Chapter 14
More than the Rot
La Fée Verte did not look any less brilliant in the daylight.
In fact, Honoré mused, as she and Sylvie followed the Sanct through the booths that made up the flea market of Saint-Ouen, the woman almost appeared brighter. Her feathers were the color of fresh leaves, and the rest of her had the glow of a hazy spring day. Never mind that this late June morning was already sweltering, so sweltering that most of the ragpickers hadn’t bothered setting up shop. One or two sat napping in chairs, exhausted by an evening spent rummaging through garbage piles, their boots propped next to their latest finds: candlesticks, dishware, mismatched earrings, stuff too sad for even Sylvie to consider stealing.
The youngest Enchantress was too busy trying to teach Honoré feline vocabulary anyway. “Their tails are tonal! They use them to accent certain words! That’s why I couldn’t understand Marmalade when he was talking about Céleste and Rafe and the strange alley…”
What more is there to understand? Honoré wanted to ask, as she wound around a booth of jars filled with things like buttons and musket balls. They found the salon.
They found each other.
She wanted to be happy for them. She really did. Honoré wanted to believe she’d found something too, as she followed La Fée Verte through the labyrinth of trash. Somewhere here was a Sanct who might know more about Honoré’s ring, who could tell her why the silver was suddenly thrilling up her arm, sprouting claws and wings. She no longer needed knives to fight. Nor did she need a cabaret to fly—as soon as Céleste and Rafe had said their goodbyes and left Montmartre, hand in gold-smeared hand, Honoré had used her ring to launch into the lightening sky with Sylvie. She’d even managed to get her dragon to carry The Known Words of Fable and Lore in its jaws without denting the cover. The metal was easy enough to manipulate. Sometimes a little too easy. Honoré hadn’t meant to get so defensive about the kitten comment in the bookstore, but she was more than making up for it now.
“Oh! And I was wrong. Cats have fifteen different words for mice!” Sylvie nearly bumped into a table covered with glass fragments. The owner startled awake at the clamor, but he didn’t seem to see the cause. “I can’t wait to tell Céleste! Though I suppose I’ll have to.”
Honoré paused to examine the scattered glass. Not broken, she realized. The pieces were slides for a magic lantern—painted with bouquets and polar expeditions and dancing skeletons. If she blurred her eyes just right, they resembled a smashed vase again.
The whole world seemed like that now.
And La Fée Verte? She was the magic lantern itself, the light that made Honoré’s insides tremble like moth wings. No, there was no need for Cabaret d’Ailes at all. Her steps already felt floaty as she followed the Sanct to the outer edges of the market, to a stall that was just as cluttered as the others. Empty perfume bottles, a telescope, and so much other bric-a-brac held down a worn blanket. There was plenty more piled high in a cart on the opposite side of the booth. The ragpicker who’d gathered it all was slouched against the wheel, a hat placed over his face.
La Fée Verte called out to him across the table. “Long night?”
“Not nearly as long as it should be, in my opinion.”
The hat slid off with a grunt, and Honoré saw the ragpicker had bright bronze markings all across his face. Without that, it would be easy to mistake him for a beggar. His gloves had no fingers; his coat had no lining. The inside was covered with keys instead. Keys and pocket watches and necklaces and monocles and all sorts of other small trinkets that chimed like alarm bells when he stood. “It’s been a time since you’ve visited my booth, Verte. What brings you to the realm of moonlight sinners?”
“A relic.”
“Got plenty of powerful objects here—” The other Sanct paused, when he saw Honoré and Sylvie. “Ah, so the rumors are true.”
Sylvie sidled up to the table, her pink hair spilling over a tangled rosary and a half-burnt map. “What rumors?”
“Libris told me he met a daydreamer who tried to steal her own story. I didn’t quite believe it.” The Fisherman of the Moon cast a glance at La Fée Verte, then looked back at Honoré. His stare was appraising. It lit up even more when he noticed the ring wrapped around her wrist. “He also mentioned a dragon.”
“This is Honoré Côte and Sylvie of a Single Name.”
“A pleasure. I hope,” the other Sanct amended. “Try not to let your fingers get too sticky here, daydreamer. Some of these objects… well, their magic can stick to you the wrong way if you don’t handle them properly.”
Sylvie backed away from the table then, leaving the rosary coiled like a snake. The charred map was no longer next to it.
Honoré broke in before the Fisherman of the Moon could notice. “La Fée Verte says you can tell me more about my ring.”
“It’s a ring, is it?” The Fisherman of the Moon plucked one of the many chains that hung inside his jacket. There was a jeweler’s loupe on the end. It made his eye the size of a small planet as he stepped around the table to get a better look at Honoré’s hand. “Ah, yes. I see now. What interesting metalwork! And that spellwork! You’d be hard-pressed to find a smith who can do either nowadays.”
