Chapter Fifty-Two
CHAPTER
Fifty-Two
CASSANDRA WALKS THROUGH the hallway, Chiron’s papers clutched to her side.
She’s never been this far inside the bookshop below.
The hallway is a deep velvet burgundy, and someone has painted dozens of crows in various poses of flight, all urging her forward.
Above her, the river is black, almost motionless, save for the ominous creak of the glass skylight.
She glances one more time behind her at Lady Fate, the travellers little more than smoke from this distance. Then she turns a corner, into unfamiliar territory.
The hallway possesses a strange quality, but it takes a while for Cassandra to pinpoint the feeling. It’s the same one she has in certain dreams, where time feels liquid and pliable. Days passing through the eye of a handful of minutes.
The bright lights, reminiscent of electricity, dim, then shift altogether to gas lamps.
The hallway changes, too, the birds vanishing into a landscape of roses.
A bee dances in and out of them, disappearing between one flower and another.
Art nouveau curlicues bracket the glass ceiling, as though holding it up.
And all around her is the sound of faint whispering.
Not the soft glug and roll of the river, but real voices, in dozens of languages she recognises by their cadence, and hundreds, thousands more that she doesn’t.
When she glances at the walls, there are shadows that don’t match hers, that flicker and glide asynchronously.
Cassandra recalls the travellers at the door, the many figures that have stood at the Keeper’s desk and marvelled at the hidden world around them.
How she’s always wondered what happens down here, when the owners aren’t watching.
Eventually, the hallway spills into another, much smaller atrium, the desk manned by someone who looks a lot like the Keeper, if the Keeper wore a corset, puffed sleeves and kid gloves. The gas lamps stutter, and the shadows stumble behind her.
“Cassandra Fairfax,” she says, and her voice is the same and yet not quite, with an odd, almost old-fashioned inflection. “You’re late.”
Cassandra falters. “I—I’m sorry.”
“Go through,” the woman says, gesturing to the archway behind her. “But make haste.”
Cassandra walks through, feeling the weight of the woman’s eyes on her.
This hallway is all wood panelling, wood underneath her feet.
Empty frames hang at intervals, like they once held portraits, candles flickering eerily in the adjacent brackets.
The shadows thicken, sweeping past her, as though urging her onwards.
Though there’s no sign of a leak, water pools on the floor, candlelight reflected within.
This walk feels twice as long as the first—so long that Cassandra is almost surprised when another atrium opens up in front of her. Another woman, with the same ink-black eyes as the Keeper, the same shifting features.
“Cassandra Fairfax,” she says, and now there’s no mistaking the slip of accent, the words refashioning themselves on an older tongue. “You were nearly missed.”
She ushers Cassandra through the archway with an expression just terse enough to suggest impatience.
Cassandra has no idea how long she’s been walking when the walls change again. No longer wood panelling, but grey stone, then greyer. The air has a heavy, damp quality, and there’s a gentle slope now to the floor, as though she’s travelling underground.
If there’s a way to return, she hopes it’s shorter than this route.
She can’t help but be reminded of all the stories she’s read of mythological women who delved deep underground and never came back, claimed by their gods for a tithe long since spent.
She touches her wrist, feeling the steady pulse underneath it.
Knowing that the river runs through her veins.
She wishes, just for a fraction of a second, that she’d asked Lowell to come.
A bright, brittle sound distracts her, and she glances up. A large crack bisects the ceiling. Water droplets gather along the line, then fall, pattering onto the floor.
She quickens her pace. Another archway. Another version of the Keeper.
“Cassandra Fairfax,” the Keeper begins.
Cassandra waves a weary hand with the papers clutched in it. “I know, I know. I’m late.”
To her surprise, the woman pulls her into a quick hug. “Be swift. Be certain.” Then she pulls back and nods. “Go through.”
Cassandra stops paying attention to the hallway, or the shadows clustered behind her, or the way the light dims until she can barely see in front of her.
She breaks into a jog, then a run. Above, water pours through cracks in the glass ceiling, beads at the joins where it meets the wall.
The sound of the river, never far away, now trickles all around her.
Time, which has never felt like something that could be counted here, is running out.
She arrives in the last atrium breathless, her hair sticking to her forehead, the pages damp in her fist. It’s not so much a room as a cave, the ceiling a flat sheet of ice instead of glass.
Wherever she’s ended up, it looks nothing like a place that might house books, or anything that once resembled them.
The Keeper tends a fire, smoke curling upwards. Though her face is shadowed by a hooded cloak, Cassandra recognises her voice instantly.
“You took your time.”
“Are we still in the bookshop below?” she says, puzzled.
“Before it was a bookshop,” the Keeper replies, “it was something… else.”
Then the Keeper removes her hood. Cassandra inhales a quick, tight breath.
It’s still the Keeper, with those same ink-dark eyes and enigmatic smile.
And yet her features remind Cassandra, more than anything, of the statues that surround her little pool of river above.
Gold links to what might have been a long chain scatter at her feet, along with objects that look like they might have once gone together—as a set of scales.
Lady Fate.
“You’ve been watching me this whole time,” she whispers.
