Everything That Burns

  Lazare was very still. Waiting.

  “You did not.” She blinked to keep the sudden tears at bay. “Until the time when you said you wished I was not a magician.”

  He clasped her knee. “Camille, please—”

  She held up her hand. “I could have told you about the pamphlets. How there was some force of magic in me that I couldn’t control and that I didn’t understand. But I was ashamed. I’d determined to leave magic behind after I killed Séguin.” A log tumbled in the fireplace, the fire crackled. “So many times I intended to tell you. But when you said how extraordinary the pamphlets were—how extraordinary I was—I couldn’t.”

  “Merde,” he swore. “What an ass I was!”

  Despite herself, she laughed. “I was in love with your vision of me as hardworking and talented and magic-less. It was as if I were living in a hall of mirrors, wanting to believe that what I saw was true.”

  “My love,” he said, his voice rough with emotion, “the day of the king’s speech, I wondered. But I didn’t want to believe it. I abetted you in your silence, when I could have made it easier for you to talk to me about it.”

  “You are already forgiven, for you’ve forgiven me.” She picked up an iron poker and jostled the logs in the fire, sending up sparks that rose vanishing into the chimney’s mouth. “I used to think about the adventures we’d have, the voyages we’d go on by balloon. But the revolution has taken our dreams from us.”

  “The places we saw in the magic lantern … our flight over the Alps … those dreams will never die,” he said softly. “They are my dream of a life with you. The dream of us.”

  He took her hand. In the fathomless deep of his eyes, she saw love and heartbreak. “Let me help you with whatever it is that you are planning. Whatever it takes, whatever magic is in it.”

  She brought his hand to her mouth and kissed it. The scent of him, the warmth of his skin, the callouses on his palm and the pale scars across the knuckles of his fingers—all of him was precious to her. “You may help me, Lazare Mellais, under one condition. Please, be careful of my heart. I cannot lose you again.”

  “I promise.” Gently he drew her down to him until they both sat on the carpet. In front of the fire, their tired bodies pressed close. Each exhale pushed them apart, each inhale brought them together. “I will stay. I am yours to command.” And then, teasingly, he said, “Your magic doesn’t frighten me anymore.”

  “Not even a little?”

  “Well, perhaps … but only in the most intoxicating way.”

  She tucked her fingers under the collar of his coat, next to his skin. As she rested her head against his shoulder, the world receded, dim and distant and far away, until there was only this moment, only him and their hope.

  The door swung open, and with it came a sigh of cold air.

  Chandon stood in the doorway, lamp in hand. “How rude of me to interrupt! But there is no help for it, mes amis. Roland has finally shown his face and Foudriard—well, my darling has arrived with grave news.”

  “They’re waiting in the great hall?”

  Chandon nodded. “How much does he know, Camille? About the book?” He gestured toward Lazare.

  “Not much, I’m afraid.” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll help you in whatever way I can,” Lazare said. “Even if it involves magic.”

  “Ah, Sablebois!” Chandon said with a sad smile. “Everything involves magic—it always has, and it always will. And if you are in desperately in love with a magician, it is practically inescapable. Now if you two will untangle yourselves, we should go in to the others. I fear we may be too late.”

  46

  The mood in the great hall was tense. Foudriard, no longer in uniform but wearing a plain blue suit instead, shuffled maps spread out on a table. The Comte de Roland stood by one of the bookcases, bewilderment and shock etched across his pointy face. Foudriard left the maps to embrace Lazare, and they had a few quiet words between them. All the while, Roland sipped from a glass of wine.

  He stopped drinking as she and Lazare approached. “The Vicomtesse de Séguin. And do my senses deceive me, or is it the aeronautical aristocrat?”

  “Roland,” Lazare said, bowing slightly. “I thought it might be you.”

  “Sablebois.” Roland stooped into a bow. “I hope you have nothing against my being here? Strange times make for strange bedfellows. For the sake of this damned blur, I am willing to forgive you for beating me at every single game of carambola we ever played at Versailles.”