“La Fée Verte thinks it’s from the Revolution,” Honoré said.
“It very well might be,” answered the Sanct. “The magic certainly holds echoes of that era, but I can’t say for sure.”
La Fée Verte pressed her lips together. “You’ve never seen a piece like this before?”
“Not exactly.” The Fisherman of the Moon kept orbiting the ring, until his nearness made Honoré bristle. The dragon did too. But instead of shrinking back from the ring’s fangs, the Sanct leaned closer. “Tell me, mademoiselle, what does it feel like to wear?”
Honoré wasn’t entirely sure how to answer this question—mostly because the ring fit her so well. Aside from her return to Caveau des Terreurs, she hadn’t removed the piece in years. Without it she just felt warped.
“It’s a part of me,” she said, finally.
“How long has the ring been in your possession?”
“Five years.” She skipped the part where she’d had to cut the beast from her father’s dead hand because his finger had grown too far into it. “But I didn’t know it was magical until last night.”
“After my fountain guard Enlightened her,” La Fée Verte explained.
“I’m surprised you managed that. This metal… well, let me test something.” The Fisherman of the Moon set down his loupe, still staring at the ring. The bronze markings around his eyes started to glow. More glittering light left the tops of his fingerless gloves, winding toward Honoré. A spell. It never hit her skin—the dragon expanded. Motes of the Sanct’s magic disappeared into its scales. “It seems this ring was designed to shield its wearer from enchantments.”
“I wasn’t wearing it at the fountain,” Honoré remembered.
Strange, to think that if the ring had remained on her finger, she’d be back at her tomb now, rolling her eyes at Sylvie’s stories about green birds, waiting for Céleste to stumble through the door after a night at who knows where.
She knew now.
She could feel La Fée Verte’s gaze—all that candlelit warmth she’d wondered about before. So it wasn’t magic that had made Honoré’s skin sing at the Sanct’s touch, but something more.
“That’s right,” Sylvie interjected. “You pulled the ring from your pocket, and the dragons fought each other! It was legendary.”
The Fisherman of the Moon tipped his hat. “Who won?”
“Well, Honoré’s ring smashed the other dragon back into the fountain, but then La Fée Verte was so impressed that she asked Honoré to become her knight, and now I’m allowed inside the salon,” said Sylvie. “So… everyone.”
“A knight, eh?” The vendor looked at La Fée Verte with a surprised expression. “She hasn’t taken a shine to someone like that in years!”
The other Sanct seemed ruffled by this. A few birds stirred out of her feathers and flew to the booth’s red tarp, which was so sun-bleached that it had faded to a coral color. La Fée Verte’s cheeks quickly started to match.
The Fisherman of the Moon kept on speaking. “That’s quite the tale, young daydreamer, but I sense it is only the start.” He glanced back at Honoré’s silvered arm. “If you mean to fight even bigger battles with this ring, take care. Relics are almost never what they appear to be at first glance. Or second. Even I have trouble seeing every layer. I once sold a watch for a pittance because I believed it was nothing but a fortune teller’s bauble. But Nicolas Flamel was no fortune teller. And I was a fool who let time itself slip through my fingers.” He glanced at La Fée Verte, Sylvie, and Honoré in turn. “Try not to be fools.”
“All right!” Sylvie chirped.
Honoré pushed the metal back into the shape of a ring. No sweat sprouted from her brow, as it had in the bookstore. She was grateful for that. “What else do you think this relic could be capable of?”
“I’ll have to do more digging,” the Fisherman of the Moon told her. “Libris has a mountain of Revolution-era letters he’s been begging me to come collect. If this was forged during that era, I may be able to find documentation of it.”
La Fée Verte lingered by the table, running a hand over a music box. “My wards are failing, Fisherman.”
“I’ve heard those rumors too,” he said.
The other Sanct made a wry face. “Gargoyles are such gossips.”
“It’s not just statues whispering these days. One of the ragpickers found a husk while they were digging through a trash pile—now most of them are too afraid to go out at night. Say there’s an even worse sinner loose in the moonlight.” The Fisherman tilted his head. “You need to cast your own net wider, Verte. Keep more dreamers awake.”
“I won’t let history repeat itself.”
“Ah, but that is what history does,” the other Sanct said, as he glanced over his wares. “To fear such a thing only makes him stronger, Verte. He may not knot your shadow with it, but he doesn’t need to, so long as you choose to keep your own hands tied.” He picked up a carnival ticket—ADMIT ONE. “We are more than just the rot that happens around us.”
“Fine words, for a magician who picks through garbage,” Honoré said.
The Fisherman’s coat jangled as he gave a short bow. “You credit me too much, Mademoiselle Côte. It was La Fée Verte herself who said such a thing, the night she handed me this.”
