staring skulls on stakes, planted among poppies. Where the doors met was a large silver ring, tarnished. The air seeping through the skull-shaped keyhole smelled of smoke and sounded like rustling paper.

  “Think this is it, Delouvet?” Chandon gave a low laugh. “Could there be anything in the world that reeks more of magic?”

  “I would clarify it smells mostly like books of magic.” He blinked benevolently at Camille. “Shall we go in?”

  She slipped the key from her sleeve and set it in the keyhole. “You’re certain you wish to do this?”

  Chandon raised an eyebrow. “The most daring gambler at Versailles has a case of the nerves?”

  “You would if you knew what was in there! Apart from the books that are gnashing their teeth so loudly we can hear them, there’s also a portrait”—she swallowed—“that conveys memories if you touch it.”

  “It sounds like magie bibelot,” Blaise said cheerfully. “The books are growing impatient, so if you don’t mind…”

  She didn’t want to be the person who was too afraid and stayed out in the hall, even though there was a part of her that wished to do just that. Camille turned the key in the lock and the door swung open.

  Blaise slipped inside, and flashing Camille a devil-may-care grin, Chandon followed. Camille fished the key from the lock—she had a sudden horror of being locked in if she left it in the keyhole—and joined them. By the time she’d lit the candles, Blaise had already found the set of tiny keys for the metal grilles that covered the books and was making his way up the spiral stairs to the second-floor gallery. As he approached, the books quieted. Deftly, he unlocked the first set of grilles and, starting at the top, ran his fingers over the spines of the volumes, just as Camille had. But when he touched them, each one seemed to brighten, a candle flickering to life. Blaise’s eyes were closed, his pale lashes trembling.

  Worried, she cried out, “Blai—”

  “Hush! He’s reading now,” Chandon said in Camille’s ear. “We mustn’t speak to him, or interrupt if we can possibly help it. He may be seized by a fit elsewise. Let’s explore instead. Who knows what we may discover? I find my curiosity has overpowered my earlier repulsion.”

  The room seemed to have grown since she was last there. Had there been a divan in it before? But the shadows in the corners were just as thick, the portrait’s golden-eyed stare just as ominous. Chandon grasped her wrist and pulled her along. Together, they peered into a large glass cabinet where pinned insects jostled with the skeletons of tiny animals she did not recognize. Chandon pronounced them dreadfully gruesome and they hastened away. There was a pair of waist-high Chinese vases that echoed faintly with voices if they put their ears to them, a silk carpet that dampened their steps completely, a large table covered with papers and books. Idly, Chandon stirred the papers, and they rose up off the table, hovering before fluttering back to the polished wood.

  “Like butterflies,” Camille said, wonder in her voice. How could a magician as terrible as Séguin have fashioned something so beautiful?

  “Aha! You will come to love magic yet, I’ll wager on it.”

  “If there is a good kind, perhaps, that will not kill me—”

  “What’s this?” Chandon gestured to an oil painting, small enough to tuck under an arm. It showed a man in a black suit, standing by the head of a black horse. The horse’s head was small, his eye wild. Beyond them lay a green carpet of grass, and at its end, a stone house.

  Nowhere was there a signature or a name that would indicate what the house was, so Camille took the painting off the wall. “Maybe there’s something written on the back?”

  Before she’d even turned it over, she felt its creeping magic. A deed had been sewn to the back of the canvas, though the stitches did not show on the front. And below it, under a dense cocoon of red thread, lay an iron key. There was something repulsive about it, like a sleeping insect.

  “Quite a ferocious warding, isn’t it?”

  “Is that what feels so sickening?”

  “How would you get the key out?” She was loath to even to touch it.

  “Silver scissors.” He yawned. “Let’s check on Delouvet.”

  “But, Chandon, don’t you see? This is the kind of magic that repulses me.”

  “That’s like saying you don’t like a particular cane, because the person who owns it hits you with it. Magic is but a tool, as my tutor always said!” Then he grew serious, and said, “You know that feeling of being watched you have in this house?”

  She nodded.

  “Mon amie, it’s nothing but magic!”

  “Séguin’s dark magic,” she insisted. “The magic of his ancestors—”

  Chandon shook his head. “You’re the magician that matters now. If you let it, the house will warn you. Even take care of you. But you mustn’t turn away from it.”

  “But how? I don’t … feel at ease with magic, not the way you do.”

  “That’s just the kind of person I am. A simple boy with simple dreams.” He smiled so that his dimple showed. “In all seriousness, the magic matches the magician. Only you can find the way to be at home with yours.”

