quietly. “But please understand: magic is only a curse if you think it so. Think of the two sides of one coin. Or a mountain: shadow on one side, sun on the other. What would happen if you took away the shadow?”
A person wasn’t a mountain, she wanted to argue. A person did not need darkness. “That person would be full of light,” she said stubbornly.
“That person would not exist.”
“Magicians love riddles.”
Blaise’s mouth twitched. “Some things are best understood that way. We try to keep secrets safe in our own heads. But heads can be dangerous places. Full of anguish and sinkholes and tempests that make us feel lost. A riddle is a way to get it out, and keep it safe.”
It was true that her head was full of storms. She wanted to be her true self, but she didn’t know what that was. She relished the power of her magic, but it frightened her too—a dark and creeping shadow forever bound to her. But also, she thought, a strength. Uncontrollable it might be, but it was still power.
Frustrated, she picked up a square tome that lay open on the seat of an armchair. Its pages were covered with a dense mirror-writing. “What’s this one, Blaise?”
“A history of magic.”
“Is that what you’re working on?”
He propped his chin in his hand. “There is no one history. Still, I hope to trace a line, like in a family tree, to the beginnings of magic, and find what lies at its root. The problem is that histories are simply stories,” he added, “stories we tell ourselves about what we believe. Or what we want to believe. It makes my task harder.”
One thin page of book rolled slowly inward; absently, she smoothed it flat. “Are you saying what we know about magic isn’t all true? That it might have a … secret history?”
“Just so. For example, in the oldest books of magic, like the medieval Le Livre d’Eau, there’s no mention of sorrow as a catalyst for magic.”
“What?” Camille struggled to understand. Wasn’t sorrow the way all magic was worked? “But what would they have used instead—”
Beyond the shuttered windows, in the nighttime street, footsteps echoed. The scuff of a heel on cobblestone as someone halted outside the door.
The doorknob rattled violently.
Blaise slid off his chair and crouched down behind the counter, making himself very small. His panicked eyes met Camille’s as he mouthed: Warded. Slowly, she too sank to her knees. The door wrenched in its frame, but it held. Still as prey they waited, until the noises outside the shop faded away.
“Blaise,” she hissed, “what was that?”
“You must go. Strange people keep coming into the shop. Not the Comité. But whoever they are, they are looking for magic. Sniffing, as if they might smell it.” Agitated, he said, “Trust me, please. We need to move faster to make the blur, even if it means starting tomorrow, before the Comte de Roland arrives.”
She could feel it, a snare drawing tight.
He glanced once more at the door. “Go now, please. I would blame myself if anything were to hurt you.”
She hated to leave him alone when he was so afraid. One of the clocks in the shop had already begun to chime nine o’clock. “Please, Blaise—won’t you join us for dinner at Les Deux Sœurs? It’ll only be my sister and our friend Rosier.”
“A collector has made an appointment with me tonight.”
“So late?”
“He doesn’t wish to be seen in daylight, bringing magic books to sell. He says he has a wagonful—I will buy them all. Perhaps there will be answers there. And even if not, I couldn’t resist them.” The corners of his mouth quirked up in a rueful smile. “It can’t be helped, can it? We are who we are, n’est-ce pas?”
Are we? That was precisely what she needed to know, and she hardly felt closer to an answer than she had before. “Come meet us afterward, please? But if not, I’ll see you very soon at Bellefleur.”
Promising to stop at the restaurant after he was finished, he waved her into his apartment behind the secret bookcase door—a small white room, quiet as a held breath, books everywhere, a single bed neatly made—and then out into the alleyway behind the shop. “It’s safer this way. À bientôt.”
As she waved good-bye to him, so still in his ghostly clothes, she felt more at a loss than when she had come. She craved answers, and it seemed that in all of Paris, there were