The other Sanct stared at the ticket. There was something tattered in her expression, as worn as the paper itself. “Dreams weren’t enough to stop him, last time.”
“Who are you talking about?” Sylvie asked.
“No one,” the Fisherman of the Moon told her. “At least for now.”
Over the next several weeks, Honoré Côte found herself picking through her own fair share of trash. Not for candelabra that lit with a snap or spoons that made your soup extra savory or any of that nonsense. No, she was searching for signs of a killer.
A vampire, really.
There was no arguing with the term when she came across her first corpse—the one that had frightened the ragpickers. Honoré couldn’t blame them for swearing off their search for treasure after unearthing this: Skeletal limbs arranged like matchsticks. Lips peeled back in a horrible wordless scream—the same kind Honoré had watched taking shape in that shard of mirror, when La Belle was killed. Whoever had drained that Sanct had done the same to this soul. Again, a mystery. There was no telling who this body belonged to. This wasn’t for the rot, strangely enough. It was the thick of summer now, the time of year when people lingered a few minutes longer underneath café awnings to avoid the high noon sun. This corpse had no such cover. It should have decayed quickly. There should’ve been a maggot or two, paired with some unholy stench, but as Honoré knelt over the remains, she smelled nothing. She found no marks on the skin, which had the consistency of a dried-out corn husk. Husk—wasn’t that what the Fisherman of the Moon had called the body? An apt term. This looked more like a discarded vegetable than a person.
Honoré found more as June slowly crawled into July, as she spent more and more evenings patrolling the city with the help of her dragon ring. She used its silver wings to soar over Montrouge, Austerlitz, the Marais, the glittering lights of the Champs-Élysées. There was no rhyme or reason to where the husked bodies turned up… only rumors. Bar talk. The kind of stories Honoré would’ve ignored while she canvassed for the Enchantresses’ next long con.
It amazed her, how quickly life could tip on its head, like an hourglass reversed. How she now spent her nights flying, honest-to-goodness flying, with the wings of the ring her father had once used to beat her. It was a heady feeling. Powerful. Far more powerful to Honoré than sitting in a salon while an elephant served her smoky cocoa. Or pasting on a moustache and fleecing a few francs from a foolish businessman.
If she could really use this magical relic to battle true monsters? To make sure this damned “Black Hand” didn’t touch La Fée Verte or the rest of her dreamers?
Well, then, she would fight.
She just had to find the fucking vampire first.
None of the rumors went this far, unfortunately. The trail went cold with each of the corpses. Honoré marked them on an imaginary map in her head—X, in lieu of any names. As far as she could tell, their enemy was still just circling the city, picking off people where La Fée Verte’s wards were weakest. So far, the Quartier Secret was safe. As was the rest of the Latin Quarter. No inebriated university students had stumbled into a shadowy end. A few were gathered around the mist-shrouded entrance of a nearby bakery, where Honoré had stopped to buy a bag full of fresh croissants. It was too late to swing by Stohrer, and flying always made her hungry for some reason. Even the drained corpses made her want to sink her teeth into something—probably because she needed a reminder that she was alive. Bread would do. Yeast, wheat, butter, and yes, a little bit of sugar.
Not enough for Sylvie to notice. In fact, the girl would likely complain at the lack of chocolate if she snatched the bag. Honoré should probably steer clear of the salon if she wanted to eat her fair share of breakfast.
Most of the dreamers were already exiting the alley. Across the street, Honoré could see Céleste walking hand in hand with Rafe. Had they seen her? She wasn’t sure. The pair paused beneath one of the opal-lit lanterns and kissed under the shifting rainbow light. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing Honoré wanted to interrupt for the sake of croissants…
She was about to slouch over a nearby café table, when she felt a small breeze.
Green fluttered onto her shoulder.
It was a songbird.
“Oh, hello.” Honoré felt her hand crumple against the paper bag. A few years ago, Sylvie had gotten her into the habit of tossing stray bakery crumbs to pigeons, but this wasn’t some innocuous gray bird.
This was an extension of La Fée Verte.
It wasn’t hard to read the songbirds’ body language. The way this one hopped and fluttered… it was asking Honoré to follow it over the zinc rooftops. Across the river. Up to the closest bell tower of the looming cathedral.
La Fée Verte was leaning against one of the stone balustrades, her emerald wings quite a contrast to the surrounding stony sculptures. The songbird slipped back into her feathers when Honoré landed on the walkway beside her.
“What are you doing up here?” She patted the banister as her dragon ring shrank back into a band. They weren’t quite at the top of the cathedral, but that did nothing to diminish the view. Apart from the salon’s parting fog, Honoré could see all the way down to the curve of the Seine, where the Eiffel Tower was starting to pull out of the night’s darkness.