  “You are nothing if not generous, Roland,” Chandon said evenly. “We must get to the point. Camille, will you tell us what has happened?”

  For the sake of Roland, but also Foudriard and Lazare, Camille began with Chandon and Blaise’s visit to the Hôtel Séguin. She told them how she’d discovered Odette listening at the door and thrown her out. How she’d received the package from Blaise, saying he had a book for her but also that he had sent other things, and the warning the house had given her that Lazare was in danger—and that somehow Odette was a part of it.

  “Every minute we stay in Paris we are drawn further into peril,” Chandon said, distraught. “The mob killed Blaise, who would never do anything to hurt anyone. They could take any one of us, at any time. They are everywhere.”

  “We are safe nowhere,” Roland snapped. “But if we have the blur—”

  “Once we get the book,” Lazare interjected, “won’t that provide you with safety?”

  “If we could make enough of the blur, perhaps,” Chandon replied. “But it’s more than that. It’s the Comité. It’s the people of Paris.”

  “There can be no safety,” Camille burst out, “not when the world is wrong! I had depended on hope, as if it were a lantern to light the way, when it was nothing but a ghost.”

  Hope had made her believe that change would happen. And it had, but not in the way she’d expected. The change she’d wrought for the girls had been good. But hoping that the leaders of France, king and revolutionary alike, would accept responsibility for their actions—that was a hollow wish. Despair and sorrow rose in her, numbing cold and swift, and she felt in her fingers the crimp of magic, the desire to change something.

  “What else have we?” Chandon said. “Hope, our wits, beautiful clothes … no, wait—”

  She refused to be cheered by his jest. “I am sick of hoping! After the violence at Versailles, I kept trying to believe. But I lost hope in the revolution when it murdered Blaise. It is tyrannical, bloodthirsty!” She dropped her head into her hands. “I have even lost hope in our country, its people—in France. There is no place for us here.”

  Lazare, his voice resonant with passion, said, “Mon âme, hope is dangerous. It is the most dangerous thing there is, because it helps us believe in the impossible. In balloons, revolutions, circuses—and love. None of it easy. What is the purpose of hope except to change things?” He waited until she looked at him. “And, yes, hope is terrifying, and hard, because believing in something is no guarantee it will ever happen, even if we work toward it.”

  In the silence that followed, the fire in the great medieval hearth danced and flickered. Fire that could light the way, fuel change, or destroy everything. Deep in her heart, she knew Lazare was right. What had she lived on when her parents were dead, she and Sophie starving, Alain beating her and trying to keep her down? Hope had been her food and drink. And though despair had shadowed her, it hadn’t overtaken her. She thought of Blaise’s mountain: two sides to everything. Hope was the sunlight, despair the shadow. Two sides of a coin, inextricable.

  He added, “Without it we have nothing.”

  “Lazare, truer words were never spoken,” observed Chandon. “Hope will take us a long way. But, if I may interject, mes amis—time ticks on and we do not yet have a plan.”

  A plan would be something. A plan was hope taking shape. She set her shoulders back, wiped away the tears that clung to her lashes.

  “There’s something
else that adds urgency to our mission,” she said. “On the oak from which Blaise was hanged, there a list. It had your name on it, Chandon, and yours, Roland. Blaise’s was there too, but crossed out, and written beside it was the word mort. This is what they intend to do to all of us magicians.”

  Chandon’s shoulders slumped. In his face was a sense of loss that mirrored her own. “Forget what I said about hope—they are calling for our deaths by name?”

  “I would never have left for England if I’d known,” Lazare said. “I cannot see how you—we—stay here any longer. We must all leave.”

  “But how?” Roland snapped. “We have no blur.”

  A faint smile played over her lips. “In my house I found a small case, with a few vials of blur that Séguin had made.” Turning to Lazare, she explained as quickly as she could what the blur was and how it worked.

