was printed. The money would be yours.” She paused, remembered again the uncanny certainty she’d felt as she’d printed the first one. This could work, but she needed them to believe. “Is there anyone else who might—”
“Me.” The forger Henriette, with her cloud of pale hair, stepped out from behind Odette. “I’m next.”
12
That night the doors to the printing room yawned open, as if waiting for her.
Inside it reeked of ash, stronger than before. Pamphlets telling Giselle’s story hung from lines running crisscross along the ceiling, more than she had remembered printing. It was no mystery why they were selling. The design—the striking way the letters were laid out, the amount of breathing room—was part of it. But there was something else in them, even beyond Giselle’s story. A kind of dark allure.
A few nights ago, she’d blamed what she’d seen on her fatigue. That the fire smoked. That she’d been imagining things. Now the worry she’d buried when talking with the girls returned: there was something unnatural about what was happening.
The old house was woven through with magic, but whatever was happening in the printing room was new. Only when she’d printed the story about Giselle had she felt it: a shift, like the air crackling before a storm. There had been the blood from her hand on the paper. And, she remembered, with a creeping horror, she’d made a wish: that the pamphlets be entrancingly perfect.
Magic, she knew, compelled. It was one of the first lessons she’d learned: how magic, worked with sorrow’s fuel, made things irresistible. The more time she’d spent at Versailles, the more the courtiers had fêted her, the palace’s hundred doors welcoming her to parties and games. Even the magic Chandon had used to cheat at cards had a persuasive glamour to it: he nearly always won, yet everyone still clamored for the privileging of losing money at his table.
No, she told herself, it wasn’t like that. Magic was no longer something she did.
But as she began to set the type for Henriette’s story, the strange fever rose despite her intentions. This time she resisted, imagining that she pushed away the scorching tide. Sweat pricked on her forehead and her upper lip. Her fingernails dug into the wood of the press as she tried to resist the fever’s pull.
“Get away,” she said out loud. But it only came on stronger, racing along her skin, hot and cold at once, urging her on. Once she began to work, the type seemed to leap between her fingers.
Too fast. Too easy.
She hesitated again, a handful of type clenched in her fist. As her arms trembled from the strain of holding back, she wondered: Too fast for what?
Too fast to save the girls from the streets? Too easy, when what they and others like them faced was violence and misunderstanding? They stood to lose so much.
But what if she was working the pamphlets with magic? No matter how she sometimes secretly yearned for it, for magic to fill the hunger it had once carved into her, she would not return to it—blood and craving and destruction.
The voice in her head whispered: Does it truly matter? You could do so much good.
She thought of Rosier and his marvels, his dream to bring hope to the people of Paris. What she was doing wasn’t that different, she told herself. But what would Sophie think, who’d always hated magic? And Lazare, who reviled it?
If she had learned anything from what had happened in the spring, it was that magic brought unforeseen consequences. Whatever she did now—used this strange new power or turned away from it—would change the path she stood on.
She did not know how to make the choice.
Sharp pain made her nearly drop the handful of type. Tiny marks showed red where the type had bitten into her flesh. For an unsettling, dizzying moment, she imagined turned coins gleaming in her palm.
For the thousandth time, she regretted how little she knew about magic. Maman, either reluctant or afraid to tell her any more than she absolutely needed to know, had left her in the dark, and Chandon, who knew so much, was unreachable at his estate. His magic had always seemed dazzling but ordinary, used mostly for cards. But who else could she ask? She’d write to him for help.
But that could take a week. And the girls didn’t have a week.
It would be perilous to wait.
Magic or not, whatever would follow, she must set the type into the frame