Chapter Forty-Five
CHAPTER
Forty-Five
FOR THE FIRST time in weeks, Cassandra moves through the bookshop with clear-headed purpose.
Although Lowell is gone, whisked away by duties at Sharpe’s, the glow of his presence lingers, kindling under her ribcage.
The knot of guilt still sits heavy in her chest, but maybe, just maybe it’s a little smaller this morning.
In the middle of the night, she’d woken up and felt Lowell next to her: the solidity of his body, the rise and fall of his chest, the way he had roused, just long enough to lay his hand on hers.
And she’d let herself picture the possibility of a morning with Lowell.
Stirring coffee, scribbling notes in each other’s books, resettling the hearth.
The daydream had spilled over the singular morning, and suddenly Cassandra had seen a day, a week, an entire month with him.
A glimpse of what it would be like to have a good day, or a bad day, and be able to rest her head on his shoulder regardless.
Then it had struck her with the force of a blow. Lowell was there, sleeping next to her, because of a paradox book. Because Edmund Sharpe had decided that between the world and his brother, he’d choose Lowell. And she can’t even blame him because she’d do the same.
What a cruelty her little fantasy seems, now.
In the morning, still tangled together, she’d pressed a kiss to Lowell’s cheek—another wild luxury—and laid her head on his chest, listening to the steady thump of his heartbeat. Alive. Alive. Alive.
“You know what this means for you, don’t you?” she’d murmured. “Because of the paradox book.”
Lowell was quiet for long enough that she wondered if he’d fallen back asleep. But then his chest heaved: a long-held sigh. He laced his fingers with hers, then turned to look at her, his dark eyes so very serious.
“I’ve been on borrowed time for a while,” he admitted. “And the river takes what it’s owed eventually.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” she said, curling into him.
But in the cold midday light, it’s a tall order she’s asking of herself.
She thinks about Chiron’s letter, how he’d sent her to the bookshop knowing it would be a death sentence.
She thinks about Edmund’s warning, the certainty of all their doom.
And she thinks about the grasping desperation of the society.
How they’d done everything in their power to ensure a future for themselves, the rest of the world be damned.
Cassandra recalls the way Lowell spoke about his brother, admiration and regret and pain. Personally, she wouldn’t care if Edmund died; after everything he’s done to her, it’s hard not to feel like he deserves it. But Arthur Sharpe did not.
And neither does Lowell.
Summoning her courage, she goes up to Chiron’s tower.
The smell of green, wet earth hits her before anything else, and she has to duck under hanging ivy to get through the door.
Every time she comes up here, it looks less like a bedroom and more like the outdoors.
His room—though it feels like a stretch to call it that at this point—doesn’t seem to be affected by the seasonal weather outside; within minutes, she struggles out of her jumper, pulls her hair back to combat the warmth.
She stands in front of Chiron’s grassy hump of an armchair, hands on her hips.
Waiting for the rage, the fear. But even though Chiron is dead and the voice in her head has faded and it wouldn’t be worth anything anyway, she still feels the pang of disappointment in the room.
As though she’s made a critical mistake, and is yet to realise it.
There is one way of looking at this: Chiron left her to die purposefully.
Chiron hated her enough to say a last fuck you to her and the society in one swoop, a winning hand in a game with no winners.
He was certainly clever enough to tie every last thread before he died, and make sure his enemies followed him into oblivion.
It’s a plausible explanation. But…
“You taught me better than that,” she murmurs.
Chiron was working on another solution. He’d told Edmund the ink wouldn’t work, and he was right. The society abandoned the ink readings, and they’d returned to the paradox books.
So why, then, months later, had Chiron tried to steal a book on ink from Lowell? Why the secretive list with Maud, when he’d already shared what he knew with the society? What had he been doing when he closed the bookshop, if he so adamantly believed it must come first?
He knew the society would kill him. But even then, he had made sure they wouldn’t be able to get hold of the bookshop and take the paradox book. So he had sent letters to the two people who might love the bookshop as much as he did.
He had picked the only two people who might still save the bookshop, themselves, and the world.
And she’s not ready to give up. Not just yet.
Five minutes past midnight, Cassandra stands in the atrium of the bookshop below. The Keeper is busy with a traveller, so she waits while the owner, whoever they might have been or will be—she hopes there is a “will be”—asks for her help.
She wonders what they’re asking, whether it’s a request for a paradox book that has already doomed them all, or some new question. Or perhaps just the one paradox book they’re allowed, trying to alter time’s current, just a little.
Above, the river sucks gently at the glass ceiling. After the time in her studio flat with nothing but the wail of sirens and the noise of her neighbours coming and going, she’ll never get tired of the sound of water.
The Keeper finishes with her traveller and gestures her over.
“Cassandra Fairfax,” she says, by way of greeting. “Have you returned to ask for a paradox book again?”
Cassandra bites her lip, trying to ignore the hot rush of shame. “No.”
She considers what she would ask for, if asking was still an option.
A paradox book to break ties with the river, and keep the bookshop afloat.
For her, not the society. Or a paradox book in exchange for Lowell, and a chance to run.
Briefly, she lets herself imagine that life once more, what might have been if she’d chosen the sailboat, the horizon, the blank slate of her past, and then lets it go—for good.
Chiron had known all along. When you run, you’re only ever taking yourself with you.
And there’s no running from that. She’d thought he was goading her, making it clear that her mistakes would never be scrubbed out.