  “Where is it?” interrupted Roland. “Are they authentic?”

  “They are; there was one with my name on it, and I tried it. As for how I found it: the house showed me.” She felt foolish saying it, but neither of the magicians seemed surprised. “I’ve sent a note to my sister, asking her to send the box here.”

  “The note’s already gone by messenger,” Chandon said. “He will be very discreet, and make certain he’s not followed.”

  “How many vials, did you say?” Roland asked.

  “Four or five, perhaps. Not enough.”

  “Not for all the magicians of France,” Chandon said. “Or even for us, considering how quickly it wears off. We may have to reduce our aspirations.”

  “One last thing.” As if she were following a thread that had been strung down hallway after hallway, she made her way through the labyrinth of all the things that had recently happened. She could only go forward by touch, but still, she was moving forward. “The book Blaise mentioned to me and Chandon? I believe it’s still at his shop. Perhaps that was why he was attacked at his shop before he was murdered. Someone else wants it. We must go to Les Mots Volants tonight and find it. Once we have it, we can make enough blur to get ourselves and every other magician out of France.”

  “It’s impossible,” Roland sniffed.

  “Why?” Lazare asked.

  Foudriard tapped one of the maps he’d been studying. “The Comité has spies throughout the city, some of them with great knowledge of magic and how to find it.”

  It made a terrible sense. “Blaise was expecting a visitor the night he was murdered. Comité members, do you think?” she asked.

  Foudriard nodded grimly. “And after Blaise’s death, there will be additional watchers around his shop. They might be expecting us.”

  “Especially if they’re also looking for the book,” Lazare said. “They may trust one of you will lead them to it, and voilà, they have both the book and a captive magician.”

  Camille nodded, considering. “There is another way into the shop, one where people might not be watching. A series of alleys leads away from the door that opens into his apartment—there’s a bookcase on hinges that acts as a door between the shop and his room. He led me out that way once, when he was worried about my safety.”

  “That sounds promising,” Lazare said.

  Chandon sat up. “And what if I have the key to that door?”

  Everyone stared. “You do?”

  “Blaise gave it to me the last time I saw him. In case, he said. I’m afraid I teased him mercilessly about it, which I now regret. I have it upstairs, quite safe.”

  “Bien. We go in that way, search the store—” Roland proposed.

  “But surely he would have hidden the book,” Lazare said, “if, as Camille says, he already felt threatened.”

  “It will be the needle in a haystack,” Roland said. “I say we divide up the blur you found, work wards on our houses, and flee.”

  “We must at least try.” Camille studied the faces of her friends, worn and harried by fatigue. “But it has to be tonight or we risk losing it forever. I can’t fathom why Odette would want it, but in the hands of the Comité—”

  “Burnt to a crisp,” said Chandon drily. “Anything in the book that they can use against us, they will. And then it’ll be thrown on a bonfire.”

  “That cannot be allowed to happen,” Lazare said. “I’m going with you.”

  “I hardly need convincing to dust off my sword,” Chandon said. “Strangely I feel as if I were born for this. Foudriard?”

  “Of course,” he said gravely. “It will be dangerous.”

  “But not to do anything will be even worse,” Camille said. “And you, Roland?”

  He raised his sharp brows. “If you insist.”

  While they had been talking, the messenger returned from Hôtel Séguin. He told them that Sophie and Rosier were both well, but that they’d searched through the wardrobe where Camille had put the valise and it was nowhere to be found. It was a hard blow.

  It was possible the house had hidden it, somehow. Things went missing all the time. But the disappearance of the box they so desperately needed—especially if this planned failed—changed everything. There was no safety net now.

  47

  They left once it was full dark.

