Chapter Four
CHAPTER
Four
CASSANDRA IS ADRIFT in a boat, on the river.
The waves are black, limned by moonlight, as water surges around her.
The body of the boat is lined with paper—book pages, each one stamped in red with her name.
Then, a spindly finger rises out of the river and tugs, pulling the boat down. Waves slop over the edge.
She tries to rise, but her body is impossibly weighted. More hands, grasping at her. Water—no, ink. Not a boat, but a funeral barge.
Cassandra.
She wakes, tangled in unfamiliar blankets. Her heart thumps wildly. It takes her a moment to realise where she is, and then a second moment of shock, dulled by the complicated ache in her chest.
Chiron’s letter and envelope are strewn across the floor beneath her, where they must have fallen when she fell asleep.
Next to her, the hearth is still ashes, looking more forlorn than the day before.
The rest of the reading room is doused in the weak light of an overcast afternoon, everything tinted grey and cold.
Cassandra checks her watch, then rubs her eyes wearily.
She’s already missed the start of her shift at the bar.
No doubt there are several emails waiting for her from furious students, wanting to know why their forged papers haven’t arrived.
She pulls out her phone to check, then realises that there’s no internet this deep into the bookshop, and certainly no reception.
She glances down just once at the letter, her name scrawled across the top.
It has to be fake. A sick, last-minute joke at her expense. Chiron would never just give her the bookshop. Not after what she did. She was barely a bookseller, never mind—
Owner.
This problem needs coffee.
Cassandra pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders and stumbles to the kitchen.
The milk is expired, but she finds a cup that isn’t growing mould, and the dregs of some instant coffee.
A rifle through the cupboards produces a couple of sugar cubes and a dusty spoon.
Coffee secured, she leans against the counter and tilts her head back.
Above her, the lanterns burn weakly, candles struggling to light.
She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, much in the same way she hadn’t intended to be here in the first place.
If she hadn’t paused in the reading room on her way down, found herself settling on the couch to read Chiron’s letter—just a few seconds, then a moment because the news was too vast to be true, then five minutes to rest her eyes and recover from the shock—she would have gone back to her flat to face whatever was waiting for her there.
Hours earlier, Roth had seemed like an impossible problem to surmount, but now…
Chiron is gone. There’s no denying that fact.
And the bookshop needs an owner. That’s also an undeniable fact.
Cassandra chews her lip as she swirls the spoon around her coffee.
It’s already a rare thing to come into possession of one of these shops.
Usually the line of inheritance is closely guarded, parent to child, or master to protégé.
And the bookshop let her in, so obviously it considers her worthy—or at least, recognises that it needs a human hand.
Once, Chiron had been called away to manage a bookshop whose owner had died in the same freak accident as their only protégé—an explosion catalysed by a rare, combustible ink left too long on a sunny windowsill.
For nearly a month he had shuttled between the two bookshops while a new owner was negotiated from a handful of surplus protégés from other owners.
He had returned grey-hued with exhaustion, stretched between two handfuls of increasingly nervous, unhappy booksellers surrounded by nervous, unhappy books.
They’d settled on another owner eventually, but not before the bookshop had caught fire twice—both times a result of the books’ unravelling magic.
“We are custodians,” he’d told Cassandra, massaging his forehead with his weary hands. “We are afforded great privilege, but in turn, we must do right by the bookshops. You are as much of that legacy as I.”
Whether Cassandra liked it or not, it turns out.
She’d never quite grasped either the great privilege Chiron had alluded to—though at the time she’d thought he’d been talking about the magic of the books themselves—or what it meant to do right.
But still, the consequences of an owner-less bookshop make her shudder with vestigial grief.
A bookshop without an owner is a bookshop left to die.
Cradling her coffee, she musters her courage and emerges from the reading room.
Downstairs, the bookshop is still cold and grey with dust. The shelves are nearly bare, which she hadn’t clocked when she’d first come in, too exhausted and overwhelmed.
How long had Chiron let the bookshop go like this?
When was the last time a customer even graced its doors?
What the hell had Chiron been doing?
Even the mere thought of deciding what to clean first is exhausting, so Cassandra sits down at Chiron’s magnificent cedar desk, a usurper on his throne.
So this is what he would have seen. The shelves in front of her, commanded by a tight group of experienced booksellers, each with a particular quality that made them indispensable to its running.
If she casts her mind back in time, she can distinguish their faces, names, the surly way they each said Cassandra, like they could tell she was already dreaming up trouble.
She gives a sidelong glance to the wall next to the staircase, so ordinary in the early evening light. Reluctantly, she lets her memory stray further back, to a time when it hadn’t been an empty space, but an archway, leading down to the deepest part of the bookshop.
The stacks. They had another name once—or at least, Chiron had called them something else—but she only knows them by that descriptor.
Stacks of what? she’d asked once, trying to be a smart-ass and half-succeeding.
One of the booksellers had given her an eviscerating look and replied, what do you think?
in such a way that she never asked that particular bookseller a question again, glib or otherwise.