But now she considers what it might have been like to be Chiron the Magician.
Chiron, who had watched his fellow owners try to escape the clutches of their mistakes in every way imaginable, and fail.
Because even if they forget, the river remembers.
“I came for a question.” She hesitates. “Did Chiron ever ask for a paradox book?”
If Chiron had tried to save the bookshops, then it must have crossed his mind, too. He might not have been able to restore the river outright, but perhaps he spent his choice more wisely than the others.
The Keeper dips her head in acknowledgement.
“Then what did he take?”
To her surprise, the Keeper turns the ledger towards Cassandra. “See for yourself.”
Cassandra glances behind her, then pulls the ledger forward. The writing is spidery, barely comprehensible. She has the peculiar sensation of the words rearranging themselves as she reads them, into a version that she understands. Then she blinks, and the ink shifts ever so slightly.
There’s only one line that clearly stands out to her, that the Keeper has chosen for her to see. Chiron’s request for a paradox book. She leans closer, trying to decipher the sentence. So he had taken one, then.
Only it’s not a book at all.
Elias Chiron Clarke: one infant, delivered.
And then beneath it, a scribbled line.
Cassandra.
A shockwave runs through her.
“That’s—that’s impossible,” she says. “I was…”
But Chiron had always been cagey about where she’d come from.
A foundling, a price for a lesser book, a distant relative of one of the booksellers.
She’d always suspected she was Chiron’s illegitimate child, and imagined that one day he would confess.
By the time she’d been kicked out, her origins felt somewhat irrelevant in the face of her life’s hard facts.
Chiron’s child, Chiron’s protégé, Chiron’s pain in the ass to deal with.
But… this?
She staggers backwards, away from the Keeper, the desk, the ledger.
“You can’t take people out of the river,” she says. “It’s impossible. And—and he would never ask for a child.”
Chiron had made it clear how little he cared for parenting. Never mind that it would have been easy enough to pick up a child anyway. She thinks of the Sharpes, each a tribute in exchange for a book.
And if Chiron had truly wanted a child—someone to carry his legacy, to follow his instructions and make him proud—it would have been someone like Lowell. If he’d had a choice…
The Keeper only looks at her. “He wished to save the river. So that’s what he asked for. Are you ready to see what he left for you?”
“What?”
The Keeper doesn’t need further invitation.
Soundlessly, she pushes back her chair and walks towards the door containing the death cabinets, and other detritus from past owners.
Cassandra hurries after her, feeling like her brain has been put through a cheese grater.
She wasn’t born, wasn’t Chiron’s illegitimate daughter or sovereign price, or even some kind of novel punishment Lady Fate had decided to inflict upon him.
He’d asked for a way to save the river. And received her instead.
“What… does that mean?” she asks, panic hitching her voice a tone higher. “I’m real. I’m not…”
Cassandra thinks of Errata, both cat and book. There—and not there.
“Are stories not real, Cassandra? ‘We are but story made manifest,’” the Keeper quotes. “You just have a little more story in you than others.”
Cassandra follows the Keeper, dazed. What the hell does that mean, to be “a little more story”? She pinches herself, just to feel the reassuring solidity of her arm, the ache of a bruise in the making. The idea of her coming from something so otherworldly as the river is ridiculous. It has to be.
And yet.
How often has she felt like a ghost, drifting through a life that didn’t belong to her?
How often has she felt like she’s living a borrowed identity?
That obliterating sense of home every time she steps into a tributary bookshop.
And the way she’s always been able to parse the language of books, even as a young child, much to the annoyance of the booksellers around her.
The cabinet rattles as the Keeper opens it, rifling through the files.
She catches a few names—Cassian, Wulfrun, Atticus—before her eye snags on Chiron’s overfull file.
The Keeper picks her way through the notes, receipts, letters, documents and who knows what else, gathering them in the crook of her elbow. Then her hands stop.
Cassandra catches the feeling before she sees it—that strange, nauseating otherness, as though it’s fighting itself. Then the Keeper hands her a wad of pages.
“You’ll want to read through these,” she says.
The ink from the night of Arthur Sharpe’s death.
All over the page, in Chiron’s handwriting.
A letter, smudged, in Chiron’s slightly shaking hand
Cassandra,
So, we are here. If you are reading this, it is already too late for me. My colleagues grow desperate. My enemies grow ravenous with greed.
Why did I not ask you sooner? Why did I ask the Keeper to wait until this singular moment—if this moment, indeed, ever comes to pass?
Do no harm to the river, and it will do no harm to you.
It might have been two decades—at least by this writing—but I’m sure you still remember the first lessons I taught you.
The Keeper needs someone she can trust. I need someone she can trust. And if the paradox books are buttons on a shirt, imagine them popping off, irreplaceable as the river sinks further into its malaise.
One for every owner too cowardly, or too greedy, to pay Lady Fate’s price. Imagine the devastation.
This must end. All of it. I’m sorry to place the most terrible of burdens on your shoulders.
I’m sorry that we will most likely never see each other again in this life.
Sometimes I see a traveller and fancy that it’s you down here, watching me somewhere in the future.
I’m hoping, somewhere deep inside of your bones, right now, that one day you will recognise this feeling, and seek out this letter and the accompanying documents.
The bookshop must always come first. It is the code we live by, when we sign away ourselves to a greater power. But truly, there are moments where I wish otherwise.
Most of all, I am just… sorry. For everything.
Yours, always,
Chiron