Chapter 30

The Story Isn’t Over Yet

Honoré Côte did not expect to wake up. She certainly didn’t expect to wake up with a tomcat sitting on her chest. Marmalade had made himself at home, curled tight, his dry pink nose nearly level with hers. He didn’t blink when she opened her eyes—simply stared at her with his endlessly judgmental orange ones. I told you so.

Told her what?

It all came crashing back then. Apaches digging through bone-riddled walls, croissant crumbs scattering the way to Honoré, Gabriel… oh, Gabriel… Where was her brother? Where was she? Back in the Quartier Secret, somehow, lying on a bed of leaves. Honoré could hear the steady whir of wings, an ebb and flow of voices in the hall beyond. They were grave tones, the way a physician might speak at the end of an ill-fated house call. Was it a doctor? Honoré remembered then that she’d been stabbed, stabbed by a resurrected Rémy Lavigne… Had she pulled off a similar miracle? There was no pain when she tried to sit up. Only heaviness.

Marmalade hopped off onto the leafy mattress, and Honoré could see that her limbs weren’t just leaden but silver. Her neck was also stiff with it. As was the entire right side of her torso, from hip to jawline.

The metal wasn’t impossible to move.

Just incredibly hard.

Her heart beat as fast as a smith’s hammer when she bent herself upright. A curtain of vines hung around the bed, and through some breeze-swept leaves, she could see La Fée Verte conversing with Sylvie and the Fisherman of the Moon.

“I only just finished reading these accounts left by Robespierre’s disciples.” There was a thick stack of letters in the ragpicker’s hands—he wasn’t wearing fingerless gloves but fuller versions. His bronze masque glittered over a grim expression as he handed the papers to La Fée Verte. “I hope my revelations haven’t come too late.”

“Honoré’s ring is eating her?” Sylvie exclaimed.

“That’s not what I said—”

“It is!”

“You’re putting words in my mouth. I said ‘consuming.’”

The youngest Enchantress crossed her arms. “I consume macarons all the time.”

“Yes, but do the macarons swallow you?” the Fisherman asked. “I’m well equipped to handle feral antiques, but your friend’s relic…” He tugged at his gloves. “I wouldn’t dare touch it after what I discovered in those letters. Most of the rings they used to storm Versailles during the Revolution aren’t rings anymore. They fused themselves to their wearer’s bones. ‘Beware the serpents that eat their own tails.’”

Echoes from that shining crypt. Hairs lit up all over Honoré’s skin as she looked down at her dragon. Its head was draped over her shoulder—much the way Marmalade’s had been in the tunnel—and its scales were too close to her jaw. Those skulls. They weren’t gilded. They were the last gasps of men and women who’d suffocated in their own armor…

Her heart hammered even harder.

Her breath tightened.

She pushed herself then, managing to swing her legs off the bed.

“My dame!” La Fée Verte was there. “How are you feeling?”

“Like one of those damn tin soldiers.” She tried to laugh, but the sound came out crumpled. “All I need is a cannon that shoots bonbons.”

“They shoot gumdrops,” Sylvie corrected. “And you need to take off that ring, Honoré. Right now!”

The youngest Enchantress made it sound so easy, as simple as a twist and a slip. Did she not see how deep the dragon went? How far? It wasn’t just Honoré’s second skin anymore. She’d have to saw off her right arm in order to do what the other girl asked—and more besides.

“I don’t think I can,” she whispered.

The girl’s pink brows bent into a frown. “The Fisherman of the Moon says it’s cursed!”

The ragpicker’s coat lining clattered with keys as he peered through the vines. “Again, you put words in my mouth. That ring, and many others like it, were designed to deflect the magic of the Sancts who held court at Versailles—to absorb spells and protect their wearers. According to writings left by Robespierre’s disciples, it was what gave his revolutionaries the upper hand and allowed them to establish their Republic of Virtue.”

“That’s an ambitious name.” Honoré snorted.

“It was,” the Fisherman agreed. “Almost as ambitious as its architect. Both failed miserably. I believe Robespierre began his Reign of Terror with good intentions, but he lost his way.”

“I’m not sure I’d call guillotining seventeen thousand people a misstep,” La Fée Verte said, with an edge that reminded Honoré that the Sanct’s parents had numbered among them.

