Everything That Burns Page 24

  “The Comité?”

  “Not just them.” She hesitated. “Someone I love doesn’t understand.”

  “I remember when you said you didn’t want them to know,” he said quietly. “But please understand: magic is only a curse if you think it so. Think of the two sides of one coin. Or a mountain: shadow on one side, sun on the other. What would happen if you took away the shadow?”

  A person wasn’t a mountain, she wanted to argue. A person did not need darkness. “That person would be full of light,” she said stubbornly.

  “That person would not exist.”

  “Magicians love riddles.”

  Blaise’s mouth twitched. “Some things are best understood that way. We try to keep secrets safe in our own heads. But heads can be dangerous places. Full of anguish and sinkholes and tempests that make us feel lost. A riddle is a way to get it out, and keep it safe.”

  It was true that her head was full of storms. She wanted to be her true self, but she didn’t know what that was. She relished the power of her magic, but it frightened her too—a dark and creeping shadow forever bound to her. But also, she thought, a strength. Uncontrollable it might be, but it was still power.

  Frustrated, she picked up a square tome that lay open on the seat of an armchair. Its pages were covered with a dense mirror-writing. “What’s this one, Blaise?”

  “A history of magic.”

  “Is that what you’re working on?”

  He propped his chin in his hand. “There is no one history. Still, I hope to trace a line, like in a family tree, to the beginnings of magic, and find what lies at its root. The problem is that histories are simply stories,” he added, “stories we tell ourselves about what we believe. Or what we want to believe. It makes my task harder.”

  One thin page of book rolled slowly inward; absently, she smoothed it flat. “Are you saying what we know about magic isn’t all true? That it might have a … secret history?”

  “Just so. For example, in the oldest books of magic, like the medieval Le Livre d’Eau, there’s no mention of sorrow as a catalyst for magic.”

  “What?” Camille struggled to understand. Wasn’t sorrow the way all magic was worked? “But what would they have used instead—”

  Beyond the shuttered windows, in the nighttime street, footsteps echoed. The scuff of a heel on cobblestone as someone halted outside the door.

  The doorknob rattled violently.

  Blaise slid off his chair and crouched down behind the counter, making himself very small. His panicked eyes met Camille’s as he mouthed: Warded. Slowly, she too sank to her knees. The door wrenched in its frame, but it held. Still as prey they waited, until the noises outside the shop faded away.

  “Blaise,” she hissed, “what was that?”

  “You must go. Strange people keep coming into the shop. Not the Comité. But whoever they are, they are looking for magic. Sniffing, as if they might smell it.” Agitated, he said, “Trust me, please. We need to move faster to make the blur, even if it means starting tomorrow, before the Comte de Roland arrives.”

  She could feel it, a snare drawing tight.

  He glanced once more at the door. “Go now, please. I would blame myself if anything were to hurt you.”

  She hated to leave him alone when he was so afraid. One of the clocks in the shop had already begun to chime nine o’clock. “Please, Blaise—won’t you join us for dinner at Les Deux Sœurs? It’ll only be my sister and our friend Rosier.”

  “A collector has made an appointment with me tonight.”

  “So late?”

  “He doesn’t wish to be seen in daylight, bringing magic books to sell. He says he has a wagonful—I will buy them all. Perhaps there will be answers there. And even if not, I couldn’t resist them.” The corners of his mouth quirked up in a rueful smile. “It can’t be helped, can it? We are who we are, n’est-ce pas?”

  Are we? That was precisely what she needed to know, and she hardly felt closer to an answer than she had before. “Come meet us afterward, please? But if not, I’ll see you very soon at Bellefleur.”

  Promising to stop at the restaurant after he was finished, he waved her into his apartment behind the secret bookcase door—a small white room, quiet as a held breath, books everywhere, a single bed neatly made—and then out into the alleyway behind the shop. “It’s safer this way. À bientôt.”

  As she waved good-bye to him, so still in his ghostly clothes, she felt more at a loss than when she had come. She craved answers, and it seemed that in all of Paris, there were none to be had. And time, Blaise had said, was running out.

