stars, and triangles fortune tellers pointed to, picked out in gold paint. “Here, I’ll show you.” He unwound the handkerchief: a thin red line ran across his palm. He stretched his fingers and it began to bleed again. As the blood welled up, he placed his palm within the thick black outline of the hand and pressed.
The space around them tightened. The pages in the book began to flutter.
“Now we can read it,” he said, serenely. “Not much to it. Magie bibelot.” He fished a clean handkerchief from his pocket and tied it around his hand. As he paged through it, maps bloomed on the pages. A city on the water, run through with canals. Certain buildings picked out in gold. An island she recognized as the kingdom of Sicily, pricked with gold circles. A map of Paris, dotted with gold circles.
“What are the dots?”
“Safe houses. For magicians.”
He flipped forward, the pages crackling and loosening as he did so. “Voilà—here’s yours.”
The picture showed a large castle, almost like a fortress, nothing like the elegant mansion it appeared to be from the outside. Instead there were barred windows, the narrow loopholes for arrows, a massive portcullis. It felt familiar, though it wasn’t. Suddenly she understood. “The outside of the house is glamoired.”
“It changes with the times, I imagine. Magicians have always built these kinds of protective houses, for we are often misunderstood.” The pages of the book curled. “Bien sûr, there are always bad magicians. But this is because they are bad people, not necessarily because they are magicians.”
“It’s what I want to believe.”
“Still,” Blaise continued, “the fear of magicians has always outweighed the threat some of us might pose. It is simpler to think in black-and-white, instead of gray. Which is why books like this, which would be so valuable to the Comité and others like them, have to be warded with blood. But that is not why you came here, is it?”
Why was it so hard to speak about this thing? To admit that there was something about herself she didn’t understand? Something she might not want—or worse, something she might?
“You know so much about books, and magic—I thought you might know.” She took a breath and shakily exhaled. “When you came to the house, I told you about the magic that comes on me like a fever. You’re right that I’m somehow working it, by wishing—or wanting. But, Blaise, it frightens me. I need it to print anything convincing, but it’s too powerful. I can feel it in me all the time now. I fear … I’ll be swept away by it. That it might reveal me somehow to the Comité. That it will destroy me.”
Blaise waited as if he had all the time in the world.
“I know a memory can be kept in tears. Preserved, like a fly in amber. Couldn’t I keep the sorrow that fuels this fever inside a vial, too? As a way to keep it separate from me.” Even as she said it, though, it felt wrong.
His pale eyelashes fluttered. “There’s something, but it may not be what you wish to hear.”
“Tell me, whatever it is. I’ve spent my whole life knowing too little about magic.”
“Sorrow,” he said, “once caught in tears, can be kept in a bottle. Though it may seem that the sorrowful memory is gone, my theory is that what Saint-Clair wrote in his journal isn’t exactly right.”
Disappointing, but not a surprise. She had felt it herself when she’d taken the blur. Like the dried pea in the fairy tale, hidden under a thousand mattresses, the sorrow remained. “It’s still inside.”
He nodded, and ran his thumb down the edge of the pages until he found one that was folded and pressed it smooth. “You simply don’t feel it as much.”
“But we are in danger! Comité is arresting magicians!” She twisted the broad ribbon of her cloak.
“Camille,” he said kindly, “everything I have read says magic cannot be truly separated from the magician. You cannot cut it out like a tumor or bleed it out, for magic is not in the blood. But you can decide what to do with it.”
Was that what she was trying to do—cut it out? Was that what Lazare had wanted from her? The thought filled her with a kind of horror. “But now more than ever, magic feels like doom hanging over me.”
“The Comité?”
“Not just them.” She hesitated. “Someone I love doesn’t understand.”
“I remember when you said you didn’t want them to know,” he said