Everything That Burns

by Gita Trelease

She ran.

  Wishing she had but a drop of blur, she raced through the edges of the crowd until she found a reeking alleyway no wider than her arms outstretched. She didn’t dare go farther before changing—she had to make it to the stage at the square’s far end, and she couldn’t be dressed like this. She was so clearly a prisoner. Desperately she hoped her friends would be there, masked and ready to take over the puppets’ parts. What roles they’d play she did not know, only that she was to be the white bird. Mademoiselle l’Oiseau.

  From the square, voices echoed, shouting for the magician to turn herself in.

  Steady now. She had made it out of the tumbrel. That was the first step. She had freed Giselle and the others. Second step. Now, the third. Transformation. Her stomach convulsed, and she was sick in the alley. Almost there, she told herself, as she wiped her mouth with her sleeve. She spat in her hands and rubbed the painted tear off her cheek and the prison grime from her forehead. Almost there.

  Out of long habit, Camille raised her hand to her shoulder, where she had always pinned the diamond brooch. But her fingers touched only silk. In her confusion, she’d forgotten she wasn’t wearing her enchanted dress. How had she thought she would change this dress? It would need blood, she knew. What had she done with Claudine’s little knife? A wave of panic coursed through her as she looked at her empty hands. That too was gone. For one dizzying moment, she stared at the filthy ground for something, anything, she could use.

  In the manure lay a black nail come loose from a horseshoe.

  She picked it up, then spat on it to clean it as best she could. Beyond the alley, the crowd exulted. She must hurry.

  The nail was so small. Only a bit larger than the point of the brooch. But it was also dull and dirty. Gagging, she set the point against her arm.

  What had Blaise written to her? Magic is not in the blood.

  She’d thought he meant magic was not in the family, not something passed down. That it was not something inherent in her, but instead, something she could choose.

  But he might have meant something else. She let the nail fall from her fingers.

  In the bright square, the gilded carriage had trundled away. Police were spreading through the crowd, offering shouted rewards for the escaped convicts. And somewhere, everywhere, was the Comité, tightening its net.

  So little time. Pressing her palms against the bodice of her dress, she steadied her breath. She stared at her blackened fingers. They had been this way before, dirty from digging up nails. Before she’d worked the glamoire, before she met Lazare, before she had changed everything. Had it been only a dream and now she was back where she’d started, with only empty hands and a burning desire to transform?

  No.

  Something had changed. She had become someone new. Stronger, more whole. She thought of the magicians’ blackened fingers in the portraits, the way the gold leaf had worn off over time to reveal the sooty underpainting. That darkness hadn’t faded; it had always been part of them.

  Blaise hadn’t worked magic with his hands. The blood she had seen him spill to read those warded books? It was only an outward sign. She’d been wrong to believe that magic was in that. It was something much deeper that had cajoled those books to speak and made paper rise and burn like stars. He’d worked magic with his generous and sympathetic heart. He’d worked it with his whole being.

  Deep inside, her sorrow rose.

  At times she’d lost her way. She was flawed, no Jeanne d’Arc. Nevertheless she strove for good amid this sorrow.

  As feeling fevered through her, like fire in her veins, she felt her magic soar.

  White, Camille imagined. White, glittering with glass and set with pearls. She pictured the doves that swooped from the rafters in the workshop and the glad flash of their wings. Like the crystals of snow in Blaise’s hair. Like her pamphlets floating over Paris.

  Feathers without number.

  She spilled no blood. She didn’t make the dress turn anymore than she sent blood to her heart or squeezed her lungs when she ran. But where her palm touched the bodice, the silk began to change. Around the shape of her dirty hand, the silk lost its color: white as ash.

  I am this, she told herself. This is who I am, this is my story. Listening to her, the dress made itself over: snow-white silk, overlaid with hundreds of dancing white plumes. Lengths and lengths of it shimmering ghostlike in the alley’s gloom.

  Until the Comité realized she’d worked magic—and the Comité would, if they caught her—she’d be safest as part of the spectacle. She had only to get there. The crooked lane led away into the gloom, along the twists and turns of Paris’s labyrinth.

  There was no time to waste. She picked up her skirts and disappeared.