  Before she could demand Chandon explain, Blaise slowly came down the iron stairs, a few books clutched to his chest. “There’s not much here that has anything to do with the blur, I’m afraid.” He was gripping the railing so hard his knuckles were w
hite.

  Hurriedly, Camille pulled out a chair for him. “Do sit, Blaise!”

  He waved her off. “It will pass. Unfortunately so much of what these books are is arcane ramblings about alchemy by magicians who had too much time on their hands. There’s very little that is practical.”

  “Another dead end,” Chandon said, irritated.

  Blaise was looking up at the rows of books in the gallery, many of which were still twitching and glowing with whatever magic he’d used to read them. He was exhausted, but his eyes were full of awe.

  “How do you know so much about magical books, Blaise?”

  “I grew up alone,” he said quietly. “They were my best companions. My only ones, really. People—have always been difficult. Books are much easier.”

  Her heart twisted at the thought of him alone with his books. “Is that why you have your bookshop?”

  “The first books of magic I ever read belonged to a kind parish priest, who took pity on a lonely and misunderstood boy. Les Mots Volants is my feeble attempt to reconstruct his astounding library.”

  “But you’re doing it in secret.”

  He gave an infinitesimal shrug. “We magicians have been in danger for a long time. I don’t believe magicians are blameless for the cruelty they inflicted on the powerless. But if we are to change ourselves, we have to preserve the records of magic both good and ill. It’s important to remember what really happened.”

  Chandon wandered over to the window and opened the shutter.

  “I never read any books of magic in our house,” Camille said, “though I remember my mother had one: green and stamped with silver. Though it could be bound in any color, couldn’t it?”

  “Not that one. It is always bound like that.”

  “You know it?” she said eagerly. “Do you have a copy?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  Only a moment ago she’d had the feeling of something big rising to the surface, something that might help her understand what was happening to her. And now it had frustratingly sunk beneath the surface once more.

  “Will you let me know if you come across anything about it?”

  “It’s called The Silver Leaf,” Chandon said from the window.

  “You know about this book, too?”

  “It’s a primer most magicians study as part of their education,” Blaise explained—somewhat sadly, she thought.

  “Chandon?”

  “Did I study the dreaded Silver Leaf? My mother warned me I’d never amount to anything in life if I ignored it. I read it, and look at me now.”

  Chandon didn’t realize how lucky he was. “What kind of things were in it?”

  “I can’t possibly remember. It’s more like a recipe book than a novel or a history, always there to refer to in case you forget.” He twisted his rings, thinking. “How to bring forth sorrow, of course; lives of the great magicians; types of transformative magic; warnings about using magic for ill. Which Séguin and many other magicians over the centuries clearly ignored. And much, much more. The type was painfully small.”

  “Was there anything about tempus fugit, the magic needed to work the veil?”

  Blaise blinked. “I hadn’t thought of it being in there! But you are right, Camille—the Marquis de Saint-Clair says it is a common magic, therefore, it should be in a basic text. Hiding in plain sight! You may have brought us one step closer.”

  Closer wasn’t close enough. “So you will keep an eye out for a copy?”

  “Certainly.” Blaise waited serenely.

  “You wish to know why I want it. Apart from the blur.” The way he talked about lost libraries as if he longed for something he hadn’t been allowed to have echoed how she felt. He seemed to understand her own tangled feelings about magic.

  “Honestly, I’m afraid! My magic overtakes me like a fever. And I don’t know whether I should force it away—if I even can—or somehow accept it. I worry that the pamphlets I’ve written are infected with magic, and that’s why they’ve been successful. And now the Comité has me in its sights…” Miserably, she turned away and caught Séguin’s portrait watching her. “Can’t I put it in a vial and keep it there until I need it, even if I’m not trying to make a blur? Wouldn’t that be one way to control it?” And keep myself and those I love safe?

  “You did not call it by wishing or feeling?”

  The Lost Girls had felt trapped, just as she had. Longing for a way out, always working so hard but despite it, everything slipping through her fingers … “Perhaps I did. But what can I do? I cannot stop feeling.”

  “Some magicians do. That was one of the dangers Saint-Clair warned of with the blur—that by making it we separate ourselves from magic.” That was what she’d seen in Séguin’s portrait. It was what he’d wanted, but without feeling, he was no longer the magician he’d once been.

  “And then the magic is so powerful,” Camille said, remembering what had happened to the Comte de Roland and how it felt so much like the way the fever-magic consumed her, “that it threatens to vanish you. How then are we to survive?”

