Chapter Forty-Eight
CHAPTER
Forty-Eight
CASSANDRA ASKS BOTH Byron and Lowell to meet her in the bookshop.
In the reading room, she explains everything. The ink, the river, Chiron’s pages. And then, in a rush of something between shame and relief, she tells them about what the Keeper had said. That she is a paradox of sorts.
Byron can’t stop staring at the pages in her hand. “This is… a lot to take in.”
Lowell says nothing, but he looks at her, his brow furrowed. He takes the pages from Byron and scans through them. Next to him, Byron is very still, all emotion drawn from her expression.
“I have a plan,” Cassandra says firmly. “I’ll go to the bookshop below. I’ll find the compendium and I’ll do the reading.”
“No,” he says immediately.
She sighs. “Lowell—”
“Absolutely not. There’s got to be another way.”
“Not this time,” she says.
Cassandra glances at Byron, but she’s still wearing the same distant, distracted expression. “You know what, there’s some, um, paperwork that needs doing downstairs,” she says, backing out of the door. “I’ll leave you to it.”
As soon as Byron’s gone, Lowell draws close to Cassandra, resting his hand on hers. The warmth sends a surge of longing through her—yearning for that fragile soap-bubble dream of a future she’d so briefly envisioned.
“You don’t have to be the owner. My offer’s still on the table,” he says quietly. “If you take it—”
“Are you kidding me?” she snaps.
“I am trying to save you, Cassandra!” he says, exasperated.
They look at each other, eyes narrowed, before Lowell breaks away.
His face has that tight, sharp expression she’s come to know well.
Worry, not anger. Lowell has tried so hard to fix everything: the bookshop, the river, his brother.
Her thoughts flash back to him sitting in the reading room, mending the patch on an old shirt. Hands always moving towards a solution.
But a solution that leaves him dead isn’t a solution at all.
“You’ve done enough saving,” she says. “Besides, do no harm to the river. Well, I am the river.” She tries to smile. “A loophole.”
A very tenuous loophole. Lowell gives her a look, as if to say just that.
She’s spent an entire night trying to convince herself that this would be true.
She’s already survived one attempt to read the river into existence; she’d hardly even felt it as an effort.
And if Chiron had asked for something to save the river, he must have received it.
Lowell leans back, his dark eyes studying her.
“I knew it,” he says. “That day you read by yourself.”
“Plenty of other people can read without a book,” she says.
“No, they can’t. I can barely manage it, and I would never trust myself to just—just be—”
“So reckless?” she says.
“So confident. Brave.”
She startles at the errant praise, but he’s smiling at her, with that rare crinkling of his eyes. Was it bravery, to summon the river, and trust that she’d find her way back from the reading? She’s never quite thought of it like that before.
“Anyway, that’s not quite what I meant. When you read, it felt like…” He pauses, his mouth working. “It felt like I was in the river. Like you’d brought it with you. I can’t describe it any other way.”
Because he was, she supposes. She still has no idea how to feel about it, whether she should be frightened of herself. Frightened of reading at all, never mind over Fate’s compendium.
Lowell wrings his hands. “Look, you can do the reading, but… perhaps it’s better if you wait. Just a few more days.”
“Sure,” Cassandra says, lying brightly, easily, confidently. “We can stand to wait a little longer.”
He kisses her, ink and salt. “We’ll find another way.”
There is a pang in her chest as she lies again. She’s always been a good liar. “Okay.”
The sun is just a faint glow behind dark clouds when Cassandra climbs the stairs to Chiron’s high tower. The candles light up one by one for her as she ascends, lengthening the shadows around her.
In Chiron’s absence, the room has become a garden.
Ancient and wild, like a legend from a fairy tale.
The ground under her feet has the soft cushion of soil, not wood, and wildflowers peek out of the grass in a blanket of moon-white and butter-yellow.
Logically, Cassandra knows that this is a room in a house, in a tower, and that there can be no explanation for this growth.