  38

  Snow had begun to fall, thinly, as if it could not make up its mind.

  With Blaise’s unease like a chill wind at her back, she made her way toward Aux Deux Sœurs. The restaurant lay close by, and when she found the street and saw the star lanterns beckoning in its windows, she walked even faster toward its warmth. Inside, candlelight flickered on faces and the hum of conversation and laughter filled the room. The tables were crowded with diners drinking wine or tucking into the café’s famous roasted meats. At the back of the room, snug against the paneled wall, sat Sophie and Rosier. When Sophie saw Camille, she waved happily.

  The way they were sitting suggested that a fresh proposal from d’Auvernay was probably not what Sophie wanted to tell Camille about. She guessed it was something momentous about Les Merveilleux—or, she thought, as she embraced them and noticed there was already champagne on the table, perhaps it was something else entirely.

  “So kind of you to come, Camille!” Rosier held up the bottle. “Some wine?”

  “S’il te plaît!” She set an empty glass in front of him. “Tell me, what are we celebrating?”

  “I wish Lazare could be here,” Sophie said, wistful.

  “I’m certain he wishes he could be, too.” Camille gave her a warning look. “Now tell me what’s happening!”

  “You must have already guessed.” Sophie reached across the table and took Camille’s hand. “We’re to be married!”

  Her eyes brimmed with sudden tears. “I hoped, but I didn’t dare believe it!” she said as she threw herself out of her seat and kissed them both, several times. “I am so happy for you!”

  “Merci, ma sœur!” Sophie swept away a few tears of her own. “Merci for everything.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You went along with my plan!” Rosier said. “Of course, I revealed everything to Sophie before I asked for her hand—not that she didn’t already know! And, Camille, you helped us hope.”

  “There was that time we talked in the courtyard, when I was ready to throw it all away,” Sophie said seriously, “and you reminded me of what was important, and of who I truly am. Just like Charles Rosier did.”

  He took Sophie’s little hand and kissed it reverently. “I am the luckiest boy in the world.”

  “And I,” said Camille, “am so happy in your happiness.” As she took a sip of wine, felt the bubbles rise, she felt her heart lighten. There was so much wrong, but so much right. One magical book had been found and surely, despite Blaise’s worries, others could be, too. Answers were coming. They had the vials of blur, Odette was gone … and now there was this promise between two people she loved. It made her wonder if she and Lazare might mend also what they had broken. Was it so much in pieces? Couldn’t feeling bring things back together?

  Each of these thoughts was a candle to wish on, a flame to drive out fear and darkness. It felt as though, crowded around this tiny table, they had a chandelier’s worth of possibilities. “Have you set a date?”

  “As soon as possible?” Sophie said, and Rosier laughed.

  “We expect Lazare back any day, non?” he asked. “We would not do it without him.”

  “I cannot say when he will return. Besides, you did promise you would have a long engagement.”

  “I reserve the right to change my mind! And who knows?” Sophie said slyly. “I have always dreamed of a double
wedding—”

  Just then the door to the restaurant swung wide open. Snow swirled in and hung suspended in the candlelight. Into the room stepped a rough man in a tricorne hat, gesturing wildly at the patrons at their tables. Conversation faltered. The air hummed with waiting, and then the man shouted, “Stand and follow me, you who are patriots! A mob seeks justice!”

  Chairs squealed as people got to their feet, some crowding together inside, others pushing to get out. Camille, Rosier, and Sophie stared at one another in horror. “What shall we do?” Sophie cried.

  Camille clasped Sophie’s hand. She thought of Giselle, how the crowd had formed and then dispersed. “Perhaps we can help? But we must stay together.”

  They pushed their way past overturned chairs and half-empty glasses of cider to reach the door. Once out in the street, they saw several customers hurrying away, heads down.

  “What’s happening?” Sophie said, a catch in her voice.

