Chapter Forty-Three
CHAPTER
Forty-Three
THUNDER BLOSSOMS OUTSIDE the bookshop. Winter winds chase leaves across the road, hurrying along passers-by.
Cassandra watches rain streak the windows a smudged grey as she waxes the bookshelves, sleeves rolled up past her elbows.
The bookshop is cleaner than it’s ever been—even compared to Chiron’s fastidious attention in her earliest memories.
Because every moment spent cleaning is one that she doesn’t have think about what Edmund said.
All this time she’s worried about what the river dying would mean for herself afterwards, but it turns out she needn’t have worried at all. And Chiron had known. He’d known he was leaving her a cursed bookshop that neither of them could save. He’d known he was condemning her to die.
Chiron had known.
Someone bangs on the door, and Cassandra jumps, startled.
Her stomach knots in fear at the memory of Aloysius, terrified.
At Roth, and the casual way he’d held her name in his mouth, like he was holding power instead.
But the silhouette behind the frosted glass isn’t either of them: ruler-straight with purpose. Her heart thumps.
Cautiously, she opens the door.
Lowell stands on the doorstep, plastered with rain. Raindrops fall from his slicked-back hair. His shirt has acquired a translucent gleam, revealing a tantalising glimpse of fabric clinging to muscle. His hands are shoved in his pockets, his glasses beaded with raindrops.
There is a fading bruise at the corner of his mouth, and another one disappearing into his hairline. Days-old scratches raked across the underside of his jaw. His eyes drop to Cassandra’s neck, where Roth’s fingerprints still ring her throat. She swallows, pain chasing after the movement.
“Cassandra,” he says.
There’s not enough of an overhang on the awning, so rain continues to soak him. But he makes no attempt to move into the shelter of the shop. He looks like he ran here from Sharpe’s, straight through the thunderstorm.
She hesitates. “Would you like to come in?”
He steps over the threshold, trailing puddles in his wake. She guides him up to the reading room, the carpet squelching a little with every footstep. Around them, the books rumble; seconds later, distant thunder follows.
A low thrum sings through her. She can’t decide if it’s hope or madness.
Lowell came here. He might hate her, but he came, when she thought she’d never see him again.
They settle on the couch. Cassandra curls her feet underneath her, wincing as her ribs reassert their injuries. The couch shifts as Lowell sits next to her, posture rigid.
He looks at her, his face oddly vulnerable without the controlled uniform of tidiness. She can see what he might have been like as a teenager, once upon a time. Before grief and the iron will of Edmund Sharpe had laid their hands upon him.
The weight of Arthur Sharpe lies taut between them.
She has so much she wants to say, but she can barely look at him. Her hands shake, so she presses them hard into her knees. Finally, there is the truth laid out between them, and what a truth it is. What a thing she’s done.
“Cassandra,” he says.
A knot rises in the back of her throat, but she can’t cry. It’s not her grief. It’s not his role to comfort her.
“Why didn’t you use a paradox book?” he asks.
She flinches because he knows she must have thought about it.
Of course she’s thought about it: what it would be like to be Cassandra Fairfax without the past of Cass Holt.
To feel the weight of guilt lift from her chest because she has nothing to feel guilty for.
To know that she hadn’t condemned herself to Lowell’s hatred because she hadn’t killed his brother.
Except.
“I—I’m not sure,” she starts.
“You could have taken a paradox book. You could have changed the past. You could still change the past. So why haven’t you?” His tone is hard, urgent—lifetimes away from the Lowell she knows.
Cassandra presses her thumb into her palm until it hurts. She is going to lose him. But she is so tired of lying.
“Lowell, please—”
“Why? Why didn’t you try to save Arthur?”
“I—I can’t—”
He shakes his head. “Tell me the truth!”
“I won’t do it!” she bursts out. “The river would collapse, and everything tied to it, and—It was my mistake, and I’ll live with that forever and I know you will, too, and you have no idea how sorry I am.
” She digs her nails into the palms of her hands.
“But I won’t sacrifice the river for my mistake. Not even to save your brother.”
Lowell sits quietly, his gaze distant. She imagines all that he must be thinking: how selfish she is. How terribly cruel, if she thinks that an apology could ever suffice. How her stupidity and arrogance have cost him everything.
Cassandra’s voice is small. “I didn’t know who he was. That night.”