“No, but it’s never just one step, is it?” The Fisherman pulled a handful of dice from his pocket. Only, their bottoms were strangely long, their black dots unevenly scattered. “Power is a path. It is one choice after another after another.” He closed his fingers, and the dice rattled inside—like a gambler’s fist. “Robespierre and his disciples chose to bathe themselves in blood, and their rings did what they’d been designed to do. They grew thirsty. They grew over their wearers. If I were you, Dame Honoré, I would choose not to use that ring.”

Again, this sounded too easy.

“As for my choice…” The Fisherman of the Moon tipped the dice from his gloved hand into La Fée Verte’s, and it was only after Sylvie made a face that Honoré realized why the pieces appeared so yellow.

“Are those teeth?” the youngest Enchantress asked.

“They’re secrets,” the Fisherman said. “Secrets I scraped from the ashes of Place de la Concorde all those years ago.” His copper gaze beat against La Fée Verte’s. “You were right that we cannot fight him as we are now. This… this may help.”

The other Sanct stared at the loose teeth, then tucked them into her own gown’s misty pockets. “Thank you, Fisherman.”

She didn’t sound thankful at all, but the other Sanct bowed. “You know where to find me, should you need my services for any more nefarious jewelry.”

Honoré might have asked about the icon necklaces—how exactly was it they kept Rémy Lavigne in the land of the living? Had they somehow done the same for her? But Céleste appeared in the doorway then, brushing shoulders with the exiting Sanct. She leaned against the branched frame, her lashes fluttering like snow over storm-colored eyes, with her hands pressed to her side in such a precise spot that Honoré knew the exact reason she herself was still alive. It wasn’t because of some damn saint.

This time, her heart didn’t hammer, but burst.

“Mon amie…”

Céleste straightened, and La Fée Verte did too. There seemed to be a new tension between the women—something not even a knife could cut. But the knife had cut Honoré. She should be dead. Six feet under. Or however many meters below the catacombs sat. How had they found her down there?

“Céleste!” Sylvie waved at the other Enchantress. “Are you all right?”

A quick nod. “Rasputin renewed his healing spell.”

“I know! Anastasia and I snuck over to Catherine Palace to watch through the windows.”

The other Enchantress’s lips tightened. She couldn’t still be hurting. Could she?

“Honoré’s fine too! Or she will be, after she removes her ring.” Sylvie looked back at Honoré’s silvered hand and stuck out her tongue. “If you really want a dragon to fight with, I can wake up the other statue at the Fontaine Saint-Michel. Or you could command some of Notre-Dame’s gargoyles!”

“I can’t fight with crustaceans,” Honoré grumbled.

“What about a pelican?”

“That is sure to inspire fear in the hearts of my enemies.” She paused, struck by what she’d just said. “Terreur’s heart. I found it.”

Céleste inhaled sharply, her eyes filling with shock, then joy. La Fée Verte’s expression was similar, as she reached out to take Honoré’s hand. The moment might have been more charged, if Sylvie hadn’t bounced on the bed, her pink hair flaring. “You did? Without me?”

“Where?” Céleste asked.

“Terreur’s men were digging for it in the catacombs. If we can go back to where you found me…” She paused again at the look on La Fée Verte’s face.

Hope collapsed.

“You were in the Vault of Dreams,” Céleste explained. “Terreur is getting impatient—he sent Apaches to tunnel into the salon so they could search for his lost memory too.”

“They wouldn’t have gotten so far without your dragon,” La Fée Verte said. “It broke through my wards.”

The ring had broken more than that, Honoré remembered. Her own bones felt dusty as she recalled the collapse, the feel of Gabriel’s rage growing, growing, growing next to her. “My brother… he was in the tunnels too…”

“He’s alive,” Céleste said quickly.

And the other Apaches weren’t. Honoré could hear as much in the other Enchantress’s blunt punctuation. She saw it in the twist of Sylvie’s face. The girl must have seen the bodies. Had she seen Rémy? Had any of the other workmen been wearing saint necklaces?

“Your brother looks a lot like you!” the youngest Enchantress said. “Except he had all these black squiggles around his eyes. We couldn’t let him wake up and see that Céleste and Rafe were helping you, so we had to put him back in the catacombs before we re-established the wards.”

