Chapter 20 The Crow and the Clock
THE CROW AND THE CLOCK
My stars say death, but my daughter’s say much worse.
From the diary of Elise Roe Jolicoeur
Tonight, Lamour is not drunk in the slightest, and when he’s not drunk, he laughs.
He laughs a lot. As they sit in comfy parlor chairs across from each other in the observatory, he spends the first half an hour telling stories from his school days.
There was the time that Sidra and Fox stole an entire tray of lemon bars from the Chow (the Treaty, which is a much cuter name) and accidentally left them under Fox’s bed, where the yellow gave way to green and the green gave way to gray and the whole room started smelling positively fermented.
Then he tells Claudia about the time that all five of them may or may not have accidentally slaughtered a deer they called Banquo after a particularly potent operatic version of Macbeth.
Then he talks about Astrologia. How Banneker taught it to him, how much he wishes he could teach it to an entire class without worrying that this knowledge would get them all killed.
“Do not misunderstand me, I love rhetoric. It was my major, and my original passion. But if Sidarphion were still here, and if the discipline were not denounced…” He looks around the observatory and sighs. “It would be a dream to see Astrologia come alive again.”
This is how Claudia feels about her mother. All she wants is one more flash of life with her where she can ask every question about the stars, and tell her once more that she loves her.
“Professor, do you think you could tell me…? Well, I have this question I’ve been wanting to ask…
I mean, every day for the last decade, I’ve wondered…
See, I’m well and truly haunted by this thing and—and I just…
I didn’t know if I could ask… because it’s like…
” She gestures widely to the room. “This whole thing is so… and you’re so…
” Good gods, why is she stumbling so much?
“Oh, Claudia,” he says as he slumps across from her. “Have I made you afraid to ask questions?”
“No, no, you haven’t made me afraid…” she says, raising her brows and scrunching her nose. “But you haven’t really been… approachable. Or sober. Or—”
“I hear you,” he says, propping his elbow on his knee and holding his face in his hand. “You’re right. I’ve been unfair to you.”
Shaking her head, she says, “No, I started it. I forced you into teaching me. I’m sorry.” She looks down, anxiously picking at her nails. “I was never really going to tell anyone about your power, you know. I’m mouthy, but I’m not cruel.”
“I know,” he says, followed by a laugh. “I always knew you were good, Claudia. I only wanted to keep you safe. You made me see that the best way to protect you is to teach you. However odd the journey, I’m glad we’re taking it together.
” He finishes the coffee in his mug and places it down on his desk. “Ask me anything you’d like.”
She nods and takes a deep breath. “Some of this you’ll know from my thesis, but my mother is dead.
” Before moving forward, she observes him closely.
Lamour blinks twice as the sentence hangs in the air.
He bows his head in sympathy, his wet eyes remaining locked on hers.
“Ten years ago, I found her outside staring up at the stars, and she told me that the stars warned of her death.”
He clasps his hands in his lap. “I see. Given how quickly you’re advancing, it doesn’t surprise me that the magic is thick in your bloodline. She must’ve heard the stars that night, just as you heard them when the grimoire first spoke to you.”
“But she didn’t simply know she was dying. She knew when it would happen. Two months, she said, and she was correct down to the very day. How is that possible?”
He nods, reaching across the desk and flipping through the grimoire until he finds the page he’s looking for and slides it back to Claudia.
“The crow and the clock. Corvus, Horologium,” he says. “The crow for divining messages, the clock for knowing when they will come to pass. This spell illuminates time itself. It allows you to see the future with acute clarity.”
Claudia stares at the book for a long time, tracing the constellations with her finger and mouthing the spell.
Her eyes well. She clenches her jaw to keep any sound from escaping, though she wants to scream. The combination of relief and sadness is overwhelming. Finally, she has an answer to something that has haunted her for a decade.
But now, she has so many more questions for her mother that she’ll only get to ask if she beats Cassius MacLeod.
“What are you thinking?” Lamour asks.