Would she have told him, if she’d known? Or would she have kept it to herself, a bloody, brutal secret?
She would have never let herself get close enough to Lowell to find out.
“You didn’t kill him,” he says finally.
She glances up sharply. Lowell is studying her face, his gaze calm and assured.
“I did the reading,” she says wretchedly. “I did it.”
“No, I mean…” He hesitates, the line of his body suddenly tense. “You did the reading, but he was already dead.” He pauses. “Because before you did the reading, it was me.”
Cassandra looks at him, puzzled.
“Arthur was always a poor reader,” he says, shaking his head.
“The river was going, even then, giving less and less of itself. And I guess Arthur… Maybe he was just unlucky when Jimena transferred ownership to him. He could barely conjure a light from verse, much less anything complex. But the society wanted him for a reading. An experiment, they told him. I think they wanted to catch him out and take Sharpe’s for themselves.
So Edmund and I decided that Arthur would have a partner of his own choosing at the reading. Me.”
Cassandra blinks. “You? But you weren’t there—I don’t remember—”
And she would remember Lowell. Even before she knew who he really was.
He cuts her off. “I’m a strong reader—stronger than Edmund. I could protect Arthur from the reading. Edmund could protect him from the owners. So we went.”
Lowell takes a deep breath, then another one, his gaze distant. Cassandra rifles through the memory of that night, but all she can picture is the haze of owners, Edmund standing unflinching and dour amongst them. There had been no other readings earlier that night, and certainly none afterwards.
“It gets… hazy after that. But I know I did the reading.” His hands shake, ever so slightly. “Because I remember the feeling of everything tilting sideways, that icy dread of a story slipping from your control. I remember… not pain, but cold. And the reading failed.”
Cassandra shakes her head. “No, that isn’t possible. You would have died.”
He just looks at her. “We both did. Arthur… and me.”
Impossible. But Lowell is here on Chiron’s couch, so unquestionably alive, his chest rising and falling asynchronously with hers. He has no scars to show a reading has gone wrong, no script imprinted on his skin forever. Unless—
The thought comes to Cassandra in one awful, instant rush.
“Edmund used a paradox book.”
Edmund, who has told her, in so many ways, what he would do for his brother. What he’s already done.
“We’d already made our choices. I’d made my choice. It’s not that I wanted to… you understand. But my life isn’t worth the river, Cassandra. No one’s life is.” He hesitates. “And I don’t think Edmund realised that…”
“That the river would push back,” Cassandra says quietly.
Time like an elastic band, like a fairy tale with infinite retellings and yet always returning to the same heartbeat underneath. The reading had still happened; Arthur Sharpe had still died. Fate had simply slotted another reader into Lowell’s place: Cassandra.
“I don’t know who Edmund intended to take back, or whether the river simply couldn’t give him both of us. We don’t get on. Whereas Arthur was always… well, easy. But Edmund’s too much of a coward to tell me which brother he wanted, and I’m too much of a coward to ask.”
But Edmund loved his brothers enough to gamble them against the world, and the unravelling of the river.
“My memories of those few weeks are… fractured. I remember preparing for the reading, and walking out the front door. But I also remember staying in the bookshop late, waiting for them to come home. Because Edmund’s paradox book had made it so,” Lowell says, a hard note creeping back into his voice.
“I was beyond furious with him. All that sacrifice—that waste—only for another reader to get involved anyway. I would have gone looking, but I assumed they died.”
The way Arthur did. The way Lowell did.
But Lady Fate hadn’t picked just anyone: she’d chosen Cassandra. And maybe it’s that a twisted luck was on her side that day, or maybe that she’d found a way to balance the scales, but she’d survived.
“When I found out it was you, I just… I wasn’t ready.” He stares at his hands, interlaced. “I shouldn’t have been surprised because I’ve seen you read. But it was still a shock.”
Cassandra thinks back to his expression, and how angry he’d been. A shudder passes through her, in an echo of everything she’d felt that day: guilt and fear and grief. But perhaps some of that anger hadn’t been for her.
“And when Byron told me about the bookshop and that you were gone…” A haunted shadow passes over his face. “You came so close to dying, Cassandra. If I had been five minutes earlier—if I’d stopped to think—”
“But you still came for me,” she says.
He looks at her, disbelieving. “Of course I came for you.” He links his hand in hers, his eyes steady and serious. “I would always come for you.”
A strange, mad hope rises within her.