The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue E-Book

V. E. Schwab

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

For someone damned to be forgettable, Addie LaRue is a most delightfully unforgettable character, and her story is the most joyous evocation of unlikely immortality. Neil GaimanA Sunday Times-bestselling, award-nominated genre-defying tour-de-force of Faustian bargains, for fans of The Time Traveler's Wife and Life After Life, and The Sudden Appearance of Hope.When Addie La Rue makes a pact with the devil, she trades her soul for immortality. But there's always a price - the devil takes away her place in the world, cursing her to be forgotten by everyone.Addie flees her tiny home town in 18th-Century France, beginning a journey that takes her across the world, learning to live a life where no one remembers her and everything she owns is lost and broken. Existing only as a muse for artists throughout history, she learns to fall in love anew every single day.Her only companion on this journey is her dark devil with hypnotic green eyes, who visits her each year on the anniversary of their deal. Alone in the world, Addie has no choice but to confront him, to understand him, maybe to beat him.Until one day, in a second hand bookshop in Manhattan, Addie meets someone who remembers her. Suddenly thrust back into a real, normal life, Addie realises she can't escape her fate forever.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also Available from V.E. Schwab and Titan Books

Title Page

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Copyright

Dedication

Villon-Sur-Sarthe, France, July 29, 1714

Part I: The Gods That Answer After Dark

I

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IV

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VI

VII

VIII

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XII

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XVII

Part II: The Darkest Part of the Night

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VII

VIII

IX

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Part III: Three Hundred Years—And Three Words

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Part IV: The Man Who Stayed Dry in the Rain

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VII

VIII

IX

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XII

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XVI

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Part V: The Shadow Who Smiled and the Girl Who Smiled Back

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II

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IV

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VII

VIII

IX

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XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Part VI: Do Not Pretend That This Is Love

I

II

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V

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VII

VIII

IX

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XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

Part VII: I Remember You

I

II

III

Acknowledgments

About the Author

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM V.E. SCHWAB AND TITAN BOOKS

The Near Witch

THE ARCHIVED SERIES

The Archived

The Unbound

MONSTERS OF VERITY DUOLOGY

This Savage Song

Our Dark Duet

VILLAINS SERIES

Vicious

Vengeful

SHADES OF MAGIC SERIES

A Darker Shade of Magic

A Gathering of Shadows

A Conjuring of Light

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM V.E. SCHWAB AND TITAN COMICS

Shades of Magic: The Steel Prince

Shades of Magic: The Steel Prince – Night of Knives

Shades of Magic: The Steel Prince – Rebel Army

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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781785652509

Forbidden Planet edition ISBN: 9781789096804

Waterstones edition ISBN: 9781789095586

Illumicrate edition ISBN: 9781789096644

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652516

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: October 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

© V.E. Schwab 2020. All rights reserved. V.E. Schwab asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Patricia—

For never once forgetting.

The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

Estele Magritte, 1642–1719

VILLON-SUR-SARTHE, FRANCE, July 29, 1714

A girl is running for her life.

The summer air burns at her back, but there are no torches, no angry mobs, only the distant lanterns of the wedding party, the reddish glow of the sun as it breaks against the horizon, cracks and spills across the hills, and the girl runs, skirts tangling in the grass as she surges toward the woods, trying to beat the dying light.

Voices carry on the wind, calling her name.

Adeline? Adeline? Adeline!

Her shadow stretches out ahead—too long, its edges already blurring—and small white flowers tumble from her hair, littering the ground like stars. A constellation left in her wake, almost like the one across her cheeks.

Seven freckles. One for every love she’d have, that’s what Estele had said, when the girl was still young.

One for every life she’d lead.

One for every god watching over her.

Now, they mock her, those seven marks. Promises. Lies. She’s had no loves, she’s lived no lives, she’s met no gods, and now she is out of time.

But the girl doesn’t slow, doesn’t look back; she doesn’t want to see the life that stands there, waiting. Static as a drawing. Solid as a tomb.

Instead, she runs.

PART

I

THE GODS THAT ANSWER AFTER DARK

Title of Piece:Revenir

Artist: Arlo Miret

Date: 1721– 22 AD

Medium: ash wood, marble

Location: On loan from the Museé d’Orsay

Description: A sculptural series of five wooden birds in various postures and stages of pre-flight, mounted on a narrow marble plinth.