She pauses for a moment, spinning her thumbs around each other in her lap. “Could I have stopped it? Can the stars be changed?”
He lets out a heavy sigh. “No. Not death.”
Claudia quickly closes her eyes and nods. “I see.”
It almost makes her feel better. At least now she knows there was nothing she could’ve done.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m just grateful to know.”
He reaches for the grimoire and pauses, looking up at her. “Do you want me to show you?”
She swallows down her tears. Looking up through her wet lashes, she says, “You would do that?”
“If it would make you feel better.”
She gives him a sad smile. “Yes. I want to see it.”
He nods, pulling the grimoire toward himself. “This spell is interesting because you don’t see the effect—you hear it. The stars speak to you. But the language of stars can be maddening. You can only hear so much before you’re driven out of your mind.”
Glancing up at the sky, she asks, “Like in the Phaedrus? Divine madness?”
“Exactly like that.” He gives her an impressed smile.
“Could it make you see things?” That’s what Cassius had said about Odette. She was going mad, seeing things.
Lamour nods, his brows pushing up the heavy crease in his forehead.
“See things, hear things, do things. It can be very dangerous. Don’t worry, I’m going to cast it on you so the voice will go through me.
This way, you’re at no risk of madness.” He points over the desk.
“Reach into that drawer and grab my needle.”
When she opens the drawer, she first sees a small note. She recognizes the handwriting immediately—Odette.
This is written in blood.
November 7th
“Claudia?” he asks.
She blinks, heart stuttering. What does that say? It’s madness. She needs to examine it, unscramble it. But she can’t take it now—not with Lamour right across from her. Why does Lamour even have this?
Is he—
No. Gods no, Lamour isn’t the killer. That’s a wild conclusion to make from this. Claudia has some of Odette’s diary entries, too, and she’s not the killer.
But the diary entries she’s found look nothing like this.
She hands him the needle, trying to hide her trembling hands.
“This spell is unique in many ways. For one,” Lamour explains while he tests the weight of the needle in his hand, “it cannot simply be written in blood. It must be needled into the skin. The stars will hum, and the message will spill into the mind of the caster.” He centers the paper between them.
“Roll up your sleeve and give me your arm.”
For a second, she can’t. Her whole body locks up as if her blood has frozen solid in her veins. She can’t stop thinking about the page in his desk. In another one of Odette’s diary entries, the girl was professing her hatred for Lamour. Is there more to their story? How did it end?
Lamour taps his needle on the desk twice like a conductor demanding the attention of a stubborn soprano. Claudia blinks herself back to the present moment and pulls up her sleeve, presenting her left arm to her professor.
She can see the rapid twitch in her pulse on her wrist.
“It will only hurt a bit,” he says, and with an artist’s precision, he needles the constellations into her skin. It takes less than five seconds for those twelve dots to turn into little red stars, glittering in the starlight that leaks through the glass ceiling.
Lamour’s eyes roll back in his head so all Claudia sees is their creamy, red-veined underbelly. He grips her wrist as his body trembles, and horrific gurgling sounds erupt from his open mouth.
This is divination.
This is like what happened to Olivier.
Panic rises in her belly when she fears he’ll see one of her many secrets—her bargain with Dorian, her affair with Cassius, her blade going through her father’s heart.
She knows he’s not looking into the past, but the future is nothing but a consequence.
He could see something that’s a direct result from one of the many horrible decisions she’s made.
He could turn on her—back to the cold, angry professor he was when they first met.
Or worse—into the killer she now fears he could be.
But she uses this opportunity to snatch the entry from the desk, ball it up, and shove it into her pocket.
She stills before her professor calms and quiets down, his eyes rolling forward as his body relaxes. He releases Claudia’s wrist, and she drops her sleeve, belting her waist with her arms.
Impatiently, she asks, “What did they say?”
Lamour looks at her for an uncomfortably long time. He knits his thick black brows. “In two months, your debt will be paid.”