in her head made it hard to think. She touched her jaw, tentatively. It was tender from her chin to her ear. Someone had hit her. Hard. That she remembered. The door to the room had a barred window in it, and through it she saw two figures, hurrying down a long, dim hall.
Sophie? Rosier? Was she in a hospital?
She pushed up onto her elbows and coughed. Beneath her was a narrow lumpy mattress covered in rough blue-striped ticking. In a corner stood a small wooden table and a straight-backed chair. One of her shoes lay on the other side of the room. Her stockings, she saw, were torn, the skirts of her dress scorched. She reeked of fire, as if she’d spent the night sleeping in the cinders. Slowly the evening came back to her. Bellefleur. The plan to get the blue book. The trap that had been laid for them. The shop, and everything in it, destroyed.
Beside her was a tin cup. Her hands shaking, she filled it from a clay vessel and drank. Were the others with her? Had they all fled? Lazare—he had tried to prevent them taking her. But what had happened to him?
The door creaked open and a man in a gray uniform stuck his head in. “Vicomtesse de Séguin?”
“Where am I?”
The man snorted. “La Petite Force.”
Prison.
Numbly, she remembered when her family had lived on the rue de Bretagne, and then on the rue Charlot, the sprawling prison had never been far away. She’d never liked to pass along the streets where its entrances lay. Superstitious, Papa had called her, laughing off her fear. But it had never gone away. Now she was inside. A prisoner, charged with treason.
But how did they know to charge her with working magic? What proof could they have? “I’ve been wrongfully imprisoned!”
The guard made a scolding sound, as if everyone in the prison claimed the same thing and he was tired of it. “Save it for trial. A visitor is here to see you. I’ll show her in?”
She tried to peer past the guard. “My sister?”
“Odette Leblanc.”
It could not be. Though she could see that it made a kind of terrible sense. After all, Odette would have seen her arrested. But why come and gloat?
Odette stepped neatly around the guard and into Camille’s cell. She wore her usual black clothes, pressed and clean, not at all reeking of smoke from the fire. “Leave us, please,” she said to the guard. With a knowing smirk at Camille, the guard sauntered away, swinging his ring of keys.
“How dare you come here,” Camille hissed. “Were you the one who called the Comité to the bookshop? What has happened to my friends?”
Odette crossed her arms. “So many questions! You will have your answers soon enough.”
Her gloating smirk made Camille regret having asked her. It was as if she’d given her an unintended gift. “Tell me what you want or go.”
“What I want?” Tapping her fingers against the stone wall, she pretended to think. “I want for all you magicians to die.”
Camille stared. How had she discovered this? How long had she known?
“You think I don’t know anything about magic?” Odette’s voice was a blade. “Let me tell you—I do. And I want you to suffer as magicians have made the people of France suffer. But instead of being strung up from a tree, I want you to get your justice in public, so there can be no question about it.”
“Justice?” The word burned on her tongue. “As if anything the Comité or the king has done has been just.”
“Nothing can equal the pain your kind has inflicted on the people of France,” Odette sneered. “You are bloodsuckers, sinners, and evildoers. You take what isn’t yours and you bend it to your evil ways.”
“You’ve been reading too many anti-magician pamphlets,” Camille said levelly. “What have I ever taken of yours?”
“You don’t even know?” she mocked. “It meant nothing to you, I suppose. Everything is easy for a magician. You simply happened to meet the girls, write a pamphlet using magic—and then!” She snapped her fingers. “Voilà, you were Jeanne d’Arc of the Revolution! Going to parties, draped in the tricolor!”
Dread churned in her gut. How did Odette know?
She stabbed her finger at Camille. “That should have been me. I worked for it.”
This was a delusion. “Why couldn’t we have worked together?” Camille asked. “The girls love you—”
Her gray eyes narrowed. “Not anymore. Did you seduce them with your magic and turn them against