Chapter Forty-One
CHAPTER
Forty-One
CASSANDRA STARTS SLEEPING with a knife under her pillow. But it proves an unnecessary precaution; the society have scattered for the moment, leaving nothing but residual fear in their wake.
There’s also no sign of Lowell.
He’ll be done with her, now. And there’s no point in reaching for the phone, in trying to steal just five minutes of his time.
Because what’s left to explain? On another timeline, Arthur Sharpe might have died in the hands of another reader, with another group of owners looking down on him.
Or better yet, not at all. But in this world, it was Cassandra’s hands, Cassandra’s reading, Cassandra who should have said no, yet went ahead anyway.
There’s no use wishing for a different present, when the past has been so entirely of her own making.
Byron stays for three days, claiming a need to organise the bedrooms, which have mostly been undisturbed until now.
So even though her entire body still aches, Cassandra mops and dusts and sorts.
She scrubs at the floor until her hands crack and bleed.
She meticulously washes armfuls of grey bedding, even though they’re so old they should probably be thrown away.
She cleans until she’s so exhausted that twice she falls asleep in the reading room and wakes in the middle of the night, a blanket around her.
Another kindness, she knows.
But on the fourth morning, she finds Byron dozing in an armchair instead, and she shoos her home.
“You need to rest, too,” Cassandra says. “Besides, you’ve done more than enough here.”
Byron waves her a drowsy but reluctant goodbye, and in her wake the silence creeps in. The river, normally noisy enough to be heard even above the day-to-day sounds of the bookshop, is quiet. The books rustle half-heartedly on their shelves.
Cassandra considers going back to bed, to stare at the ceiling and pick apart how badly she’s broken everything, excruciating piece by excruciating piece.
Instead, she makes the long climb to Chiron’s tower.
The flowers have started to escape from the confines of his quarters, new buds clinging to the door frame.
She digs through Chiron’s belongings, until she finds what she’s looking for.
The gold mask of the society, worked into a delicate lattice that reminds Cassandra of lace.
It would have looked odd against Chiron’s face, incongruous with his rough-hewn features.
It might have softened the harsh crow’s feet around his eyes, the bumped ridge of his nose—broken, he’d always said, from a shelf collapsing on top of him; only she’s not so sure anymore—or it might have highlighted them.
A reminder that for all their niceties, all their play-acting at secret societies and disguise, the man underneath was real, and capable of all the great and cruel things that encompassed.
The Magician. Too clever to be wholly taken in by the society’s farce. Too stupid to avoid the death that had come for him, in the end.
Maybe the stupidity was in the belief that Cassandra would fit so snugly back into her role as protégé, after too many years on the other side. Or that she would be able to pull herself above the depths to which she’d sunk.
Cassandra holds the mask in her hands for a while. She almost puts it on. But at the last second, thinking of its last wearer, and how well its wearing had gone for him, she drops it.
Then, because it is a weekday, even if it’s cold and rainy outside, because Cassandra is still an owner, with an owner’s obligations, and because there is nothing else to do, she opens the bookshop.
She looks through old boxes, repairs fraying bindings, opens and shuts the ledger just so her hands stay busy.
A few customers shuffle in, more for the warmth than anything else. She sells a couple of books, not knowing whether it’ll matter, in the end. How long will it all last, before the river unravels, and the magic vanishes? She thinks of the river’s song, nearly absent. Soon.
The last customer has been gone for some time when the doorbell rings again. Cassandra glances up and feels something deeper than fury stir within her.
“Get out of my bookshop,” she says.
Edmund Sharpe’s face no longer looks quite so pleasing. One eye is nearly swollen shut, and he holds himself stiffly, the suggestion of broken ribs underneath his grimace. Good, Cassandra thinks.
“We need to talk,” he says.
“Oh, no, we fucking don’t,” she says.
He takes a step across the threshold, and Cassandra half-hopes for the bookshop to eject him.
Or better yet, impale him with splintered floorboards, as a warning to the rest of those gold-masked bastards.
But the river still runs underneath his own bookshop; no invitation is needed.
Even though the shop has always seemed to dwarf Cassandra with its high ceilings, Edmund moves through it with a confidence that shrinks the room around them.
“I understand you might be upset,” he says.
Cassandra grabs the letter opener off the desk, lately sharpened to a fierce point. She remembers the darkness, the bruising press of strangers’ hands, of her body fighting until there were only dregs to fight with. The exhaustion that’s buried her for a week.
She’ll never truly sleep again at night. Edmund Sharpe took that from her.
“What was it again?” She advances on him. “It will be painless? Or it will be long, and slow, and terrible?”
“I told you to get rid of the bookshop,” he says. “You didn’t leave the society much choice.”
“Long, and slow, and terrible.” She angles the knife towards him. “I wonder what it would have felt like. How long, how slow. How terrible. We could find out together.”
Around her, the books crackle, pent-up rage seeping through their pages. On her side, for once. For days, they’ve had to drink her anger, her terror.
She presses the tip against the hollow of his throat. He doesn’t stop her, doesn’t move.
“I didn’t come to apologise,” he says, and the friction of skin on steel shivers across her fist. “Do you know what happens to an owner when a bookshop’s river runs dry?”
“They pack up,” she says flatly, just to watch Edmund’s face twist in annoyance.
