Chapter Twenty-Five #2
Time, Chiron’s voice whispers in the back of her head.
That’s what all books are, he’d told her, in one of his more forthcoming moments.
Just time, packaged in a convenient format for mortal eyes and ears, a dilution of the river’s power.
A small magic, a chance to tug on the strings of fate a little.
But only a little. And even then, with a price to pay.
Cassandra decides to feign ignorance. “Gosh, I don’t know.”
“The paradox books aren’t just touched by the river, but of the river. And like the river, they don’t play by our concept of time. Imagine any book touched by the river. Imagine its power, and then magnify that a thousand times. You could change the past, and through doing so, change the future.”
“You could do anything with a book like that,” Cassandra says quietly.
Eveline’s mouth curls, amused. “Oh, yes.”
Reluctantly, Cassandra’s thoughts turn to that blue horizon, the boat: freedom.
But then she thinks bigger, wider. Not a future where she’s running from the past, but a future where the past is entirely different.
One where she never fell out with Chiron, never fancied herself a thief, never went to a reading that ended with a dead man in her arms.
“Yes, I too once considered what I would change,” Eveline says, and Cassandra flushes at her transparency. “But you only get one choice, as an owner, amidst all those possibilities. One chance to divert Fate’s hand.”
And so many requests to choose from, with no way of knowing what that might truly mean. A king could die four hundred years ago where otherwise he might have reigned, and the world would be unrecognisable. For better—or for worse.
“How do you…?”
“That’s the burden we take as owners. I’m sure Chiron would have been able to tell you more.” That same snide, undercutting tone, like Cassandra is too stupid to notice the insult. “Sometimes it was simply better for us to choose… ourselves.”
Cassandra considers how much power she would need to wipe the slate clean. More than she would get from any of the titles in Chiron’s bookshop. But if a paradox book is more powerful, then it would need more power in the first place. And where would that come from? The river.
What would it take, Cassandra wonders, to tilt Lady Fate’s scales back into balance?
“The price would be steep,” she says.
“The price for power is already steep.” Eveline’s eyes glint. “If you pay it.”
Cassandra instinctively recoils. She might have broken all of Chiron’s rules, and more once she’d left.
But even in the haunting gap between thief and whatever she’d become after that night—broke, amongst everything else—she’d found a way to give back to the river.
Eveline has to be joking, she decides. No bookseller, never mind owner, would forsake that fundamental duty.
“As you can see, we are paying the price anyway. Because the river isn’t infinite.” Eveline gestures to the chalky stripes across the cave walls. “And you, with Lady Fate’s bookshop and all its remaining power at your disposal, make for a quite compelling target.”
Ah, here it is. The threat. How generous of Eveline to take Chiron’s bookshop off Cassandra’s hands, and take on the responsibility of this new danger. But Cassandra keeps returning to that small phrase, said with such certainty: the river isn’t infinite.
“What do you mean about the river?” she says very carefully.
“Have you not noticed?”
Cassandra is about to say no, because it’s impossible. The river threads through every tributary bookshop, time and history and wonder. Concepts that can’t simply disappear.
Then she glances again at the cave walls, the new stairs at the bottom of the old ones because the original staircase is no longer sufficient to reach the surface of the lake.
Roth’s experiment with recreating the river.
That strange, nagging feeling that has dogged her, even as she’s worked in the bookshop.
What had the men at Maud’s said? River’s gone.
“I assumed Chiron would have told you,” Eveline says casually. “Amongst other things.”
There’s something underneath her tone that makes Cassandra linger. She knows something else, she thinks, and she’s not telling me.
“The river is fine at Chiron’s,” she says, as though she’s careless, overconfident.
Just enough of a taunt to flatten Eveline’s amusement.
“Have you heard of the society?” she says, with a terrible new gleam of interest. “No? But perhaps you’ve already met them. They’ve certainly met Chiron.”
The men at Maud’s bookshop, again. The hair on the back of Cassandra’s neck prickles. There are only two ways to inherit a tributary bookshop: a contract, each party willing and able, with the complex rite of ink, blood and the river’s water.
Or death, in whatever form.
Cassandra doesn’t realise she’s slipped off the mask of respectable owner until her hands are balled into fists, every line of her body taut with the urge to fight. The ground judders ever so slightly beneath her feet, the bookshop uneasy around them.
“Chiron’s bookshop isn’t for sale,” she snaps. “Over my dead body, and over his, too, apparently.”
Eveline glances sharply at her, and Cassandra immediately knows that she’s said too much.
She knows Chiron was murdered, she thinks.
She should have played stupid for longer.
From behind her, she catches a glimpse of the artifices in her peripheral vision, their odd, accordion bodies jerking with movement.
Eveline observes her, no longer amused. “Chiron told me you were difficult.”
“Keep threatening me,” Cassandra says softly, “and find out how difficult I can be.”
They watch each other, tense. Cassandra readies herself to read, even though she’s in an unfamiliar bookshop, the river’s song not as deep as she’s used to.
She might get past Eveline, but she doesn’t like the look of those artifices.
But then Eveline inclines her head, and the artifices reel away from the entrance to the cave.
“Get your driver, or whoever it is, to take me home,” Cassandra snarls. “I’m done here.”
Eveline merely cocks an eyebrow. “Lady Fate will fuck you over sooner or later, same as the rest of us.” Her eyes glint. “And I suspect sooner.”
Found loose in the cabinets on the second floor of the bookshop below
Here lies the record of the original society members, brought together to dispense Justice, Wisdom and Knowledge under Lady Fate’s Guiding Hand. For O to you, who holds our fate most tight, we are but story made manifest. May we protect your heart as you guide ours.
First session commencing—
[Here, most of the names have been scrubbed out, either by time or another, more purposeful hand.]
Owner: Abbess Wulfrun III; protégé: Sister Agnes Mayhew
Owner: Wymer de Chauncy, Earl of Lincoln; protégé: Ranulf Sutton
Owner: Fortescue, of no last name; protégé: Godwin, of no last name
Owner: Simon Skerning; protégé: Godfrey Roper
Thus we do sign our names and pledge ourselves to this historic occasion, entrusting this document to our faithful secretary for records hereafter.
[All useless. Wulfrun dead within a year and her protégé deeply inexperienced in record-keeping; de Chauncy caught up in politics, protégé dead of some plague. Fortescue and Skerning uninterested in their inherited history.
Pledge plus heart? Heart equal book?
They must have known about the compendium. The society must have known.]