Chapter Forty-Six
CHAPTER
Forty-Six
WHEN BYRON GETS into the bookshop, an hour before opening, Cassandra is still curled up in the reading room, studying Chiron’s pages. There are notes alongside, written in pencil, and more in the margins of the list that he and Maud had created.
All this time, they believed they needed the ink to read another river into existence. To pull power, again, and in turn create it. A paradox, but an attractive one, because nothing would have to change.
Chiron considered it differently. Not to recreate the river, or to pull yet more paradox books from it.
No. He’d wanted to put back pages into the river. Into Fate’s compendium. An entirely new future, one that side-steps the catastrophe waiting for them. And Chiron’s future is sensible and straightforward, as she’d predicted. But there is that clause, tucked away near the very end.
The river, at last, severed its ties with the owners, the bookshops laid to eternal slumber. Never again would such a powerful force be used in such weak, greedy hands. Never again would Lady Fate be disappointed in her custodians.
The paradox preserved, but the bookshops gone forever, with no one to hear the musicality of the river and wonder. No one to dip their feet into its waters and feel, for a second, the vast connections across the world.
Maybe this is what Chiron had meant by his letter, when he’d said he was sorry for placing such a terrible burden on her.
Not just that he had given her the bookshop, or condemned her to death by doing so.
But that he had ever asked her to fix the river in the first place, whether she’d known it or not.
All the times she’d tried to please him and failed, all the remonstrations, the disappointments, his increasingly desperate tone as he’d said, “You must be more.” She had always assumed the desperation came from exasperation, a sense that they were both trapped in the same loop of Cassandra forever failing to meet expectations.
But if he had truly believed that she would save the river, then how he might have watched in horror as Cassandra proved herself inadequate. Desperation giving in to despair.
How does a child save the river? he might have wondered. And here’s Cassandra, years later, no more the wiser.
She has never really cried over Chiron’s death, but now she finds herself biting back tears.
If Chiron had told her—if she’d known—then maybe it would have played out differently.
Maybe it would be both of them sitting here.
Both of them deciding how to save the river, and whether a future without owners is the right one.
One small adjustment in the snag of time, and how different the world might look.
Byron bursts into the room, interrupting her thoughts. “Cassandra, I—”
Cassandra pushes aside the papers. “What is it?”
Byron’s voice wobbles. “I found it on the desk.”
Gently, she lays Errata’s collar on the table.
Cassandra can’t stop staring at it. Real.
Not real. Most of the time, she forgets that he was a book before he was a cat.
How can he be anything but real, when he paws at her face in the morning for food, or cries until she pulls him onto her lap to cuddle? But the river hasn’t forgotten.
“It’s really leaving us, isn’t it?” Byron whispers.
Cassandra can’t bring herself to confirm it. But she doesn’t need to. The pool downstairs hasn’t refilled; the bookshop creaks wearily, as though it can no longer quite hold itself together. And now, Errata.
How much they’d all loved that stupid, scruffy cat.
After Byron leaves, Cassandra holds Chiron’s pages up to the light. The ink glows pearlescent, a rainbow of colour. So much loss, for such a small thing.
For a long time, she sits there and thinks. There has to be more than this bleak future of Chiron’s. There has to be another way.
That night, she calls Sharpe’s.
Aloysius picks up on the first ring. “Welcome to Sharpe’s, how may I—Oh, it’s you. Do you want to speak to Lowell? I can just—”
Cassandra cuts him off. “Actually, I need to speak to Edmund.”
The phone is silent for a few moments. Then another voice crackles down the phone.
“What the hell do you want?” Edmund sounds even less charming than usual.
“The vial of ink. The one that your… that Arthur took. Do you have it?”
“How dare you ask me.”
Cassandra sighs. “Do you have more? I just need—”
“It won’t work. It didn’t work for Arthur—” and there is just the tiniest slip in his voice “—so what makes you think you’ll be different?”
“Edmund,” she says pleasantly, “I can come down to Sharpe’s, if you’d like.
I can bang on the door until you or Lowell let me in.
I can make a scene that will be so thoroughly annoying you’ll wish you’d never come back from wherever you’ve been holed up.
Or,” she suggests, “you could just tell me now.”
There’s silence on the other end of the line. Then a long, resigned sigh.
“There’s one more vial. It’s with Judgement. Eveline.”
Cassandra remembers the bookshop, the quiet threat in the darkness.
“Send me the address,” she says.
“She won’t just give it to you,” he says, irritated. “And you won’t be able to do anything with it.”
“Goodbye, Edmund.”
She hangs up the phone.
Six hours later, Cassandra stands outside Eveline’s bookshop. The last time she’d been here, it was as a prisoner, more than anything else.
Edmund might be right, but she’s not going to ask for the vial. She’s going to steal it.
For an hour she watches the bookshop from the vantage point of the park opposite. No one comes in or out. When the lights dim, she waits another fifteen minutes. Then she moves.
Again, she’s decided not to read onto herself. Roth’s flat was one thing, but a tributary bookshop? It feels disrespectful, now, to think that a bookshop could be fooled by whatever she’s taken from the river, when really they’re one and the same.
