Chapter 31
ELARA
By the time they arrived, the textile factory was engulfed in flames. People in the area were sorted into two different crowds: one that watched the smoke as it clogged the air, raining ash upon their heads, and one that formed chains to bring buckets of water from the Joyaux.
Elara and Chantal joined the second group.
“We have to stop it from spreading!” shouted a man to her left, his face scorched and hands burnt.
“The fire brigade can handle it,” someone answered.
“Because it’s one of their damned factories that went up,” he snarled back. “If it’d been the tenement across the street…”
He didn’t need to finish. They’d seen it before. Anything that didn’t outwardly belong to the Counseil or one of their aristocratic sycophants was free to burn.
“What happened?” Elara asked.
“Damn rebellion, that’s what,” a woman up the chain said. “I don’t much blame them.”
“Then you can stand to the side like the rest of those useless scum.” The man glowered at the crowd of people backing farther and farther away.
A whistle blared around the corner, followed by the thunder of boots. A swarm of police surged toward the crowd, a tidal wave that would swallow them all. The man to her left addressed them.
“We’ve got plenty of buckets, and—”
They struck him with a baton across the face. Blood sprayed the already wet cobblestones.
Everyone scattered, but not before a few were caught and slammed to the ground or against brick buildings. More bones were broken than buckets of water were sluiced onto the crumbling building.
“Leave him alone!” Elara shouted.
Chantal grabbed her elbow. “We have to go.”
One voice rose above the chaos. “Run! Go home!”
Fernand.
Elara pushed through the riot to find him dragging a smoking body from the smoldering curb.
Sirens wailed through the night. The fire brigade. And more police.
“RUN!” Fernand shouted again, hobbling faster. It wasn’t enough. The body would slow him down, and he’d be captured.
Elara ran toward him.
“I don’t understand,” Chantal shouted, following Elara through the herd and toward Fernand. “We’re helping!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Elara replied, stooping to grab the body.
Fernand’s eyes flared with surprise at seeing her, but he accepted her help, and together, they raced to the back of the tailor’s office. Others were flooding in and down into the cellars of étoiles.
The dance hall had been converted into a makeshift hospital.
Bodies in varying degrees of pain were stretched on blankets or covered with cloth.
The vendors passed out their contraband magie wherever it helped—tea to numb the pain, food to nourish the burns, little toys to help children forget what they’d just seen.
But they would never forget.
It didn’t work like that.
“What are you doing here?” Fernand said, laying the body down.
The person was … unidentifiable. Any hair had been singed short, their clothes burned nearly beyond recognition save for a splotch of bleach across little pink flowers. Had they worn it to catch someone’s eye this morning? Or just to feel pretty?
They gasped, fingers reaching, scratching.
Chantal knelt down, grasping their withered hand.
“I’m here to help,” Elara said.
“Move!” Nicolette shoved her aside and dropped to the floor with water and bandages. “We’re a little busy, Souverain.”
Elara ignored the jab. “What happened?”
“Some damned fool took it upon themselves to try and start a war on their own.” Nicolette doused the poor soul in water, and their screams joined the riot of others.
“Gently,” a familiar voice snapped from a few cots over.
“Blai?”
They poked their head up, cheeks tinting red. “I can explain.”
“Blai came to warn us about the arrest,” Fernand said. “It gave us time to prepare down here before the police arrived.”
“Only because his face is too beautiful to be crushed by a fist,” Blai muttered.
Elara wasn’t awake. She couldn’t be, because Blai, someone who’d warned her against sticking her neck out for others, was here, helping a rebel and his cause.
Chantal took the pitcher from Nicolette. “Let me.”
“What do you know about burns?” Nicolette snapped.
“I’ve seen my fair share of theatre fires and stage accidents.” She held out a hand. “Chantal Maran, at your service.”
Nicolette’s face blanched. “The Chantal Maran?”
“One and the same.”
They went to work, giving Elara and Fernand freedom to step away. The boy-like fear he’d shown earlier was gone, the hardened face of a general plastered on once more.
She gripped his elbow. “If you didn’t start this, who did?”
“I know you’ve been a little busy playing chef to notice, but things in the Restes have gone to shit.” He wiped his hands on a rag and tossed it aside, turning to prowl through the dance hall to the back rooms.
“I know that.” She followed on his heel.
He slammed the door to the Cradle open. It was busier than last time, the table cluttered with maps, extra rations … weapons. Empty chairs surrounded the center table, where a map had been pinned to the top with knives. A circle had been traced around The Market.
“Why are you angry?” Elara asked. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
He tore his ruined shirt over his head. “If you’re asking that, you don’t know me as well as I thought.”
Elara flushed at his stinging words more than his glistening skin. She did know Fernand. Better than most people. She’d just been too stubborn to see it all this time.
Fernand was rage and vengeance incarnate, but he was also calculated and compassionate.
He would never put his quarter in danger if he could avoid it.
She’d been so wrong in reducing him to an angry boy who lashed out without a plan.
Regardless of how things went, he tried his best to protect his people. His neighbors. Her.
Elara knew she needed to apologize, but there wasn’t time.
“How did news about Gaetan spread so fast?” she asked.
“Blai only gave us a few minutes warning before this thing”—Fernand tossed his head at a Lisette Plouffe poster laid out beneath the map—“started rearranging the narrative. They pinned Plouffe’s murder on him, declared you a stooge.”
