Chapter 16
The Knight and the Hellcat
Honoré Côte stood by a heap of ashes.
They were darker than the usual fireplace soot, marking out a perfect square. None of the surrounding plants had caught fire, though they were beginning to drop their leaves, as if it were October instead of July. The air held an extra chill too. There was a grayness to the day that had nothing to do with clouds. Or smoke. The pillar witnessed by the owners of Cabaret d’Ailes had vanished by the time they summoned La Fée Verte.
The message had come by bird—not green, like the rest of the creatures roosting in the misty reaches of the Quartier Secret, but red. The animal trembled when it landed on the loveseat where Sylvie had fallen asleep, The Known Words of Fable and Lore splayed across her chest. Honoré was tired too, after an evening spent patrolling Paris’s streets, but she didn’t want to shut her eyes when La Fée Verte was lounging in the opposite chair, her wings draped over the rest of her like a lazy morning robe.
This pose didn’t last long, after the bird said what it had come to say: “Montmartre is burning.”
They flew to the eighteenth arrondissement, but there was no fire brigade to greet them. Only two Sancts. The winged women stood in front of a small gate, their arms outstretched, the flash of their red and gold masks easy to mistake for flames. When Honoré landed, she saw they’d extinguished the fire, but something sinister was still spreading from the ashes. Leaves kept dropping down the stone steps, as if some invisible rot was slouching its way toward the gate, determined to seep into the rest of Montmartre.
It might have, if not for La Fée Verte.
She landed by the other Sancts. Her magic joined theirs. Her hand touched the gate, making the iron glow gold, creating a cage for whatever shrouded the hill. The pall wasn’t just drying up leaves but the posters pasted on adjoining buildings too—Honoré could see the ends of a Tournée du Chat Noir advertisement starting to curl. Its iconic black cat looked about ten shades blacker.
“I smelled it about an hour after sunrise,” the red-winged Sanct told La Fée Verte, as the messenger bird slipped back into her feathers. “I thought a guest had left one of their desires on a settee, but then I saw the windmill.”
Windmill? There were a few left in the neighborhood, Honoré knew, but she’d never seen one here. She still didn’t.
“Is there a body?” she asked.
The yellow-feathered Sanct shook her head. “No Sanct has used this place in years.”
“I thought it was erased after Moulin disappeared.” Her companion’s ruby wings trembled. “I thought our magic was strong enough to keep him out.”
“It is.” La Fée Verte pushed through the gate. There was a flash of gold from her eyes, and a wave of warmth as she fanned her wings. Leaves began to bud on the surrounding bushes—quickly unfurling into lusher summer shades. New moss coated each step as she climbed. “You were right to summon me, Désirée. His curse hasn’t spread too far. We can keep your claim on Montmartre if we act quickly.”
The other two Sancts stayed close—their wing tips touching, their halos shining. Their magic braided with La Fée Verte’s as they followed her to the base of the windmill. Honoré also edged toward the scorched earth, close enough to nudge the burnt ground with her boot. No grass grew back. It was so dark that she started to see shapes—the way one did when one sat in a lightless closet for hours on end. Like when Gabriel’s head had been heavy in her arms and her mother had been trapped on the other side of the door and there had been nothing Honoré could do but stare. She saw bursting stars and wriggles that reminded her of maggots and circles that smeared like spilled blood.
“Honoré?”
She started at the sound of her name.
“Go guard the gate while Désirée and Plume and I seal the breach,” La Fée Verte said gently. “We don’t want our backs exposed.”
To what? Honoré wondered. A street sweeper? The couple sipping coffee in the cane chairs of a nearby café? There wasn’t much for her dragon to do. La Fée Verte’s magic had already taken root, and the path back to the gate was wreathed with flowers. Magnolia, cherry blossoms, wisteria—blooming all out of order. Beautiful. She even paused to smell them.
The scents were sweet but faint.
It was hard for Honoré not to wonder if she was missing something. She hadn’t heard anything more from the Fisherman regarding her relic, but she’d had three weeks to mull over his words. This ring was designed to shield its wearer from enchantments.
