The Enchantresses were better together.
Honoré Côte could not argue with that, but she knew they were better with La Fée Verte too. It wasn’t just personal preference. The group’s plan to defeat Terreur wouldn’t work without the Sanct’s blessing—without a steady flow of dreams to burn, night after night—so it was agreed that they must confess. Honoré couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this nervous. Her pulse beat all over her body—with the singular silvered exception of her right arm—evidence that she was not heartless. If anything, she had too much heart. It stuttered through Honoré’s veins as she stood before La Fée Verte. In front of Céleste. Between the two women. Her power was supposed to be protecting people—so why didn’t she feel like a shield? Why was her skin so flushed? Why had she insisted on bringing all of them here, to the salon’s garden with the bottomless pool, where she’d washed her hands of Rémy’s death, where his blood must still be swirling. Down, endlessly down.
Rafael lingered by the water’s edge, staring at the stars’ reflections, as Honoré told his story. Then Céleste’s. She stumbled over the words. Sylvie would have done a better job—but the youngest Enchantress was hearing many of these details for the first time. The leaves of the branch she was perched on shuddered when Honoré described the extent of their friend’s disease.
La Fée Verte’s wings shuddered too. Her golden face held no trace of anger, only sadness, as she gazed across the garden at Céleste. “I thought I sensed a deeper hurt,” she said, once Honoré finished her explanations. “You hide it well.
“And you…” She turned toward Rafael, kneeling and holding out a hand to the young man’s shadow. Slowly, slowly, it moved to meet her—a fox that sniffed the Sanct’s fingers. “I am sorry.”
Rafael still hadn’t looked up from the pool. “Why are you sorry?”
“The Sanct who stole your name and broke your soul…” La Fée Verte lowered her hand. “I created him.”
Sylvie’s tree shook again.
Céleste’s eyes narrowed.
Shock. Honoré felt it too—rushing up to join the rest of her nerves—as La Fée Verte met Rafael by the pool. One of her birds slipped from her wing and plucked a strand from her head. When the Sanct cast it into the waters, the sky gave way to a different scene. A long-ago Paris—without automobiles or electric lights. There was no light around the eyes of the fair-haired woman who sat on the curb either. A bedraggled shawl hugged her shoulders instead of feathers.
“I know what it’s like to watch your future die,” La Fée Verte began. “I know what it’s like to hide in plain sight—to throw my family’s jewels in the Seine and my accent into the gutter. I understood why so many people were so angry too. No money, no bread, no hope… it’s no wonder they started a revolution.”
Suddenly, a moth landed on the young woman’s shoulder. Its wings were made of marzipan, but she didn’t eat it. She simply laughed as the confection fluttered around her head.
“There weren’t many Sancts left in Paris, when I was Enlightened, but Stohrer was still standing. Barely. Nicolas took me in.” Honoré recognized the baker in the unchanged doorway. “He fed me. He taught me how to see the good in people. He showed me how to share it.” The next memory saw La Fée Verte inside the shop—her hair powdered with sugary snow. Her feathers too. Green birds gathered in the glass chandelier, watching customers as she passed them pastries. “I was never a terribly talented baker though, so I set out to find my own magic.”
The pool swirled, showing a daydreamer hunched over scrolls, reading by the shine of her own eyes. “Many ancient Sancts—the powerful ones—gathered worship. Prayers and bent knees. They set themselves up as gods. Others chose to be seen as kings, but it seemed to me that France had already had enough of those.
“When I was a girl, my parents used to host these beautiful salons. They made a space for philosophers and artists and anyone who wanted to talk of higher things. There was even an aeronaut, once. I didn’t meet him myself, but I listened from the staircase as he told stories about his balloon. That night, I dreamed I was flying, and I woke up with my heart in my throat, not because I was afraid, but because I wanted it to be true… so badly…” La Fée Verte’s feathers stirred. The waters at her feet did too. Honoré recognized the Sancts from Cabaret d’Ailes—simply women then. They seemed to be walking through a carnival, wandering past a merry-go-round with galloping horses. Pegasi, actually. Wings moved in time with their wooden hooves. “I never did meet that aeronaut, but I found others who wanted wings. People who wanted to dream with me. Most were children of the Revolution. They wanted to build something better than the world their parents had left.
“I found power in their ideas. I learned how to take songs and poems and paintings and make them soar… make them magic. I discovered ways to make other imaginers magical too, to give them the very same gift Nicolas had given me.” La Fée Verte glanced up at Sylvie’s tree as she said this. “Daydreamers ruled Paris—some saved enough of their imaginings to become very strong Sancts, but we were, at heart, a democracy. Each interwoven with the other, strengthened by our shared idea of sharing magic. We built cafés and cabarets and carnivals.”
