The Bane Chronicles Page 8

  On the word “Axel,” she froze. This was all he needed. He shoved her backward out the window. The balloon, bumped back by the force, shifted a foot or so away from the window—so she landed half in, half out. She hung there, terrified and grasping at something she could feel but not see, her slippered feet kicking into the air and smacking into the side of the building. Magnus had to accept a few flurried kicks in the chest and face before he was able to roll her over into the basket. Her skirts tumbled over her head, and the Queen of France was reduced to a pile of cloth and two flailing legs. He jumped into the basket himself, closed the basket door, and released the hold on the basket with a deep sigh. The balloon went straight up, shooting above the rooftops. The queen had managed to flip herself over and scramble to her knees. She touched the basket, her eyes wide with a childlike wonder. She drew herself up slowly and peered over the side of the basket, took one look at the view below, and fainted dead away.

  “Someday,” Magnus said, looking at the crumpled royal person at his feet, “I must write my memoirs.”

  This was not the balloon ride Magnus had hoped for.

  For a start, the balloon was low and suicidally slow, and seemed to like nothing more than dropping suddenly onto roofs and chimneys. The queen was shifting and groaning on the floor of the basket, causing it to sway back and forth in a nausea-inducing way. An owl made a sudden assault. And the sky was dark, so dark that Magnus had largely no idea where he was going. The queen moaned a bit and lifted her head.

  “Who are you?” she asked weakly.

  “A friend of a friend,” Magnus replied.

  “What are we—”

  “It’s best if you don’t ask, Your Majesty. You really don’t want the answer. And I think we’re being blown south, which is the completely wrong direction.”

  “Axel . . .”

  “Yes.” Magnus leaned over and tried to make out the streets below. “Yes, Axel . . . but here’s a question . . . If you were trying to find, say, the Seine, where would you look?”

  The queen put her head back down.

  He managed to find enough strength to restore the glamour on the balloon, rendering it invisible to the mundanes. He did not have the energy to completely glamour himself in the process, so some people were treated to the view of Magnus’s upper half sailing past their third-story window in the dark. Some people didn’t spare the candles, and he got one or two very interesting views.

  Eventually he caught sight of a shop he knew. He pulled the balloon down the street, until more and more looked familiar, and then he caught sight of Notre Dame.

  Now the question was . . . where to put the balloon down? You couldn’t just land a balloon in the middle of Paris. Even an invisible one. Paris was just too . . . spiky.

  There was only one thing for it, and Magnus already hated it.

  “Your Majesty,” he said, prodding the queen with his foot. “Your Majesty, you must wake up.”

  The queen stirred again.

  “Now,” Magnus said, “you won’t like what I am about to say, but trust me when I say it is the best of several terrible alternatives. . . .”

  “Axel . . .”

  “Yes. Now, in a minute we are going to land in the Seine—”

  “What?”

  “And it would be very good if you perhaps held your nose. And I’m guessing your dress is full of jewels, so . . .”

  The balloon was dropping fast, and the water was coming up. Magnus carefully navigated them to a spot between two bridges.

  “You may get—”

  The balloon simply dropped like a stone. The fire went out, and the silk immediately came down on Magnus and the queen. Magnus was almost out of strength, but he managed to find enough to rend the silk in two so it didn’t trap them. He swam on his own power, pulling her under his arm to the bank. They were, as he’d hoped, quite close to the Tuileries and its dock. He got her over to the steps and threw her down.

  “Stay here,” he said, dripping wet and panting.

  But the queen was unconscious again. Magnus envied her.

  He trudged up the steps and back up onto the streets of Paris. Axel would probably have been circling the area. They had agreed that if anything went wrong, Magnus was to send a blue flash into the sky, like a firework. He did it. Then he sank to the ground and waited.

  About fifteen minutes later a carriage pulled up—not the simple, plain one from before but a massive one, in black and green and yellow. One that could easily carry half a dozen or more people for several days, in the grandest of possible styles. Axel hopped down from the driver’s seat and rushed to Magnus.

  “Where is she? Why are you wet? What has happened?”

  “She’s fine,” Magnus said, putting up a hand. “This is the carriage? A berline de voyage?”

  “Yes,” von Fersen said. “Their Majesties insist. And it would be unseemly for them to arrive in something less grand.”

  “And impossible not to be noticed!”

  For the first time von Fersen looked uncomfortable. He had clearly hated this idea and had fought it.

  “Yes, well . . . this is the carriage. But . . .”

  “She’s on the steps. We had to land in the river.”

  “Land?”

  “It’s a long story,” Magnus said. “Let’s just say things got complicated. But she is alive.”

  Axel got to his knees in front of Magnus.

  “You will never be forgotten for this,” Axel said in a low voice. “France will remember. Sweden will remember.”

  “I don’t care if France or Sweden remembers. I care if you remember.”

  Magnus was genuinely shocked when it was Axel who instigated the kiss—how sudden it was, how passionate, how all of Paris, and all the vampires, and the Seine and the balloon and everything fell away and it was just the two of them for one moment. One perfect moment.

  And it was Magnus who broke it.

  “Go,” he whispered. “I need you to be safe. Go.”

