Odette jabbed a finger at Camille. “Her whole house stinks of magic! The attics are full of it! I have gone over half of Paris, sniffing out magic with the Comité, and there was never such a foul nest of it as her house.”
A hush fell over the room. In the emptiness, there was only the scrape of a shoe, the scratch of dead leaves against the windows.
Camille’s eyes blazed. “I am truly sorry, Odette, that you had a father who did not love you. But bad people are not always magicians. They’re everywhere, or haven’t you noticed?”
“Enough, madame!” insisted the prosecutor. “Answer the question. Are you a magician and therefore a traitor to France?”
She was the bonfire, burning in the streets. She was fever and flame. And if she did not speak, it would consume her. “I am a pamphleteer for the revolution,” she said, fierce and defiant. “I have used the magic of words to help the poorest among us, and if Odette Leblanc were honest, she would admit that.”
“The magic of words!” she jeered. “It was more than that! Your spying, your vanishing, your magic-infested house—”
“How narrow your mind is, Odette, that you think no one else can do good but you. Has hatred made it so small?” She paused, and looked out over the gallery. The reporters scribbled furiously, and even from here, she could see the sketch on the cartoonist’s paper: two red-haired girls facing each other. Behind the scribblers sat the Lost Girls, frozen, except for Giselle, red-eyed, rocking back and forth in her seat. Sophie’s face was pressed against Rosier’s shoulder. More people had come in to line the back of the courtroom. Hundreds of eyes and ears and hearts. Soon the papers and pamphlets describing the sensational trial would be printed and circulating all over Paris.
The only sound in the courtroom was the scraping of the quills. She would not let them tell her story—not that way.
“Magic,” she said, “is not evil. That is like saying a hammer is evil. Or a scythe, because it can be used to kill as well as to bring in the harvest.” As she spoke, Camille felt the fever-magic rise in her. Sympathy for the girls, the deaths of her parents, magicians hunted, Lazare gone—and whatever pain still awaited. “My magic helped print pamphlets that saved the lost girls from cruel eviction. It brought money to feed them and warm clothes. Magic,” she insisted, her voice rising, “helped them see themselves as important.”
“Quiet, madame, or we will have to remove you—”
She would not be quiet. She might never have an audience as large as this, and she would say what she must to convince them. Otherwise, what meaning did her life have?
“I am proud to be a magician!” she blazed. “Do you know where magic comes from? Not from evil, but from understanding. From great sorrow, great feeling at injustice and suffering. How can it be wrong? Sympathy is the fuel that changes the world, is it not? Magic is revolution!”
Someone in the gallery stood up, face crimson: “Magic is unnatural! The accused is outside the law, and therefore has no rights! Take her away!”
Had no one had heard her? Had her words had meant nothing?
The courtroom dissolved into chaos. After that there was nothing more to be said for the shouting down of the gallery, and the prosecution rested. Dufresne shuffled away, head down. The jury deliberated for ten fretful minutes while Camille sat in a room no larger than a closet. A fly buzzed against the glass of the barred window. Beyond it echoed the chants: Magician! Magician!
Dufresne stood behind her, and she listened to him wheeze. “You spoke too much,” he said finally. “There was no order. You should have let me—”
“I did, monsieur. I waited, and you did not defend me.”
* * *
When she returned to the courtroom, the jury had already been seated. Odette raised an eyebrow at Camille and dragged a finger across her throat.
Odette’s gesture filled Camille with foreboding. The future of magic in France would be determined now. If Camille did not win this, more magicians would follow in her footsteps. They would sit in courtrooms just like this, be convicted on made-up charges, executed. The revolution she’d believed in would lose its credibility, and then the losses to the people would be even greater.
The judge cleared his throat. “Camille de Veaux, also called Camille Durbonne, Vicomtesse de Séguin, you have been found guilty of the charges