Honoré lay back on the bed, staring at the fireflies that drifted through the overhead canopy. She hated the thought of her brother waking up in the dark, so far below, without a lantern. Not that he needed one… Instead of a trail of crumbs, he had his own fears, stringing him back to Terreur.

“I tried to free him, again—” Her voice felt tight. “I did.”

La Fée Verte squeezed her hand.

“I cut through the fears Terreur was using to compel him, but he didn’t want to come with me. I killed our father, you see, back when Gabriel was Sylvie’s age, and I left him an orphan in one of Paris’s worst neighborhoods, and he… he hates me.”

She’d taken so much damage for her brother over the years—dragon bruises and broken bones—all with the thought that she was saving Gabriel. Shielding him. But in the end, none of her pain had mattered. That was what hurt so badly. Not the pinky that had gotten smashed to splinters along with the knight carvings.

“Well,” Céleste said, after a moment, “if your father was anything like the other Terreur, I’m sure the bastard deserved it.”

La Fée Verte gave a tiny nod and kept squeezing Honoré’s hand.

“Your brother can’t hate you,” Sylvie said, ever the optimist.

“He does.” That black loathing had been so much worse in her brother’s clear gaze. “I could see it in his eyes. I could feel it in the ring. When I grabbed Gabriel, he tried to take my dragon.”

“Maybe you should have let him.” Sylvie had that same easy-enough tone she’d used along with Rémy’s revolver, on that first excursion to Belleville. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about eating yourself—”

“What?” Céleste broke in.

“Honoré’s ring is cursed,” the youngest Enchantress explained. “If she keeps using it, her bones will turn silver. Or something.”

Honoré shut her eyes, noting how the dragon half of her body felt none of the mossy sheets. She did seem cursed to go in circles. Fighting Terreur. Abandoning Gabriel. Again and again and again. Until what? She couldn’t be crushed as thoroughly as her brother’s wooden figurines, but even metal soldiers had their weaknesses. Like rusting shut.

“You can’t save everyone, my dame,” La Fée Verte said softly.

“I know,” croaked Honoré. “But I wanted to save him.”

“You will!” Again, the youngest Enchantress was using her golden-gun voice.

“Stop, Sylvie.”

“Stop what?”

“Pretending that everything will have a happy ending. You’re old enough to know better. Life isn’t a fairy tale.” Honoré knew her rage was mostly echoes. She knew she was acting like a ruthless bitch, but honestly, what else could she be, after understanding what had happened to Eleanor? After crushing nearly a dozen Apaches to death? “It’s shit. Life is just people shitting on each other over and over until they die. That’s it. Expect anything different, and you’ll be in for years of pain.”

La Fée Verte’s hand stilled in hers. Honoré didn’t want to open her eyes and see the Sanct’s disappointment. Or anyone else’s. Silence blanketed the canopy, almost as heavy as the weight of all those bones in the catacombs.

Sylvie’s voice pierced it like a bullet.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re right too. Bad things happen. Awful things. Parents die, and food gets scarce, and you get so sad and so hungry. But I don’t think that’s ever The End. When the world feels ruined… well, that just means the story isn’t over yet. You have to brace yourself and be more than the rot. You have to keep going!”

Well, damn. This was one fight Honoré didn’t want to win. She cracked an eyelid to find the youngest Enchantress cross-legged at the end of the bed. Marmalade had curled up in Sylvie’s lap, but he was still fixing Honoré with his I told you so stare.

“We’ll keep searching for the evil sorcerer’s heart,” the girl continued. “And after we find it, we’ll free everyone from his curses. Rafe and Céleste and Gabriel and the Romanovs. All of us will get our happily ever afters, but only if we don’t give up hope.”

Céleste put on a wry smile. “I think I have to agree with Sylvie, mon amie.”

Honoré sighed. Her anger had ebbed, but the dragon didn’t feel any softer. “I don’t want to give up, though it might be a while before I start hunting again. I can’t walk. And even if I could, I wouldn’t know where to go…”

“I’ll continue to dig for clues,” Céleste said. “But I don’t know how much more I can get out of Terreur without handing over the dream you took from him.” She glanced over at La Fée Verte, who continued to stay still.