Background: A diligent autobiographer, Miret kept journals that provide insight into the artist’s mind and process. Regarding the inspiration for Revenir, Miret attributed the idea to a figurine found on the streets of Paris in the winter of 1715. The wooden bird, found with a broken wing, is reputedly re-created as the fifth in the sequence (albeit intact), about to take flight.

Estimated Value: $175,000

I

NEW YORK CITY, March 10, 2014

The girl wakes up in someone else’s bed.

She lies there, perfectly still, tries to hold time like a breath in her chest; as if she can keep the clock from ticking forward, keep the boy beside her from waking, keep the memory of their night alive through sheer force of will.

She knows, of course, that she can’t. Knows that he’ll forget. They always do.

It isn’t his fault—it is never their faults.

The boy is still asleep, and she watches the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, the place where his dark hair curls against the nape of his neck, the scar along his ribs. Details long memorized.

His name is Toby.

Last night, she told him hers was Jess. She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name—one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass. Hidden barbs designed to sting. What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.

In the last month, she has been Claire, Zoe, Michelle—but two nights ago, when she was Elle, and they were closing down a late-night café after one of his gigs, Toby said that he was in love with a girl named Jess—he simply hadn’t met her yet.

So now, she is Jess.

Toby begins to stir, and she feels the old familiar ache in her chest as he stretches, rolls toward her—but doesn’t wake, not yet. His face is now inches from her, his lips parted in sleep, black curls shadowing his eyes, dark lashes against fair cheeks.

Once, the darkness teased the girl as they strolled along the Seine, told her that she had a “type,” insinuating that most of the men she chose—and even a few of the women—looked an awful lot like him.

The same dark hair, the same sharp eyes, the same etched features.

But that wasn’t fair.

After all, the darkness only looked the way he did because of her. She’d given him that shape, chosen what to make of him, what to see.

Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?

Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.

Now it is morning, in another city, another century, the bright sunlight cutting through the curtains, and Toby shifts again, rising up through the surface of sleep. And the girl who is—was—Jess holds her breath again as she tries to imagine a version of this day where he wakes, and sees her, and remembers.

Where he smiles, and strokes her cheek, and says, “Good morning.”

But it won’t happen like that, and she doesn’t want to see the familiar vacant expression, doesn’t want to watch as the boy tries to fill in the gaps where memories of her should be, witness as he pulls together his composure into practiced nonchalance. The girl has seen that performance often enough, knows the motions by heart, so instead she slides from the bed and pads barefoot out into the living room.

She catches her reflection in the hall mirror and notices what everyone notices: the seven freckles, scattered like a band of stars across her nose and cheeks.

Her own private constellation.

She leans forward and fogs the glass with her breath. Draws her fingertip through the cloud as she tries to write her name. A—d—

But she only gets as far as that before the letters dissolve. It’s not the medium—no matter how she tries to say her name, no matter how she tries to tell her story. And she has tried, in pencil, in ink, in paint, in blood.

Adeline.

Addie.

LaRue.

It is no use.

The letters crumble, or fade. The sounds die in her throat.

Her fingers fall away from the glass and she turns, surveying the living room.

Toby is a musician, and the signs of his art are everywhere.

In the instruments that lean against the walls. In the scribbled lines and notes scattered on tables—bars of half-remembered melodies mixed in with grocery lists and weekly to-do’s. But here and there, another hand—the flowers he’s started keeping on the kitchen sill, though he can’t remember when the habit started. The book on Rilke he doesn’t remember buying. The things that last, even when memories don’t.

Toby is a slow riser, so Addie makes herself tea—he doesn’t drink it, but it’s already there, in his cupboard, a tin of loose Ceylon, and a box of silk pouches. A relic of a late-night trip to the grocery store, a boy and a girl wandering the aisles, hand in hand, because they couldn’t sleep. Because she hadn’t been willing to let the night end. Wasn’t ready to let go.

She lifts the mug, inhales the scent as memories waft up to meet it.

A park in London. A patio in Prague. A tea room in Edinburgh.

The past drawn like a silk sheet over the present.

It’s a cold morning in New York, the windows fogged with frost, so she pulls a blanket from the back of the couch and wraps it around her shoulders. A guitar case takes up one end of the sofa, and Toby’s cat takes up the other, so she perches on the piano bench instead.