Was that why she still felt so out of place in La Fée Verte’s salon? Honoré knew it was odd that she felt more comfortable around desiccated bodies than a party full of painters and poets. She wished it weren’t so hard to blend into the Quartier Secret. Céleste and Sylvie and Rafael had no problem making themselves at home—why, just last night, she’d come back from patrol to find an entire room of imaginers trying to copy the youngest Enchantress’s hairstyle. The most notable of them was Duchess d’Uzès, who picked up a paintbrush and splashed pastels into her own graying locks.
The paint was as purple as these wisteria blooms when she waved the brush at Honoré. “Would you like to try?”
“You’d look ravishing in violet!” Jean Cocteau swept his own pale pink fringe to the side as he said this. “No, no. Forgive me. I misspoke. You’d look ravaging. Especially if we went a few shades darker—”
“I’d look like an Easter Egg!” Honoré snapped.
Her dragon ring did too.
The rainbow collective scattered, leaving Sylvie there to look at her as if she’d just committed murder. So much… so much like Gabriel. It made Honoré want to roar even more. But then she caught Rafael staring too, his arm wrapped around Céleste, watching her ring, and damn… was that fear flashing through his eyes? Or was it Terreur? Either way it had made Honoré’s nostrils flare. Deep breath. Keep the fire in.
Don’t let history repeat itself.
She sniffed La Fée Verte’s resurrected blossoms again.
She twisted her ring.
It didn’t come off as cleanly as it had on her last trip to Caveau des Terreurs, but it certainly wasn’t as messy as when she’d tried to take it from her father’s finger. There was no blood staining Honoré’s hands when she slipped the relic into her pocket.
The flowers did smell brighter without it.
The gate glittered as Honoré pushed through, doing another quick sweep of the street beyond. Sequins were scattered on the sidewalk alongside flyers for a variety of vices: gin, cards, skirts hiked high. Harmless enough, all things considered.
She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall, studying the Tournée du Chat Noir poster again.
Its edges were still curled.
But the cat’s tail was not.
Honoré frowned.
The cat inside the poster smiled. A Cheshire grin that twisted into a snarl as the creature leapt out of its advertisement. Black fur blurred to the size of a panther as it landed on the sidewalk.
“Oh shit,” Honoré swore.
The… drawing… moved like spilled ink, but it sure felt solid when it lunged at her. Fur glossed Honoré’s arm as she sidestepped. Claws raked the opposite wall. The cat splashed against the stone; dark drops rolled down bricks, causing the weeds that grew through the sidewalk’s cracks to wither wherever they landed. Honoré fumbled through her pocket as the monster rounded back on her. The ring! The ring! Fuck. The cat sprang again. She kicked it with her ash-smudged boot, and even though this action pushed the creature back, it seemed to pull something too. Dark and stringy. It unraveled from her foot, latching on to the cat like a second tail.
Honoré could feel her dragon latching on as well. Her ring roared from her pocket, up her arm, over her torso, ready to tear apart the cursed drawing still tethered to her boot. Silver rushed down her leg—she was almost fully armored.
But the cat had transformed too. It no longer looked like the drawing from the Tournée du Chat Noir. It no longer resembled a panther either. It was her kitten—the one she’d found in a lifeless heap in the alley behind Rémy Lavigne’s apartment. Next to a saucer of soured milk.
Her stomach curdled again.
Her dragon froze. Honoré couldn’t bring herself to strike the skinless creature, even when it stalked toward her with bloody paw prints, even when it seemed to be lapping up her shadow so it could grow larger and larger and—
There was a flash.
A blade that was not a knife cut through Honoré’s shadow. One of La Fée Verte’s imaginings. The Sanct had removed a bangle from her wrist and was now holding it like a dagger, sawing through the second tail string that connected Honoré and the cursed creature. It snapped from the Enchantress’s leg. The rotting kitten shifted into a hellcat—with abyssal fur and flames for eyes. It should’ve been an easier foe to fight, but when Honoré reached out for her dragon, the ring felt slippery. She couldn’t make it move. She almost couldn’t move her arm either under so much dead-weight metal.
The hellcat hissed.
A black tongue uncurled from its teeth, lashing out at La Fée Verte. This caught the edge of the Sanct’s wing, causing several feathers to fall. Her masque flickered. She pulled more dreams from her wrist and turned them into blades.
“Here!” She tossed one to Honoré. “Use this!”
The imagining felt heavier than Honoré had anticipated.
Sharper too.