“Like the one on the floating island?” Sylvie asked.
Honoré frowned. She’d seen the drifting landmass—it was hard not to notice with how often she flew over the Seine—but she’d never seen a carnival there. Certainly not one as shimmering as the memory inside the pool, where La Fée Verte was handing out tickets. ADMIT ONE. The letters read far more crisply under the torchlights than they had at the Fisherman’s booth.
“Yes,” La Fée Verte said. “The Carnaval des Merveilles drew many talented dreamers to me: Désirée, Plume, Libris, La Belle, Madame Arcana, Moulin, the Fisherman of the Moon… Their imaginations were brilliant enough to turn them into Sancts. Some stayed with the carnival. Others went on to establish magical corners of their own. Libris built his bookstore, and Désirée and Plume started their cabaret. Moulin had a windmill where she hosted artists.”
The windmill’s blades looked much like they had in Rafael’s painting—except they were moving. Honoré recognized the blooming vines that wreathed the hill as well. Men tossed off their top hats when they reached the top of the stone steps, revealing glittering hairs.
“Montmartre looked different then. The neighborhood was a haven for artists who could not afford rent. They were hungry—not just for food but for meaning. They wanted to paint and write and sing. They wanted their lives to matter,” La Fée Verte said, with a hint of sadness. “There was one young man who visited Moulin’s windmill every evening. He did not speak much, she told me. He preferred to listen to the prima donna who came to give an encore after her performance at the opera house every night. He liked to sketch this woman as well. There was something especially striking about his drawings. Powerful. They commanded the eye so that you almost could not look away.” La Fée Verte stared into the pool, where Honoré could see a man taking shape. Man. That was the main difference from the monster she’d faced in the Apaches’ bar. He had no black masque yet, but his fair hair and blue eyes were the same. “The artist had this air about him too. Everyone at the windmill seemed to gravitate in his direction. Even Moulin herself. She started to teach the young man how to harness his own power—he was a quick learner. Eager. Too eager, now that I look back, but when he came to the Carnaval des Merveilles, I had yet to learn the difference between want and obsession. I didn’t understand how dark his dreams would become… how all-consuming… Perhaps if Madame Arcana had warned me…”
“The fortune teller?” ventured Céleste.
“She vanished, the night that devil joined my carnival; she didn’t even clear out her tent.” La Fée Verte seemed unsettled. “I suppose that was a warning in itself.”
“So you taught your enemy magic?” Honoré said.
“He claimed he wanted to become a muse, so I showed him how to harvest other peoples’ imaginings, how to take just enough so that their souls stayed untouched, how to sow magic back into dreamers’ minds to make sure more inspirations would grow. Again, he learned quickly. Once I’d shown him all I could, he established himself at the Palais Garnier.”
“The opera house?” Honoré asked. She and the other Enchantresses had been there several times to find wealthy marks.
“It was the perfect place for a new muse: rich with inspiration, freshly built itself. The Palais Garnier hosted lavish performances that filled well over a thousand seats. He should have been satisfied there, with so many sparkling minds, but no…” She shuddered. “He focused only on the star soprano. He took and he took and he took, until there was nothing left of her.” La Fée Verte glanced back at Rafael’s fox. “By the time I realized what he had done, it was too late. He’d vanished as well. I’d almost begun to believe he was gone, when other drained bodies began turning up across the city. Artists from Moulin’s windmill. Moulin herself. Victims piled up and fear started to spread, and I could not weed it out of my own dreamers’ minds because they were too afraid to even come to Île du Carnaval.”
An empty carousel spun inside a ring of gutted tents.
A bookstore with too much dust.
A café with cold cups of tea.
“It was the same with other magical establishments. Daydreamers’ powers faded as his shadow grew—darker and darker across the city. Some Sancts decided to join him. Even more, after my fortune teller turned up by his side. They feared that this meant the future of Paris belonged to him.
“I was afraid as well.” La Fée Verte swallowed. “I tried to reverse his Enlightenment, but he’d grown too powerful to forget his magic. He’d become too powerful even to kill.” The pool began flashing with visions of a battle. Shadows tangled with spells. Gargoyles peeled themselves off Notre-Dame’s bell towers, diving at the shadow-bent man just as Honoré’s dragon had. Many were smashed to dust. Claws and beaks evaporated. So did the marks they’d left on XXXXXXX’s flesh. “Imaginings slowed him, but they did no lasting damage, and the more we battled, the stronger he grew. Blood only seemed to feed him. I don’t think it was a coincidence that he forced the Mapmaker to carve out a space for him by Place de la Concorde—where my mother and my father were guillotined. It was difficult for me to dream there. So I turned to a different magic.”