The cat, also named Toby (“So I can talk to myself without it being weird . . .” he explained) looks at her as she blows on her tea.

She wonders if the cat remembers.

Her hands are warmer now, and she sets the mug on top of the piano and slides the cover up off the keys, stretches her fingers, and starts to play as softly as possible. In the bedroom, she can hear Toby-the-human stirring, and every inch of her, from skeleton to skin, tightens in dread.

This is the hardest part.

Addie could have left—should have left—slipped out when he was still asleep, when their morning was still an extension of their night, a moment trapped in amber. But it is too late now, so she closes her eyes and continues to play, keeps her head down as she hears his footsteps underneath the notes, keeps her fingers moving when she feels him in the doorway. He’ll stand there, taking in the scene, trying to piece together the timeline of last night, how it could have gone astray, when he could have met a girl and then taken her home, if he could have had too much drink, why he doesn’t remember any of it.

But she knows that Toby won’t interrupt her as long as she’s playing, so she savors the music for several more seconds before forcing herself to trail off, look up, pretend she doesn’t notice the confusion on his face.

“Morning,” she says, her voice cheerful, and her accent, once country French, now so faint that she hardly hears it.

“Uh, good morning,” he says, running a hand through his loose black curls, and to his credit, Toby looks the way he always does—a little dazed, and surprised to see a pretty girl sitting in his living room wearing nothing but a pair of underwear and his favorite band T-shirt beneath the blanket.

“Jess,” she says, supplying the name he can’t find, because it isn’t there. “It’s okay,” she says, “if you don’t remember.”

Toby blushes, and nudges Toby-the-cat out of the way as he sinks onto the couch cushions. “I’m sorry . . . this isn’t like me. I’m not that kind of guy.”

She smiles. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

He smiles, too, then, and it’s a line of light breaking the shadows of his face. He nods at the piano, and she wants him to say something like, “I didn’t know you could play,” but instead Toby says, “You’re really good,” and she is—it’s amazing what you can learn when you have the time.

“Thanks,” she says, running her fingertips across the keys.

Toby is restless now, escaping to the kitchen. “Coffee?” he asks, shuffling through the cupboards.

“I found tea.”

She starts to play a different song. Nothing intricate, just a strain of notes. The beginnings of something. She finds the melody, takes it up, lets its slip between her fingers as Toby ducks back into the room, a steaming cup in his hands.

“What was that?” he asks, eyes brightening in that way unique to artists—writers, painters, musicians, anyone prone to moments of inspiration. “It sounded familiar . . .”

A shrug. “You played it for me last night.”

It isn’t a lie, not exactly. He did play it for her. After she showed him.

“I did?” he says, brow furrowing. He’s already setting the coffee aside, reaching for a pencil and a notepad off the nearest table. “God—I must have been drunk.”

He shakes his head as he says it; Toby’s never been one of those songwriters who prefer to work under the influence.

“Do you remember more?” he asks, turning through the pad. She starts playing again, leading him through the notes. He doesn’t know it, but he’s been working on this song for weeks. Well, they have.

Together.

She smiles a little as she plays on. This is the grass between the nettles. A safe place to step. She can’t leave her own mark, but if she’s careful, she can give the mark to someone else. Nothing concrete, of course, but inspiration rarely is.

Toby’s got the guitar up now, balanced on one knee, and he follows her lead, murmuring to himself. That this is good, this is different, this is something. She stops playing, gets to her feet.

“I should go.”

The melody falls apart on the strings as Toby looks up. “What? But I don’t even know you.”

“Exactly,” she says, heading for the bedroom to collect her clothes.

“But I want to know you,” Toby says, setting down the guitar and trailing her through the apartment, and this is the moment when none of it feels fair, the only time she feels the wave of frustration threatening to break. Because she has spent weeks getting to know him. And he has spent hours forgetting her. “Slow down.”

She hates this part. She shouldn’t have lingered. Should have been out of sight as well as out of mind, but there’s always that nagging hope that this time, it will be different, that this time, they will remember.

I remember, says the darkness in her ear.

She shakes her head, forcing the voice away.

“Where’s the rush?” asks Toby. “At least let me make you breakfast.”

But she’s too tired to play the game again so soon, and so she lies instead, says there’s something she has to do, and doesn’t let herself stop moving, because if she does, she knows she won’t have the strength to start again, and the cycle will spin on, the affair beginning in the morning instead of at night. But it won’t be any easier when it ends, and if she has to start over, she’d rather be a meet-cute at a bar than the unremembered aftermath of a one-night stand.