“They don’t have a shred of proof.”
“Of course they don’t. Because none of it’s true.”
“Please.” She stepped forward. “You need to save him.”
“Sure. I’ll just make an appeal at court first thing in the morning.” He grabbed a bottle of liquor and splashed it on his burnt hands. “Shit!”
Elara fought the urge to help him. That wasn’t her place anymore. “If anyone can get him out, it’s you. You’re good at this kind of thing. You got those papers for me—”
“Because I had a connection. Look what happened to her.” He sloshed down a swallow, then grabbed a rumpled shirt from the pile.
“Who really killed her?” Elara asked.
His face fell in disbelief. “You have no idea, do you?”
She felt like a child beneath his stare.
“Oh, Elara.” His tone was laced with so much pity she wanted to smack him. “You were offered a patronage by Lafontaine’s direct apprentice, and, let me guess, he promised you’d win as long as you played their game. For what price?”
Elara bit her tongue.
He sneered. “Did you at least show the paper to Dupont?”
“He’s trying to figure it out,” she replied. “And I didn’t come here to be ridiculed or punished for being a disappointment to you and everyone else in the city. I came here to help Gaetan!”
Fernand shoved a pistol in his belt. “Do you want me break into prison to save him? Get arrested and leave my people to die?”
This was the Fernand Travers people followed. Elara would’ve followed him too if she hadn’t been so afraid.
“I can’t sacrifice the hope of the resistance for one man,” he declared. “If anything, his arrest might be the power I need to propel people into action. The right kind of action.”
Elara drew back. “You really would use him to further your own plans.”
“If it’s the only way to win,” he said, approaching the door.
“Then you’re no better than the Counseil,” she spat.
She added it to the growing list of things she should apologize for. Fernand was nothing like the Counseil, but that didn’t help her understand how he could so easily cast Gaetan aside.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I have somewhere I need to be.”
“Why?”
He opened the door, letting a nightmarish cacophony fill the air: screams, cries, harshly struck commands.
“I deserve to know,” she snapped.
He whirled on her. “Deserve?” Elara backpedaled until her thighs hit the table. “You don’t deserve anything, Elara. Not until you realize everything you do—everything—affects others.”
“I do,” she whispered. “Now I do.”
“If you did, you wouldn’t have come here and put us all in more danger, Favored. You only came here to make yourself feel better. To pretend like you’re making a difference instead of actually helping.”
Her lip wobbled, but she refused to let him see her break.
“Do you know why I said your bakery was a waste of time?” He pointed to the table cluttered with plans. “Because your mother knew there was more important work to be done. She died for that work, and you chose to live out some fantasy instead.”
He stormed out, stopping at the door. “Don’t attend the final contest.”
Before she could ask why, the shouts outside changed. They weren’t the soul-tearing screams of those in pain, but the terrified shrieks of—
“Police!”
“Run!”
Furious stomps shook the walls, and Elara was fourteen again, watching the city’s guard tear through people like they were sugar-work figurines, smashing them to pieces until they got their answers. Fourteen when buildings burned and she had to hear the wails of a child—
“They found us.” Nicolette panted. “We have to get out of here.”
Blai and Chantal were on her heels, as well as other faces Elara recognized as if through a hazy dream—the people who’d surrounded Fernand in the booth the day she’d answered his call. They were here, looking to him for answers.
“Out the back,” Fernand mumbled, eyes stuck on the archway to the ballroom.
Standing there, Elara understood his struggle. If he left now, he’d be abandoning those people to a fate worse than death. But if he tried to help, he’d be captured and any hope for change would end. It was an impossible choice.
One Elara made for him, both because she still cared for the stubborn boy who’d saved her from her grief and because she wanted to prove she was capable of committing to change.
She shoved him into his followers. “Get him and as many people out of here as you can.”
“What!” Fernand fought to get away. “No! Let me go!”
They dragged him backward and around the corner, where his voice finally faded.
“We have to go too,” Chantal said, following on Elara’s heels into the Cradle. “What are you doing with that!”
Elara brought the bottles of liquor into the hallway and dumped the contents in a line across the stones.
It would burn, but not for long. Just enough to deter the police from following.
Beside her, Nicolette and a handful of Fernand’s other supporters helped, adding clothes and curtains from the Cradle to the barrier.
Down the hallway, a troop of officers appeared. “Halt!”
Elara went to strike a match, but Nicolette stole it from her hand.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
Nicolette knocked her back into the shadows. “They can’t recognize you!”
Elara frowned. “Why do you suddenly care?”
“I don’t,” Nicolette snapped. “Not about you, but about what you’ve done. What you could do for us. For the Restes. Fernand’s plan is solid, but so is yours. You can support him and the Restes if you win, and you can’t do that if you’re in shackles.”
The police were nearly upon them.
“GO!”
Blai tugged Elara’s sleeve, bringing her back to reality. If the police caught her, the Counseil would have perfect reason to raze the Restes to the ground.
They left Nicolette behind, her silhouette darkened against a fiery explosion of liquor and cloth.
When they hit stifling summer air, Blai broke away. “Get back to the house.”
They fled, forcing Elara and Chantal to disappear down the narrow, twisted alleys leading back to Belleplace. Across the river, Elara turned back to face her home, which lit up the sky like a smoldering dawn.
She couldn’t ignore it any longer.
They were at war.