  Axel nodded, looking a bit shocked at his own action, and ran to the dock steps. Magnus got up, and with one last look started to walk.

  Going home was not an option. Saint Cloud’s vampires were probably at his apartments right now. He had to get inside until dawn. He spent the night at the petite maison of Madame de ——, one of his more recent lovers. At dawn he returned to his apartments. The front door was ajar. He made his way inside cautiously.

  “Claude!” he called, carefully staying in the pool of sunlight by the door. “Marie! Ragnor!”

  “They are not here, monsieur,” said a voice.

  Henri. Of course. He was sitting on the staircase.

  “Did you hurt them?”

  “We took the ones called Claude and Marie. I don’t know who Ragnor is.”

  “Did you hurt them?” Magnus said again.

  “They are beyond hurt now. My master asked me to send his compliments. He said they made for excellent feasting.”

  Magnus felt sick. Marie and Claude had been good to him, and now . . .

  “Master would like very much to see you,” Henri said. “Why don’t we go there together, now, and you can speak when he wakes this evening.”

  “I think I’ll decline the invitation,” Magnus said.

  “If you do, I think you will find Paris a most inhospitable place to live. And who is that new gentleman of yours? We’ll find his name eventually. Do you understand?”

  Henri stood, and tried to look menacing, but he was a mundane, a darkling of seventeen.

  “What I think, little darkling,” Magnus said, stepping closer, “is that you forget who you’re dealing with.”

  Magnus allowed some blue sparks to flick between his fingers. Henri backed up a step.

  “Go home and tell your master that I’ve gotten his message. I have given offense th
at I did not mean to give. I will leave Paris at once. The matter can be considered closed. I accept my punishment.”

  He stepped away from the door and extended his arm, indicating that Henri should exit.

  As he’d expected, everything was a shambles—furniture overturned, burn marks up the walls, art missing, books shredded. In his bedchamber wine had been poured onto his bed and his clothes. . . . At least he thought it was wine.

  Magnus didn’t take long to pick through the wreckage. With the flick of his hand, the marble fireplace moved away from the wall. He retrieved a sack heavy with louis d’or, a thick roll of assignats, and a collection of wonderful rings in citrine, jade, ruby, and one magnificent blue topaz.

  This was his insurance policy, should the revolutionaries have raided his house. Vampires, revolutionaries . . . it was all the same now. The rings went on his fingers, the assignats into his coat, and the louis d’or into a handsome leather satchel, which had also been stored inside the wall for this very purpose. He reached back farther into the opening and produced one last item—the Gray Book, bound in green velvet. This he carefully placed in the satchel.

  He heard a tiny noise behind him, and Ragnor crawled out from under the bed.

  “My little friend,” Magnus said, picking up the frightened monkey. “At least you survived. Come. We’ll go together.”

  When Magnus heard the news, he was high in the Alps, resting by a stream, crushing some edelweiss under his thumb. Magnus had tried to avoid all things French for weeks—French people, French food, French news. He had given himself over to pork and pounded veal, thermal bathing, and reading. For most of this time he had passed his days alone—with little Ragnor—and in the quiet. But just that morning an escaped nobleman from Dijon had come to stay at the inn where Magnus was living. He looked like a man who liked to talk at length, and Magnus was in no mood for such company, so he’d gone to sit by the stream. He was not surprised when the man followed him there.

  “You! Monsieur!” he called to Magnus as he puffed and huffed up the hillside.

  Magnus flicked some edelweiss from his fingernail.

  “Yes?”

  “The innkeeper says you recently came from Paris, monsieur! Are you my countryman?”

  Magnus wore a light glamour at the inn, so he could pass as a random noble French refugee, one of hundreds that were flowing over the border.

  “I came from Paris,” Magnus said noncommittally.

  “And you have a monkey?”

  Ragnor was scampering around. He had taken to the Alps extremely well.

  “Ah, monsieur, I am so glad to find you! For weeks I have not spoken to anyone from my land.” He wrung his hands together. “I hardly know what to think or do these days. Such terrible times! Such horrors! You have heard about the king and queen, no doubt?”

  “What about them?” Magnus said, keeping his face impassive.

  “Their Majesties, God protect them! They tried to escape Paris! They made it as far as the town of Varennes, where it is said a postal worker recognized the king. They were captured and sent back to Paris. Oh, terrible times!”

  Without a word Magnus got up, scooped up Ragnor, and returned to the inn.

  He had not wanted to think of this matter. In his mind Axel and the family had been safe. That was how he’d needed it to be. But now.

  He paced his room, and finally wrote a letter to Axel’s address in Paris. Then he waited for the reply.

  It took three weeks, and came in an unfamiliar hand, from Sweden.

  Monsieur,

  Axel wishes you to know he is well, and returns the depth of feeling. The King and Queen, as you know, are now imprisoned in Paris. Axel has been moved to Vienna to plead their case to the Emperor, but I fear he is determined to return to Paris, at the risk of his life. Monsieur, as Axel seems to hold you in high esteem, won’t you please write to him and discourage this enterprise? He is my beloved brother, and I worry for him constantly.