  54

  The white-and-gold carriage had come to a halt at the far end of the square, near a low wooden stage. Over it was raised a red curtain; behind it stood a painted backdrop of a gray sky dazzled with snow. A white fawn pranced across the platform, paused on nimble hooves, blew a horn, and ran on.

  In the crowd of spectators, a little girl pulled on her mother’s skirts. “Tiens, Maman! A play!”

  For on the square’s opposite end, far from the gallows, a band of players had begun to perform. Les Merveilleux were known for their extraordinarily lifelike puppets, and if the performers today were not puppets but flesh-and-blood actors, no one seemed to mind. Dressed in flowing white garments, they stepped disjointedly on slender stilts. Their faces were painted alabaster and decorated with pips from every suit—hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs—like the beauty marks women at court used to wear in another age, long ago. From behind the snowy sky, sheer curtains billowed and parted. A princess appeared. She wore a gold crown on her golden hair, and when a masked highway man appeared, she curtsied low to him, making the crowd applaud. He wore a white mask and a red beard. When he drew his sword, the princess swooned on her spindly stilts as the people shouted: Ahhh! Be careful!

  Behind the curtain, Rosier briskly hooked Camille into a harness and clipped it to a line. “Up!” he commanded. “Do not think twice!”

  The rope pulled her and she flew. As an enormous white bird, she snatched the golden crown off the princess’s golden head before soaring away. The crowd roared its approval. The princess fainted into the highwayman’s arms. He bent and kissed her. Behind them grew a forest. From between its black trunks tiptoed a ghostly wolf who disappeared as the lovers stared at one another, deeply in love.

  Between the princess and the highwayman unfurled an enormous bouquet of the reddest roses. As if they were spent dandelions, the princess blew on them, and the crimson petals floated out over the crowd in a rain of red paper.

  The players took their bows. The crowd applauded: Encore! Encore!

  A rain of rose petals, Camille thought from her dizzying perch on a window ledge. Or blood. The window beside her was open; Rosier had promised it would be when, far below, behind the golden carriage, he’d strapped white wings to her back. You’re almost there. Madame who lives upstairs was happy to help make the players’ performance a success, as long as I gave her a front-row seat. They will all be entranced, he’d said when she’d choked out that the Comité was there. Trust me—they will never see you in this feathered dress.

  Below her on the cobblestones, the white-costumed players were already stepping into a carriage, waving adieu. She had only a minute to join them. Through the holes in her snow-white bird’s mask, she took in the square, where every red-cloaked man might be a guard of the Comité. Casting one last look over Paris—dirty and crowded, dangerous and beautiful, her beloved city of marvels—she unclipped herself from the line and slipped through the window into a stranger’s apartment. A tea set sprigged with pink roses waited on a polished table, like at the queen’s tea parties at Versailles. A thousand years ago, in another life.

  Down the stair’s tight spiral she ran, the tips of her wings trailing behind her. Dashing through a courtyard where a dog frantically barked she wa
s suddenly in the street, where her own carriage, now painted white and gold with a banner spelling out LES MERVEILLEUX, waited. Bowing to the spectators who applauded her, and calling out brightly, as Rosier had suggested, “Next show in half an hour!” she made her way through the throng.

  As she approached the carriage, Rosier, the masked highwayman, jumped off the driver’s box and flung open the door with a flourish. “Entrez, Mademoiselle l’Oiseau!”

  “I’m coming! Perhaps I should fly instead, if you are so impatient?” she said, flapping her wings in the air. She dared not look past the spectators in the first few rows for fear of seeing black hats. Play the part, she told herself. Disappear into it. Pulling a tiny crown from her hair, she tossed it into the crowd: one final piece of misdirection.

  “Mine!” someone shrieked, and soon they were all scrambling for it.

  “Get in,” Rosier urged from under his highwayman’s mask. “We’re leaving immediately.” He pulled a cord on her harness that collapsed her wings, and she scrambled inside, pulling the door shut. Through the window she saw him leap onto the box and take the horses’ reins. The whip snapped. She hadn’t time to sit down before the carriage jolted forward and tossed her against the wall in a flurry of feathers.

