Enchantée(127)

Camille shook her head. “You know what I’ll give you in payment, brother? Your freedom.”

“I already had that,” Alain sneered.

“Did you?” Camille said, rounding on him. “The Vicomte de Séguin was a magician. Unlike mine, his promises were cinders that crumbled to ash as soon as you picked them up. How did you not realize this? If I’d refused to marry him, and he’d married Sophie—or kept her as his mistress, his slave—he would have made your lives a nightmare. And he’d never have given you anything. Whatever he might have been once, the Vicomte de Séguin loved power and power alone. He would never have relinquished one atom of it.”

This was the end, then. It was over.

But she might still say what she needed to with love instead of hate. She cleared her throat. “I cannot know what you shall think of me, nor if you ever will wish to see me again. That’s your choice.” Then she gestured out to the streets of Paris. “This is what I am giving you, Alain. It is the finest, and rarest, of gifts. Now go and do something good with it.”





68


On the second floor of the mansion she was still learning to call home, Camille tapped on Sophie’s bedroom door. Her sister slept late these days, recovering from the ordeal that Séguin and Alain had put her through. She didn’t share the details with Camille, and in turn, Camille did not pry. They were Sophie’s wounds, her hurts. Camille only did her best to let them heal.

From inside the room, she heard a bird warbling—a canary Lazare had sent to Sophie to hasten her recovery.

“Come, but don’t let in Fant?me!”

For the first time in many days, Sophie sat up in bed, her hair hanging in a smooth braid over her shoulder, the bird clutching her index finger. “Careful not to startle him!” she exclaimed as Camille came in.

Smiling to herself, Camille took her usual seat by the head of the bed and clasped Sophie’s other hand where it lay on the embroidered coverlet. The bird fixed a suspicious black eye on Camille.

“Don’t worry, little…?” Camille didn’t know if it had a name.

“Louis. The sixteenth.” Sophie’s lips quirked.

“Majesté,” she said to the bird, “I’m not here for an audience with you. It’s Sophie I’ve come to see. I’m so happy to see you better, my darling sister.”

Sophie ducked her head. “I may look fragile, but I’m stronger than I appear.”

Camille kissed her on the cheek. Everything she wanted to say jostled in her mind. If she hadn’t left Sophie alone so much, if she hadn’t focused on life at court and had really listened to her sister, couldn’t all of this have been avoided? “I’m so sorry, Sophie. For leaving you, for not trusting you, for getting so caught up in everything that I lost my way—”

“Enough, Camille!” Sophie burst out. “Yes, you should have dealt better. You should have trusted me. When Maman and Papa died, I did grow up. You just didn’t see it.”

“I am so sorry.”

“You’ve already apologized. Some of it was my fault, too, n’est-ce pas? I wanted to believe I could save us by marrying Séguin. That was wrong.” The bird trilled. “See?” Sophie said, mock-serious. “The king agrees.”

“It wasn’t just you. Alain was in debt to him, completely ensnared.”

“The vicomte enchanted our brother.”

Surprised, Camille asked, “With magic?”

Sophie shook her head. “Séguin was everything Alain and I had been striving for, everything we thought we wanted—don’t you see? Séguin was our fairy-tale ending.”

It wasn’t just Sophie and Alain. Maman, Grandmère, and back before her, people telling and retelling these dangerous stories. Believing in them, and by believing remaking the world in the stories’ image. Until they felt true. Despite the wash of sunlight flooding the room, a chill crept along Camille’s neck. “He would have used you horribly, to increase my sorrow. That was what he intended, in the end. We were to be his way out of suffering.”

With her little finger, Sophie stroked the top of the bird’s head. “We escaped, though.”

Camille shivered. All that blood, the trampled grass. The magic, and the sorrow. “We escaped with our lives, but just barely.”

“I think we escaped with quite a bit more than that,” Sophie teased. Louis flapped off her finger onto the arm of a candelabra. “We have this beautiful house! We have an enormous estate, which Séguin bragged about endlessly while he held me captive. You should have heard him, telling me how many heads of cattle he had and all the taxes he got from his poor farmers. And somewhere in the attics there’s probably trunk after trunk loaded up with gold louis!” She peeked sidelong at Camille, suddenly serious. “And you have the Marquis de Sablebois.”

“He isn’t a prize!”

“I think he is.”

Camille gave her sister a gentle shove. “You know what I mean.”

“In any case, we are now rich and we escaped a very dangerous magician. Camille,” Sophie said, hesitantly, “you won’t keep working the glamoire, will you? Or turning coins? Now that we have everything we need?”

Camille hesitated. It was true: they had all they needed.