believed those black letters could launch ideas into the world and change things for the better. A good kind of magic.
She had used a dangerous magic to disguise herself at court, cheating at at cards to keep herself and her sister alive, even while that magic hollowed her out and left her wondering if she would ever be completely free of it. But through determination and daring and pain, she’d lifted herself and Sophie from poverty to a place of safety.
And yet?
She hefted the bundle of unwanted pamphlets. She was not satisfied with this.
In the fairy stories Maman had told them when they were little, the ones that had gotten mixed up in her head with the gilded stories of court life, there would sometimes be a girl who got a wish. Usually she had done something kind, like saving a trout that was really an enchanted prince or helping an old woman find a needle she’d dropped, which turned out to be the thing that released the woman from a terrible spell. And in return, the girl got a wish. Some girls wished well and others wished badly. When they could have had anything, those girls wished for sausages or for their shoes to fit. They had been so desperate for so long that they had stopped wishing for anything big. Anything that could truly change their lives.
She did not want to make that mistake.
Solemn and deep, the bells of Notre-Dame began to toll six o’clock. The dry leaves of the oaks rattled in the hot wind that rose from the river. The long afternoon was edging toward evening, and still, the flower seller hadn’t appeared. But surely, Camille reasoned, the girl would return to Sainte-Chapelle in a few days, and she could bring her the tray then. As she stooped to pick it up, a flash of white caught her eye. A piece of paper, nailed to the tree. It had an unusual shape: long and narrow, its bottom edge ragged.
A notice of some kind? Curious, she began to read.
It was a list of names. Hastily scrawled, blots and spots marring the letters. Some names were misspelled. To her surprise, there were a few names she recognized from court. The Comte d’Astignac. The Duchess de Polignac.
Unease gnawed at her. Halfway down was the name of the aristocrat who’d reported Papa’s revolutionary pamphlets to the censors. Below it, Germaine de Staël’s, who held a popular salon on the Left Bank, which Camille had attended with Lazare and Rosier. What was her name doing on this list? But when she came to the end, and saw the names Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, she understood: it was a list of nobles deemed traitors to the revolution.
At the very bottom was written: À la lanterne!
Who gave this person the right to decide who should live and who should die?
Glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder, Camille tore the paper down.
Quickly, she left the square, heading home. As she crossed the river on the Pont Notre-Dame, she dropped the crumpled paper over the side of the bridge. For a moment, the list floated on the Seine’s black water, undulating with the current, and then, like an eye winking shut, it was gone.
3
Home—if it could be called that—was the ancient Hôtel Séguin.
Protected by a cobbled courtyard and a tall, spiked gate, the mansion stood proudly aloof from the rabble of the streets, very much like the aristocrats who had always lived there. Built of honeyed limestone, the Hôtel Séguin’s facade glittered with costly windows, its two wings enfolding a walled garden where a fountain burbled and carefully kept fruit trees grew. Between it and the gate lay the small stables and a carriage house.
From the outside it looked like the kind of place Camille had dreamed of living in. Elegant, impenetrable, safe.
It had certainly seemed that way the first time when, with Lazare at her side, she’d arrived in a gown stiff with blood to free Sophie from imprisonment at their brother’s hands. The Vicomte de Séguin had planned to use her as a pawn to compel Camille to marry him, so he could in turn use her sorrow to fuel his own magic. And she had married him, though things had gone differently than he’d hoped. And upon the death of her handsome and villainous husband of a few hours, like the fulfillment of a wish, this grand house and all his other property was suddenly hers.