Cover

Dedication

To my parents, who first taught me how to dream

Map

Part 1

Magic of Old

1

September’s new moon waited for the sun to set, and I found myself trapped in Mazarine’s library, drawing her twelfth portrait by candlelight. For as long as I had known her, she had never left her house during the day, and she kept her curtains closed while the sun reigned. She liked to summon me every few months for various things, the foremost to commit her face to paper with my charcoal stick as if she forgot what she looked like, the second to read to her from one of her leather-bound books. I was eager to do both because she paid me well, and I liked the stories I could sometimes coax from her. Stories that came from the mountains. Stories that were nearly forgotten, turning into dust.

“Do I look the same as I did the last time you drew me?” she asked from where she sat in a chair, its armrests carved as roaring lions. She was wearing her usual raiment: an elegant velvet gown the shade of blood with a diamond necklace anchored at her neck. The stone caught the firelight every time she breathed, winking with secrets.

“You look unchanged,” I replied, thinking that I’d drawn her only three months ago, and I continued with my sketch of her.

She was proud, even with her multitude of wrinkles and her age spots and her strange beady eyes. I liked her confidence, and I drew it in the tilt of her chin, the hint of her knowing smile, and the waves of her long quicksilver hair. I wondered how old she was, but I didn’t dare ask.

Sometimes I feared her, although I couldn’t explain why. She was ancient. I had rarely seen her move from the furniture scattered about this gilded, shadowed room. And yet something pulsed from her. Something I couldn’t identify but all the same cautioned me to keep my eyes open in her presence.

“Your father does not like when I summon you here,” she drawled in a smoky voice. “He does not like you alone with me, does he?”

Her words unsettled me, but I concealed my feelings. The dimness of the room was like a cloak, and while it seemed impossible to draw a portrait in such poor light, I did it well.

“My father simply needs me home on time today,” I said, and she knew what I implied.

“Ah, a new moon awaits you tonight,” said Mazarine. “Tell me, Clementine . . . have you read one of my nightmares recorded in your father’s book?”

I had not, because there were no recordings of her nightmares in the book my father filled and guarded. I didn’t want to confess such to her, for fear it might upset her.

And so I lied.