a broken puppet’s. “Wake up!” she cried. “Please hear me, Blaise!” Wake up!
Her scream echoed back to her from the walls of an empty room, a younger self shouting these words at Papa as he lay doll-eyed in his bed, his skin blistered with weeping pox, the cords in his neck tight as wires. She had chafed his hands and patted his face and sobbed, but even the hot tears falling on his face had done nothing to revive him. He was gone, the spirit emptied from his eyes like water trickles from a cupped palm.
Camille’s tears made tiny useless spots where they fell on Blaise’s silk suit. How had magicians believed tears had any power? What good were they if they could not bring those they loved back to life?
“Why would they do this?” she raged. “He was so kind and gentle—he never harmed anyone!”
Policeman were yelling all around them, breaking up the crowd. Rosier kneeled beside her. Very gently, first one, then the other, he closed Blaise’s eyelids with his thumb. “What’s this on his hands?”
They were ebony from fingertip to wrist. She touched his palm and her finger came away black with soot. “To show he was killed for being a magician.”
With his handkerchief, he wiped away her tears. “We must go, Camille. I’ll take you both home. The police have come; they will take his body to the morgue. And”—he said in her ear—“Sophie told me. It’s not safe for you here. The Comité’s arrival is imminent.”
She let herself be lifted to her feet. It was then that she noticed the spot of white on the oak’s gray bark.
A piece of paper, nailed to the tree. She ripped it loose.
It was another list of names.
Ten, twenty … her vision stuttered, she could not tell how many there were. Most but not all were aristocrats, and a few had a new designation after their names.
Eugène de Tolland, Comte de Roland. Magician.
A cry of anguish tore at Camille’s throat when she saw, several names below, Étienne Bellan, Marquis de Chandon. Magician. She raced through the others, dreading to see her name, but not finding it.
At the very bottom was written: Blaise Delouvet. Magician.
His name was run through with a ragged line, and underneath was scrawled a single word: MORT.
40
It was well past midnight when they returned home.
The vast house was still and silent, as if it knew what had happened.
Rosier promised to stay in a guest bedroom, to be close by if he was needed, and with Adèle’s encouragement and aid, he gave Sophie a sleeping draught. She lay terrifyingly still in his arms as he carried her upstairs. Watching them go up together, Camille longed for Lazare. She wanted to disappear in him, for him to enfold her in his arms so that she might press her ear to his chest and listen to his steady heartbeat instead of her broken one.
But there was no one to comfort her. So while the servants readied Rosier’s room, Camille went alone to the attic.
There in a towering wardrobe, under lock and key, hung the enchanted court dress.
In the wavering gleam of her candle, the fabric glowed as if with an inner light. When she took it off its hook, it rustled and slithered into her arms. It still smelled of magic: burned wood and bitter ash, sorrow and fear—and power. Once she’d not been able to abide its scent and had dabbed it away with cologne. But now, for a reason she could only dimly fathom, she inhaled deeply. The smoky scent eased the ache within her.
In her arms it had the weight and shape of a body.
She knew the servants would think it strange when she came down the attic stairs, the dress’s train trailing after her, leaking magic. But she was past caring. “Madame?” Adèle called after her. “May I—”
Camille shut her bedroom door behind her with a click. There she shrugged off her ruined fur-lined pelisse. Tearing off the striped dress, she shoved it behind the Chinese screen. She wished never to see it again.
Outside, snow sighed against the shutters.
Once she’d promised herself she would never wear the enchanted dress again, but now that promise felt as if it had been made by someone else. Inside she felt frighteningly empty, as if at any moment she might drift away. Like a husk, a dried leaf. And so she slipped on the heavy court dress.
Under her palms, its ancient silk was smooth and cool. Gently she traced