She reaches the doorstep, confident that no one else has seen her. The handle is a brass knocker in the shape of an anatomical heart. Cassandra rests her fingers on it, sends the briefest of wishes to Lady Fate, then tugs.
The door slides open without a sound.
A powerful, moulding smell emanates from within. When she steps into the shop, the floorboards sink under her feet, inches of brackish water pooling into her shoes. She braces herself for the unnerving artifices, but there’s no sign of their erratic, fluttering movements.
Two strides in, she realises why—and where the smell is coming from. What remains of the artifices lies in a sad, crumpled heap of wet paper. The magic that had animated them has vanished, and ink bleeds across the words that would have given them commands.
The bookshop is dying, she realises. Like Maud’s had.
A vial of ink in a bookshop is not quite a needle in a haystack, but it’s a close thing.
She starts in the obvious places: desk, office, behind every shelf and in every drawer.
It’s an easier search than it should be; the bookshop has been emptied of almost every single book.
Only two or three line the front-most shelves, and even when she rests her hand on them, they’re silent.
Cassandra keeps moving through the bookshop methodically, aware that every moment she spends in here is another chance of being discovered. But there’s no sign of the vial.
The only place she hasn’t checked is the lake.
The cave at the back of the bookshop is uglier than she remembers. A dark yawning abyss, where no abyss should ever be. Reluctantly, she takes her first step downwards and the entire staircase groans, as though it’s only through goodwill that it doesn’t break under her.
Step by step, she inches her way down, one careful ear out for Eveline’s presence. One by one, the lights sputter on, and she has to stifle a gasp. The lake is nearly gone, barely a puddle in its centre. Eveline must know what it means for her, she thinks grimly.
Aware of the monstrous task in front of her, she starts to comb the lakebed. Without the river’s magnifying effects, the cave is much smaller than she remembers, with a clear perimeter. But a vial is still a tiny object compared to a lake.
For ten, fifteen minutes she searches, her heart in her throat every time a pebble slips underfoot. Twenty.
Then, she sees it. A glimmer amongst the rocks, terribly fragile—but well hidden, until the lake had vanished.
She picks it up gingerly, trying not to shudder at the feeling. When she holds it to the light, it swirls inside, an oily sheen that matches the writing on Chiron’s pages. A faint hope flickers within her.
“It’s not going to work.”
Cassandra whips around, one hand tight on the bottle. Eveline is standing on the shoreline, watching her as if she’d been there the entire time.
“Our Magician was so insistent that it wouldn’t. And then he went very quiet. I’d hoped to discover what he was up to, before he died.”
“It was you,” Cassandra says with sudden clarity. “You murdered Chiron. You wanted the bookshop—no, you wanted the river.”
Eveline smiles thinly. “I didn’t murder Chiron. I could have, if I wanted to.”
“Liar,” Cassandra snaps.
“Do you know how many of us could have done it? Chiron was sloppy. He let his emotions get the best of him. He left himself vulnerable. And so he paid the price.” She pauses, twisting the knife further. “For what it’s worth, I bet it was Sharpe.”
“Edmund couldn’t have—”
“Oh, he could have,” Eveline says. “Whose idea do you think it was to replace you with James Roth?”
Cassandra closes her eyes briefly. That bastard.
But then she considers his position. Lowell, poised to inherit the bookshop once Cassandra was out of the way. Between Roth and Cassandra, he would have removed two enemies at once, all while controlling the situation.
A bastard, but a clever one.
Eveline tilts her head at the vial. “It’ll still kill the reader, whether it works or not. No one can channel that much power.” Her voice rings clear. “Lady Fate will fuck you over, and the world with you.”
Probably, Cassandra thinks. But she’s not willing to cede ground to this woman.
Instead, she smiles sharply. “Maybe Lady Fate will show mercy instead. Or maybe it’s just personal for you. Because I don’t want a future that only serves myself.”
Because she wants the world, but only if everyone’s still in it.
To her surprise, Eveline shrugs. “Perhaps. But you forget: a reader, no matter how talented, can never match up against the infinity of the river. You yourself saw that much.”
She sighs, and for a second, Cassandra almost believes that Eveline is just an old woman. No real threat, no one of importance. Then her eyes flash, and Cassandra remembers the same piercing gaze underneath the mask.
“Now, if you’d be so kind,” Eveline says tersely, “I’d like you to leave.”
Cassandra blinks. “You’re just… letting me go?”
“Yes, go. Take the ink with you. Be my guest. What does it matter to me, now? My bookshop is on its deathbed, and I wish to settle my affairs with it.” A tinge of sharpness. “Alone.”
Cassandra leaves, victory clutched in her hands. But even as she takes a step into the cool night air—away from the mouldering scent of the bookshop, thank God—the nagging thought of Eveline’s words worries at her.
A reader can only conjure what they can conceive. It’s one of the first tenets of reading, drilled into every bookseller, regardless of their ability. Ask for too much, stretch the world just a little too far, and the world snaps back, rebounding on the reader.
But the river is infinite—the future is infinite. She has always known this. And so, whoever reads the pages into Fate’s compendium will die.
It’s just a question of who.