When she stabbed the demon—dream blade to skull—it didn’t splash apart into a puddle of ink. Instead, the creature became ash, swirling past its empty poster and over the garden’s blooms.
“You told me you weren’t afraid of cats,” La Fée Verte said, as she watched them vanish.
“That wasn’t a cat,” Honoré managed.
“No,” the Sanct agreed. “It’s one of his tricks: pulling dark thoughts out of people’s heads. Fears are hard to fight. Memories can be even harder.” She kept staring at the rooftops, her gaze narrowing on an empty balcony, where curtains fluttered on either side. “The Fisherman of the Moon was right. It was a mistake for me to rely too much on your ring. I should have armed you with more hope. Hope as sharp as hurt. Most people wouldn’t be able to wield a dream that way, but I can tell you’ve had practice…”
Somehow, Honoré knew she wasn’t talking about défense dans la rue lessons. Croissant pistols be damned. No, the Sanct was talking about actual hope. That brute force Honoré felt as she stared at the Sanct’s bangles—evening stars and fields of fireworks. Her own insides burned. She didn’t want to be a mistake, especially to La Fée Verte. There had to be a better way to start blending in…
She needed something else to fight with.
To fight for.
“Give me dreams, then,” she said.
Honoré had never been one for wearing bracelets.
Like so many other feminine accessories, they felt designed to constrain. Metaphorical shackles. When paired with corsets and tight shoes, they were unbearable. She wasn’t sure this sensation would change much, even if the bracelet happened to be a sliver of someone else’s soul. Even if they looked oh so beautiful on the arms of the woman guiding her into an underground room that reminded Honoré of a cathedral. It wasn’t just the shape of the space, its vaulted ceilings dripping with dreams, but a holy feeling. The sensation that she’d set foot on sacred ground. There should be hymns chanted here, or incense burning in censers, or altars spilling over with fruit.
Honoré felt more at peace here than she ever had inside a church.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
La Fée Verte’s cheeks went the same color they had at the Fisherman’s booth. “Thank you. I’ve never shown any of my guests this space before. It’s precious to me. Really, it’s my life.” The Sanct’s arm sang with light as she lifted it. Her wings stretched too. Green feathers materialized into birds and began unknotting the bangles one by one, flying them up to the ceiling. “I’ve spent years mastering the magic of art. Every night I invite the brightest minds of Paris to my salon, and every night I take a small spark in return—”
“That’s a lot of nights,” Honoré said, as she looked around the cavern.
“I suppose so. The best ideas often need time to grow,” the Sanct said. “And sometimes they must stretch outside their original imaginers’ heads. This is a safe place for them to do just that. I’ve grown several inventions here. Neon lights, scooters, pneumatic tyres…”
“And women’s trousers?”
“I’ll try again, as soon as your friend paints me a pair.” La Fée Verte smiled. “She seems slow to warm.”
Was she? It was difficult for Honoré to say—their own first meeting had been at knifepoint on a winter evening, when she’d tried shaking Céleste down for francs. But all the other young woman possessed was a damn good poker face and an art portfolio.
“These are all I have,” she said when she handed the papers over. “And I was just told they’re worthless.”
Many of the drawings inside were done in pencil, as gray as the young artist’s eyes. Notre-Dame de Paris, the Panthéon, the Arc de Triomphe. These were the sights of someone fresh to Paris… Céleste Artois, according to the signature on the bottom. The A looked like the Eiffel tower—slender and ambitious and not necessarily to everyone’s taste.
Honoré kept flipping through the drawings, her knife forgotten. “You drew them?”
A nod.
“Use them for a fire, if you’d like. Or stuff some down your clothes to keep warm. It’s all the same to me,” Céleste said.
Snow started to fall, catching the edges of the sketches. Honoré shut the folder quickly, to keep them from ruin. “They’re wrong.” She handed the papers back to Céleste. “The person who said that. I’ve seen men only half as good as you, and they live like kings, drawing their own money.”
“Really?”
“It’s how I’d steal,” Honoré admitted, “if I could draw. It’s a hell of a lot nicer than mugging people for pocket lint.”
To her surprise, Céleste laughed. “Then it’s a good thing you tried to rob me.”
