Chapter 32
I knew as soon as I staggered out of the baker’s oven that the spell had worked. The cats in their cages and the filing cabinets were gone, replaced by a long counter topped with glass display cases.
Despite everything, I found myself briefly spellbound by the craftsmanship of the baking itself.
About half the cases were empty—I assumed to be filled by the labours of the morning.
But those that were stocked held cakes and patisserie of all shapes and colours, from delicate custard tarts to cakes piled with fruit and bonbons to madeleines with bright strawberry icing.
Small wonder Havelock had been upset by Claude’s departure!
The baker had been active before bedding down—several pies were cooling on the counter closest to me, each with latticework as intricate as weaving.
I hovered a shaking hand above one—rhubarb, I thought—and felt the steam warm my palm.
There were lemon éclairs, like the ones Havelock and I had stolen from the future, and I shivered.
The oven was half blocked by a proofing cabinet, open shelves that held a dozen or so mounds of dough rising in their pans.
I wasn’t surprised that the baker had continued his work, though the world was ending; I knew others who had done the same, opening their shops or maintaining social engagements through the storms and the darkness, either refusing to believe that the world wouldn’t be saved, or because it was simply how they wished to spend their last days.
The bakery smelled of fresh bread and roasted apples in a way that was painfully familiar, because an echo of it remained in my time, preserved by magic.
A tremor rumbled deep beneath the earth.
I went to the window and found the view an almost incomprehensible contrast to the homey atmosphere of the bakery.
The elements were in chaos—a storm pelted the cobblestones with pebble-sized raindrops, forming deep puddles, but even as I watched, the rain pittered to a stop and strands of fog drifted down the street.
The most unnerving thing, though, was the darkness.
Not only had Havelock’s enchantment made the sun wink out like a snuffed flame, but every electric light had flickered and died.
Candles had been the only option, and I saw a few gleaming now from behind the windows.
The result was a sky full of more stars than I had ever seen before or since, as well as dancing ribbons of blue and green, though Montréal was too far south for the aurora in ordinary times.
It would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so disturbing.
I had known Havelock had done this, and yet knowing was different from witnessing it again, and being forced to connect the two: the Havelock I knew and this. How could one person, magician or not, have so much power?
“It’s so quiet,” élise murmured. “I’d forgotten that.”
I nodded. The apocalypse had been peaceful, less like an ending and more like the world was falling asleep.
After the first day, at any rate. The first day had been filled with the sort of noise and panic one would expect—people fleeing the city, clambering into cars and carriages and trying to get as far away as they could, before they realized that nowhere was far enough, that this darkest of magics had enveloped the entire world.
“Have we really—” I felt ridiculous saying it, because the evidence was there in front of me, and yet the larger part of me still refused to believe it.
It was partly that there had been no shift, nothing to mark the change.
Time had run backwards in an invisible arc, as unseen as its passage always was in the other direction.
I felt strange, though, as if I were trapped in a dream—voices swirled around me, echoes too distant to be made out, and the light flickered in a way that reminded me of sunlight reflecting on the windows of a fast-moving train.
Yet as the moments passed, these sensations faded, and I felt no different than I did in my own time.
“Are you all right?” I asked élise.
She was rubbing her temples. “Dizzy,” she said. “It’s fading, though. Why have you brought us here?”
“To steal a lantern,” I said. “Vortigern’s lantern—Havelock said it can pull enchantments into itself. It’s powerful enough that he was going to use it to stop the world from ending, so it should be able to make short work of Valérie and her apprentices, if we can only get it to him.”
élise’s face was pale, her eyes a little glazed, but still it was only a second or two before she nodded and said, “Good. That sounds promising. But I still don’t understand—why this moment?”
“Because I think this is when I stole the lantern,” I said, and I told élise what Havelock had told me about the stranger who had taken the lantern from him, forcing him to travel to the Fourth Fathom of the Rivenwood and invent a new spell to stop the end of the world, sacrificing a piece of himself in the process, perhaps the largest part.
“And you think that person was you?” élise said dubiously.
“I’m certain of it,” I said, though I struggled to explain why.
Being here, in this time, felt like turning myself into a ghost, the sort who retraced the same lonely path night after night, floorboards creaking under her insubstantial weight.
My feet wanted to pull me into the street and to Havelock.
Yet how did I put any of that into words? It didn’t even make sense to me.
“Why not go back to when Vortigern made the thing, and take it from her?” élise said. “It seems safer than trying to wrestle it away from Havelock—pretty much anything does. Hell, Agnes, why don’t we just stop Valérie from taking His Majesty? That goddamn cat is the reason she was able to get in.”
“We can’t change the past,” I said. “At least, Havelock didn’t think we could. Either that or we can, but the world will come apart.”
élise pressed her hands to her eyes and moaned. “Coudonc, how did I get mixed up in all this? We’re not magicians, Agnes! Maybe they can make sense of travelling to other worlds and fiddling with time like the hands of a clock, but this whole business gives me a raging headache.”
We argued about it for a while longer before I finally said, “You’re thinking about it too much. This feels right, élise. I feel as if I’ve been here before.”
She threw her hands up. “Of course you’ve been here before! You’re here right now, probably back at your apartment on Rue Sainte-Roseline with Robin.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment after that.
I saw the old shelter in my mind’s eye, before it had been damaged by magicians, the fire flickering in the hearth and His Majesty lounging on his favourite chair.
Robin sitting across from him with the newspaper, occasionally reading aloud to the cat and asking his opinion—we’d always chuckled at how His Majesty would stare at Robin as if enraptured.
élise came to my side and pulled me into her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s all right,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
The pull towards Robin felt like starvation, all-consuming.
I hadn’t thought about this part when I made my decision to return to this moment.
If I had, I would have realized that I wasn’t strong enough.
I’d lost Robin more than two years ago, but here, in this time, I still had another year to spend at his side, and I would have sacrificed ten lifetimes to live it over again.
The only way to stop myself from falling apart was to focus on Havelock and the cats, back at the shelter three years from now.
They needed me. Banshee and Thoreau and the others needed me.
So did Havelock, who needed no one, or pretended to.
Valérie had come to kill him, and with his Artefacts in her possession, how could she fail?
“You want to rescue him,” élise said. She’d been eyeing me with knitted brows as I thought. “Don’t you?”
“I want to rescue them all,” I said, half in exasperation—partly at myself, I think.
She shook her head. “I knew it. I knew you saw him as one of your cats.”
She was scowling but there was amusement in her gaze, and I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “You’re going to say he doesn’t deserve it.”
She gave a resigned shrug. “Well, they don’t either, really. Is there anything more contrary and self-centred than a cat? Yet I’d risk my life for them.” She gestured at the floor. No, not the floor—the basement. “Is he down there now, do you think?”
The question made me feel like even more of a ghost than I already did. I pictured Havelock, three years younger and brokenhearted from Valérie’s betrayal, hunched over his worktable only a few yards from where I stood.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Even if he is, though, this isn’t where he lost the lantern, so we can’t go down there.”
élise made another inarticulate noise and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
I released the breath trapped in my chest and said, “Trust me, élise. Please.”
She looked up, glaring at me. “All right. But if this doesn’t work, we’re going back in time to when you agreed to move into his goddamn shop, and I’m going to beat you over the head with one of your file folders.”
I gave a shaky laugh, and then we both froze.
We’d been keeping our voices down, to avoid waking the baker sleeping upstairs in what was my room but also wasn’t yet.
But now the floorboards were creaking overhead in a pattern that I recognized: someone had walked to the window, as if to identify the source of a disturbance, and was now moving down the hallway towards the stairs.
I seized élise’s hand and we fled into the street.