The cathedral had vanished. La Fée Verte stood in front of an obelisk with an army of Sancts on the plaza behind her. Masques winked like stars over the cold stones. Honoré recognized a few: the bookseller, the baker, the dancers of Cabaret d’Ailes again. But there were so many others. A Sanct at La Fée Verte’s right side held a scroll—no, he held a map. His hands shook.
La Fée Verte’s eyes blazed.
Stones around them began to burn.
Smoke choked out the rest of the memory.
“Just the whisper of his name was enough to plant fear in people’s hearts, so I took that first. I took and I took and I took, but no matter how hot the fire got, he would not die. The spell started burning through my followers instead… They gave up too much of their magic for this final push. I knew that if I stopped, their sacrifice would be in vain. I knew that if I kept going, more would fall.”
The dark clouds parted to show La Fée Verte and her enemy interlocked, their magic sulfuric. His shadows pulled at her feet. Her birds clawed at his head. Some got tangled in the sorcerer’s hair, trapped and swallowed, while others managed to steal strands.
“I could not make him forget his magic, but I didn’t need to, in the end. His dream was to devour all of Paris—to become its shadow king. That was the vision I found in his head.”
One of La Fée Verte’s songbirds pulled away—the idea in its talons looked wormier than most. Not glowing, but gray. The color of ash and long-cold corpses. XXXXXXX’s eyes began to dull as well, their fire smothered. “After I stole it, he faltered. I pushed him out of Paris and set up wards to ensure he could not set foot on the city’s soil. Nor any of his disciples. He’s found ways to test these boundaries over the years—the Seer wasn’t always the Seer of the Seine. I would have that traitor gone altogether, but water has its own rules, and most of my power is tied to tightening the rest of my defenses.”
“The Fontaine Saint-Michel’s dragon…” Honoré thought back to the bronzed beast’s attack that first night.
“My gatekeeper.” La Fée Verte nodded. “There was a time when I might have Enlightened anyone with a hungry heart, but this enemy taught me what Nicolas Stohrer did not—to search for darkness in people. Everyone has shades of it, to some extent, but I trained the statue to weigh those against their brighter thoughts. This doesn’t always work, of course.” Her gaze swept from Rafael to Céleste and finally to Honoré. “So I established a second safeguard to prevent any darker magic from growing: a spell that makes every imaginer in Paris forget magic at sunrise.”
“You stopped creating daydreamers,” Céleste murmured.
“Again, this doesn’t always work.” Golden eyes glanced up at the tree, where Sylvie was crouched.
The youngest Enchantress stared back. Unabashed. “But… doesn’t that just hurt you?” she asked. “If you’d invited Rafe to your salon before he ran off to Budapest, he might have stayed! He could’ve become a daydreamer and helped strengthen your power instead of stealing it. Right?”
La Fée Verte stayed silent, her masque wavering like a lantern down to the last of its wick. It was hard to see what the Sanct was thinking—outside the pool—but Honoré had a feeling it wasn’t as black-and-white as the battle that had played out there.
It never was, was it?
“There are many things I would have done differently,” the Sanct said, finally. “Given the chance.”
“Me too.” Rafael’s gaze found Honoré when he whispered this.
She stared back. He didn’t look so different from the young man she’d grown up with at the Caveau. A firebrand with his head in the clouds, according to Eleanor. While no one had ever read fairy tales to Honoré, she’d known about knights even then, thanks to him. His carvings. His whittling knives. His quiet corrections on how to hold a blade just so. His even stronger silences. Rafael never breathed a word about the two siblings crouched under his drafting table whenever their father’s boots came into view, prowling past wood shavings and crumpled drafts of banknotes. How many bruises had he spared Honoré then? How many cuts? Tigers don’t change their stripes, she’d told Céleste, and she could see now just how true her saying was.
Curses be damned.
Rafael’s magic had reached for the clouds. The stars, even. But Honoré knew that if he could figure out how to turn back time with that fancy watch of his, he’d choose to stay in Paris, not for La Fée Verte’s invitation, but to keep Lucien Durand from finding that note, because, at his core—in that sacred space between body and being—RafXeX García was a protector. This was the real reason he hadn’t left Céleste bleeding on the theatre steps. It was the reason he stayed standing here now. Rafe might have been missing a few letters from his name, but he wasn’t nearly as lost as he thought.
None of them were.
“We do have a chance,” Honoré said. “We can defeat this bastard, but only if we believe in each other—”
“Dreams weren’t enough to stop him last time,” La Fée Verte broke in. “The only thing that’s changed since our visit to the Fisherman’s booth is that Terreur has claimed a name. He has enough power to hold a piece of the city. I fear he’ll soon swallow more.”
“You shouldn’t be afraid!” Sylvie piped in. “That way he can make you a puppet! Just like the tsarina! Besides, Honoré wasn’t talking about our imaginations. We’re going to find this evil sorcerer’s heart and stop him before he takes over Paris again!”