  There was an address in Vienna given, and the note was signed simply “Sophie.”

  Axel would return to Paris. Of that, Magnus was sure.

  Vampires, fey folk, werewolves, Shadowhunters, and demons—these things made sense to Magnus. But the mundane world—it seemed to have no pattern, no form. Their quicksilver politics. Their short lives . . .

  Magnus thought once again of the blue-eyed man standing in his parlor. Then he lit a match and burned the note.

  Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale

  By Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan

  It was then that the fair-haired Shadowhunter that Magnus had spotted at the Institute somersaulted from the top of a wall and landed gracefully in the street before him.

  —Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale

  London, 1857

  Ever since the unfortunate events of the French Revolution, Magnus had nursed a slight prejudice against vampires. The undead were always killing one’s servants and endangering one’s pet monkey. The vampire clan in Paris was still sending Magnus rude messages about their small misunderstanding. Vampires bore a grudge longer than any technically living creatures, and whenever they were in a bad temper, they expressed themselves through murder. Magnus generally wished his companions to be somewhat less—no pun intended—bloodthirsty.

  There was also the fact that sometimes vampires committed crimes worse than murder. They committed crimes against fashion. When one was immortal, one tended to forget the passing of time. Still, that was no excuse for wearing a bonnet last fashionable in the era of Napoléon I.

  Magnus was beginning, however, to feel as if he might have been a trifle hasty in dismissing all vampires.

  Lady Camille Belcourt was a terribly charming woman. She was also attired in the absolute height of fashion. Her dress had a darling hoop skirt, and the fall of blue taffeta in seven narrow flounces about her chair made it appear as if she were rising from a cascade of gleaming blue water. There was not very much material at all around her bosom, which was as pale and curved as a pearl. All that broke the perfect pallor of the curve of bosom and the column of neck was a black velvet ribbon and the thick shining ringlets clustered about her face. One gold ringlet was long enough so that it rested in the delicate curve of her collarbone, which led Magnus’s eyes back once again to—

  Really, all roads led back to Lady Camille’s bosom.

  It was a wonderfully designed dress. It was also a wonderfully designed bosom.

  Lady Camille, as observant as she was beautiful, noticed Magnus noticing, and smiled.

  “The marvelous thing about being a creature of the night,” she confided in a low voice, “is that one need never wear anything but evening clothes.”

  “I had never considered that point before,” said Magnus, much struck.

  “Of course I adore variety, so I do seize any opportunity to change costumes. I find there are many occasions during an adventurous night for a lady to divest herself of her garments.” She leaned forward, one pale, smooth elbow resting against the Shadowhunters’ mahogany table. “Something tells me that you are a man who knows something about adventurous nights.”

  “My lady, with me, every night is an adventure. Pray continue your discourse on fashion,” Magnus urged her. “It is one of my favorite subjects.”

  Lady Camille smiled.

  Magnus lowered his voice discreetly. “Or if you choose, pray continue your discourse on disrobing. I believe that is my most favorite subject of all.”

  They sat side by side at a long table in the Shadowhunters’ London Institute. The Consul, a dreary Nephilim heading up the proceedings, was droning on about all the spells they wished warlocks to make available to them at cut-rate prices, and about their notions of proper behavior for vampires and werewolves. Magnus had not heard a single way in which these “Accords” could conceivably benefit Downworlders, but he
could certainly see why the Shadowhunters had developed a passionate desire to ratify them.

  He began regretting his agreement to make the voyage to London and its Institute so that the Shadowhunters could waste his valuable time. The Consul, who Magnus believed was called Morgwhatsit, seemed passionately in love with his own voice.

  Though, actually he had stopped talking.

  Magnus glanced away from Camille to find the far less pleasant sight of the Consul—his disapproval writ across his face, as stark as the runes on his skin—staring at him. “If you and the—the vampire woman could cease your flirtation for a moment,” he said in acid tones.

  “Flirting? We were merely indulging in a little risqué conversation,” Magnus said, offended. “When I begin to flirt, I assure you the entire room will know. My flirtations cause sensations.”

  Camille laughed. “What a clever rhyme.”

  Magnus’s joke seemed to liberate the restless discontent of all Downworlders at the table.

  “What else are we to do but talk amongst ourselves?” asked a werewolf stripling, still young but with the intense green eyes of a fanatic and the thin determined face of a fanatic who was actually competent. His name was Ralf Scott. “We have been here for three hours and have not been given the chance to speak at all. You Nephilim have done all the talking.”

  “I cannot believe,” put in Arabella, a charming mermaid with charmingly placed seashells, “that I swam up the Thames, and consented to be hauled out by pulleys and put in a large glass aquarium, for this.”

  She spoke quite loudly.

  Even Morgwhatsit looked taken aback. Why, Magnus wanted to know, were Shadowhunter names so long, when warlocks gave themselves elegant family names of one syllable? The long names were sheer self-importance.

  “You wretches should be honored to be in the London Institute,” snarled a silver-haired Shadowhunter by the name of Starkweather. “I wouldn’t allow any of you in my Institute, unless I was carrying one of your filthy heads on a pike. Silence, and let your betters speak for you.”