Marie cants her head to the side like a sparrow, tiny replicas of the torch flame dancing in her eyes as she considers me. Then she gives a little nod, as if she has come to some decision.
“Then perhaps there is another way,” she says, picking up her stride as she tugs me along, until I nearly struggle to keep up despite my longer legs. “A better way than battering yourself against that book—and certainly safer.”
“What do you mean? And why the sudden rush?” It is not as if our outings ever follow some set schedule. “Has Stephane earmarked a particularly choice wine bag for us? An entire barrel, perhaps?”
Marie merely shakes her hooded head, cryptic as a sphinx. She maintains her silence as we walk, only piquing my curiosity further. By the time we set foot on the Île de la cité, I am so ablaze with anticipation I feel as though I could light our way myself.
The Île cleaves itself uneasily between the city’s richest and its poorest, with Notre Dame’s grand spire presiding over its eastern point, the king’s Palais Royal and its lush gardens sprawling across the west. But Marie and I make straight for the island’s shabby center, the cité itself, an ancient maze of run-down tenements and taverns, seedy hospitals and churches. And in it the notorious Val d’Amour, beating like a secret heart within a heart, with the Rue de Glatigny as its central artery. The wealthy only venture here when they have a pressing need, or some burning wish. The death of a rival, a glimpse into the morass of the future. Or perhaps only some stolen hours with one of the Val’s many filles de joie, with their threadbare corsets and garishly rouged lips.
Though I do not live in the cité as Marie does, I’ve dallied in her demimonde enough to know that any twisted dream the mind devises can be purchased here.
As we whisk by shuttered storefronts, keeping our skirts hitched high above the mud-slick cobbles, I glance curiously at Marie.
“But we’ve passed La Pomme Noire already,” I protest, naming our favorite tavern. “Surely you were not thinking of La Sirene et la Pierre, not after the rotgut swill we had there last time? My innards are likely to never be the same.”
“Trust me, Cat,” she replies, flashing me a sharp slice of a smile, firelight shining off her teeth. “I am not taking you anywhere you have been before.”
Some minutes later, she draws to a halt in front of a hulking wooden door clasped with battered hinges. Standing on her toes, she brings the torch to bear just above the door, casting light on a sigil inscribed in the stone.
“What is that?” I ask her, an anxious swell surging up my throat. “That symbol?”
“One of the runes of les arts occultes,” she replies, rapping on the door. “This one denotes chiromancy.”
“But there are chiromancers every night at the Pomme,” I remind her. “You read palms there yourself; I’ve seen you do it a time or two. Why come here instead?”
“The Pomme is merely good for the occasional diversion, ma belle,” she scoffs. “Only unskilled dilettantes ply their trade in earnest there. The ones too simple to gain admittance here.”
“But—”
The eyelet set into the door rattles open, and a gruff “Alors, dis-moi” filters through. Marie whispers something through it, too quietly for me to hear.
A moment later the door creaks inward, whining on its hinges.
Then Marie steps inside and draws me in behind her, and I’m left with no more time for questions.
CHAPTER TWO
The Haven and the Lady
The first thing I notice is the ceiling.
It is barrel-vaulted and flung high enough above us that the arching ribs vanish into gloom, as if the building has neither roof nor end. We must be inside one of the abandoned and deconsecrated churches that litter the Île, I decide, though this one is rather grander than most of them.
The second is the smoke. The air is so steeped in frankincense and myrrh that it gathers above our heads like trailing clouds, as if we’ve stepped outside rather than in. The first lungful leaves me a little dizzy, reinforcing the illusion of having crossed a threshold only to land in another world. It almost makes me want to trawl the dark above us for stars, or the winking glimmer of a miniature moon.
The third is the quiet.
“Why is everyone whispering?” I ask Marie, bringing my lips close to her ear and pitching my own voice low. None of the patrons seated at the room’s many candlelit tables pay us any mind, so intent are they on their quiet conversations carried out over upturned palms. But a thrumming sense of tension pervades the space, and I find myself loath to disturb it. “And there is no music.”
“What is spoken here is to not be shared beyond these walls,” she whispers back, reaching up to gently tug my hood farther over my head. “As to music, well. No one seeking mere amusement can afford to seek it here.”
Wreathing her cool fingers through mine, she leads me over to the colossal bar top that takes up the room’s left wall, like a standing stone toppled on its side. As she orders from the gruff barkeep, I lean forward to sweep my palms over the bar’s scarred surface, pocked with age and scratched with obscure sigils. Eight-pointed stars, spirals trapped in circles, hands with too many fingers and palms turned up, inscribed with overlapping lines. With a spurt of shock, I realize that some of them are familiar—I have seen these symbols in Agnesot’s grimoire. Some of them I know to be astrologers’ runes, but others I have never been able to
