Chapter Fifty-Six
CHAPTER
Fifty-Six
THE NEXT DAY, Cassandra and Byron return to the bookshop.
Or rather, where it used to be. Now it’s blackened brick and timber, with caution tape striped across the entrance.
The windows blown out, torn pages littering the street.
For the first time, every passer-by slows to look, and Cassandra knows they’re seeing exactly what she is: a wreck, abandoned by the river to its mortal life.
A grave.
Edmund Sharpe is waiting for them at the top of the stairs, a grey statue amongst the rubble.
He’s too tall, too broad in the shoulder to be mistaken for Lowell, but even so, Cassandra’s heart clenches.
She’s never noticed before how similar their posture is, pin-straight precision despite too many years of walking in low-ceilinged rooms.
He looks like he’s been waiting there for hours. Cassandra climbs the stairs, every step an eternity, until she has no choice but to stand at the top.
“Where’s Lowell?” he asks.
She doesn’t answer. Her lungs feel scooped out, leaving a bloody hole behind too big to staunch. Flecks of ash, still airborne, settle on her shoulders, and she finds herself reflexively searching for that in-between sound, that easy musicality. But there’s nothing. The river is gone.
“Where is my brother?” Edmund shakes her, hard enough that her teeth rattle. “Where the fuck is my brother?”
Byron pulls her away from him. “She saved your life, you ungrateful bastard.”
“He saved everyone,” Cassandra says quietly, the wind snatching away her words.
But Edmund hears and his face turns ashen. He falls to his knees. A sob wrenches out of him. Grief, at last. The unbreakable Edmund Sharpe, broken. It is the worst kind of victory imaginable.
“What did you do?” he asks.
But he already knows.
It’s the last time Cassandra ventures outside, for a while.
With the bookshop gone, there’s no choice but to stay with Septimus.
Another Cassandra might have refused, or confronted him about Chiron, or at the very least done something other than walk under his doorway without a word.
But this Cassandra, the one who narrowed down so many possibilities to this specific life in this specific world, lets Byron make the decisions.
Byron can argue with Septimus about Cassandra living in his house for a while.
It’s not as if Cassandra is there, really.
Septimus avoids Cassandra at first, but when it becomes apparent that this is no short-term stay, he finally knocks on her door. When she doesn’t get up, he pushes it open with a measure of caution. He glances at her pointedly, and she shrugs. He can do whatever he wants; it’s his house.
“I could tell you how it happened,” he says.
Cassandra doesn’t reply. Her gaze snags on the way he thumbs his trouser pockets. A hand that had guided hers, in so many ways, over the course of her life. A hand that had shown her the correct ways to dust a book, to pencil in a catalogue card.
A hand that had murdered Chiron.
She reaches for the part of her that cared, but finds that she can no longer muster the strength.
“He was my oldest friend,” Septimus says. “But he would have destroyed the bookshops. When I did… what I did, I thought it would be the end.”
Then Cassandra showed up. How merrily she’d run roughshod over so many people’s plans, ruining years’ worth of ambition or hope in the seconds it took to sign her name on the bookshop’s contract.
“I thought he might have told you. That you were his contingency plan should he fail. But I could not do what I did again without proof. Even if you were everything I’d feared you’d become.”
A thief. A liar. But Cassandra thinks she knows what he means: a survivor at any cost. The way the society had tried to survive, at the expense of everyone else.
“I—we—were working on a solution,” he continues.
“Booksellers might not be owners, but we owe our fealty to Lady Fate, nonetheless. We were trying to rebalance the scales. If we’d had more time, or the bookshops hadn’t started to disappear—or the owners hadn’t been spooked into greater action… But that was my fault.”
Cassandra thinks back to the books in Septimus’ arms at the fair, or sunk at the bottom of Fate’s well. The persistent rumours that the river-touched books were vanishing out of the thieves’ circulation. She’d put it down to the river itself, not the booksellers guarding its remnants.
The silence hangs expectantly, but she doesn’t say anything. What else is there left to say? The facts are unchanged, and now with the river gone, there’s no possibility of undoing all their damage. No magical book, paradox or otherwise, to wipe the past clean.
“Well, then,” Septimus says awkwardly.
He’s halfway out of the door when she finds the only question she’s really interested in.
“Was it worth it?”
Septimus turns, one hand clutching the edge of the doorway.
In his face, she sees it all: the grief, the anger, the self-loathing.
But it’s a weary expression without bite in it, as though he’s been wearing them for too long, and is well acquainted with these enemies.
He looks old, she thinks, and is surprised to find that she does, at least, care about that.
“Was it worth it?” he echoes. “For the world, perhaps. But not for me.”
It’s an honest answer. Cassandra hates it.
In the evenings, she hears Byron and Septimus discussing what to do with the remaining books, now that the magic is slowly vanishing from their pages—another possibility, gone.
In the end, it seems as though there was just enough of the river to preserve the decisions of the paradox books and thus the world, but not enough to keep the bookshops or the magic within.
So much loss, so much grief, just to hold on to the thinnest of threads.
Something else she would blame Roth for, if she could muster the energy.
The tributary bookshops that still remain are sinking into their foundations. Soon there will be nothing left but memories. And one day, not even that. Chiron has got his future, after all, even if he’s no longer around to see it.
Is this all there is? Perhaps this is all there should be.
Sometimes Cassandra takes out the scrap of paper from the compendium, to trace the faint edges of her handwriting interlinked with the river’s. The future that she’d so earnestly written for them all, now forever unfinished, hums faintly between her fingers.
There are days when she thinks she can still hear the river, at the very edge of a car backfiring in the street, or Byron putting on the kettle, or Septimus turning the page of a book. But it’s not real, like the voice in her head that sounds so much like him.
I thought you might like this—
I’m never wrong. But sometimes I would very much like to be so—
What if I’m afraid to get what I want?
I choose another future—
Cassandra drowns it all in sleep.
One month goes by. Then another.
Edmund, at the door. “You don’t think anything… happened to her, at the river? A head injury, or—”
Septimus, gruff and shouldering Edmund out of the way. “She’s physically well, as far as I can tell.” A pause. “It’s a hard loss for her.”
Edmund, angry—always angry. “He was my brother. So what the fuck’s it to me, then? Easy?”
“I didn’t mean—”
Edmund interrupts. “He was supposed to live. Because Arthur made his own decisions, but… I asked Lowell to come to the reading. I asked him to watch out for Arthur. I—” A strangled noise that could be a sob, choked back. “He never had a fucking choice.”
Septimus, glancing at Cassandra. “I don’t think anyone did.”
Byron shoos them both out. “She’ll be fine.”
But Cassandra catches Byron’s worried gaze, and knows a liar when she sees one.
Three months gone. Byron sets down a piece of paper in front of Cassandra.
“I didn’t rescue you at three in the morning from that shitty bar for nothing,” she says.
Cassandra doesn’t reply. But later that night, when everyone else is asleep, she picks up the advertisement and studies it.
Someone is selling an old bookshop.