Under her palms, its ancient silk was smooth and cool. Gently she traced the embroidered ferns that spiraled between crystal-studded flowers. How desperate she’d once been to don this dangerous dress and work the blood magic it required. And though she’d been afraid, she had done it. They had gone into battle together: determined but hopeful.
She had been such a fool.
She’d believed that, though anti-magic pamphlets and posters had inflamed the people of Paris, underneath they were good at heart. That they all wanted the same things. After all, hadn’t the people of Paris helped the girls? Didn’t they all believe in freedom and brotherhood?
This night had shown her otherwise. She thought back to the other time she remembered it snowing, when she’d walked out onto the ice of the Seine and it had cracked. It had seemed solid, but it was thin. And underneath was always that black water.
She had been wrong not to see it.
Kicking off her shoes, she crept onto the high bed and lay down on her side, pulling her knees up tight. Around her the dress’s skirts fanned out like great wings. Oh Lazare, she thought as she hugged the pillow close. There was no trace of his scent there. Have I lost you too to magic?
As her tears fell onto the sleeve of the dress tucked under her cheek, its threads began to stir. Not hungry, as it’d been so often before. But resolute and calm, as it had been that dreadful day of her marriage to Séguin and during the duel, when she had been so hopeless. It had helped her when no one—not even Lazare—could. It had believed in her when she had not believed in herself.
In her grief, she tucked herself tighter into its shell.
In return the dress fit protectively around her. She closed her eyes and the memories it held of Camille shimmered through her in a blur: the hushed glide of a gondola through the Grand Canal’s mirrored water, cool dew on grass, the thwack of a paille-maille ball scudding over the lawn, the daring crush of Lazare’s embrace. Then, endless as the sea, her ancestress’s memories, held so long in the dress, followed after in waves. As they swept over her, they were like a veil that hung between her and her sorrow and rage, so that she might finally sleep.
Her hand loosened its grip on the list and it fell, crumpled, to the floor.
The house creaked and fretted.
And outside the snow fell steadily until Paris was shrouded in white.
41
Two days passed in grief. Slow and heavy, curtains closed over windows. In the library, the books could be heard to weep, and the weapons in the armory clanged against the door, wanting out. The house closed off rooms and hallways it had opened before. Its wind keened through the rooms, overturning vases and tilting paintings. Its melancholy was its own, and also Camille’s.
When Sophie recovered, she tiptoed into Camille’s room to sit on the bed, but Camille didn’t wish to talk.
She needed to think.
Her mind went back to the things Blaise had said, things she should have paid more attention to. He’d been worried about leaving Les Mots Volants unattended for too long. Strange people had come into the shop, peering at the books. Someone had tried to force his way inside the night Blaise was murdered. The doorknob’s violent rattling haunted her. But he’d also told her the shop was warded. Who then could have got in and pulled him out into the street?
“Camille,” Sophie said, “what do you think about selling off the magical things in the house? In case the Comité comes? Or simply get rid of them?”
“What shall go first—the dress? The tapestries? Why not the entire house?”
Calmly, infuriatingly patient, Sophie persisted. “You must see that any hint of magic is more dangerous than it’s ever been. I saw Blaise…” She laid her blond head on Camille’s shoulder. “Whether magic is good or bad, why not finally be free of the magical objects? Know that you are safe?”
It was a safety that reeked of coffins and locked boxes.
From her bed Camille could look out over the inner courtyard and the garden. Beyond it, the stable roof, the walls, in the corners where shadows collected: Was someone there, watching? Waiting? How long would it be before someone came forward, saying they’d seen her at Les Mots Volants? How long before the Comité stepped out of the night again, the signed warrant a sheet of doom in their hands?
How had her Paris become this Paris? Lazare, with his dreams of traveling, his talk about London, had already lost faith in it. Sophie, too. And her own Paris had become a shadowy, sinister place where being a magician was a death warrant. It was as if the darkness in the alleyways and broken courts of the city had risen, drawn together, and like a great hand, was closing around her throat.
Worry pinched at the edges of Sophie’s blue eyes. “What are you thinking about, Camille?”
“Blaise. And Paris.”
“You are not going to write about this.”
Anger tensed her neck, her jaw. Steady, she told herself. “Am I not?”
“We need to think of how to protect you and the other magicians, not draw more attention—”
“Does not this murder draw attention to magic?” Despite herself, her frustration grew. “What is the point of living—in believing in something—if I do nothing? If I hide in this house, afraid? I could have saved his life, Sophie!”
“Don’t be reckless,” she pleaded. “You will put yourself in danger!”
Camille’s fingers clenched the coverlet bunched in her hands. “If I wait, and keep quiet, what will happen? Who will I be?” What was it Lazare had said? I can’t live with myself if I don’t take the Cazalès. Now she felt the power of that conviction burning within herself.
Tears stood in Sophie’s eyes. “I know you loved your friend. At least wait a few days, until things calm down—”
“That will never happen unless we do something.” She flung back the bedclothes. “I can say I loved him, but what is love without action? Hollow, empty words! Talk is dirt-cheap, and it sickens me. Love must be proved.”