But she also knows the bookshop is not particularly fond of logic, and that wherever this door now leads, it’s unlikely to exist in any form her brain cares to think about.
The outline of Chiron’s chair is still there, and the roses have blossomed, unfurling from tiny white knots into velvet-soft petals. Waxy leaves spill outwards onto the floor, disappearing into the grass.
For a while, Cassandra sits and leans her head against what used to be the armchair.
She lets herself spill grief, then: the wound that Chiron has made with his absence, the wound he made with his negligence.
The paralysing terror of Lowell, and the wound he could make if she let him.
The wound of herself, wanting for all that she told herself she wouldn’t.
Is this all there is? She asked for an exchange; the bookshop has kept its word. She wanted more, so she received more. And now, there is too much for her to hold on to. Too much for her to lose. The cemetery of owners, each one a slip of paper in a file cabinet, and yet worth an entire life.
“What do I do?” she whispers.
The door to the tower opens with a soft sigh, as Byron steps in quietly. Her expression is still impossible to read. Cassandra’s insides twist nervously; maybe Byron is reconsidering her position as bookseller. And maybe she’d be right to.
“I thought I’d find you in here.” Byron glances at the skylight, almost overtaken by vines. “I’ll need to trim that down again.”
“You’ve been coming here?” Cassandra says, worry overtaken by disbelief.
Byron kneels at the bed of flowers to pull out a weed. “Every day, since you hired me.”
The entire time, Cassandra had imagined the bookshop caring for this grave of a room by itself.
Pruning here, encouraging growth elsewhere, watering where necessary.
The river looks after its own, she’d believed—it was just the definition of belonging that fluctuated, or so she’d thought.
To imagine Byron tending this sacred space fills her with a nameless gratitude and fury.
No one else should be allowed here. No one else can claim this grief.
“Why?” she asks.
“I… No, it’s time you knew. It was Septimus,” Byron says quietly.
Cassandra blinks, uncomprehending. “Septimus? He asked you… to come here?”
“It wasn’t the society. It was him, Cassandra.”
All at once, she knows what Byron is talking about.
“That’s—he wouldn’t—”
Byron just looks at her.
The floor tilts under Cassandra and she grasps at the doorway for support.
All this time she had imagined it, in so many ways that she’d started to wonder if it was even real.
She’d placed so many different people at the bookshop’s entrance—Roth, Eveline, Edmund, even Lowell—and let itself play out in her mind.
Someone familiar with the bookshop, someone it trusted.
She’d imagined them gliding through the bookshop like a ghost, malevolence in their heart, weapon in their fist—and then her imagination had failed her.
Because she couldn’t picture Chiron looking death in the eye and accepting it without a fight.
Chiron would have fought to a bitter, bloody end. He would have fought.
But not if it was someone he trusted.
Not if it was Septimus.
“No.”
But Byron is shaking her head. “It started with the pages. You’ve read them, so you know. Chiron thought it was best for the river to dismantle the bookshops and their owners. Forever. But we, as booksellers, know that the bookshops must come first. And a bookshop must have an owner.”
Cassandra’s pulse throbs in her ears. Chiron was killed by Septimus. Chiron was killed by his most loyal bookseller.
“Septimus fought him on it. The booksellers were… They thought they could buy more time. They’ve been collecting books for over a year, you know.
Putting them back in the river to try and preserve what’s left.
And I’ve been helping, where I can.” She pauses.
“But Chiron couldn’t be reasoned with. So Septimus…
made a decision. To do what was best for everyone. ”
“He killed him… to do what was best?” she echoes.
She can’t believe this. But Byron is still talking, her words rolling over one another.
“He made sure it looked like a society job. He… didn’t think Chiron recognised him. He thought that would be the end of it. But then it wasn’t, because Chiron had sent out those letters.”
Numb, Cassandra says, “So he sent you.”
