“Help? You are pathetic.” Odette grabbed Camille’s wrist and twisted it. “They’ll remember who I am, once you are gone. While I struggled to pay for my pamphlets to be printed, I saw how many pamphlets you sold. I let myself believe you were better than I. Then I discovered it had nothing to do with what you said or what you wrote.” Odette’s voice burned with righteous anger. “You succeeded because you are a magician.”
“Let go of me,” she said, but Odette only hardened her grip.
How had she seen so deep into her heart? For wasn’t this what she’d once believed herself? That it was nothing but a spell she’d cast, that whatever she created would turn back to scraps of twisted metal—less than nothing.
No, she told herself. Not anymore. That was not what magic was.
Bending Camille’s wrist backward, Odette forced her against the wall. Her face was hard, and hungry for the pain she was inflicting. “How I love having you right in the palm of my hand. Some say Justice wears a blindfold, and only cares that the scales are even. I think Justice keeps her thumb on the scale.”
Sophie had suspected this was who Odette was, but Camille had believed she could do good by being kind to her. “What changed? When you saw my house and what I had?”
“That?” Odette scoffed. “The money you got by a convenient marriage? I knew you had money from the beginning. I only had to get into your house to see if you actually were a magician,” she spat. As if magician were poison on her tongue.
Camille tried again to wrench free, but only succeeded in pulling Odette toward her. Their faces were a hand’s width apart, so close she could count the freckles on Odette’s cheeks. See the gold and brown lines in the gray irises of her eyes. Feel Odette’s breath on her own mouth.
“But why?”
“So I could write about it, of course.” Angrily, she stepped back. She yanked at her sleeves, which had ridden up, exposing the black ink on her wrist. Camille had always thought it was ink from her pen, or her press. But it was a tattoo of a tiny bird.
Where had she seen one just like it?
The scrap of paper caught in the gates of the Hôtel Séguin. The anti-magician pamphlets she and Chandon had talked about, the writer’s mark a little black bird. A flock of them, descending on Paris. “You?” she choked. “You wrote those pamphlets?”
Odette’s mouth twitched into a gratified smile. As if she had been waiting only for this: for Camille to truly see her.
All this time, Odette had been working against magicians? But why? What had brought them together? How tangled it had become. She thought of the lines on her palm Séguin had read, the branches of the pear tree, the net of ropes across the printing room’s ceiling: Was it fate or chance that made Odette cross Camille’s path?
She shook her head. It didn’t matter. Odette had no evidence. Only another magician could look at the objects at the Hôtel Séguin and say they were magical. And as long as no one broke the warding as she herself had done by inviting Odette in, the house and its people would be safe from the Comité.
Odette could play her games, but as long as they were safe that was all that mattered.
Stumbling to the pallet in the corner, Camille dropped wearily down on it. “Go away, Odette. I don’t care what you have to say.”
“You will when I see you in court. I imagine you’ll be quite attentive then. And don’t think the crowd has any allegiance to you. They will believe what they are told. You know that to be true, don’t you?”
She did. And it filled her with dread. Rumor and gossip and lies—the fearful would believe anything that made them feel safe.
In the half-light, Odette’s gray eyes had gone to iron. “My suffering will have been worth it when I watch you die. I wonder if they have figured out a special execution for magicians? An aristocratic death by sword is too good for you.” Wistfully she said, “Whatever they come up with, I hope it is not quick.”
50
From a window two floors up, the courtyard of La Petite Force looked like what it was: a prison. Walkers had trod paths in what was left of the insubstantial grass and only the topiary bushes, shaggy and unpruned, seemed