“We’ll keep searching too,” Sylvie offered.

“Do not go dragging that poor princess through the catacombs!” Honoré hadn’t expected to enjoy the grand duchess’s company so much. She hadn’t expected to feel such a kinship with the young royal either, both their brothers doomed. “She’s suffered enough.”

“I didn’t mean Anastasia.” Sylvie nodded at the ginger tomcat curled up in her lap, scratching him between his torn ears. “Marmalade tells me he can enlist some of his feral friends to search the city. Cats can go lots of places that people can’t, and they have good noses for magic.”

“That would have been useful to know a week ago,” Honoré said.

“Probably,” Sylvie agreed, as Marmalade started to purr. “He says that herding cats usually takes a lot longer than that.”

It was only after the other Enchantresses left—Sylvie to her hammock and Céleste to La Ruche—that Honoré understood exactly where she was. La Fée Verte’s bed. There were no sheets but a plush coat of moss that served as a mattress. The surrounding leaves smelled evergreen and bright, and many weren’t leaves at all but songbirds, which swirled through the clouds of fireflies that kept blinking over Honoré’s pillow, drifting into starry shapes that reminded her of the constellations she used to make up with the other Enchantresses. Well, really it was Céleste and Sylvie doing most of the work connecting the dots. Without them, Honoré would have just drifted in the dark.

This felt even truer with La Fée Verte.

The Sanct glowed like an evening star as she sat at the edge of the mossy mattress; several of the vines started to bud from this golden magic, but most of it was aimed at the teeth in her palm. Incisors spun like compass needles, and Honoré felt her own molars grind together when she heard the rotten ones hiss. Their sounds were vaguely French, but many of the words seemed to disintegrate when Honoré tried to focus on them. She wondered if this was the dragon’s fault—its silver did coat her right ear—though the metal didn’t seem to muffle any other hearing.

“What are they saying?” she asked, when the teeth finally began to still.

“Nothing I want to hear.” La Fée Verte closed her palm. “Terreur took them from Robespierre’s skull many years ago, and they taught him how to remove his heart. They keep whispering the spell over and over…” Her wings shuddered, the ends of their feathers weeping into the mattress.

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

It was a clue, at least. Even if Céleste couldn’t chase the information much further, the feral cats of Paris could step in. Honoré had more faith in Marmalade now. Sure, the ginger tom had left her tunic covered in fur, but compared to the dragon that was fused to the rest of the cloth, that felt as cozy as a knitted sweater.

La Fée Verte shivered again. So did the rest of the birds in the surrounding canopy. “The spell… it’s just that tearing your heart from your chest would kill most people.”

Well, sure. In her défense dans la rue lessons, Honoré had always pointed her students’ blades to that part of the body. “It is a vital organ.”

“That doesn’t change much with magic.”

Honoré thought back to the conversation she’d had in the opera house, filled with cupids and their rear ends. “I thought you could turn hearts into books or gold lockets or… was Sylvie just teasing me?”

“She spoke true.”

“It’s hard to tell, sometimes.”

“Sylvie doesn’t lie nearly as much as your other friend.” There was no edge to La Fée Verte’s voice when she said this. “But I see now why you trust them both so deeply. Your love binds you together—for better or worse—though Robespierre’s spell would consider this the latter. Attachments are a weakness. Your heart cannot last long locked away unless it has withered into something not even your closest companion would recognize.” Her fist curled even tighter over the teeth. “The spell doesn’t just require you to cut into your own flesh. It asks you to sacrifice everyone your heart holds dear.”

Lying there, half encased in metal that still hummed with her brother’s hatred, Honoré could understand why. She didn’t want to, of course. Life would be so much easier if everything were sunshine and roses—but no. There was rot. There was ruin. There was shit upon shit. And instead of battling such things, Terreur had chosen to embrace them. He’d turned himself into a dead man walking so he could live forever.

“I don’t know what the Fisherman hoped to gain by giving me these.” La Fée Verte summoned an empty aperitif flute and tipped the decayed molars inside. “He must know I could never perform such a spell.”