  The crescent moon was rising, a scythe in the night sky, as Camille’s carriage rolled silently away from Bellefleur. The wheels and the horses’ hooves had been wrapped in rags and the quiet thump they made was unnatural, eerie. Inside, the curtains were drawn and none of them—not Lazare, Chandon, Foudriard, Roland or even Camille herself—dared open them. Only one lantern flickered in the carriage, and the shadows it threw made her companions’ faces unreadable. Roland’s white fingers danced nervously along his thigh, tapping out a rhythm only he knew.

  They could no longer wonder if the watchers of the Comité would be there, but where. How they might be avoided, and if they couldn’t, what those guards would do. Beyond that, she would not let herself think. Lazare was already wanted by the police. Chandon and Roland’s names were on the list. And Foudriard, steadfast, and dashing, would end his career with the National Guard. And though Rosier and Sophie were safe at the Hôtel Séguin, Camille knew that whatever happened to her affected them, too.

  But there was no other way. If they did not get the book, they would be trapped in Paris as the Comité’s fist tightened around them.

  As the carriage passed over the final bridge to the island, Lazare threaded his long fingers through hers. The warmth of him was all that tethered her to this moment, keeping her from racing through the wilds of her fear. It steadied her. She let herself rest her forehead on his shoulder and thought: In an hour, we’ll have found it. In an hour, we’ll be on our way home.

  Soon the carriage came to a stop at the street that ran behind Les Mots Volants. The houses that crowded the narrow lane were silent, their shutters closed.

  Roland peered out. “It’s too quiet. Even for this late in the evening.”

  “This entrance is as concealed as we could hope for. If there are watchers,” Foudriard pointed out, “they’ll be at the front of the shop. We should go in now.”

  “I don’t like it,” Roland said with a frown. “I will keep a look out from the carriage.”

  Irritated, Chandon snapped, “There is the coachman to do that, Roland. But if you must, fine. I would rather have at my side someone completely committed to this adventure than someone secretly hoping to sneak away.”

  “A Roland would not sneak.”

  “He had better not.” There was iron in Chandon’s voice. “If anything were to go wrong, this carriage needs to be here, waiting, ready to run. Keep your eyes and ears open, comprenez?” He pointed to the bell that hung inside the carriage to alert the driver. “And if you need to warn us, open the door and ring the bell.”

  “D’accord,” he agreed.

  “We have the key, and the lanterns?” Lazare asked.

  Camille held hers up. Once lit, it would provide only enough light to see by, but no more than that. Chandon showed them the key to
Blaise’s apartment. Brass, with a red warding ribbon threaded through the bow.

  “We’ll light them once we get inside,” Foudriard said. “I have the flint in my coat.”

  Silent as shadows, they left the carriage. Two small alleyways, the last with a crooked gate, and they’d reached the doorway of the apartment. Chandon fitted the key to the lock.

  “Strange,” he observed. “It is already open.” Blaise was always meticulous. Would he not have locked his door? Not if he didn’t have enough time. Not if he were being dragged away—

  “Careful,” Lazare whispered. “Someone else may have gone in ahead of us.”

  As silently as they could, one after another, the boys loosened their swords in their sheaths and they went in.

  As Foudriard lit his lantern, the tiny apartment flared into being around them. The air was bittersweet with the scent of magic. Bookcases towered all the way to the ceiling. His single bed haunted her: the pillows fluffed, the coverlet folded back as if he were about to come in, lie down to sleep, and dream of books. A sob caught in Camille’s throat; Lazare squeezed her hand. They were doing this to save their own lives, of course. But she was also doing this for Blaise. What he’d worked for would not be in vain.

  Between the apartment and the shop was a door that opened onto a short hall, two or three paces long. Slowly they crammed themselves into the passage, their breathing unbearably loud, until Foudriard finally pushed open the bookcase door.

  Beyond lay the shop. Waiting. Foudriard held up his light.

  It was as if a storm had raged through the room.

  Books yanked from shelves lay torn in heaps on the floor. Papers littered every surface. Any order that had existed before was utterly destroyed.

  “What now?” Camille asked.

  A white cat emerged from behind the counter and pressed against Chandon’s shins.