Chapter Fifteen
CHAPTER
Fifteen
GOD DAMN LOWELL Sharpe.
This is the problem with men like him: the insufferability, the audacity to take Cassandra on some bullshit journey to “educate” her. As though she needs educating. As though she doesn’t know what happens when a reader fucks up.
It’s just past closing time, but Cassandra sits at Chiron’s desk, still burning with fury. She’s exhausted—whether from her anger, or a holdover from the reading, she can’t tell—but when she closes her eyes, a blur of images flash through her mind.
Blood. Ink. That awful, panicked sensation of losing control. And the man in her arms—
Every time she thinks she can forget about it, every time she tries to leave it behind, there it is, clinging to her like a second shadow. And the worst part of it is that Lowell has no idea, yet somehow he’d sensed it on her. A stain that she’ll never be able to scrub out.
And wouldn’t he be right?
Even if she wasn’t irreversibly marked by her past, it’s harder to fault him for his insistence at her unsuitability.
The bookshop might be open and running, but it’s been years since she was a bookseller, and longer still since Chiron had trusted her with any of its more secretive workings.
There are so many details that he’d omitted or outright refused to pass on.
So many gaps in her already patchy memory—gaps that a real owner would never have because they would have never left.
“I’ve heard of Lowell Sharpe,” Byron says, bringing a stack of books from the back of the bookshop to the front.
It’s taken a good few weeks, but it seems as though the bookshop is finally starting to warm up to Cassandra—or at least test her in less vexing ways.
Two days ago, a door appeared behind the broom cupboard, revealing several boxes of books still waiting to be catalogued, each unfit to sell in their current state.
Byron had taken one look and sorted through them wordlessly, so that the ones requiring only simple mends were already catalogued, and now it’s just the tricky books that need tackling.
Cassandra has a pair of thick welding gloves on for the occasion.
Byron’s not been at Chiron’s for long, but Cassandra has already found numerous reasons to appreciate her new employee.
It’s because of Byron that the bookshop gleams every morning, that they’ve avoided another tempestuous weather event at the hands of an unhappy book, that no customer has returned irate.
Within two days, she’d found a more suitable place for Chiron’s ledgers than the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and ordered in Cassandra’s favourite tea—without asking.
Between the two of them, they’ve managed to actually start accruing cash, through taking in repairs, consulting, and valuing antiquarian books, regardless of magical origins.
All the fiddly, dull bits of bookselling, meticulously orchestrated. Chiron would have loved her.
“What have you heard?” Cassandra asks.
“That he has the dress sense of a sexy undertaker. Also, he’s an asshole.” Byron shrugs. “At least it’s not personal.”
Cassandra doesn’t have the heart to tell her that actually, it’s quite personal.
Only Lowell knows about the second letter from Chiron.
And even if he wanted to contest the validity of her ownership, it’s too late now.
It would take a complex combination of both of their wills and the river to change it.
Either that, or death—and he’s already seen how one posthumous roll of the dice can have disastrous results on what should be an assured outcome. Though she wouldn’t put it past him to try it.
“That sexy undertaker look is really working for him, though. By the way, do you need an extra toe?” Byron says conversationally. “Because I think we have a surplus.”
“No, I—” Cassandra’s brain catches up. “Toe?”
Byron pulls the next book from the pile and thumps it on the desk. Sure enough, the tome in front of them is peppered with toes sticking out of the pages, as though someone had run out of cross-referencing tabs. Several of them are wearing coral nail polish.
“I think the last reader was using them as bookmarks,” Byron adds.
Though she can’t think of much else she’d like less, Cassandra removes the welding gloves, places her hand on the front cover and listens carefully for a moment. A wave of sensations washes over her: the creak of leather, wind rushing past her, the infinite space between one step and another.
“Someone trying to craft a seven-league boots story with multiple editions. See the binding? An experiment gone awry,” she concludes.
Byron looks at her curiously, and Cassandra shifts in her seat, feeling as though she’s been caught out in something.
“You’ve always been able to do that? Read the books so easily, I mean.”
She shrugs. “I grew up here.”
Her origins are a little fuzzy; Cassandra had started asking questions around the time Chiron had stopped answering them.