“Waiting…” There was an open-endedness to the way the Sanct said this. Honoré figured it could mean just about anything: For the sun to rise. For her enemy to appear. For a young woman with an enchanted ring and a bag of still-steaming bread.
“I found a husk over by Montparnasse this evening. A man, judging by the clothes,” Honoré said.
La Fée Verte tilted her head, taking in Honoré’s trousers and loosely buttoned shirt. Her own gown was gold, matching her masque light, along with the mists starting to crawl out over the river. Dawn was very close.
“Montparnasse,” she said slowly. “A fair number of my artists live in that neighborhood.”
Down on the bridge, Honoré could see several salon guests gathered to watch the approaching sunrise. More than a few were wearing tails. The drained corpse had been lacking extra appendages, but that didn’t mean anything if he’d been attacked before midnight.
“It’s the second body that’s turned up there,” Honoré said. “Could that mean something?”
“It means I must refresh my wards in the fourteenth arrondissement.” La Fée Verte sighed. “Every victim is making him stronger.”
She sounded tired, and there was a heaviness behind her eyes as she looked out over the river. Honoré wanted to be something other than the bearer of bad news, so she lifted the bag of pastries.
“Do you eat?” The question felt clumsy, coming from her lips.
La Fée Verte’s bangles glittered down her wrists as she straightened. “What?”
“Do you eat bread?” Honoré clarified. Despite all their talk of cake, she’d not once seen La Fée Verte take a bite of the confections in her salon. “Or do you just live off air and ideas? I don’t have any sonnets to share for breakfast, but I did manage to get some croissants. If—if you want one, that is.”
The Sanct laughed. She looked surprised but happy. “I would love nothing more, Honoré Côte.”
The croissants were still warm, flaking off onto Honoré’s fingers when she drew them from the bag. Her mouth watered as she handed the first pastry to La Fée Verte. Several of the Sanct’s birds peeked out of her wing feathers, their beaks twinkling while they eyed the bread.
“You know, I once worked at Stohrer,” she said. “Croissants are deceptively difficult to bake. You have to let the dough rest each time you fold in the butter—and there are so many folds. It really is an art.”
Honoré was already halfway through her pastry. She paused, looking down at all the layers she’d just bitten through. “I never thought of bread that way. I did once try to use a ficelle to teach Sylvie how to fight with a knife, but she just ended up eating it.”
“A battle with baked goods? That’s imaginative!” La Fée Verte laughed again and lifted her croissant. “What would this be in your arsenal? A pistol?”
Honoré chewed through the rest of her croissant, trying not to think about the actual golden gun Sylvie had waved around. “I think I prefer it as breakfast food.”
“Me too.” The Sanct took a bite of bread, her eyelids fluttering. “This tastes even better than poetry.”
“Well, certainly any of my poetry,” Honoré added, though she still thought of every beautiful comparison she’d made at the first sound of La Fée Verte’s voice. Honey on her tongue and sunlight pouring through storm clouds.
There were no clouds on the horizon now, as the Sanct turned to look at her. “No one has ever brought me breakfast before.”
Dawn light spilled across the river. It matched the color of La Fée Verte’s eyes—amber and gold. Honoré could see the imaginers’ tails burning away, swirling up in a column of glowing sparks as their memories evaporated.
“Seems to me not many people have had the chance,” she answered.
Several green birds flew out into the sparks, swooping like a flock of swallows as they guided the light back toward Notre-Dame’s south bell tower. As soon as the sparks hit La Fée Verte’s face, they melted into her masque, making it glow even brighter. It made Honoré think of what the Fisherman of the Moon had said: She hasn’t taken a shine to someone like that in years!
It made her own insides glimmer with hope.
“It’s not easy to trust others when you have a history,” La Fée Verte said, looking back down at Honoré’s ring. “But even before I stole my enemy’s name, there was no one who brought me croissants without expecting some magical favor in return.”
Honoré looked back at the dragon relic too. She thought of all the effort she’d poured into the metal over the past three weeks, how she’d learned to shape its wings and jaws and tail, how she’d hardened these things over herself, how incredibly strong she felt, but also how incredibly scared—scared that all this magic was too good to be true.
Too good for her.
It was the same with the shimmer she felt even deeper inside.
“I don’t— I’ve never let my guard down easily either. You can’t, when you grow up the way I did.” Honoré thought of all the bottles of lemonade Eleanor had shared. All the smiles Honoré had needed to swallow back with them. “But the moment you Enlightened me at that fountain, I knew I wanted to fight for you.”
“I knew too,” the Sanct murmured softly.
The last of the imaginers’ sparks were settling into her masque, and salon-goers on the bridge had scattered. Honoré stayed right where she was, her hand on the balustrade. Only her heart leapt when La Fée Verte’s fingers brushed against hers.
“Thank you for the bread,” she said.