My mother warned me I’d never amount to anything in life if I ignored it. I read it, and look at me now.”
Chandon didn’t realize how lucky he was. “What kind of things were in it?”
“I can’t possibly remember. It’s more like a recipe book than a novel or a history, always there to refer to in case you forget.” He twisted his rings, thinking. “How to bring forth sorrow, of course; lives of the great magicians; types of transformative magic; warnings about using magic for ill. Which Séguin and many other magicians over the centuries clearly ignored. And much, much more. The type was painfully small.”
“Was there anything about tempus fugit, the magic needed to work the veil?”
Blaise blinked. “I hadn’t thought of it being in there! But you are right, Camille—the Marquis de Saint-Clair says it is a common magic, therefore, it should be in a basic text. Hiding in plain sight! You may have brought us one step closer.”
Closer wasn’t close enough. “So you will keep an eye out for a copy?”
“Certainly.” Blaise waited serenely.
“You wish to know why I want it. Apart from the blur.” The way he talked about lost libraries as if he longed for something he hadn’t been allowed to have echoed how she felt. He seemed to understand her own tangled feelings about magic.
“Honestly, I’m afraid! My magic overtakes me like a fever. And I don’t know whether I should force it away—if I even can—or somehow accept it. I worry that the pamphlets I’ve written are infected with magic, and that’s why they’ve been successful. And now the Comité has me in its sights…” Miserably, she turned away and caught Séguin’s portrait watching her. “Can’t I put it in a vial and keep it there until I need it, even if I’m not trying to make a blur? Wouldn’t that be one way to control it?” And keep myself and those I love safe?
“You did not call it by wishing or feeling?”
The Lost Girls had felt trapped, just as she had. Longing for a way out, always working so hard but despite it, everything slipping through her fingers … “Perhaps I did. But what can I do? I cannot stop feeling.”
“Some magicians do. That was one of the dangers Saint-Clair warned of with the blur—that by making it we separate ourselves from magic.” That was what she’d seen in Séguin’s portrait. It was what he’d wanted, but without feeling, he was no longer the magician he’d once been.
“And then the magic is so powerful,” Camille said, remembering what had happened to the Comte de Roland and how it felt so much like the way the fever-magic consumed her, “that it threatens to vanish you. How then are we to survive?”
“These things are manipulations of magic,” Blaise said. “They’re not the way magic is.”
Frustrated, Camille clenched her fists in the fabric of her skirts. Why did they only go round and round and not get anywhere? “If we aren’t able to hide our magic, the Comité will hunt us down. And the books we need are nowhere to be found. Why isn’t there a list, or a map for them—”
Blaise’s other eyebrow rose. From the stack he’d collected, he pulled a slender green-bound volume. It had no silvery leaves on it but it was nevertheless so familiar that she reached for it.
“It’s only an index. Made by some industrious student, I suppose, to help her learn The Silver Leaf better.”
“Do you see?” Chandon interrupted from his perch by the window. “How ominous the clouds are becoming—as if it might rain for weeks.”
Lazare. Balloons were not made for rain. If it rained for days, would he have to stay longer in Lille?
Under her fingertips, the book’s magic hummed.
“Copies of The Silver Leaf were so common,” Blaise said as he peered over her shoulder. “No one took care of them because they could easily get another. Ephemera, we book collectors call them. And now they are being destroyed in fires.”
But Camille was hardly listening. Instead she paged quickly to B.
Blood Magic.
-Glamoire, 256
Camille stared in wonderment. “Really?”
“That is why I was surprised you hadn’t read it. Chandon said you had worked such a compelling glamoire.”
It shouldn’t have pleased her, but it did. “Thank you,” she said, and raced through the other subcategories for Blood Magic.
-Irresponsible use in fortune telling, 378
-To bring back lost memories, 325
-To bond a sorrow-well, 524
Her fingers tightened around the book’s spine. Was it always like this with magic, teetering between beautiful