  “Ouch!” cried Sophie from behind her princess mask. “You’re crushing me!”

  “Pardon,” Camille said, finding a spot next to the white wolf. The carriage picked up speed. Buildings shuffled past the window, faster and faster. “We did it,” she said, slowly, as if she didn’t yet believe it. Tears pricked behind her mask. “And everyone is here?”

  Sophie’s smile wavered. “How beautiful your dress is!”

  Taking a steadying breath, Camille took in the carriage with its familiar green upholstery. Had they truly done it? Risked all, and escaped? There was Sophie, untying her princess mask, and there was black Fantôme in his wicker basket, curled like a comma alongside Blaise’s white cat. Beside her sat the wolf, his furred mask a hood that covered his entire head. She reached out and took his white-gloved hand, felt its answering squeeze.

  He was here! Her heart soared. “My love, wherever have you been?”

  The wolf’s head tipped back, as if surprised.

  She laughed and threw her arms around him. “Oh, it doesn’t matter now—I am only so glad you made it in time!” But in her embrace Lazare did not feel like himself. Too narrow, too compact. “Lazare?”

  Sophie reached for her. “Camille—”

  There was, she saw now, an empty space next to Sophie. Where was the bear from the forest scene? “Someone is missing! Where is the white bear? Was that Chandon’s role? Or is he on the box with Rosier? And—Foudriard? Is he riding postillion?”

  He couldn’t be. She would have seen him astride one of the carriage horses when they’d come into the square. Bewildered, Camille stared at Sophie, then at the wolf, trying to grasp what was happening. “Why do you not say anything? You’re frightening me! Tell me what’s happened!”

  Wearily, the wolf pulled off his hood. But instead of Lazare’s amber-flecked eyes, it was Chandon’s hazel ones she saw. “We don’t know where they are. We left word as best we could, but we had no sure way to tell them the plan.” He swallowed hard, as if not saying the words could keep them from being true. “We waited all morning. But Lazare didn’t come. Neither did Foudriard.”

  No.

  “Camille,” he said warningly, “I’ve decided to believe that they are together, and they will catch us on the way. Do not say different, I beg you.”

  Camille banged her fist against the ceiling. “Stop!” she shouted. “Stop the coach!”

  But the carriage hurtled on. Sophie dragged her down to the bench. “Sit, or you’ll only hurt yourself!”

  Camille reached for the door handle, but Chandon held her back. “Let me out!” she cried. “I cannot go without him! Why did you not wait longer?”

  Anguish contorted Sophie’s face. “Rosier feared we’d be arrested if we waited. Lazare is wanted by the police! His face is plastered on posters all over the city. And the Comité,” she said helplessly, “made it impossible to linger. It was you or them.”

  As Paris rattled by beyond the window—tilting houses and brash new buildings and ancient churches and squares—Camille’s head sank into her hands. As she wept, she felt the dress stir around her, breathing more extravagant white feathers into being. It was beautiful magic, but it was no consolation for the desolation of this. To have finally escaped, and to be leaving him behind.

  “Be brave of heart, mon petit oiseau,” Chandon murmured as he wrapped an arm around her shaking shoulders. “The game is not yet over.”

  55

  As the carriage hurried through the city, Camille peered out the circular window in the carriage’s back wall. No red cloaks, no police. Perhaps, Camille considered, they were still searching the crowd at the Place de Grève. Perhaps they had given up.

  They had nearly reached the western gate when suddenly the coach slowed. The horses’ hooves thudded on packed earth, their harness jingled as they tossed their heads, pulling against the reins.

  “What is it?” Camille wondered. “Shall I’ll open the window and ask Rosier—?”

  Chandon held her back. “Careful.”

  She lifted only the edge of the tasseled curtain. Outside loomed a stone wall with a closed wooden gate set into it. Beside it milled several policemen who were inspecting the carts and riders ahead of them in line. “They are speaking to everyone who wishes to pass through.”

  “They will be checking our passports.” Sophie opened her purse and pulled out the forged document. Her hands shook and she dropped it in her lap. “What if—”

  “Our passports are perfect.” Camille trusted Henriette knew her trade. “But we must appear as performers who travel like this often.” She tied the white bird face on so it sat on top of her head, its fall of feathers covering her conspicuous hair. Sophie did the same.

