of feet. The clash of metal. A sharp, jagged tune, played on a horn. The door of the café burst open again and several men excitedly shoved their way outside. “Let’s go! It is the Comité!”
“Rosier?” She pushed back the fear that threatened to crush her. The Comité abroad at midnight could not be good. “What’s happening?”
“Citoyens,” Rosier called to the men, “tell me, what is underway?”
But the men raced away, kicking up a fine spray of snow. “To the tree!”
“What tree?” Sophie demanded.
The tree at the end of the island.
The tree where she’d waited for Giselle to give her the tray. The tree with the list of names nailed to its trunk, shining like the palm of a white hand. “The old oak, by the well!”
In the direction she pointed, the invisible crowd roared. Screams rose above the rooftops. “We have him now!” a man’s voice shouted. Stuttering to a halt, the horn released a triumphant shriek. Then someone cried, “À la lanterne! String him up! Death to the magician!”
Magician.
Dread, icy and black, rushed through Camille. The crowd had come from the direction of Les Mots Volants.
“Blaise!” she choked out. Grabbing her skirts, she ran. Underfoot the snow was slick, treacherous.
“Camille, wait!” Sophie called.
“Hurry!” she shouted over her shoulder. “We must stop them!”
She didn’t wait to see what they would do. Her legs were nightmare slow, her heart a frantic timpani, but still she ran. Toward the torches, and the terror.
39
Down the narrow streets, toward the river, toward the tree. Running until she thought her heart would explode. Soon they caught the tail of the crowd, pushed their way through. It was a gruesome carnival of laughter and terror and anger. Torches that made faces into masks with vacant holes for eyes. Deep in the crowd, the crimson flare of Comité cloaks. The baying of hounds. And all the while, like a drumbeat, the restless chant: “À la lanterne, magician!”
She didn’t know what she would do if she found him.
How she would get to him, how to take him away from these people—his neighbors—who wanted to kill him. Shoulders bumped hers, boots crushed her feet. Not tall enough to see over the heads of the crowd, she’d lost sight of Sophie and Rosier.
And she had not seen Blaise at all.
“Let me through!” She tried to elbow past the people, but they shoved her back. Their hands grabbed at her, pulling her hair, mauling scraping stamping—not as separate people, but as one thing. A monster with one mind, bent on destruction. “Stop this!” she cried.
The crowd’s roar was thunder. “Magicians deserve to die!”
Where is he?
“Traitors!” another shrieked. “We will see his limbs ripped from his body, like traitors of old!”
Blaise!
“Enough!” shouted Rosier, suddenly behind her. He had a stick in one hand and brandished a sharp, short knife—where had it come from?—in the other. “Let us through!”
The people saw the knife and fell back. A space cleared around them. At the end of it spiked the forked shape of the tree, another crowd chanting and screaming beneath it. Rosier forged ahead, swinging his stick. They were close now.
“Blaise!” she shouted. “We’re coming!”
The lamp in the square shone through the tree’s spreading fingers, shining on something that hung from one of the oak’s low-growing branches. It spun, very slowly, as if eddying in a wind.
A ghost.
Camille was running, sliding, shoving her way through the jeering crowd milling around the trunk. It could not be. Let it not be. Her head and heart were a storm of no.
Behind her, Rosier cried out, “Don’t!”
But she had already seen.
A body hung from the tree. Pale suit rumpled, brightened by the mob’s swarming torches. Slowly, it swung toward her. Blood clotted the ends of white-blond hair—
Black spots teemed in her vision. She grasped at Rosier to steady herself. Around her shoulders, a supporting arm: Sophie was there, too. Pupils wide with fear, her lower lip trembling.
“It’s Blaise!” Camille heard herself scream, stumbling toward the tree. “Quickly! Help me!” She grasped Blaise’s body at the waist to ease the awful tension on the rope around his neck.
“We’re going to cut him down,” she heard Rosier say.
“Foolish girl!” said the owner of the café. “He’s already dead, and what’s worse, he’s a magician. You don’t want to get caught up in this—”
“He is a human being!” Camille spat.
With his knife, Rosier sawed at the rope. When it finally unraveled, she staggered under Blaise’s weight, sinking to the ground with him in her arms. His head lolled like