Chapter Fifty-Seven
CHAPTER
Fifty-Seven
RENOVATING A BOOKSHOP is both an effort in patience and ingenuity.
There are materials to be sourced, contracts to be wrought and signed—just ink, this time; Cassandra is very careful about that—and shelves to fill.
The flat above the bookshop is small, cramped.
No expansive living room, no hearth to keep alight, or rows of bedrooms for booksellers to fill. Because there’s no need of it.
For the first time, Cassandra is faced with what it would be like to run a normal bookshop.
With the river gone, the magic is very nearly vanished from the books that once touched its waters, like a dream they’re all waking from.
But the world crashes forward on its imperfect, chaotic path, all the owners’ choices sealed behind them—the only sign that her pages have worked.
The day before the bookshop opens, Cassandra waits until Byron’s left before heading downstairs.
The shelves are tidy; the books are quiet.
It doesn’t have the same authority as Chiron’s bookshop did, but there’s a gentle warmth, a welcoming to it.
Tomorrow, it’ll be noisy with the first customers, but tonight it’s hushed, as though it knows what’s coming next.
Cassandra settles herself on the floor, and sets out three items: ink to her left, needle to her right—and the scrap of the compendium in the centre. It’s been a long time since she’s done this, but her hands know what to do.
Maybe all dreams must end, and maybe this world without magic is the one Chiron would approve of—the right one.
But Cassandra’s never been very good at doing the right thing.
She presses her fingertips to the scrap of compendium, and a light hum reverberates through her body. Then she pricks her finger with a needle. Blood. Ink. Iron will.
And maybe, just maybe, a little magic. Whatever she carries with her in her bones.
“I invoke Lady Fate,” she says. “I bloody well invoke you and the river. Do you hear me?”
She stands up, feeling the weight of the bookshop settle on her shoulders, an impossible something rising in her chest. All the grief she has held close for fear that its absence would be worse, all the rage at herself and Roth and the society.
“How do I know you’re not gone?” she demands. “Because I’m still here.”
Because the river thrums through her blood, in time with her heartbeat, fizzling through the tips of her fingers. Because it had, once upon a time, decided that it was worth making a story into a person.
She presses ink and blood to her lips, the familiar taste rocketing her back through time. But with effort, she pulls herself to the present.
“I invoke you,” she says, then continues, a little less steady, “but I’m also asking.”
What had Lady Fate said? You are a daughter of the river, Cassandra Fairfax, and so you were always meant to be, just as you are. Maybe, if she was meant to be, then she was meant to do this, too.
“I give back that which I owe,” she says. “I return the river to you. As much of it as I can.”
The readings, the language of the books, the magic she has used and might yet use in the future. Whatever is deemed necessary.
“Please,” she whispers.
Lady Fate might fuck her over. She might not. But Cassandra isn’t done with her yet.
It begins as a murmur, at the very edge of her consciousness, in that hazy line between dreaming and waking.
A few days later, a shroud-like mist settles over the bookshop, blanketing everything in a slight chill, though it’s almost impossible to discern.
She wakes with dewy beads of water clinging to her skin.
Byron complains about the damp weather, and suggests there might be a leak in the shop. Cassandra says she’ll look into it, but she doesn’t.
Instead, she waits. She’s become very good at waiting.
The summer continues. The bookshop swells with customers, who don’t ask for dark miracles in return for teeth, firstborn children, terrible secrets—or anything else of priceless value.
But Cassandra is surprised to find that they love the books, all the same.
They slump into comfortable armchairs, and she realises that there’s joy in a bookshop that’s made for lingering.
Some days they come in for nail-biting thrillers, or an armful of picture books, or door-stopping fantasy.
Every time she puts through a romance, she thinks of Chiron.
Water appears in puddles on the shop floor, vanishing into the floorboards as the day’s heat climbs.
A spray of white flowers appears on her desk, laid like a peace offering, though Byron swears she didn’t leave anything behind.
The books murmur to themselves, in a language that’s forever on the tip of Cassandra’s tongue.
Edmund stops by every so often. Customers scatter in his wake, a storm cloud threatening the sun, until Byron makes him settle in a corner.
For a while, he observes the bookshop, his gaze catching but never quite resting on Cassandra.
Although she still can’t say she likes him, she tolerates him, just as he tolerates her.
Maybe it’s grief shared; maybe it’s pity.
Cassandra walks past Sharpe’s most weeks, and every time, it’s closed.
Today, with autumn chasing on summer’s heels, Edmund seems out of place in his charcoal attire. But there’s a rare absence of his frown. He shoots Cassandra a suspicious look and she shrugs.
“Smells like rain,” is all he says.
It’s a chilly evening when Cassandra and Byron close up the bookshop together. A time of slumber, hibernation. Of things settling into themselves, as the weather turns. Cassandra has never paid so much attention to the time of year before.
“You know, it feels…” Byron spools out the sentence. “Good.” She grins. “I like what you’ve done with the place, Fairfax.”
Cassandra smiles back. “What we’ve done.”
Lately, they’ve had to hire another two booksellers, and Byron’s looked into the cost of the empty building next door.
They’re not quite there yet, but Cassandra’s started to imagine a larger bookshop, with more space for customers to settle down and read, maybe even a coffee shop if she’s feeling ambitious.
She could be happy here.
Byron punches her gently on the arm. “And don’t you forget it.”
She’s just about to leave when Cassandra stops her.
“Do you ever miss it?” Cassandra asks.
And Byron must know what she means because she pauses, a complicated expression on her face. Like she’s weighing up the truth and deciding how much of it Cassandra can handle. Which is a fair question, these days.
Eventually, Byron smiles sadly. “All the time.”
After Byron leaves, Cassandra normally goes up to the flat, where she’ll settle into the evening routine: dinner on the finicky gas stove, some light reading, an early bedtime to compensate for the early morning.
But tonight, she lingers in the bookshop, listening to the faint gurgle of water somewhere.
Another leak, Byron had suggested, a little less convincingly than the first time.
She wonders if Chiron would be proud of this life she’s carved out for herself.
Maybe he would be proud of how she’s thrown herself into the bookshop’s running, the way the floors gleam and windows sparkle.
Maybe he’d be just a little proud that she’s continued to do anything at all, given everything that’s happened.
That night, Cassandra falls asleep to the sound of rain.
For the first time, she dreams that she’s back in Chiron’s bookshop, walking through the buttery sunlight of an afternoon.
She lets her hands glide across the shelves, listens to the soft creak of old floorboards, polished to a high shine.
But in this version of Chiron’s bookshop, the tree in the courtyard has wound its way through the interior, the trunk soaring upwards where the staircase should be. And every flower is a delicate white.
The daylight shifts rapidly around her to dusk, then night. Stars hang above her, suspended in mid-air. On the right-hand side of the desk, where normally a plain wall stands, an archway appears. She takes a step towards it, then another—
She bolts upright, awake. Something is moving in the dark under her bed.
Her heart pistons, fear briefly eclipsing every rational thought before she remembers that the society are long dead, their only member defanged and brooding at Sharpe’s. She leans over her bed, breath held.
Two bright yellow eyes stare back at her quizzically. A plaintive meow from a fuzzy void. Errata.
Cassandra is about to scoop him into her arms—tearfully, ecstatically; every word she can think of that means joy and heartbreak and then even greater joy—when she notices a piece of paper slipped inside his collar.
The first few lines she recognises as a story from her favourite author’s collection. Something in her seizes.
Slowly, she begins to read.