levied against you. You will be hanged by the neck until you are dead.” The gallery roared, and the judge banged his gavel for quiet. “Tomorrow at four at the Place de Grève.”
She would be hanged like any commoner, a rope around her neck. The room swayed again, and she clung so hard to the railing her arms shook. She must stay standing. She must not faint, not now.
Dufresne slouched away, shaking his head. In the commotion, Camille saw Rosier stand, the Lost Girls behind him. Their faces were fierce, unflinching, their hands on their hearts. You are one of us. Rosier’s face was blank with worry, but he mouthed at her: Soon. Raucous, the spectators pushed out of the courtroom, making plans to meet at the square tomorrow where the execution would take place. Once I might have been among them, she thought, applauding the death of the ancien régime, content never to consider the situation more deeply. Even Roland had been changed—for a moment—when he drank the unknown girl’s tears and felt her pain. But to have sympathy you must let yourself feel vulnerable, and she did not think a crowd ever did.
A guard dragged her toward a side exit. Odette and the prosecutor made their way to the larger double doors, where a crowd of supporters waited for them. One girl stepped forward from the jostling group. It was Giselle. In her hand, she still held the tricolor corsage. Who was it for? For the briefest of moments, her eyes met Camille’s. They brimmed with heartbreak.
Giselle waved and called out to Odette, “Mon amie! You did it!” She held up the corsage.
Giselle was now on Odette’s side? Camille felt her betrayal like a kick in the gut.
Arms out, Odette skipped toward Giselle, her face lit with happiness. “It is over!” she crowed as the two girls embraced. “I made certain of the evidence, just as I told you I would, n’est-ce pas? Now she’ll never trouble us again! We can go back to the way things were. All of us together again.”
“Never again,” Giselle said as she squeezed Odette tight. One of Giselle’s hands was tangled in the sweep of Odette’s red hair, the other close around her friend’s waist. The crowd in the courtroom cheered to see the girls reunited. Camille ached to see Giselle overwhelmed by emotion—were those tears on her cheeks?
No, Camille thought. Something is wrong—
Suddenly Giselle smiled, wild and lost and grim, like a fox in a trap, ready to bite off its own foot. Her hand darted out—and wrenched a pistol from Odette’s belt.
“Vive la révolution!” she cried.
“No!” Camille tried to wrench free of her guard. “Stop, Giselle!”
She hesitated. For one long moment, she and Camille looked at each other. In Giselle’s hand, the black nose of the pistol shook. Then she closed her eyes and fired.
The gunshot shattered the world.
Women screamed. Men shouted for a surgeon. The crowd surged toward the girls. A dozen hands grasped Giselle and dragged her away. She did not resist, only crossed her arms over her chest and let them take her.
Odette lay motionless on the floor, a lake of blood widening around her.
Amid shouts for help, men in the courtroom gathered her in their arms. Her head tipped lifelessly back, red hair spilling free of her hat. The men carrying her slid in her blood. Under the light of the courtroom’s many candles her dress gleamed, as slick as if she’d been dragged from the river.
Numbly, Camille said, “Is the surgeon not coming?”
“No surgeon can help her,” muttered the guard.
“And the girl? Giselle?”
“They’ll try her, and I warrant she’ll hang—right alongside you.” The guard grasped Camille’s arm and yanked her toward the side door. “One more death on your conscience, magician.”
52
The guard shoved hard between Camille’s shoulder blades, and she stumbled into her cell. The door banged shut with a dismal clang. There followed the now-familiar jangle of iron keys before her jailer moved away. Did he stand outside, now that she was condemned? Or was a chair down the hall still acceptable for the guard of the first magician to be executed in Paris in more than two hundred years?
The view from the barred window had not changed. Prisoners still strolled their well-worn routes through the familiar garden. She envied them those tiny paths of freedom. For them this might be their home for the next few months … not, as it was for her, merely a rest stop on the way to the