Underneath, a ripple of worry surfaces. Maud’s bookshop vanished, and it’s true that she hasn’t heard from her since. The others… Well, she doesn’t know.
“They die with their bookshops,” Edmund says.
“Bullshit,” she says. “You’re lying to me.”
“We all drank from the river; we all signed in blood. What did you think you were signing yourself away to?” He shrugs, and she’s unnerved to see the flicker of helplessness in his expression. “I have no reason to lie. You’ve seen the river’s decay. You know the bookshops are disappearing.”
Cassandra swallows. So that’s why Edmund won’t give Lowell the bookshop. Her hand holding the knife slackens.
“At first, we—the society—thought that if we could get hold of a paradox book to change the terms of the contract, it didn’t matter that the river would fall apart, or the magic with it. We would save the owners.”
Cassandra narrows her eyes. “And the world?”
For the first time, she catches a glimmer of shame and he glances away from her. “We thought it was worth the risk.”
Of course he did.
“But then we discovered the paradox books would unravel anyway, without the price paid. So Chiron got to work on another solution,” he continues.
“The ink. He thought… if we could somehow rewrite the future into Fate’s compendium, we could save it all.
The bookshops, the magic, the river, and the owners.
I know it sounds stupid—some fairy-tale nonsense.
But we’d done our research. At least, Chiron had.
“He told the society he was abandoning it—claimed it wouldn’t work—but we weren’t convinced, so we continued in secret. All we needed was someone willing… and an exceptionally talented reader.”
The breath leaves Cassandra’s chest. “Arthur.”
“Chiron was right, of course.” Edmund’s hands curl into fists. “We gambled poorly.”
This entire time, Cassandra had thought of this as the mess that Chiron had left behind. She’d considered herself chasing a problem that she’d inherited.
Instead, she has been a participant, unknowing.
A dozen poor decisions, threaded with the society’s greed and interests—and they’d known it wouldn’t work.
A new rage sweeps over her. If she’d known that this was what they’d planned at the reading, she would have never said yes.
Would never have placed her hand on Arthur Sharpe’s shoulder.
Never listened to the wheeze of his last breaths, never held a dying man’s hand. Never felt the heart-wrenching horror of what she’d done.
“Why did you come here?” she asks quietly.
“Did Chiron leave anything to you?” Edmund asks, desperation catching in his voice. “Did he leave notes about what he was doing? Or why?”
Cassandra raises an unimpressed eyebrow. “So concerned about your own fate.”
Even though, she realises, a beat too late, it’s her fate, too. The bookshops, falling like dominoes, taking their owners with them. She is an owner. If the bookshop goes, so does she.
“The society only need to preserve one paradox choice—and as long as Chiron’s bookshop stands, that’s still within their means,” Edmund says urgently.
“They just need a high enough price for the river to cement the choice before it disappears. Do you really think they were going to let an asshole like Roth be an owner? They don’t give a shit about the other decisions.
They won’t care what changes, or who vanishes—as long as they are safe. ”
“And what, suddenly you’re feeling a stab of altruism?”
He runs a hand through his hair. “You have no fucking idea what this will do. None at all. If you knew… Look, forget the society for a second. Listen to me: I would do anything to fix this, understand? Anything.”
“No,” she says, feeling weariness and that old stab of shame. “Chiron didn’t leave anything for me.”
Edmund’s shoulders slump in rare defeat. “Then we’re all fucked.”
“Was it you?” she asks suddenly. “Who killed him?”
Edmund looks at her. His face is so unlike Lowell’s in every feature, but in this moment, there is something awfully mimetic about the way he looks at her, grief etched in every line.
“I knew who Chiron was, outside of the society,” he says. “I’d known for a while. I think he knew me, too. He was a good man. Difficult. But good. Maybe difficult because he was good.”
Every one of Chiron’s lessons, hammered into her from earliest childhood. What does it mean to be an owner, Cassandra? What does it mean to be a bookseller? What does it mean to hold that kind of power? No wonder he’d thought Lowell a worthy successor.
“No, Cassandra, it wasn’t me. Maybe the Empress, or Judgement…” He shrugs. “What does it matter now? All his hard work, everything he strove for, will be undone.”
Because of you. Cassandra can’t tell if it’s recrimination, or simply regret that Lady Fate chose to intervene and place Cassandra as owner.
He opens the door and steps into the cool evening air, thunder rumbling in the distance. Cassandra reaches for him just as he’s about to close it.
“Wait.” She tries to think of a better way to frame her question, but there’s no tactful way to put it. “You’ve taken a paradox book, haven’t you?” When he says nothing in confirmation, she continues, “How high was the price? You must have paid it.”
Edmund looks at her coldly, without a trace of the pity she’d seen earlier. This is what Lowell Sharpe would become, if Edmund had his way. A concrete pillar of a man, unyielding, with nothing to soften those edges.
“Lady Fate’s already taken everything from me. My home, my freedom. My brother. Felt like that was payment enough.”
Cassandra stares after him as he disappears into the rain.
Chiron would have known, when he sent the letter to her, all those months ago, what it would mean for her to become the owner. What he was asking, when he’d sent it.
She slumps at her desk, clutches at the front of her shirt. Something, anything to steady herself. But all she can feel is the fragile beat of her heart, the surge of fear.
The bone-deep knowledge that Edmund is right, and they are all dead. It’s just a matter of time.