Chapter Forty
CHAPTER
Forty
FOR THREE DAYS, Cassandra drifts in and out of sleep. The river laps around her, the sound a lullaby from a place in her heart beyond memory.
A figure watches her from the waves. Sometimes it’s Lady Fate, her expression amused, as though she’s seen this play out before.
Occasionally, she pauses to make a note in her compendium.
Other times, it’s a stockier, more severe silhouette.
Chiron stands over her with his usual stern glare, hands in his pockets as though he’s caught her yet again being somewhere she shouldn’t.
She tries to speak to him, to apologise, to explain—to do anything at all. But her mouth feels too tired for words, her head too sore for thoughts.
On the fourth day, the silhouette flickers. Lady Fate. Chiron. Lady Fate again.
They press a kiss to her forehead. “On your feet, Cassandra.”
Cassandra wakes up.
Pain hits her like a wall and then again, when she musters the energy to open her eyes. She takes her time easing out of bed, then struggles to the reading room, feeling every bruise and ache as she inches her way down the stairs.
Byron is lounging in one of the armchairs, half-asleep with a book falling out of her hand, but she bolts upright when Cassandra staggers in.
Cassandra stops, leaning against the door frame to catch her breath.
She’d expected the room to be cold, the hearth unlit, abandonment evident in every surface collecting dust. But the hearth crackles, and the windows are fogged with condensation, and someone has washed the collection of mugs now drying on the side.
Her bookseller is still there.
“She lives,” Byron says.
Cassandra searches for any sign of regret or anger, but all that’s evident is a guarded relief. But there must be anger, underneath the relief, after what she’s done.
It hurts too much to attempt a smile, and anyway, given the circumstances, it doesn’t seem right. “She does.”
After a beat, Byron gets to her feet and puts on the kettle, clatters around in the cupboards for dry mugs, spoons, the last of the sugar. The sound of domestic life, so ordinary, so exquisitely perfect. So deeply undeserved.
“You look like crap,” she says over her shoulder.
While Byron makes tea, Cassandra gingerly examines her injuries. Her throat still hurts, though it’s no longer the liquid fire that had coursed through her. Gently, she flexes her limbs. Nothing broken, as far as she can tell. It just hurts like hell.
Quietly, she watches Byron, waiting for the moment to splinter and snap. But it hangs taut as Byron hands her a mug, then settles back into her armchair. The fire pops in the hearth as a log shifts. Cassandra flexes her hands, her muscles protesting.
“Ink sick,” Byron says. “Whatever you read… had an impact.”
Cassandra runs her tongue over her teeth, tasting ink underneath strong minty toothpaste. She’d been confronted with an ugly sight in the bathroom mirror: the ghost of black tears down her face; black-rimed gums; her lips tinged so she looked like a corpse, rudely awoken from eternal slumber.
She’d read too deeply, with no regard for her body. Or control, for that matter. She’d been so close to letting the river take her, and take them all. That she’s here, with limbs and pulse intact, is beyond lucky.
“I guess this is the part where you ask what happened,” Cassandra says.
Byron thumbs the pockets of her jeans. “I guess so.”
But neither of them say anything. Instead, it’s Cassandra who opens.
“How did you find me?”
“I came back to the bookshop to… pick up my things,” Byron says, and Cassandra nods because it’s the only action that makes sense.
It’s this—this kindness that’s inexplicable.
“The bookshop was a wreck. You were nowhere to be found. And I—I just knew that something terrible had happened. So I went back to Sharpe’s.”
Cassandra can picture it: the dash back to the bookshop—and it would have had to have been a dash, given they’d reached her in time—Byron barrelling through the front door, calling Lowell’s name like a life depended on it because it did.
What she can’t picture is Lowell. Whether he’d needed persuading, whether he’d registered Edmund’s absence, whether he’d only come out of a sense of duty. Because that’s what an owner does. And Lowell is an owner through and through, in everything but name.
All she can think of is his gaze, burning, like she’d slapped him and was already raising her hand to do it again.
“It was another bookshop,” Cassandra says, and Byron nods.
“Lowell read to find you,” she says. “I didn’t know he could do that.”
Lowell, so adamant about not wasting resources, about wielding the river’s gifts so carefully, would surely have seen it as an indulgence. But he read for her anyway.
“I’ve never seen him look like that before,” Byron continues, sounding awed and horrified at once. “I thought he was going to kill that guy in the devil mask. If you hadn’t fainted when you did… he might have.”
Roth is still alive, then. Cassandra waits to feel something, anything: rage, fear—perhaps betrayal, if there had ever been a time when she would have considered their relationship to be capable of such a thing.
Maybe relief that she hasn’t made Lowell a killer, to join the ranks of those terrible gold-masked owners.
But all that’s left is a hollow between her ribs, as though she’s still reading without a book, siphoning the precious river.
“Anyway, we managed to haul you out of there. I don’t think the society were interested in sticking around,” Byron says. Then she adds, “You dropped this, by the way.”