  “These things are manipulations of magic,” Blaise said. “They’re not the way magic is.”

  Frustrated, Camille clenched her fists in the fabric of her skirts. Why did they only go round and round and not get anywhere? “If we aren’t able to hide our magic, the Comité will hunt us down. And the books we need are nowhere to be found. Why isn’t there a list, or a map for them—”

  Blaise’s other eyebrow rose. From the stack he’d collected, he pulled a slender green-bound volume. It had no silvery leaves on it but it was nevertheless so familiar that she reached for it.

  “It’s only an index. Made by some industrious student, I suppose, to help her learn The Silver Leaf better.”

  “Do you see?” Chandon interrupted from his perch by the window. “How ominous the clouds are becoming—as if it might rain for weeks.”

  Lazare. Balloons were not made for rain. If it rained for days, would he have to stay longer in Lille?

  Under her fingertips, the book’s magic hummed.

  “Copies of The Silver Leaf were so common,” Blaise said as he peered over her shoulder. “No one took care of them because they could easily get another. Ephemera, we book collectors call them. And now they are being destroyed in fires.”

  But Camille was hardly listening. Instead she paged quickly to B.

  Blood Magic.

  -Glamoire, 256

  Camille stared in wonderment. “Really?”

  “That is why I was surprised you hadn’t read it. Chandon said you had worked such a compelling glamoire.”

  It shouldn’t have pleased her, but it did. “Thank you,” she said, and raced through the other subcategories for Blood Magic.

  -Irresponsible use in fortune telling, 378

  -To bring back lost memories, 325

  -To bond a sorrow-well, 524

  Her fingers tightened around the book’s spine. Was it always like this with magic, teetering between beautiful and horrible? “How many entries there are under blood magic!”

  “Too often misused, I’m afraid.”

  She ran her finger down the column of B-words. There was no entry for Blur. Perhaps the working for the blur was under its other name, the veil? Hurrying, she paged past Control of magic, 37; Illness, 57; Spells for love, 392; and Spells for enemies, 401 until she reached the very end of the index: V.

  Value of magic, 10

  Vanishing letters, 258

  Veil, 613.

  “It is in The Silver Leaf!” she cried out. Next to the entry for Veil was a star. Séguin must have marked it—proof he’d been working on the veil, as they’d guessed.

  But most the most important would be under T, and it was:

  Tempus Fugit, 13.

  Nevertheless they were hardly closer than before, because this was only the index. She gripped the book in frustration. All these books, and still no answers!

  “I promise you, I will
keep trying,” Blaise said.

  She closed the index and handed it to him. As soon as it left her hand, she missed the warmth of it and wanted it back.

  “They’re funny like that,” he said with a fond smile as he patted the books on the table. “Magic compels.” The clock in the library began to chime the hour. “I must go—I hate to leave the bookshop unattended for too long.”

  “Please be careful, Blaise,” Camille said. “With the Comité looking for books, will they not come to Les Mots Volants?”

  “It is warded,” he replied. “I am safe enough for now. Nothing without risk is worth doing.” He produced a calling card and gave it to her. “But, Camille—”

  “Yes?”

  “I know it is not easy. But please, do not be afraid of answers. They may come to you in strange ways. This ancient house,” he said, gently smiling at the grim, magic-laced library, “has secrets to tell. You must find a way to listen.”

  25

  But Camille wasn’t certain she wished to listen. After the magicians had said their adieux and slipped back out the kitchen door, Adèle came to tell Camille that a wagon load of furniture had arrived from Versailles.

  Perplexed, she asked, “For whom?”

  “It’s the old master’s things, collected from the apartment he kept there. You don’t wish to go over them?”

  She wanted nothing to do with them. The unicorn tapestry that had watched while Séguin had drugged her, the glasses that had held the poisoned wine, the embroidered chair he’d shoved her against, trapped and weeping—no. She wished to see none of it again. “If you could…?”

  “Of course,” Adèle said. “Mademoiselle Sophie is waiting for you in the courtyard.”

  Sophie almost never went into the courtyard. Too enclosed, she said. It makes me feel trapped. “She’s returned from Le Sucre so early? Is she not well?”

  Adèle considered. “She seems—distraught.”

  Through the wavy glass of the doors, Camille saw her sister pacing back and forth by the espaliered pear trees, heavy with yellow fruit. In her hand, she gripped a fallen branch. Each time she hit it against the wall, a piece of it broke off and fell to the grass. Not promising.