“If you can convince the Société that their cause is lost, if you can get them to me, then I will help to save them,” he says, and I know there is no more arguing with him.

For a Guild Lord to agree to save countless numbers of Those Who Walk by Day is no small matter. It is a bad bargain, for I’ve no way of convincing St. Juste to give up the fight—but it’s the only bargain I’m going to get.

32

She Who Was Lost

The next evening, I go visiting. The house in the rue Plumet is modest for a genteel neighborhood. It looks perversely cheerful in the fading twilight, with a garden full of greenery and pots brimming with flowers at its every window.

My heart is skittering behind my ribs as I scale the wall. My breath is short, and I find it hard to swallow. But I press on, ignoring the fact that I’m breaking into church property, ignoring the thought of what lies inside. I enter through an attic window and silently glide into an empty corridor.

Or so I thought. A shiver starts at the nape of my neck, and my Cat instincts sing. There is another presence here. I freeze. There’s no sound, but it’s here. I narrow my eyes, trying to acclimate them to the deep dark. There’s a whisper of movement behind me. I try to swing around, when something heavy hits the back of my head. I crumple to my knees, seeing only stars, and the darkness grows thick. There is the ominous click of a pistol being cocked.

A lantern is lit, and I hiss at the brightness. Pain lances my head. A hulking figure of a man stands over me, a giant with a forgettable face. The one I rescued from the Châtelet. Le Maire. For le Maire is the prisoner I freed that day—beloved son of the Guild of Letters, a Merveille of the Miracle Court, lost and found. Orso recognized him that night in the prison and whispered the truth to me sometime later. But a spy of the Guild of Letters is only as good as the mystery that surrounds him, and so his reappearance has been kept quiet from most of the Wretched.

His eyes take me in, and he sighs heavily and lowers his pistol. “Oh, it’s only you,” he says.

“Ysengrim be damned, did you have to hit me so hard?” I complain as he helps me to my feet.

“I have big hands,” he says by way of explanation. He puts his pistol away and stares at me. “You said you weren’t going to come here.”

Just then a door crashes open behind us with a thwacking crunch. My reflexes kick in and I drop and roll, a dagger in my hand, while le Maire points his pistol at the entrance. There stands Ettie, in a dress that she’s since outgrown, wildeyed, her hair a tangle of curls, a giant ax in her hands. She is taller than when I last saw her that long-ago night when I paid the bread price. But her face is as lovely as ever, and when she sees me, she throws up her arms, waving the ax around, and gives a triumphant cry.