filthy ground for something, anything, she could use.
In the manure lay a black nail come loose from a horseshoe.
She picked it up, then spat on it to clean it as best she could. Beyond the alley, the crowd exulted. She must hurry.
The nail was so small. Only a bit larger than the point of the brooch. But it was also dull and dirty. Gagging, she set the point against her arm.
What had Blaise written to her? Magic is not in the blood.
She’d thought he meant magic was not in the family, not something passed down. That it was not something inherent in her, but instead, something she could choose.
But he might have meant something else. She let the nail fall from her fingers.
In the bright square, the gilded carriage had trundled away. Police were spreading through the crowd, offering shouted rewards for the escaped convicts. And somewhere, everywhere, was the Comité, tightening its net.
So little time. Pressing her palms against the bodice of her dress, she steadied her breath. She stared at her blackened fingers. They had been this way before, dirty from digging up nails. Before she’d worked the glamoire, before she met Lazare, before she had changed everything. Had it been only a dream and now she was back where she’d started, with only empty hands and a burning desire to transform?
No.
Something had changed. She had become someone new. Stronger, more whole. She thought of the magicians’ blackened fingers in the portraits, the way the gold leaf had worn off over time to reveal the sooty underpainting. That darkness hadn’t faded; it had always been part of them.
Blaise hadn’t worked magic with his hands. The blood she had seen him spill to read those warded books? It was only an outward sign. She’d been wrong to believe that magic was in that. It was something much deeper that had cajoled those books to speak and made paper rise and burn like stars. He’d worked magic with his generous and sympathetic heart. He’d worked it with his whole being.
Deep inside, her sorrow rose.
At times she’d lost her way. She was flawed, no Jeanne d’Arc. Nevertheless she strove for good amid this sorrow.
As feeling fevered through her, like fire in her veins, she felt her magic soar.
White, Camille imagined. White, glittering with glass and set with pearls. She pictured the doves that swooped from the rafters in the workshop and the glad flash of their wings. Like the crystals of snow in Blaise’s hair. Like her pamphlets floating over Paris.
Feathers without number.
She spilled no blood. She didn’t make the dress turn anymore than she sent blood to her heart or squeezed her lungs when she ran. But where her palm touched the bodice, the silk began to change. Around the shape of her dirty hand, the silk lost its color: white as ash.
I am this, she told herself. This is who I am, this is my story. Listening to her, the dress made itself over: snow-white silk, overlaid with hundreds of dancing white plumes. Lengths and lengths of it shimmering ghostlike in the alley’s gloom.
Until the Comité realized she’d worked magic—and the Comité would, if they caught her—she’d be safest as part of the spectacle. She had only to get there. The crooked lane led away into the gloom, along the twists and turns of Paris’s labyrinth.
There was no time to waste. She picked up her skirts and disappeared.
54
The white-and-gold carriage had come to a halt at the far end of the square, near a low wooden stage. Over it was raised a red curtain; behind it stood a painted backdrop of a gray sky dazzled with snow. A white fawn pranced across the platform, paused on nimble hooves, blew a horn, and ran on.
In the crowd of spectators, a little girl pulled on her mother’s skirts. “Tiens, Maman! A play!”
For on the square’s opposite end, far from the gallows, a band of players had begun to perform. Les Merveilleux were known for their extraordinarily lifelike puppets, and if the performers today were not puppets but flesh-and-blood actors, no one seemed to mind. Dressed in flowing white garments, they stepped disjointedly on slender stilts. Their faces were painted alabaster and decorated with pips from every suit—hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs—like the beauty marks women at court used to wear in another age, long ago. From behind the snowy sky, sheer curtains billowed and parted. A princess appeared. She wore a gold crown on her golden hair, and when a masked