The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,134

way to water, and water giving way to sky. She has seen maps of course, but ink and paper hold nothing to this. To the salt smell, the murmur of waves, the hypnotic draw of the tide. To the scope and scale of the sea, and the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the horizon, there is more.

It will be a century before she crosses the Atlantic, and when she does, she’ll wonder if the maps are wrong, will begin to doubt the existence of land at all—but here and now, Addie is simply enchanted.

Once upon a time, her world was only as large as a small village in the middle of France. But it keeps getting bigger. The map of her life unfurls, revealing hills and valleys, towns and cities and seas. Revealing Le Mans. Revealing Paris. Revealing this.

She has been in Fécamp for nearly a week, spending her days between the pier and the tide, and if anyone takes notice of the strange woman alone on the sand, they have not seen fit to bother her about it. Addie watches boats come and go, and wonders where they are going; wonders, too, what would happen if she boarded one, where it would take her. Back in Paris, the food shortages are getting worse, the penalties, worse, everything steadily worse. The tension has spilled out of the city, too, the nervous energy reaching all the way here, to the coast. All the more reason, Addie tells herself, to sail away.

And yet.

Something always holds her back.

Today, it is the storm that’s rolling in. It hovers out over the sea, bruising the sky. Here and there the sun splits through, a line of burned light falling toward the slate gray water. She retrieves the book, lying in the sand beside her, begins to read again.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

It is Shakespeare’s Tempest. Now and then she trips over the playwright’s cadence, the style strange, English rhyme and meter still foreign to her mind. But she is learning, and here and there she finds herself falling into the flow.

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself …

Her eyes begin to strain against the failing light.

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind—

“‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’” comes a now familiar voice behind her. “‘And our little life is rounded with a sleep.’” A soft sound, like breathless laughter. “Well, not all lives.”

Luc looms over her like a shadow.

She has not forgiven him for the violence of that night back in Villon. Braces for it even now, though they have seen each other several times in the intervening years, forged a wary kind of truce.

But she knows better than to trust it as he sinks onto the sand beside her, one arm draped lazily over his knee, the picture of languid grace, even here. “I was there, you know, when he wrote that verse.”

“Shakespeare?” She cannot hide her surprise.

“Who do you think he called on in the dead of night, when the words would not come?”

“You lie.”

“I boast,” he says. “They are not the same. Our William sought a patron, and I obliged.”

The storm is rolling in, a curtain of rain sliding toward the coast. “Is that really how you see yourself?” she asks, tapping sand from her book. “As some splendid benefactor?”

“Do not sulk, simply because you chose poorly.”

“Did I though?” she counters. “After all, I am free.”

“And forgotten.”

But she is ready for the barb. “Most things are.” Addie looks out to sea.

“Adeline,” he scolds, “what a stubborn thing you are. And yet, it has not even been a hundred years. I wonder, then, how you will feel after a hundred more.”

“I don’t know,” she says blandly. “I suppose you’ll have to ask me then.”

The storm reaches the coast. The first drops begin to fall, and Addie presses the book to her chest, shielding the pages from the damp.

Luc rises. “Walk with me,” he says, holding out his hand. It is not an invitation so much as a command, but the rain is quickly turning from a promise to a steady pour, and she has only the one dress. She rises without his help, brushing the sand from her skirts.

“This way.”

He leads her through town, toward the silhouette of a building, its vaulted steeple piercing