It won’t matter, in a moment, anyways.

“Jess, wait,” Toby says, catching her hand. He fumbles for the right words, and then gives up, starts again. “I have a gig tonight, at the Alloway. You should come. It’s over on . . .”

She knows where it is, of course. That is where they met for the first time, and the fifth, and the ninth. And when she agrees to come, his smile is dazzling. It always is.

“Promise?” he asks.

“Promise.”

“I’ll see you there,” he says, the words full of hope as she turns and steps through the door. She looks back, and says, “Don’t forget me in the meantime.”

An old habit. A superstition. A plea.

Toby shakes his head. “How could I?”

She smiles, as if it’s just a joke.

But Addie knows, as she forces herself down the stairs, that it’s already happening—knows that by the time he closes the door, she’ll be gone.

II

March is such a fickle month.

It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.

Estele used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.

Addie has always been predisposed to both.

It makes sense then, that she was born on the 10th of March, right along the ragged seam, though it has been so long since Addie felt like celebrating.

For twenty-three years, she dreaded the marker of time, what it meant: that she was growing up, growing old. And then, for centuries, a birthday was a rather useless thing, far less important than the night she signed away her soul.

That date a death, and a rebirth, rolled into one.

Still, it is her birthday, and a birthday deserves a gift.

She pauses in front of a boutique, her reflection ghosted in the glass.

In the broad window, a mannequin poses mid-stride, its head tilted ever so slightly to one side, as if listening to some private song. Its long torso is wrapped in a broad-striped sweater, a pair of oil-slick leggings vanishing into knee-high boots. One hand up, fingers hooked in the collar of the jacket that hangs over one shoulder. As Addie studies the mannequin, she finds herself mimicking the pose, shifting her stance, tilting her head. And maybe it’s the day, or the promise of spring in the air, or maybe she’s simply in the mood for something new.

Inside, the boutique smells of unlit candles and unworn clothes, and Addie runs her fingers over cotton and silk before finding the striped knit sweater, which turns out to be cashmere. She throws it over one arm, along with the featured leggings. She knows her sizes.

They haven’t changed.

“Hi there!” The cheerful clerk is a girl in her early twenties, like Addie herself, though one is real and aging and the other is an image trapped in amber. “Can I get a room started for you?”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she says, plucking a pair of boots from a display. “I’ve got everything I need.” She follows the girl to the three curtained stalls at the rear of the shop.

“Just give me a shout if I can help,” says the girl, turning away before the curtain swings shut, and Addie is alone with a pillowed bench, and a full-length mirror, and herself.

She kicks off her boots, and shrugs out of her jacket, tossing it onto the seat. Change rattles in the pocket as it lands, and something tumbles out. It hits the floor with a dull clack and rolls across the narrow changing room, stopping only when it meets the baseboard.

It is a ring.

A small circle carved of ash-gray wood. A familiar band, once loved, now loathsome.

Addie stares at the thing a moment. Her fingers twitch, traitorous, but she doesn’t reach for the ring, doesn’t pick it up, just turns her back on the small wooden circle and continues undressing. She pulls on the sweater, shimmies into the leggings, zips up the boots. The mannequin was thinner, taller, but Addie likes the way the outfit hangs on her, the warmth of the cashmere, the weight of the leggings, the soft embrace of the lining in the boots.

She plucks the price tags off one by one, ignoring the zeroes.

Joyeux anniversaire, she thinks, meeting her reflection. Inclining her head, as if she too hears some private song. The picture of a modern Manhattan woman, even if the face in the mirror is the same one she’s had for centuries.

Addie leaves her old clothes strewn like a shadow across the dressing room floor. The ring, a scorned child in the corner. The only thing she reclaims is the discarded jacket.

It’s soft, made of black leather and worn practically to silk, the kind of thing people pay a fortune for these days and call it vintage. It is the only thing Addie refused to leave behind and feed to the flames in New Orleans, though the smell of him clung to it like smoke, his stain forever on everything. She does not care. She loves the jacket.

It was new then, but it is broken in now, shows its wear in all the ways she can’t. It reminds her of Dorian Gray, time reflected in cowhide instead of human skin.