  Suddenly they heard it: angry voices echoing down the island’s narrow streets. Shouting, the pounding of feet. The clash of metal. A sharp, jagged tune, played on a horn. The door of the café burst open again and several men excitedly shoved their way outside. “Let’s go! It is the Comité!”

  “Rosier?” She pushed back the fear that threatened to crush her. The Comité abroad at midnight could not be good. “What’s happening?”

  “Citoyens,” Rosier called to the men, “tell me, what is underway?”

  But the men raced away, kicking up a fine spray of snow. “To the tree!”

  “What tree?” Sophie demanded.

  The tree at the end of the island.

  The tree where she’d waited for Giselle to give her the tray. The tree with the list of names nailed to its trunk, shining like the palm of a white hand. “The old oak, by the well!”

  In the direction she pointed, the invisible crowd roared. Screams rose above the rooftops. “We have him now!” a man’s voice shouted. Stuttering to a halt, the horn released a triumphant shriek. Then someone cried, “À la lanterne! String him up! Death to the magician!”

  Magician.

  Dread, icy and black, rushed through Camille. The crowd had come from the direction of Les Mots Volants.

  “Blaise!” she choked out. Grabbing her skirts, she ran. Underfoot the snow was slick, treacherous.

  “Camille, wait!” Sophie called.

  “Hurry!” she shouted over her shoulder. “We must stop them!”

  She didn’t wait to see what they would do. Her legs were nightmare slow, her heart a frantic timpani, but still she ran. Toward the torches, and the terror.

  39

  Down the narrow streets, toward the river, toward the tree. Running until she thought her heart would explode. Soon they caught the tail of the crowd, pushed their way through. It was a gruesome carnival of laughter and terror and anger. Torches that made faces into masks with vacant holes for eyes. Deep in the crowd, the crimson flare of Comité cloaks. The baying of hounds. And all the while, like a drumbeat, the restless chant: “À la lanterne, magician!”

  She didn’t know what she would do if she found him.

  How she would get to him, how to take him away from these people—his neighbors—who wanted to kill him. Shoulders bumped hers, boots crushed her feet. Not tall enough to see over the heads of the crowd, she’d lost sight of Sophie and Rosier.

  And she had not seen Blaise at all.

  “Let me through!” She tried to elbow past the people, but they shoved her back. Their hands grabbed at her, pulling her hair, mauling scraping stamping—not as separate people, but as one thing. A monster with one mind, bent on destruction. “Stop this!” she cried.

  The crowd’s roar was thunder. “Magicians deserve to die!”

  Where is he?

  “Traitors!” another shrieked. “We will see his limbs ripped from his body, like traitors of old!”

  Blaise!

  “Enough!” shouted Rosier, suddenly behind her. He had a stick in one hand and brandished a sharp, short knife—where had it come from?—in the other. “Let us through!”

  The people saw the knife and fell back. A space cleared around them. At the end of it spiked the forked shape of the tree, another crowd chanting and screaming beneath it. Rosier forged ahead, swinging his stick. They were close now.

  “Blaise!” she shouted. “We’re coming!”

  The lamp in the square shone through the tree’s spreading fingers, shining on something that hung from one of the oak’s low-growing branches. It spun, very slowly, as if eddying in a wind.

  A ghost.

  Camille was running, sliding, shoving her way through the jeering crowd milling around the trunk. It could not be. Let it not be. Her head and heart were a storm of no.

  Behind her, Rosier cried out, “Don’t!”

  But she had already seen.

  A body hung from the tree. Pale suit rumpled, brightened by the mob’s swarming torches. Slowly, it swung toward her. Blood clotted the ends of white-blond hair—

  Black spots teemed in her vision. She grasped at Rosier to steady herself. Around her shoulders, a supporting arm: Sophie was there, too. Pupils wide with fear, her lower lip trembling.

  “It’s Blaise!” Camille heard herself scream, stumbling toward the tree. “Quickly! Help me!” She grasped Blaise’s body at the waist to ease the awful tension on the rope around his neck.

  “We’re going to cut him down,” she heard Rosier say.

