Chapter Forty-Nine
CHAPTER
Forty-Nine
CASSANDRA LINGERS IN the reading room. Vial of ink in one hand, pen in another, blank sheets of paper in front of her. There are so many ways this could go wrong. So many chances for her to wreck everything.
What future would she conjure from the river? What could she ask of it?
She tries to imagine every possibility, spinning out all of its implications.
She reads Chiron’s pages again. A future where the river flows unimpeded, unable to be used for material gain, or be manipulated by people like the society.
The paradox book choices secure, with no timelines to unravel and split like hairs.
Lowell, safe. In some ways, it’s a good future—or at least a known one.
But how much they will lose.
The song of the river twining through city streets and countryside lanes, whispering of magic and history.
An entire way of life wiped off the map, with no one but a handful of booksellers to remember what it was like, and then only for a time.
Cassandra thinks of the woman who had come in for the Napoleonic War volumes, and how her desperation had resolved into something more.
What would a future for her look like, without the saving grace of the river and Lady Fate’s hand?
Cassandra blinks, and the ghost of Arthur Sharpe flashes in her vision, his wide eyes staring panicked, then glassy, back at her. How easily it could have been Lowell—and how it was, before Edmund wrested them all down another timeline.
Perhaps if Chiron hadn’t been killed, perhaps if she’d never received the letter, then maybe it would have been different.
Maybe if Chiron had succeeded, she would have woken up one day and not heard the rush of the river.
She would have picked up a book and felt it limp in her hands, the magic gone to a place she could no longer reach.
What, then, would Cass Holt have become?
Maybe she would have stayed a thief, scraping up a living until she was caught—by an official authority, or else disappeared by a darker power as so many of the other thieves had, and then forgotten just as quickly.
Maybe she would have let the thievery slip away and become Cass Fairfax, who wrote students’ papers and worked at the bar and came home every night to an apartment that only ever felt like someplace temporary. Alone.
Is this all there is? she’d asked herself, and then told herself, yes, and she’s damn lucky to have it. Because she knew, even then, that the lie, bitter as it was, was easier to swallow than the truth: there is so, so much more.
And God, how she wants it.
She looks at her hands, nails seemingly always stained with ink of some kind. Then she stands and stretches, feeling the ache of stress in her shoulders.
She folds the blanket and settles it on the armchair.
She makes another cup of tea. She paces furrows into the rug, teasing out the right words until they’re crystal clear in her mind.
There’s only one small vial—just enough for a few sentences and a bitter mouthful.
She’s a reader; she’s never before considered what the hand at the other end of those words might have been thinking.
In the end, she settles for a nearly identical future to the one facing them now. It doesn’t promise miracles. It doesn’t promise a world free of war, or guaranteed riches, or unending happiness.
A lie, however, fits best against the truth. And she could believe in this lie.
The river is renewed; the magic remains.
So do the booksellers, the owners, the scent of cedar on warm days when the summer sun pours syrupy and golden onto the floor, and cold nights, when the fire crackles merrily in its hearth.
The bookshop below still opens at midnight, the desk still manned by its enigmatic Keeper.
But there are no more paradox books. No more attempts to sway the course of the river for their own benefit. Time, for better or for worse, falls out of the owners’ hands forever.
When it’s finished, she goes up to Chiron’s tower for one last conversation with her ghost.
She kneels at the foot of his armchair, little more than a grassy mound now. White flowers carpet the ground, climb across the walls. She leans her head against where the armrest would be, letting it take the weight. She takes a shaky, sobbed breath.
“I’m afraid,” she whispers.
She lets the words hover in the air, lingering. Feels them settle into her bones.
Then she gets up, takes another, less shaky breath. Locks that part of herself away.
There’s work to be done.
She spends the morning cleaning. Talking with Byron, drinking tea, shelving books like it’s just another day in the bookshop. In her bookshop.
At the end of the day, she waves Byron out into the cool night air. There must be something on her face because even though she’s worked so hard to pretend that everything is fine, Byron looks at her suspiciously.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.
Byron’s eyes narrow further. “Yeah?”
“Of course,” she says lightly.
And because Cassandra’s a good liar, Byron relents. She pulls her coat on and Cassandra watches her leave, strolling down the street until she disappears from view. To think that she’d ever be able to manage the bookshop on her own without Byron is laughable now.
The hours between closing and midnight are long.
Long enough to think about how she’s going against everything Chiron wanted, even after he’d finally decided to trust her with his version of the future.
She shuffles and reshuffles the pages in her hand.
Chiron’s writing, up until a very careful tear, and then her own.
She imagines placing them into the compendium, imagines reading the words that between them should protect everyone.
The river will keep me safe. Do no harm unto the river. And what am I if not the river?
She wishes she was as good at lying to herself as she is to other people.
When Cassandra goes down to the bookshop below at midnight, the staircase seems a little less sturdy than before.
The hallway wavers in her vision. Spidery cracks fissure the atrium’s glass ceiling.
The sound of water, never far away, is suddenly too close, the low roll of ocean beneath ice.
Lowell had asked for more time, but they were never going to get it, she realises.
The Keeper is at her usual place behind her desk. The travellers, past and future, gather at the corners of the atrium, as though they can sense that something is deeply wrong.
“Cassandra Fairfax.”
“I’m here,” she says. “I know what I need to do.”
She offers the pages to the Keeper, who waves them away. Instead, she gestures to the hallway behind her, trailing into the deepest part of the bookshop below. The heart of the river. The heart of the world.
“Follow the hallway. Keep going. Don’t stop for anything,” she says.
But Cassandra hesitates. “Can… you leave?”
“I will be here until the very end.” The Keeper touches her arm gently. “You will not be alone.”
It’s the smallest of reassurances, but Cassandra feels the burden lift, ever so slightly. Readjusting her grip on the pages, she walks past the desk, past the travellers and everything else that’s become familiar to her. Thief, liar, owner. She has survived this far, where others might not.
She takes a steadying breath, and walks into the depths of the bookshop below.