Byron, with her bright hair and bright smile, who had strolled in with such carefree, uncomplicated delight.
At Septimus’ recommendation. Cassandra recalls that intensely awkward phone call, how Septimus had never questioned her presence at the bookshop, even though it had been years.
He must have known, she thinks, that Chiron would have had a contingency plan, no matter how threadbare.
She’d called Chiron’s murderer to ask his advice.
“I thought he told you not to take the job,” she says, as though out of all the details, this is what matters.
“He advised against it. He told me that being a bookseller could make you go a little mad, maybe a lot mad. That I’d probably see things I’d never be able to forget, and not in a good way. That it was a terrible burden to shoulder because I’d never be able to let that shit go.”
“But he needed you to take it.”
“He did.”
A terrible, clenching fear takes holds of her. Her voice slips into a hard, cold tone, Cass Holt rising to the fore.
“To keep me in line,” she says.
Byron stands up, brushing grass and white petals from her jeans. Blue for sorrow, for grief. Blue, for the hottest part of the flame.
“He wanted me to make sure you wouldn’t repeat Chiron’s mistakes.”
Here Cassandra is, with Chiron’s ink and pages. With his plan that she’d laid out so neatly in front of Byron, so unthinkingly, foolishly trusting.
“And if I did?”
“Cassandra—”
She interrupts her. “If I decided to? What were you supposed to do, Byron?”
Cassandra wants her to say it. To say the words that Septimus had obviously never told Chiron, that he’d simply acted upon because to say it out loud is to admit the horrifying truth.
“Whatever was necessary.”
“Murder?”
Byron glances away. The silence sings through the room.
“Yes.”
Cassandra sucks in a sharp breath. It was Septimus. And now it’s Byron, fulfilling his legacy. Maybe this is what makes Cassandra a true owner. Dangerous enough to be reckoned with. Dangerous enough to be killed.
“So do it,” she says, biting down on each word.
Byron glares at her. “Fuck you, if that’s what you think of me.”
“You’ve lied to me this entire time,” she says. “You knew my history. Septimus would have known.”
“He barely told me anything,” she snaps. “I bloody well wish he had. And do you really want to go there? You, calling me a liar?”
But there is a gulf between theft and murder.
“I can make up my own goddamn mind, Cassandra. And I say, fuck my uncle. Fuck the society.” Her hands tighten into fists. “If it wasn’t for them, Errata would still be here. And I really miss that goddamn cat.”
Every time Cassandra thinks of the collar, absent its owner, she has to swallow back tears. She has already lost so much, swept up in the society’s consequences.
“I’m still your bookseller.” There’s just the tiniest hitch in Byron’s next words. “Until you say otherwise.”
It would be smart, whispers a voice Cassandra knows all too well, to cut Byron adrift. She’d told herself that she would only take a bookseller on for as long as it took to learn the craft of running the bookshop.
Cass Holt would tell Byron to get out.
But she thinks of that bar, three in the morning and no one else to call. Byron afraid of her, and demanding the truth anyway. Byron charging through the society’s doors, Lowell at her side. Byron, who has stayed and stayed and stayed, when there’s been nothing left to stay for but Cassandra.
She exhales, long and slow, enough for her heart to settle. “Owners have stuck by their booksellers through worse.”
The cloud that has shadowed Byron’s face since she walked in here abates, ever so slightly. But it’s the truth. Byron might bear blame, but then so does Cassandra. She touches the top of where the armchair might once have been, springy and green.
“It’ll be dangerous,” she says.
“I know.”
“You’ll be going against Septimus—”
“Let me worry about that.”
“—and the society.”
Byron cracks her knuckles. “I’ll do it again.”
“And…” Cassandra hesitates. “It still might not work. You’ll be out of a job. All this will be gone.”
The cloud passes back across Byron’s face. “I said I wasn’t afraid of a challenge. I meant it. Did you?”
Cassandra smiles, a little sadly. Because she did. She still does.