She holds out a key, old and smooth with the weight of so many hands across time.
“It’s still your bookshop,” Byron says softly.
Cassandra looks at it for a long time. It’s hers, whether she takes it or not. The bloodied signature down in the stacks has made sure of that.
“And I’m still your bookseller,” she adds.
There’s a long pause.
“Edmund wasn’t lying,” Cassandra says, very quietly. “About any of it.”
Byron exhales. “You could have told me.”
Cassandra’s hands tighten on the armrests of her chair. “And for what? For you to leave?”
She wouldn’t blame Byron for finally drawing the line between herself and the bookshop, with Cassandra’s secrets spilled bloody across the floor, and no way to pick them back up. But she needed Byron. And not just because she was a bookseller.
“I wrecked your life!” Cassandra says, too hoarse to shout properly.
“And you know what? I never thought twice about what the consequences might have been, or who I might have hurt, or what you might have—” She cuts herself off, and takes a deep, shaky breath.
“It was easy to me. It always has been.”
The great irony of her life. Quieting books, thieving from tributary bookshops, reading without so much as a page in front of her. Everything a bookseller should be, on paper. And yet an owner’s worst nightmare in person.
With careful deliberation, Cassandra studies her mug. “If you want to leave, I won’t stop you. I’ll give you an excellent reference.”
She waits for Byron to stand up, agree, walk out. Instead, Byron rolls her eyes.
“Booksellers have stood by their owners through worse.” Cassandra looks at her, surprised, and she shrugs.
“Eugénie Fontaine killed an owner and two protégés. Anton de Graaf poisoned a book to catch a thief, and damn near killed half the bookshop. Then the thief stole the book anyway. And you know what his bookseller said?” She leans in conspiratorially.
“Where would you like me to bury the bodies? I’ve read the letters—trust me, I know. ”
“But I still did this to you.”
Byron’s smile fades. “Yes, you did, and you lied to me—which really sucked, by the way. You know what the worst part of it all was? Not knowing who had cost me the job I’d loved. Not really. Cass Holt could have been a ghost, for all the evidence she—you—left behind.”
Cassandra winces.
“But you also revived the bookshop, gave me a job before you had any idea of what you’d done, braved Septimus.
Went to bat for Lowell—and God knows what would have happened to him if you hadn’t.
That counts for something, too.” She glances towards the window.
“You’re not the only person who’s trying to make the best of a second chance. ”
It doesn’t erase what Cassandra’s done. It doesn’t bring a man back from the dead. But how she wishes it could.
“Is Lowell okay?” It comes out more timid than she means to.
All she remembers are glimpses of blood, the swing of his fist. A wild, haunted look in his eyes that she’s never seen before. She wishes she didn’t remember any of it.
“He helped me bring you back. Then he went home.” She hesitates. “He… didn’t say if he’d return.”
He won’t, not now.
But he’s okay, Cassandra tells herself. That’s all that matters. And if he never speaks to her again, if they only catch glimpses of each other across auctions, or galas, or in the street, then he’s already given her more grace than she deserves.
They finish their tea in the hush of the fire, snow falling softly outside.
Despite the warmth, Cassandra can’t quite shake the chill of the river, which seems to have settled deep into her bones.
There’s still something fragile about the reality in front of her; every time she blinks, she expects the walls to collapse around her, for Byron’s figure to stutter and reverse, for the snow to drift upwards instead of down.
Whatever reading the river had given her, it was powerful.
She had wanted to survive more than anything. And so had the river, she supposes.
“You nearly died, you know,” Byron says quietly.
Cassandra shrugs. “I know. But I didn’t.”
Like a cockroach, another thief had told her once. But she’d said it in an admiring way, and it had felt like a compliment at the time.
Byron takes the mug out of Cassandra’s hands. “I think I might stay here for another night or two. I’m in one of the old rooms on the right, if you need me.” She flashes her a smile. It’s maybe not as light-hearted as it’s been before, but it’s real.
“Thanks,” Cassandra says. “For the tea. And… for everything else.”
Exhaustion is starting to drag at her again, so she eases herself out of the armchair and limps from the reading room. She walks down the corridor, past the row of empty bedrooms. Her hands shake, and she curls them into fists. Every muscle begs her to rest.
But she keeps walking, until she reaches Chiron’s old bedroom, the one he’d used before he became the owner. The door clicks shut, silence thundering in its wake.
Doesn’t Cassandra know about ghosts.
She slides down to the blissful cool of the floorboards, and breaks into breathless, juddering sobs.
Found in the hearth of the reading room, burnt
From The Fairy Knight’s Daughter they answer in no language we can decipher.
But by their song, they could find one another anywhere in the forest. Until poachers visited the forest, and plundered its rarities for the wealthy, the spoilt, the cruel.
“When the sun rose on that day, the white bird sang. Yet for the first time in millennia, there was no response. The bird was alone.”
Lowell, I’m sorry
If I could take it back
If you could see my nightmares—if you could know how much I regret it all—
You weren’t wrong about me.