In her most childish fancies, she originally imagined herself as the result of Chiron’s long-lost love, or a forlorn orphan, left in his dutiful care amongst a box of Dickens novels.
But the reality is that she’s most likely a price paid, like so many protégés and booksellers: a firstborn in exchange for a book.
“I grew up with Septimus,” Byron counters. “Who is at least half bookshop himself.”
Cassandra’s gaze returns to the book of toes. “Maybe there’s just something about this place.”
Byron’s expression turns reverent. “I wonder if Lady Fate still takes an interest.”
Cassandra fervently hopes not. It’s hard to imagine what Lady Fate would make of Cassandra’s casual heresies.
She used to sail paper boats in the pool at the back of the bookshop, the water dappled by the twin shadows of Lady Fate’s statues.
And when she was even younger, she used to climb in—her own personal paddling pool, with empty inkwells for toys.
But it’s more than that. The first books she’d learnt to read were the ones brimming with magic that she pulled off shelves, and more than one singed finger to show for it.
Her first clumsy attempts at writing are still memorialised at the back of old ledgers in archival ink, Chiron’s handwriting above her own.
She’d stolen her first kiss from the son of another bookseller amidst the botanical shelves, and broken up with him three months later when he said he was going into accounting.
Years later, someone had lashed out at her—a deal gone wrong—and she’d been surprised to see blood instead of ink.
If a bookseller starts their vow to Lady Fate with a glass of river water, then Cassandra had drunk an ocean by the time she was old enough to walk. Haphazard devotion and defilement in one.
“All I know is that I’ve worked in bookshops my whole life, and so has Septimus—and he’d never be able to do that,” Byron says, admiring. “Gifts like that can’t be taught. No wonder he didn’t like you.”
Gift. She’s never considered the books’ language a gift before—just another fact of herself, like being left-handed or slightly too short to reach the highest two shelves without a stepladder.
“But you didn’t stay,” Byron adds.
Cassandra tenses. The why is unspoken, but it’s there all the same.
Next to the botanical shelves is where she had her first fight with Chiron.
Behind the desk is where he’d told her, yet again, the vastness of his disappointment in her.
There’s nowhere in this bookshop that she hasn’t argued with one of his booksellers, or received a passing criticism, like they were commenting on nothing but the weather.
Talented, but lazy. Talented, but won’t do the work. Talented, but undeserving.
She sets the toe book to one side. “Can you put this in the back? I’ll deal with it later.”
Byron must take the hint because she gingerly adds the toe book to the stack already waiting to be mended and gathers the pile into her arms. That’s what Cassandra should have been. Chiron’s right-hand knight to his king, in the way of all booksellers and their owner.
“If I lived here, I’d never leave,” Byron says, a little too sharply to hide her envy.
Cassandra presses her fingers into her shoulders, feeling a deep ache from sitting at the desk for too long. That’s what I thought, too.
She waits until the faint strains of some eldritch folk band rise from Byron’s cranky speaker in the back—“I dropped it in the pond by mistake and now all it plays is this nonsense,” she’d complained—before pulling open a drawer to retrieve a note.
The other reason she’s sat at Chiron’s desk this evening, trying to be some semblance of an owner, is in her hands.
A piece of paper in Byron’s straightforward handwriting, with a request from a customer.
It’s an ordinary request, in that it’s a book—and impossible in every other way. Because it’s a book that doesn’t exist.
Wearily, Cassandra places it on top of the small but stubborn pile of equally impossible requests.
Books devoured by fires in the private libraries of the very rich, scrolls that drowned with the crew of a maiden voyage, philosophical texts disposed of in their entirety by their cut-throat opponents.
And then, peculiarly, a book that would have been written except the writer died of tuberculosis before a word could ever be placed to page.
She massages her forehead with the tips of her fingers and rises from the desk.
If it was just the one request, she’d think someone was playing a joke on her.
Books doused in the river’s magic, sure; but books that don’t exist?
Even the river can’t conjure something out of, well, nothing.
But the bookshop thrives on fulfilling its duty.
If it perceives that she’s failing, when she’s just managing to win it over again…