  “Foolish girl!” said the owner of the café. “He’s already dead, and what’s worse, he’s a magician. You don’t want to get caught up in this—”

  “He is a human being!” Camille spat.

  With his knife, Rosier sawed at the rope. When it finally unraveled, she staggered under Blaise’s weight, sinking to the ground with him in her arms. His head lolled like a broken puppet’s. “Wake up!” she cried. “Please hear me, Blaise!” Wake up!

  Her scream echoed back to her from the walls of an empty room, a younger self shouting these words at Papa as he lay doll-eyed in his bed, his skin blistered with weeping pox, the cords in his neck tight as wires. She had chafed his hands and patted his face and sobbed, but even the hot tears falling on his face had done nothing to revive him. He was gone, the spirit emptied from his eyes like water trickles from a cupped palm.

  Camille’s tears made tiny useless spots where they fell on Blaise’s silk suit. How had magicians believed tears had any power? What good were they if they could not bring those they loved back to life?

  “Why would they do this?” she raged. “He was so kind and gentle—he never harmed anyone!”

  Policeman were yelling all around them, breaking up the crowd. Rosier kneeled beside her. Very gently, first one, then the other, he closed Blaise’s eyelids with his thumb. “What’s this on his hands?”

  They were ebony from fingertip to wrist. She touched his palm and her finger came away black with soot. “To show he was killed for being a magician.”

  With his handkerchief, he wiped away her tears. “We must go, Camille. I’ll take you both home. The police have come; they will take his body to the morgue. And”—he said in her ear—“Sophie told me. It’s not safe for you here. The Comité’s arrival is imminent.”

  She let herself be lifted to her feet. It was then that she noticed the spot of white on the oak’s gray bark.

  A piece of paper, nailed to the tree. She ripped it loose.

  It was another list of names.

  Ten, twenty … her vision stuttered, she could not tell how many there were. Most but not all were aristocrats, and a few had a new designation after their names.

  Eugène de Tolland, Comte de Roland. Magician.

  A cry of anguish tore at Camille’s throat when she saw, several names below, Étienne Bellan, Marquis de Chandon. Magician. She raced through the others, dreading to see her name, but not finding it.

  At the very bottom was written: Blaise Delouvet. Magician.

  His name was run thr
ough with a ragged line, and underneath was scrawled a single word: MORT.

  40

  It was well past midnight when they returned home.

  The vast house was still and silent, as if it knew what had happened.

  Rosier promised to stay in a guest bedroom, to be close by if he was needed, and with Adèle’s encouragement and aid, he gave Sophie a sleeping draught. She lay terrifyingly still in his arms as he carried her upstairs. Watching them go up together, Camille longed for Lazare. She wanted to disappear in him, for him to enfold her in his arms so that she might press her ear to his chest and listen to his steady heartbeat instead of her broken one.

  But there was no one to comfort her. So while the servants readied Rosier’s room, Camille went alone to the attic.

  There in a towering wardrobe, under lock and key, hung the enchanted court dress.

  In the wavering gleam of her candle, the fabric glowed as if with an inner light. When she took it off its hook, it rustled and slithered into her arms. It still smelled of magic: burned wood and bitter ash, sorrow and fear—and power. Once she’d not been able to abide its scent and had dabbed it away with cologne. But now, for a reason she could only dimly fathom, she inhaled deeply. The smoky scent eased the ache within her.

  In her arms it had the weight and shape of a body.

  She knew the servants would think it strange when she came down the attic stairs, the dress’s train trailing after her, leaking magic. But she was past caring. “Madame?” Adèle called after her. “May I—”

  Camille shut her bedroom door behind her with a click. There she shrugged off her ruined fur-lined pelisse. Tearing off the striped dress, she shoved it behind the Chinese screen. She wished never to see it again.

  Outside, snow sighed against the shutters.

  Once she’d promised herself she would never wear the enchanted dress again, but now that promise felt as if it had been made by someone else. Inside she felt frighteningly empty, as if at any moment she might drift away. Like a husk, a dried leaf. And so she slipped on the heavy court dress.