Basile had crumpled to a heap at her feet, but only for a second. As soon as he was able, he scrambled away from her, gasping and staring, his fingers gouging deep into the gravel. The woman gazed down at him without expression.
No, not a woman,he thought frantically, over and over
'Still,' she continued, sounding thoughtful, 'it's not good for your soul to steal, is it? That is what you were planning. I think, Basile Cote, it's time for you to find a more laudable profession.'
She walked away from him, moving nimbly now to the coat and hat she'd discarded before, gathering them into her arms, finding the lost glove too. She threw him a final glance from over her shoulder.
'Perhaps I'll be watching to see what you're up to, Basile. You never know.'
And the monster walked off through the king's trees.
* * *
The Palais des Tuileries was known throughout certain quarters of Paris as the Grand Squander. It had been a royal residence once upon a time, but that was nearly a century past, and today it was merely an elaborate, empty reminder that the aristocracy could waste anything they wished, even a palace. The king and queen and their courtiers resided just outside the city in sparkling Versailles; Tuileries, with its vast drafty chambers and dim, dark-paneled hallways, was considered old-fashioned and unnecessarily dreary.
It was very nearly vacant. There were a few retainers still living on the lower level, along with a handful of retired court officials who no doubt felt the sting of their banishment very sharply. Royal soldiers still patrolled the grounds, but it was monotonous, tedious work, and more time was spent furtively hunched over dice than actually walking about. After all, who would want to break in? The most lively occupants of both the gardens and the palace were the rats.
Curiously enough, however, the rats were hard to find lately. They had fled, in droves, in the pit of the night not quite one week before, along with all the ravens that had been roosting in the trees and the wild geese and ducks nesting in the grasses. And the mice from the stables. And the colony of rabbits that had dug generations of warrens beneath the western amphitheatre and its verdant slopes.
There were no animals of any kind left in Tuileries, in fact, except for two. One were the humans.
The other was creeping softly up the servants' staircase in the far southern segment of the left wing of the palace. The stairs were dusty, remarkably so, but there were no windows to illuminate the flight, and thus no easy way for anyone else to see her footprints. Still, she carried her shoes in one hand, hitching up her skirts and coat with the other, careful with the hems.
The silver-haired demoiselle emerged cautiously from the doorway that opened to the uppermost floor, easing around it soundlessly, although she knew the corridor before her was deserted. The entire wing, in fact, from top to bottom, was deserted; it was the main reason she had chosen this place.
The lack of human distraction.
Her eyes closed a moment; she tested the area, inhaling deeply, drawing the air over her tongue, using every sense she could, just to be certain .
No. No people. Only dust, and her.
With the skies so overcast there was no moonlight to reflect off the walls and mottled green tiles of the long hall ahead of her, but that was fine. Zoe knew her way by now. Her feet in their stockings padded without noise along the marble. There had been a runner here once, but it had been removed, along with all the paintings and pedestals and even the chandeliers. No one, however, had bothered to strip the coved ceiling of its frescoes of hunters and horses and golden-crowned kings. There was even a panel of a dragon—dead on its back, with a knight standing over it and a sword angled through its neck.
Zoe didn't bother to glance up at it as she passed. She kept her gaze on the center tiles that stretched before her in a straight pale arrow, smoother and cleaner than everything else.
They led her to the fifth doorway on her right, the painted black-and-gray door, closed as she had left it. As all of them here were.
The hinges did not squeak. She had ensured that after her first night.
The apartment she'd chosen was cold, almost colder than the open night beyond its windows. She kept the heavy velvet curtains pulled shut across them, not just to keep in whatever heat she herself managed to generate—obviously she couldn't light a fire, even if the chimney would draw—but also to conceal the set of candles and the oil lamp tucked away in the bedchamber, her sole means of light.
The curtains had faded from maroon to reddish pink and reeked of old smoke, and there were moth holes cratering the trim, but they functioned well enough. On her second night here she'd left a candle burning and then slipped outside, and she hadn't been able to detect even a tiny glow from the gardens below.
Although the majority of the palace had been divested of its finery, this suite was still furnished, perhaps because it was not so elegant as some of the rest—or perhaps because the massive antique gilt bed squatting in the bedchamber and cracked walnut mirror across from it were too cumbersome to move. Even she had a hard time shifting the mirror to where she wanted it, and that was saying something.
The bed, however, dominated the room. It was heavily carved into a profusion of scrolls and garlands and swirling vines; the canopy supported a silk tapestry cover and drapes—also with moth holes—featuring woven roses still so purple and fat and lavishly petaled they seemed ready to drip from the folds. The gilt was curling away from the wood around most of the edging; she crossed to one of the posts and pressed a thumbnail beneath a loosened flake, lifting it free.
The gold warmed her nail like a tiny, tiny sliver of a summer day, sending heat down into the bones of her hand. Zoe let out a sigh and the flake floated away, zigzagging down to the bare maple floor.
There had been no bedding left, but that was easily remedied. Chests of linens and coverlets were scattered throughout the occupied apartments at the far other end of the palace; she reckoned no one would miss a sheet here, a blanket there. The plain covers looked oddly out of place against the succulent colors of the rest of the suite, but they were comfortable, and that was all that mattered to her. She sank to the edge of the mattress and studied the mirror from the corner of her eye.
It had been removed from its hooks to lie propped against the crimson-papered wall, an angled tilt that caught the ceiling in its reflection, the nearest window with its curtains, three-quarters of the bed, and her. The crack had splintered the enormous square of glass into two nearly equal halves: on one side, shadow Zoe and the shadow chamber, a pale figure of a woman against a ruddy gloom, the faint foxing of spots near her shoulder trailing down in a curve to the frame.
In the other half, the room—bed and curtains and woman and all—had vanished.
The other half showed her the deep blue darkness. The cloak, and the ghosts within it, their edges smoking and writhing. Waiting. None of them crossed over to the normal side of the mirror; it was as if that shining, uneven crack was a mighty river they could not breach. The blue darkness dissolved upon its edge.
This Gift, whatever it was, was growing stronger. She didn't know why she saw ghosts in glass now, the cloak manifest. She didn't know why it was becoming easier and easier to draw the blue void of it near to her, to hear the whisperings from inside it. To use it to capture the thoughts of the living.
Perhaps it was Paris, or her, or both. Perhaps she was doomed never to dwell in true silence again.
Her eyes cut away. She didn't want to see it now, any of it. She didn't want to feel the lost souls caught in that blue. She'd been out all day, and now all she wanted was to sleep. If she'd had an extra blanket, even another sheet, she would have tossed it over the glass, but she needed what she had.
Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow she'd borrow another blanket.
Zoe stood and walked to the closet where she'd hidden her valise, and began to undress.
From the mirror lifted the voices, pleading, soft and indistinct. She bowed her head to watch her hands, frowning, focused on loosening her bodice. Without turning around, she murmured, 'Not now. I'll try again tomorrow.'
But she knew they wouldn't really quiet. They seldom did.
Once properly in her nightgown she bent down, scooped out a handful of jewelry from the valise, and went back to the bed.
She sat again upon its edge and began, piece by piece, to adorn herself for the night.
The choker of diamonds and topaz, strands of stones three bands wide.
The earrings of gold and coral. A bracelet of emeralds, and one purely of diamonds. Three bangles of