“I suspect Picasso would make a poor sacrificial lamb, though I could see Jean playing up that role—he’d probably script out an entire play, complete with costumes.” Honoré didn’t know why she was going on so, or why she wanted the Sanct to laugh, or why her heart started to thunder when the other woman’s amber gaze caught her.

“Oh, Honoré. It is not Picasso or Jean or any of the other imaginers who have my heart…”

No one had ever said her name like that before—as sacred as a psalm. Nor had she ever been touched quite like this. La Fée Verte had set the rotten teeth aside and leaned over the bed where Honoré lay so that her wings became a second canopy, the feathers sheltering both women. They were a secret shared only with each other. Skin whispering against skin. Just fingers joining, but somehow more, for when La Fée Verte reached for Honoré’s palms, she touched not just flesh but the dragon part of her too. Fearless. La Fée Verte did not flinch back from the fangs, nor did she try to push into the scales’ hardness. She simply held Honoré’s hand and pressed it up to the warm skin of her breastbone. Her heart fluttered just below. Slowly, slowly, the ring began to move, shifting over the Sanct’s chest much like it had clung to Gabriel, forming a bridge between them.

And, just as before, the metal flooded with feeling.

La Fée Verte’s emotions felt nothing like her brother’s. There was fear, yes, but that had been tempered, hammered out into something stronger, something that made Honoré sit up and stare deep into the other woman’s gaze.

“Oh” was all she could whisper, before their lips met.

Honoré Cote had never kissed anyone before. Greeting pecks on the cheek did not count, nor did the unfortunate incident with Rémy—his tongue on her neck while her hand searched for a blade. It had been too dangerous to chase true kisses back at the Caveau, too risky to even imagine her lips meeting another’s that way, so she’d stopped herself before she started.

But all this melted away at La Fée Verte’s touch, and Honoré suddenly felt like one of those flowers by the windmill—color coaxed from burnt thorns. Light from the Sanct’s masque glowed gently through her eyelids. There was a taste like nectar, a sweetness she couldn’t quite put her finger on, lingering long after the kiss itself.

“When I saw the dragon curled up on the cavern floor, I thought I’d lost you,” La Fée Verte murmured, her forehead touching Honoré’s. “I never should have asked you to turn yourself into a weapon like that, my dame. You are more than a sword.”

“I’m your sword.”

La Fée Verte’s smile glimmered, but Honoré could feel a surge of sorrow in the silver threads between them.

“Besides…” Honoré’s words started to feel stumbly again. “I would’ve used the dragon whether you knighted me or not, so don’t go blaming yourself if I end up swallowed.” She hazarded a glance at the ring, barely able to contain her surprise when she saw that its edges had ebbed away from her leg and hip. Her neck was less stiff too. In fact, she could feel La Fée Verte’s breath where scales had once sat. “Did you do that?”

“What?”

“The ring… it’s… retreating. Did you enchant it?”

“I couldn’t have.” The Sanct pulled away, bathing Honoré with a golden stare. “You must have moved the silver.”

“I needed a full-blown forge just to scratch my nose a few minutes ago.”

La Fée Verte’s brow furrowed. “Then, perhaps… perhaps the relic is doing what it was designed to do. There is power in a kiss. A true kiss,” she amended. “It could be that the metal absorbed that magic and became more malleable. It yielded for my healing spell too, but if it hadn’t surrendered then, you’d be dead…”

Honoré felt as if she’d taken a hearty swig of Chartreuse—head spinning, mouth still burning sweet. “Why does magic have to be so damn complicated?”

“Because people are, my dame.” The Sanct’s face flickered with soft laughter. Her wings folded back. “Magic is our fear and our love and our joy and our rage. It is what we choose to make of these things.”

The flute full of rotten teeth stayed on the stump that served as a bedside table, still rattling. Honoré’s heart stirred too while she stared. It was too easy to remember Sylvie’s arguments, not just about happy endings, but sugar and tsars and the cost of cavities. That’s not how magic works, Honoré had told the daydreamer. Then she’d joked that her heart was made of cheese. But the truth was so much more complicated…

It was a brother lost.

It was a future found.

It was a dragon cradled between two chests.

“Well, then,” Honoré said, as she leaned back into La Fée Verte’s arms, “let’s choose to make something better.”