Enchantée(82)

The knowledge was a pulse of fear. Steady, she told herself. She needed to go, and quickly. “The others will wonder where I’ve gone.”

He flicked the last plum peel into the flowers edging the path. Juice dripped from the knife and fell onto the ashy gravel in tiny dark spots.

“Adieu then, Baroness.” Something raw flickered in his eyes. “Patiently or not, I’ll be waiting.”

Camille bowed and ducked into the hedge, clutching the ball in her hand.

What had just happened? The Vicomte de Séguin had suggested—marriage? Some kind of partnership? But why would a magician need a partner, a partner who was also a magician? For she felt quite certain now that Séguin suspected—if not knew outright—that she, too, was a magician.

She’d thought magic a simple thing, once. Magic was the way one turned useless scraps into useful coins. It was difficult, and it hurt on the inside to work it, but it was manageable. Now magic seemed a vast and trailless continent, only one very small part of its landscape familiar to her. There was so much she did not know.

Nothing seemed right: not Versailles, with rot crumbling at its edges; not Séguin, with his watchful eyes and his talk of invisible traps and magic; not even Lazare, with his lazy smile, willing to bestow a kiss on a baroness he hardly knew. In the space of one bright afternoon, she was in grave danger of her disguises failing, the boundaries between her two selves collapsing.

She had to be more careful.

By the time she’d finally made her way through the yew hedge, her friends had advanced down the lawn. They seemed tiny next to the wind-ruffled hedges, beneath the wide dome of washed-blue sky. They were as painted figures in a model of Versailles, placed there by some larger force. And just as easily knocked down.

Lazare must have wandered off in search of his ball, for she could not make out anywhere his lanky shape, the ink-black of his unpowdered hair.

The dress shifted restlessly against her skin.

As she watched, Chandon hit his ball squarely, though not very far. The effort made him double over, coughing. The raspy sound echoed toward her.

Aurélie rubbed his back. A breeze caught at her skirts and then, as if she could feel Camille’s gaze, she tipped her hat back and waved.

“Hurry up!” she shouted. “You’ll miss your turn!”





41


“Viens ici,” said Sophie, her blue eyes sharp with concern. “I want you to come here and really look.”

“I’m reading,” Camille replied, carefully turning a page in her copy of Les Liasons Dangereuses so as not to reveal how it trembled in her hand. Late afternoon light warmed their sitting room at the H?tel Théron; Fant?me lazed in a golden splash of sunshine, licking his paw. To be a cat, she thought, and not have to worry about being caught out as a fraud, or a magician. A simple, snare-less life.

“I’m very serious,” Sophie said.

Camille lay her book down over the arm of her chair. “You won’t leave me alone until I do, I suppose?”

Sophie said nothing but waited, with her hand on her hip, next to the large mirror above the fireplace. Camille was exhausted, la magie-worn—and she suspected she knew what Sophie wished to show her.

“Come,” Sophie said, waving Camille closer to the long mirror. It reflected back at them the salon’s wallpaper and curtains, the unlit chandelier.

“What is it?” Camille said, warily.

“Stand by me, and look at your reflection.”

Camille did as her sister asked, fixing her attention on the mirror’s curlicued frame.

“First me. The more money we have, the better I look,” Sophie said. “See?”

Avoiding her own reflection, Camille looked at Sophie’s. Her sister’s blond hair gleamed with health. There was a pretty flush in her round cheeks and her blue eyes shone brightly. “It’s true. You’re very pretty,” Camille acknowledged.

“And you?”

“I don’t wish to analyze myself at the moment.” She pulled the collar of her robe around her throat, over her collarbones. “I’ve only just woken up.”

“Camille,” Sophie warned.

Reluctantly, Camille shifted her gaze from Sophie’s reflection to her own. If she didn’t look too closely, she did resemble herself. The dusting of freckles across her nose, her serious gray eyes, the copper lights in her hair. She was no longer as gaunt as she used to be and the hungry tightness was gone from around her eyes. “Well enough.”

“Truly?”

She’d seen it enough in Chandon to see its shadow in herself.

Sometimes she’d catch a glimpse of herself at Versailles, reflected in a mirror or a window, and be struck by how thin her skin seemed. The way a chemise would wear away to holes, the more it was washed. Or the way a piece of paper, scraped over and over to remove old ink, slowly became translucent.

Ghostly. Spirit-thin.

“It’s because I was at court last night. It takes time to recover from the glamoire. It’s always been that way. As you know.” Which was true, as far as it went. The aching weariness in her bones, the sensitivity of her skin, the slaying fatigue were as they had been the first time she’d gone to Versailles. But now there was something more. It took her longer to recover her strength, as if the glamoire took more from her than it had in the past. It had a constant hunger.