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