  “Not I.” His cheeks flushed, Chandon flung his wolf mask across his knee. “With the windows closed it’s so hot in here that no one in his right mind, player or not, would wear this loathsome hood for any longer than he had to.”

  The carriage crept forward and stopped again. “How many more are there ahead of us?” Sophie asked.

  “One cart, and a group of riders.” And there, beside a wagon full of wine barrels, two guards in black hats and crimson cloaks. “Dieu,” she said low as fear clawed through her. “They’re here.”

  “Stop that!” Sophie yanked the curtain closed. “We are players on a stage, bringing marvels to the people. There’s no reason for us to be afraid of the Comité.”

  “But if they recognize me—” Camille tried to push back the terror that rose in her as the carriage trundled closer to the gate. Guards dragging her away. And what would happen to Sophie, Chandon, and Rosier for traveling with an accused magician? In that moment she was glad that Lazare, at least, was somewhere else.

  “They won’t.” Chandon rummaged beneath the seats and uncovered a bottle of wine. Sloshing it about the carriage, he drenched her and Sophie’s dresses as well as the fur of his white wolf costume. “Addendum to the plan: we are to be drunk, and foolish, though respectful, and they will be so annoyed with us that they will leave in disgust—”

  The door was wrenched wide by a policeman. Behind him, their hats shadowing their faces, loomed two Comité guards. One of their monstrous dogs pushed his head into the carriage and, as his black lips pulled away from his yellow teeth, inhaled. His nose twitched, as if scenting for magic.

  The wine. Fervently she hoped it would be enough to cover the bitter ash scent of the magic she had worked.

  “Passports, s’il vous plaît.”

  In his hands, the papers dwindled, insignificant and powerless. Cursorily, he paged through them. “You are all performers?”

  As one, they inclined their heads. Chandon burped. “Pardon!”

  “Drunk and debauched,” one of the C
omité guards said as the dog growled. “And what is your play?”

  What could they possibly say? Well, monsieur, it is a fantasy, a fairy tale. A story of love and wishes and a longing for beauty—a play about hope and possibility. She knew they would consider it antirevolutionary in the extreme. Hadn’t Sophie and Rosier already been warned?

  She remembered how in the Tennis Court at Versailles the members of the Assembly had raised their arms in a Roman salute. That was the kind of thing they valued. Virtue. Reason.

  Before she lost her nerve, she said, “It is an ancient play, messieurs. Popular in the time of Caesar, it’s a story of a transformation and hope, a virtuous parable for our time.”

  The Comité guard shoved the policeman out of the way and leaned into the carriage. “Those costumes are an insult to progress. Fantastical. Magical.” He spat the word out as if it would kill him. Beside him, eager saliva dripped from the dog’s mouth.

  Steady, she told herself, but she could not stop her frenzied, galloping heart.

  “But, monsieur!” Sophie gave him her most winning smile. “The only magic in the play is true love. In my role as the princess, I give up my crown to marry a reformed highwayman. He is taught a lesson about being honest and hardworking, and I am humbled to see the wrong in my royal life.”

  The guard grunted. Camille clenched her hand in her skirts to keep herself from screaming. They were so close. To go back to the terror of the jail, or worse than that, back to the black shape of the gallows—

  “Here,” Chandon slurred, taking a huge gulp of wine and holding the bottle out to the guard. “Want a sip?”

  The guard’s lips thinned in disgust. “And France is to be transformed for the benefit of you costumed fools? Take your play out of Paris. It is not wanted here.” He threw their passports at them and, yanking his dog away, closed the door.

  Chandon put a finger to his lips and they sat in silence as, on the box, Rosier clucked at the horses. The carriage jerked forward. As the ancient walls of Paris rose up around them, the crowd parted, the gate creaked open, someone shouted, “Look! A circus!” But no one stopped them. It felt like years that they sat in the hot carriage, not daring to move, as the wheels rolled on. When they finally were out of sight of the gate, Rosier cracked the whip and sent the horses into a gallop, racing west.