But there’s obviously no archway now, even though there’s no sign that it’s been bricked up, either. Another problem to set aside for later. Or, she amends, until she decides what to do with the bookshop.
Instead, she gets up and makes her way behind the staircase, to the back of the shop.
If the front looks shabby, then this is dismal, with rows of empty shelves, cobwebbed and filthy.
But the whisper of magic runs through her head, a chattering buzz in a language that ripples and shivers like stones skipped across a lake.
Because there, behind the last shelves, lies the river.
Or what remains above ground anyway—a shallow pool of water, surrounded by crumbling ornamental stonework and pebbles.
The water laps at the very edge of the wooden floorboards, though there are no markers of rot.
Above, twin statues of Lady Fate in grey-white marble look down, their sightless eyes bearing judgement on their errant visitor.
One carries her scales, for balancing a person’s fortune; the other holds tightly to her compendium for writing it down, cementing past and future forever.
Cassandra remembers searching for it as a child, convinced it was real, until Chiron had told her otherwise.
Even then, she had considered the future a matter of bargaining for her preferred outcome, or at least of catching a glimpse inside the compendium to see how far its elasticity stretched.
The whispering from the shelves grows louder, as Cassandra kneels at the edge and pulls off her socks. Hesitantly, she slips her feet into the cool water. All at once, the whispering fades. The bookshop peels away. Nothing but the feeling of water against skin.
Cassandra releases a deep breath, and the tension falls away from her muscles.
She whispers a few lines of verse, and glimmers of light dance along the surface of the water like fireflies.
They cluster around Lady Fate’s scales, less than the weight of a feather.
A sensation as familiar and painful as longing washes over her. Home.
It’s hard to say what the river truly is, although Cassandra knows there are other, older names for it.
Magic feels like an insufficient word, as though the river is a tap to be turned on and off again at will.
But by its own definition, it is magical.
It’s why the bookshop can only be found by those who need it most, why its books are so much more than just ink and paper, why previous owners have sometimes gone down into the stacks armed with swords, and never returned.
This is what’s chased the edges of Cassandra’s dreams. This is why she slept so deeply last night, even on a couch, even in a room in a bookshop she was supposed to leave behind.
For all the time she’s spent away from here, for all the fury that she’s buried like nails in a coffin, now that she’s back, how hard it would be to wrench herself away.
A thought creeps into the front of her mind, almost too bold to acknowledge.
She could… stay.
Just long enough for Roth’s temper to cool. Just long enough to fall asleep one more time to the sound of whispering books and burbling water. Just long enough to sate the hunger within.
A noise from the front shatters the silence. Cassandra scrambles out of the water, and to the front of the shop.
It’s Chiron, she thinks wildly, impossibly. And she’ll have to explain about the letter, and her bare feet and oh God, he might very well know about Roth and—
She careens to an ungainly halt at the front of the shop, leaving wet footprints behind. It’s not Chiron. Her heart settles in her chest, somewhere between relief and disappointment.
An older woman is examining the bookshelves, one hand clasped around a cane.
Her hair, white like laundry, curls around the back of her head in a gold clasp.
It would be an innocuous sight, were Cassandra not absolutely certain that the door’s been locked all day.
An errant customer, swept in through the bookshop’s will—or a bookseller, already attuned to the river’s whisper.
The woman catches sight of Cassandra and smiles thinly. “May I speak to Chiron?”
Cassandra isn’t sure why she doesn’t tell the truth—that Chiron is dead and she’s all that’s left.
Maybe it’s the way the woman eyes her, as though she’s squeezing value from a worthless jewel.
Maybe it’s the faintest whisper of alarm from the books at the back, or the ice-water creep down her spine that’s usually the first sign of a theft going awry.
Maybe she just doesn’t appreciate the way the woman’s barged in.
“He’s not here,” she says instead. “And we’re closed.” She adds a smile that they both know isn’t sincere. “Sorry.”
The woman sighs, but makes no motion to leave. “What a pity. I was so hoping to catch up with him.”
“Well, he isn’t here.”
The woman smiles, and even though Cassandra can’t say there’s anything terrifying about it, every hair on the back of her neck prickles with well-practised warning. Business gone bad, or worse.
“What a trickster, that Lady Fate,” she says, and it sounds like a threat. “I suppose I’ll have to return.”
“I can’t promise he’ll be here if you do.”
Her eyes rake over Cassandra again. “Chiron always had such interesting taste.” She pauses for a second, long enough for Cassandra to see her make a decision. “I fear I’ve made you stay late. Have a good evening, and do say hello to Chiron for me when he returns.”
As soon as the woman leaves, Cassandra shuts the door behind her, securing all three bolts.
She double-checks the locks on the windows and draws the curtains.
Only halfway up the staircase does she realise her shoulders are still tense, her muscles knotted with energy the way they feel during late nights at the bar.
She glances back at the dark shop floor, the streetlight filtering thinly through the curtains. She was ready to fight, she realises.
Against what, she has no idea.