They warmed instantly after that—not by burning Céleste’s drawings, but by erasing her name from the bottom and replacing it with a signature that could pass as Monet’s. At least in the eyes of tourists who didn’t mind parting with some coins. The sketches sold quickly. Céleste drew more. She purchased paints. She bought tickets to Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre. She studied the masters’ canvases. She mimicked them well, but when Honoré had looked at the paintings, she couldn’t help but feel like something was missing, that snow-swirling, breath-catching wonder that had made her lower her knife.
The spark she knew now. The magic.
“It’s good that you’ve been inviting Céleste here,” Honoré said. “She needs room to grow too. But… do you have to take her memories every morning?”
“Yes,” La Fée Verte said.
“Why?”
The other woman’s lips pinched. “To keep this place safe.”
“Isn’t that why you’re keeping me Enlightened?” Honoré wondered.
“Yes,” the Sanct answered again. “But you’re different.”
“I’m not a dreamer, you mean.”
Honoré raked a hand through her chopped hair. Tempting, still, to blame its dullness on her childhood’s lack of fairy tales—but Rafael had grown up right alongside her. He’d sworn, he’d stolen, he’d stabbed. He had even more scars than she did. And yet, somehow, he managed to paint over them. Was it because he’d gotten the hell out of Belleville when he had? Leaving Honoré with nothing but a note that said MEET ME IN CONSTANTINOPLE and a pile of shit?
It was hard not to see the irony.
Rafael had risen above the Caveau’s rot, while Honoré had continued to spread it. She’d lured Céleste into a life of crime. Years of her friend’s art—her power—had been wasted on fiddle games. Thank goodness Rafael had managed to get her excited about painting again. Honoré could almost see sparks flying between the pair when they were in the landscape room together.
She wanted to be happy for them.
She really did.
Even more than that, she didn’t want to get left behind again.
“You may not be an imaginer,” La Fée Verte replied softly, “but you, Honoré Côte, have an unwavering heart. It has been tested and found true. You battle fountain beasts and bring bread to the hungry. The world has been ugly to you, yes, but you still care. You care so fiercely… I know, with my deepest anima, that I can trust you, and that is worth more to me than ten thousand dreams.”
More birds swirled out of the Sanct’s wings, rising in a column to the ceiling. Each one grabbed an imagining in its talons and returned to La Fée Verte’s feet. Shard after glowing shard was spread out, fit together, until Honoré saw the outline of a sword. Sharp, sharp hope. Oh, this was so much better than a baguette or a bracelet! She itched to pick up the hilt, but La Fée Verte grabbed it first, lifting the blade to Honoré’s shoulders.
She shirked automatically, but it wasn’t an attack.
It was a knighting.
Honoré recognized the gesture from an illustration in one of Sylvie’s books, where an elegant willowy woman touched a man on the shoulder with a broadsword. The drawing had looked archaic. The thought of knights felt much the same. Until now, she couldn’t have imagined swearing such fealty to someone.
She knelt for La Fée Verte though.
Her knees touched stone, but everything else in Honoré Côte soared as she stared up at the golden woman. She who wakes the best in us. Honoré could see even more dreams from this angle. They shone over the Sanct’s head like a halo, but as Honoré locked eyes with La Fée Verte, she no longer felt like a sinner.
She was Fear’s Bastard, yes.
She was his murderer too, but La Fée Verte saw past that. She must, if she was asking this of Honoré.
“Would you like to go by ‘sir’ or something else? What title should we use for a knight who is also a lady? ‘Dame’ perhaps?”
“Dame,” Honoré declared. For though she’d taken a male name and wore men’s clothes, this was more to deter them than to become one.
“I dub thee ‘Dame Honoré, Defender of Dreamers.’ May your hope be bold and your justice be true.” The sword switched shoulders, but La Fée Verte’s eyes did not waver. She held Honoré’s gaze, pouring light into it. “May you fight for a better world. May you make it so. Be thou a knight in my name.”
“I will,” Honoré said, breathless.
Her veins felt full of molten gold, as if the armor were inside her. She looked down and was surprised to see that she was not, in fact, glowing. Only her dragon hand shimmered. The beast’s wings gave an excited flap when La Fée Verte handed over the sword. Honoré cradled the blade, taking in its details like a mother meeting her infant child for the first time. So much shone beneath the surface: Sea monsters. A map of a lost continent. A reindeer with lanterns sprouting from its horns.
Her dreams now.
La Fée Verte smiled down at her. “Arise, Dame Honoré.”