“But you’ll only make things worse!” Sophie insisted. “Unsafe!”
“There is nothing safe anymore,” she said grimly as she set her feet on the floor. “And I will not remain silent.”
* * *
Time was running out for magic. But with Blaise gone, how would they make the blur? There were barely enough vials in the valise to get them out of Paris, let alone all the way to England or Austria. She thought of setting a paper flare but wasn’t ready to call all the magicians together. Then she wrote a note to Chandon, only to tear it up.
Well past midnight, when every person in the house—but not the house itself—was asleep, she went down to the printing room. As she opened the double doors, a breeze, like a chill breath, caressed the side of her face.
“Blaise?”
She stilled, remembering how, after her parents had died, she thought she sensed them in any darkened room. That they were not so far away. There were many times she’d whispered their names into the gloom, and waited, not wanting to spark a light and chase them away.
One more heartbeat. Two.
Nothing but the wind.
From embers in the hearth, she lit the sconces and the many-branched candelabras. Taper by taper, the room came awake: the squared-off shape of the press, the long tables with their rustling papers, the ropes running along the ceiling like paths on a map. It was all hers. She had never thought of it like that before.
What was it Blaise had said?
You cannot bleed it out or cut it out … but you can decide what to do with it.
Not so long ago she’d believed that magic was something she could lock up in a box or a bottle and ignore. A part that could be separated from the rest. But it couldn’t. She thought of lace, or a web—pulling away one part destroys the whole.
Magic is only a curse if you think it so.
She’d feared that the magic had crawled inside of her and taken up residence in her body, like sickly poison thickening in her veins. Taking her over, making her into something sh
e did not wish to be. How had she forgotten that there was power—rich and dangerous—in it? In herself?
The power had always been a part of her. Like her freckles, the red of her hair. Perhaps the magic that glittered through her had given life to the house, steeped as it was with enchantments. As she had slept in its rooms and printed her pamphlets and eaten food cooked in its kitchen, keeping it alive, the house had—perhaps—also given her something.
Before Blaise was murdered, she’d been afraid of being exposed. It could have almost as easily been me. But she was finished with being small. With being safe. Now she was going to strike back.
Pulling the case toward her, she picked out a few letters. They were warm in her hand. Good. Along her neck, down her arms, the fever began to rise, burning and powerful.
Not a fever, she told herself as she set the type. My magic.
MES AMIS
When the magician was seized upon by a mob and hanged from the great white oak,
did you laugh?
Cheer?
Turn away?
Or say, loudly or in a whisper: he deserved it?
Had he done something to deserve this fate— or was it because he was a magician?
The people and their king have agreed that there is nothing lower than a magician. Nothing worse to be feared, no snake sooner to be stepped on. After all, for centuries they tormented us— don’t they deserve what they get? How dare they?
We shrug. Perhaps they do deserve it.
OR
HAVE WE ONLY CREATED
A NEW
TYRANNY?
A French revolutionary said:
SOMEONE MUST DIE, IF WE ARE TO LIVE
Some must be
SACRIFICED for the GREATER GOOD
FOR
OUR
PROGRESS
What progress is worth the sacrifice of another human being?
FOR THAT IS WHAT A MAGICIAN IS
What if the person who died were YOU?
In your heart, ask yourself:
ARE YOU READY TO DIE FOR AN IDEA?
ARE YOU CERTAIN
IT IS THE RIGHT ONE?
It took one long day, but then they were finished.
Across Paris, in the soft morning hours before dawn, the pamphlets went out. They were tied and knotted with rough twine and bundled into wagons while half-sleeping horses waited drowsily, one leg cocked. They were swung into doorways. Piled and stacked. Knives slipped under twine to shear it off so that the pamphlets could be settled onto shelves or counters or folded into bags for selling on the street.
To be read, consumed.
Sheets of paper, like feathers from a burst pillow, lofted into the city’s tangle of streets. Floating away on the slightest breeze, landing in stores and squares and cafés. Paper passed from hand to hand to hand. A stream of words, wending its way through the city’s heart and out through all its arteries, until Camille’s defense of Blaise and of magic was on everyone’s lips.
And then came the response. Swift, unambiguous.
Clothing stuffed with straw, heads shaped from a pillowcases or sacks. Features painted on, bright crimson lips. A ruff of dried leaves for a cravat. On every face were blue tears, spilling from hastily drawn eyes. Tears, fat and heavy like rain. Some effigies had hands made of gloves, the fingertips blackened with tar.
They were shaped out of hatred, hatred itself fashioned from the fabric of fear.
And all of them, strung up like pheasants, were effigies of magicians.
42
“You were right to stand up for magic,” Adèle said the next morning, when she brought Camille a breakfast tray.
She rubbed at her aching temples. “All night the Comité threatened me in my dreams. I can only imagine what is happening in the city.”
“It had to be said. And besides,” she said, a note of pride in her voice, “they cannot get in here.” She handed her a small cup of coffee and set the letter tray beside her chair.