“I watch everyone, Cassandra Fairfax.”
All those desperate moments in the bookshop below. Every weakness, every flaw, exposed. Every time she stole a book, thinking that Lady Fate must have had her eyes elsewhere, to let her take without consequence.
“You have overcome much,” Lady Fate says, as though reading her thoughts. “But there is further to go.”
Cassandra hesitates. There are so many questions she wants to ask, so many potential paths that have whittled down into this one singular point.
Would she have still ended up here if Edmund had never taken a paradox book to save Lowell?
Or was it her own choices building the road she walks on now, brick by bloody brick?
How badly she would like to rest her burdens on Fate’s shoulders, instead of her own.
Aware that time is pressing on her, she settles for the most important one. “Will I succeed?”
“I see the river remade anew. I see the river dead. It has happened already; it will never happen at all.”
Cassandra’s heart sinks. “So you really don’t know.”
It’s hard to articulate why she’s so disappointed in this. Perhaps because underneath, she’d hoped that there would be a reason for her flaws. That she has failed, in so many ways, for a future beyond herself, and it’s just the threads of time that have yet to make everything clear.
To her surprise, Lady Fate laughs.
“What’s meant to happen? One man considers his fortunes a certainty; the other lucky chance.
And yet more believe they have wrested their futures against my will.
But you are a daughter of the river, Cassandra Fairfax, and so you were always meant to be, just as you are.
” Lady Fate smiles gently. “May you carry goodwill behind you and strength in front.”
Lady Fate gets up, and Cassandra sees that there is one last opening. A slight crack in the cave, barely big enough for her to squeeze through. A dim glow licks the wet stone.
Her shoulders brush the walls, and she takes several deep breaths before the tight, panicky knot in her chest settles. Behind her, the sheet of ice booms distantly.
The cave narrows, and she shuffles sideways, rock slick on her back. The light grows brighter, until the seam at the other end is visible. With one last effort, she pops out of the cave, stumbling over large, smooth stones.
She takes a breath—and holds it, too astonished to let it go.
There it is.
A crystalline, glacier-blue river. The water seems to carry its own light within it, iridescent patterns shifting across rock-hewn walls. And in the centre, just as Chiron had described in his notes, an island, and a rocky outcrop. The compendium.
Slowly, Cassandra takes one step into the water, then another.
The waves lap over her feet in prismatic light.
With each step, a deep cold pierces through her skin—the cold of a place beyond death.
Her limbs ache with a weight beyond mere weariness.
Her mind roils, nauseated, with the split truths in front of her: wet feet, water seeping up through her socks, splashed across the cuffs of her jeans; and the other.
Her shoes are dry because there’s no water, no river, no pebbles grazing the soles of her shoes.
Time has shaped itself this way, a form fit for mortal comprehension.
The smooth stones slide underneath her feet as she wades in, knee-deep, towards the island. The water is crystal clear, but there are no fish that swim in it, no soft crunch of empty shells or green algae clinging to rock. No living thing resides here.
She’s grateful when she finally hits the incline of the island. From the bank it had looked huge, but really, it’s just a spit of pebbles, with a kind of dais built up in the centre. Shivering, she wrings as much water as she can from her clothes, and approaches the dais.
On it, Fate’s compendium. Heart of the river, of the world and all its history. All its future.
It doesn’t look as big as she thought it would. There’s no lettering on the cover, no details to denote its importance. But when she places her hand on it, a shockwave ripples through her palm.
She pulls out the vial of ink and tilts it in the light.
The last of the pearlescent liquid swirls blue and gold and sage and deep red, almost luminous, as though it emits light of its own.
For all its inherent wrongness, it had been buttery smooth to write with, the faint scent of petrichor lingering for hours after she’d replaced the stopper.
She wonders if it tastes any different, or whether it’ll carry that sharp, bitter tang because ink, after all, is still ink.
What a beautiful thing, but it killed Arthur Sharpe.
She sets the pages on top of the compendium, pricks her finger and dabs her lips with blood. Then she unstoppers the vial.
“Here goes,” she says.
And she drinks.
Ink hits the back of her tongue, and to her immense relief, it tastes like it always does.
Then she turns to the compendium and flips it to the back.
She has no idea if the order matters—whether the future for her is the past for the book—but if the river has shaped itself for her eyes, surely the compendium will, too.
Carefully, she double-checks her pages. There are Chiron’s words, in his handwriting, and then there are hers, picking up where he left off.
She starts to place them into the book, but when the first page lines up, she jumps back, her fingers burning as if singed. The remaining pages scatter around her.
There is a brief, brilliant light, and then the page sinks into the paper, vanishing entirely. Seconds later, the words float up to the surface of the original page, as though they’ve always been there. A new future, written for them all.
They have stolen so much of the river. They have plundered for their own gain, for a king’s gain, for a country’s gain. She’ll never be able to undo those choices, catastrophic or benevolent, well meaning or vindictive. But she can do this. Whatever it means for her.
Cassandra reaches out for the pages—
And hands close on them, plucking them out of her reach.
“I think the fuck not.” Honeyed summers and brittle charm.
Roth.