“His heart?” La Fée Verte blinked.
The pool at her feet went dark.
Rafael stared back into the black water. “He cut it out from his own chest and buried it away. It’s why you couldn’t kill him before. It’s why Terreur drains people’s blood along with their souls… The anima, he uses for power. The blood, he must drink to keep his own body from withering.”
Silence again.
La Fée Verte’s skin had paled to the color of candle wax.
“Don’t worry!” Sylvie chirped from her tree. “We have a plan.”
A plan that had been pieced together over a gravestone, under the wavering light of dreams and stars. Admittedly, it felt as fragile as glass. Honoré glanced over at Céleste. Her friend hadn’t said much in her own defense, so how could she be expected to talk their enemy into confessing the location of his heart? And even if she did, would it be in a place Sylvie could steal through unnoticed, so she could bring the heart back to the other Enchantresses? Honoré had no doubt that she herself would be able to stab it… if they got that far.
“Fighting Terreur outright will end poorly.” Céleste smoothed her skirts; the hem around her ankles swished. “But, as powerful as he is, he is not invincible. His heart is still out there somewhere. I can trick him into telling me where it is, but the only way I’ll be able to manage that is to keep playing my part as his forger—so that Terreur believes I’m absolutely on his side.”
“Are you not?” La Fée Verte asked simply.
Honoré’s chest tightened far more than it ever did when she bound her breasts.
“I’m here,” Céleste replied. “Offering you the last chance at victory you have left. Terreur might not remember his exact vision for Paris, but he feels the hole of that dream. He’s not going to stop chasing it. Trust me.”
“That’s the thing,” the Sanct answered. “I don’t trust you.”
Céleste didn’t flinch at this the way Honoré did. Her friend held herself like one of those marble statues that could be found in a wealthy person’s foyer, chin tilted high. “I can’t fault you for that, La Fée Verte, but you shouldn’t fault yourself either. Or your dragon guard. Even I don’t know how much stardust I truly have inside. I’ve spent so long painting without it…”
Honoré flinched again.
Céleste’s storm-gray gaze met hers. “But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years as a forger, it’s that Honoré Côte is someone you can trust with your life. She is your best defense. Without her, I’d still be down in your vault, stealing dreams for days, but now I see there’s a better way.”
She reached up to pluck a star-white hair from her head.
It shimmered as she held it out to La Fée Verte.
Inside? A dress with the skirt sewn into trousers.
It was—Honoré mused—the perfect peace offering. But she’d expect nothing less from Céleste Artois. “Instead of forging, I’ll focus on dreaming. I’ll try my best to conjure imaginings,” Céleste promised the Sanct. “You won’t lose any more power on my account. I’ll replace whatever imaginings I take to Terreur each night with my own ideas. Once we locate that bastard’s heart and defeat him, you and I can split hairs.”
Which was just a fancy way of stating that she wanted to become a Sanct.
La Fée Verte’s hand hovered over Céleste’s imagining.
Her lips drew tight.
Her wings folded in.
She’s still afraid, Honoré realized. Each of them was in their own way. They all wanted the same thing—Terreur dead and gone—so why did this moment feel so tangled? Why did Honoré feel as if she were walking a tightrope when she joined the two women and grabbed the dream floating between them?
Céleste’s imagining had an edge to it.
A weight.
If Honoré yanked her own heart out of her chest at this very moment, she figured it would have similar proportions. Heavy. Sharp. The shape of a blade, but a blade forged by hope instead of a hammer. A weapon made of stardust—not steel. Truer, even, than the sword La Fée Verte had first knighted her with.
She wondered if the Sanct was also remembering that scene as Honoré held the other Enchantress’s dream in her palms. “Céleste might be slow to warm,” she said, “but she is right. She’s standing here with you now. With us.” Honoré lifted the glowing imagining, like some ancient offering. “This is our only path forward. Together.”
La Fée Verte’s face shimmered.
A few birds slipped from her wings and alighted on Honoré’s fingers, examining the idea, but none flew away with it. The Sanct herself reached out to accept the trousers—her palm resting over Honoré’s. Her touch trembled.
“Very well.” She exhaled. “I’ll give Céleste and Rafe the dreams they need to continue their charade with Terreur—but that pattern won’t hold much longer. He’s gaining strength in Belleville.”
“I’ll work as quickly as I can without tipping him off,” Céleste promised. “It’s a delicate balance.”
“To that end, Rafael shouldn’t be hunting for the heart,” Honoré said, looking back at the other thief. “I’ll take over that search so you can focus on your dreams.” And Céleste’s. The sparks between them weren’t just chemistry, she knew. “The more you can conjure, the better our chances.”