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Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.
And when Robbie speaks, his voice is crystal, reflecting across the theater. “This,” he says, “is a story of gods.”
It’s not that bad, which is easy to say when you’ve never had a day of rain.
For an instant, uncertainty flashes across the woman’s face. But it is too brief, too fleeting. Addie will one day learn to ask for secrets, details only a friend or intimate would know, but even then it will not always gain their favor. She will be called a trickster, a witch, a spirit,
And that is how Addie comes to be in Paris, with a crust of bread and a broken bird, and nothing else.
“With time,” she said, “you can get used to anything.”
Every moment since she left Villon, she has feared the loss of this last token. Now that it is gone, there is a guilty gladness tucked among the grief. This last, brittle thread to her old life has broken, and Addie has been set well, and truly, and forcibly free.
Addie still holds on to dreams, but she is learning to be sharper. Less the artist’s hand, and more the knife, honing the pencil’s edge.
She draws the stoppered bottle of laudanum from her skirts, and holds it to the meager light. Three tries, and two bottles of the precious medicine wasted before she realized she could not drug the drinks herself, could not be the hand that did the harm. But mix it in the bottle of wine, reset the cork, and let them pour their own glass, and the action is no longer hers.
Henry Strauss has never been a morning person. He wants to be one, has dreamed of rising with the sun, sipping his first cup of coffee while the city is still waking, the whole day ahead and full of promise.
Reasons come second to needs. She took her in, she warmed her up, before she thought to ask her name.
Like the wooden bird, lost among the bodies in the cart.
Only her eyes mark the change—an edge of shadow threaded through the brown and gold.
She takes up a pair of shears, tries to trim the loose coil of her hair to her shoulders, but seconds later, it is back, the locks on the floor swept away by some invisible hand. No mark made, even on herself.
He smells of summer nights, of earth, and moss, and tall grass waving beneath stars. And of something darker. Of blood on rocks, and wolves loose in the woods.
He has the kind of face, she thinks, that can’t keep secrets well.
“I wasn’t—” “I remember you.” Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.
It’s less hostile than suspicion, more guarded than relief, and it is still wonderful, because of the knowing in it.
At the coffee shop, she tells him to grab a table while she buys the drinks, and he hesitates, as if torn between the urge to pay and the fear of being poisoned, before retreating to a corner booth.
“Henry.” It fits him, like a coat. Henry: soft, poetic. Henry: quiet, strong. The black curls, the pale eyes behind their heavy frames. She has known a dozen Henrys, in London, Paris, Boston, and L.A., but he is not like any of them.
“What is it?” she asks, and he starts to say one thing, but changes course. “Your freckles look like stars.”
“I see someone who cares,” she says slowly. “Perhaps too much. Who feels too much. I see someone lost, and hungry. The kind of person who feels like they’re wasting away in a world full of food, because they can’t decide what they want.”
There are more cushions here than in all of Villon, she is certain, and each is twice as full of feathers. Apparently nobles are made of glass, designed to break if laid upon too rough a surface.
taking her first sip of Champagne. It is unlike anything she’s ever tasted; a thousand fragile bubbles race across her tongue, sweet and sharp, and she would melt with pleasure, if it were any other table, any other man, any other night.
It will take Addie years to learn the language of those eyes. To know that amusement renders them the shade of summer ivy, while annoyance lightens them to sour apple, and pleasure, pleasure darkens them to the almost-black of the woods at night, only the edges still discernible as green.
Luc. In her mind it stood for Lucien, but now, sitting across from this shadow, this charade, the irony is like a too-hot drink, an ember burning in her chest. Luc. As in Lucifer.
“I wish you would send them away.” “You are out of wishes,” he says. But Addie meets his eyes, and holds them—it is easier, now that he has a name, to think of him as a man, and men can be challenged—and after a moment, the darkness sighs, and turns to the nearest servant, and tells them to open a bottle for themselves, and go.
“It was a mistake to curse me.” Her tongue is coming loose, and she doesn’t know if it’s the Champagne, or simply the duration of his presence, the acclimation that comes with time, like a body adjusting to a too-hot bath. “If you had only given me what I asked for, I would have burned out in time, would have had my fill of living, and we would, both of us, have won. But now, no matter how tired I am, I will never give you this soul.”
She looks up, and so does Henry, and for a moment, only a moment, he looks overwhelmingly, unbearably sad. “I miss the stars,” he says. “So do I,” she says,
“Saturday?” “Saturday.” “Don’t go disappearing.”
“It’s A—” The sound lodges, for just a second, the stiffness of a muscle long since fallen to disuse. A rusty cog. And then—it scrapes free. “Addie.” She swallows, hard. “My name’s Addie.”
The evening is quiet, and she is alone, but for once it is not the same as being lonely.
But the sorrow has faded, replaced by stubborn rage, and she resolves to kindle it, to shield and nurture the flame until it takes far more than a single breath to blow it out.
To think, Addie might have saved her soul, and simply asked for these clothes.
Remy shakes his head. “It is a crime,” he says, “that women are not taught the same as men. Why, a world without reading, I cannot fathom it. A whole long life without poems, or plays, or philosophers. Shakespeare, Socrates, to say nothing of Descartes!”
“Life is so brief, and every night in Rennes I’d go to bed, and lie awake, and think, there is another day behind me, and who knows how few ahead.”
Nervous, like tomorrow, a word for things that have not happened yet. A word for futures, when for so long all she’s had are presents.
She loves the way Henry says her name. Luc used to wield it like a weapon, a knife grazing her skin, but on Henry’s tongue, it’s a bell, something light, and bright, and lovely. It rings out between them.
She holds her breath as she inserts the first coin, braces for the inevitable clink of it rolling back into the dish at the bottom. But it goes in, and the game springs to life, emitting a cheerful cacophony of color and sound. Addie exhales, a mixture of delight and relief.
If one is the thrilling darkness, the other is midday radiance, and if the boy is not quite as handsome, well, that is only because he is human. He is real.
“Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
“These are the words of a man—Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.”
“I would see you again,” he says, “in daylight, or in darkness. As a woman, or a man. Please, let me see you again.”
She cannot erase the memory of those other nights—so she decides to become a palimpsest, to let Remy write over the other lines. This is how it should have been.
She hasn’t, in truth, since that night in the woods.
Plot hole? She dreamt of her mother tending her while she was sick.
For the first time since they met the night before, he frowns, stammers a greeting, the words too formal, stiff with embarrassment, and Addie’s heart breaks a little.
But this? This is hers. Addie found the tunnel on her own.
The bartender smiles, produces a third shot glass, and pours again. He presses his hands to his chest in the universal gesture for it’s on me.
“Addie,” he breathes, and the sound sends sparks across her skin, and when he kisses her, he tastes like salt, and summer. But it feels too much like a punctuation mark, and she isn’t ready for the night to end, so she kisses him back, deeper, turns the period into a question, into an answer.
They do not fit together perfectly. He was not made for her the way Luc was—but this is better, because he is real, and kind, and human, and he remembers.
