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No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.
A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.
Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
He has given her a gift tonight, though she doubts he knows it. Time has no face, no form, nothing to fight against. But in his mocking smile, his toying words, the darkness has given her the one thing she truly needs: an enemy. It is here the battle lines are drawn. The first shot may have been fired back in Villon, when he stole her life along with her soul, but this, this, is the beginning of the war.
Freedom is a pair of trousers and a buttoned coat. A man’s tunic and a tricorne hat. If only she had known. The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.
“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.”
“I thought you couldn’t leave a mark.” “I can’t,” she says, looking up. “I can’t hold a pen. I can’t tell a story. I can’t wield a weapon, or make someone remember. But art,” she says with a quieter smile, “art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.”
“But isn’t it wonderful,” she says, “to be an idea?”
it’s hard to entirely discount the presence of a higher power when he recently sold his soul to a lower one.
“Take your echoes and pretend they are a voice.”
“How many mortals have met you more than twice—once to make a deal and once to pay the price? How many have been a part of your life as long as I have?” Addie flashes a triumphant smile. “Perhaps that’s why you cursed me as you did. So you would have some company. So someone would remember you.”
“Why would anyone trade a lifetime of talent for a few years of glory?” Luc’s smile darkens. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.” He leans close, twists a lock of her hair around one finger. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”
Greatness requires sacrifice. Who you sacrifice to matters less than what you sacrifice for.
“Even if everyone you met remembered,” Luc says, “I would still know you best.” She searches his face. “Do I know you?” He bows his head over hers. “You are the only one who does.”
She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat.
“And how was it, your human love? Was it everything you dreamed of?” “No,” she says, and it is the truth. It was messy. It was hard. It was wonderful, and strange, and frightening, and fragile—so fragile it hurt—and it was worth every single moment.
She peels back the cover, turns past the title to the dedication. Three small words rest in the center of the page. I remember you.
with her flawless memory, she became a student of his machinations, a scholar of his cruelty. She has had three hundred years to study, and she will make a masterpiece of his regret.