A small package lay on it. It was dirty, as if it had passed through many hands. Brown paper enfolded it, bound with red string. The careful handwriting was only vaguely familiar. As she untied the string, the wrapping fell open. There seemed to be nothing in it except for a card that tumbled out onto the coverlet.
On it was written:
A scant five minutes after you left the bookstore, I came across a copy of the book you are looking for. I nearly sent it but changed my mind. Instead I’ve set it aside for you. Come to the store as soon as you can. If I am not here, take it with you.
And as to what is enclosed, consider it a gift from someone who struggled with his heritage just as you have.
Ton ami,
Blaise Delouvet
Beneath he’d sketched a mountain. One side was shaded with inky hatch marks, the other side illuminated by a sun.
He had done this for her. He hadn’t been afraid when she’d told him what she suspected about herself. He hadn’t reminded her that magic was wrong, or treated her like a fool who clung to something that was forbidden by law, a magic that could kill you in more ways than one. He’d reassured her that magic itself was not bad. That it might even be good, necessary.
She imagined him opening one of the crates of books and seeing the flash of green and silver, setting the book aside for her. Writing this note. And then letting the customer in, through the store’s wards. Soon after the mob broke down the door—or were allowed in. Did his books scream like the ones in the Hôtel Séguin as they dragged him away?
A tear slipped from her eye and landed on the word here.
Where it had fallen, the blue ink blurred. Its edges dissolved and the space around the words trembled. Had he hidden something in this letter? She blinked and the words ran together, nothing more than a smudge.
But then they sharpened.
I did not dare send the three things at once, lest they be intercepted by the people who are watching the shop. Come soon, and please be careful.
He’d found the book she’d been looking for: The Silver Leaf. What were the other two things?
Hastily, she reread the lines as they started to fade. In a minute, they were gone, as if they’d never been. As she began to fold the brown paper up, her fingers came across something hard. An object, caught in the wrapper’s folds.
It was a tiny vial. She knew what the narrow label wrapped around its neck would say before she picked it up. Blaise Delouvet. He’d already worked the magic of tempus fugit from the book he’d found and made the blur. These were his tears.
She held it up to the light: pale green liquid filled a quarter of the crystal vial. Between her fingers, the glass radiated a small heat, like the flame of a candle. But why her? Why did he want her to have them—did he really think they would help her, in case he himself was gone? Without him there was no blur to be made.
Unless.
Three things, he’d written. The vial of his tears. The Silver Leaf. Was the third thing the book that explained how to make the blur?
But it wasn’t at all clear from his letter where that book was. He might have already sent it to her, and it hadn’t yet arrived. But she didn’t think so. Come soon, he had written. Perhaps it wasn’t The Silver Leaf that was at the shop after all. Perhaps it was the book explaining how to make the blur, the one he’d disguised with a blue binding. The one he’d told her he’d kept in a safe place. It had to be at the shop. Somewhere.
Carefully, she slipped the vial into the secret pocket sewn into the seam of her skirt. It felt both light and heavy at the same time.
On the silver salver lay another letter, facedown. She flipped it over. The dashing, impatient letters spelling out her name set her heart to running. Hands shaking, she unfolded it and pressed it flat.
Mon âme—
I send these lines to you in haste. Two days ago I said my adieux to the Cazalès family. The grandmother is brave but frail, and when she requested I accompany the family by coach to London, where she has a cousin, I
could not refuse, though it kept me from Paris longer.
London is a city of marvels—I wish you had been with me to see it.
She imagined a crowded street, Lazare watching the unfamiliar passersby not with displeasure or annoyance but instead with his intense, consuming gaze. The signs in foreign English, the conversations a babble of unintelligible words. For a terrifying moment she thought he meant to stay. She skipped to the end.
I am already in France. The farmer who drove us from Saint-Cloud has taken me in. Tomorrow morning, as early as I can, I land at the Champ de Mars. Please ask Rosier to bring a wagon.
And then, underlined twice:
I regret everything.
He did not ask for anything. Not for her to be there, not to forgive him. There was only regret and longing.
While he’d been gone, her friend had been murdered, and she had published a pamphlet defending magicians. Even if she had wanted to, there was no way to be rid of her magic now, nor even to contain it. How big was his regret?
As always, I am yours, body and soul—
Lazare
She surprised herself by bringing the paper his hands had touched to her mouth and kissing the place where he had written his name.
He was safe, and he was coming home to her. Perhaps not everything was lost. Perhaps there was some way to mend what was broken. Throwing open the door to her room, she ran down the hall, letter in hand. When she reached the grand staircase, she leaned over the banister and shouted: “Sophie? Rosier? Lazare is nearly home!”
43
It was nearly dawn. Soon Lazare’s balloon would appear over the horizon. The rising sun would glimmer on its silk as it descended over the frost-tipped grass of the Champ de Mars. And Rosier would be there to embrace him.
She would be here, in the Hôtel Séguin.
It was safer this way. No one would be searching for Rosier, not the way they’d be searching for her. It was also safer for her wounded heart.
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