Addie steps out of the little curtained booth.

Across the boutique, the clerk startles, flustered at the sight of her. “Everything fit?” she asks, too polite to admit she doesn’t remember letting someone into the back. God bless customer service.

Addie shakes her head ruefully. “Some days you’re stuck with what you’ve got,” she says, heading for the door.

By the time the clerk finds the clothes, a ghost of a girl on the changing room floor, she won’t remember whose they are, and Addie will be gone, from sight and mind and memory.

She tosses the jacket over her shoulder, one finger hooked in the collar, and steps out into the sun.

III

VILLON-SUR-SARTHE, FRANCE, Summer 1698

Adeline sits on a bench beside her father.

Her father, who is, to her, a mystery, a solemn giant most at home inside his workshop.

Beneath their feet, a pile of woodwares make shapes like small bodies under a blanket, and the cart wheels rattle as Maxime, the sturdy mare, draws them down the lane, away from home.

Away—away—a word that makes her small heart race.

Adeline is seven, the same as the number of freckles on her face. She is bright and small and quick as a sparrow, and has begged for months to go with him to market. Begged until her mother swore she would go mad, until her father finally said yes. He is a woodworker, her father, and three times a year, he makes the trip along the Sarthe, up to the city of Le Mans.

And today, she is with him.

Today, for the first time, Adeline is leaving Villon.

She looks back at her mother, arms crossed beside the old yew tree at the end of the lane, and then they round the bend, and her mother is gone. The village rolls past, here the houses and there the fields, here the church and there the trees, here Monsieur Berger turning soil and there Madame Therault hanging clothes, her daughter Isabelle sitting in the grass nearby, twining flowers into crowns, her tongue between her teeth in concentration.

When Adeline told the girl about her trip, Isabelle had only shrugged, and said, “I like it here.”

As if you couldn’t like one place and want to see another.

Now she looks up at Adeline, and waves as the cart goes by. They reach the edge of the village, the farthest she has ever gone before, and the cart hits a divot in the road, and shakes as if it too has crossed a threshold. Adeline holds her breath, expecting to feel some rope draw tight inside her, binding her to the town.

But there is no tether, no lurch. The cart keeps moving, and Adeline feels a little wild and a little scared as she turns back to look at the shrinking picture of Villon, which was, until now, the sum of her world, and is now only a part, made smaller with the mare’s every step, until the town seems like one of her father’s figurines, small enough to nest within one calloused palm.

It is a day’s ride to Le Mans, the trek made easy with her mother’s basket and her father’s company—one’s bread and cheese to fill her belly, and the other’s easy laugh, and broad shoulders making shade for Adeline beneath the summer sun.

At home he is a quiet man, committed to his work, but on the road he begins to open, to unfold, to speak.

And when he speaks, it is to tell her stories.

Those stories he gathered, the way one gathers wood.

“Il était une fois,” he will say, before sliding into stories of palaces and kings, of gold and glamour, of masquerade balls and cities full of splendor. Once upon a time. This is how the story starts.

She will not remember the stories themselves, but she will recall the way he tells them; the words feel smooth as river stones, and she wonders if he tells these stories when he is alone, if he carries on, talking to Maxime in this easy, gentle way. Wonders if he tells stories to the wood as he is working it. Or if they are just for her.

Adeline wishes she could write them down.

Later, her father will teach her letters. Her mother will have a fit when she finds out, and accuse him of giving her another way to idle, waste the hours of the day, but Adeline will steal away into his workshop nonetheless, and he will let her sit and practice writing her own name in the fine dust that always seems to coat the workshop floor.

But today, she can only listen.

The countryside rolls past around them, a jostling portrait of a world she already knows. The fields are fields, just like her own, the trees arranged in roughly the same order, and when they do come upon a village, it is a watery reflection of Villon, and Adeline begins to wonder if the world outside is as boring as her own.

And then, the walls of Le Mans come into sight.

Stone ridges rising in the distance, a many-patterned spine along the hills. It is a hundred times the size of Villon—or at least, it is that grand in memory—and Adeline holds her breath as they pass through the gates and into the protected city.

Beyond, a maze of crowded streets. Her father guides the cart between houses squeezed tight as stones, until the narrow road opens onto a square.

There is a square back in Villon, of course, but it is little bigger than their yard. This is a giant’s space, the ground lost beneath so many feet, and carts, and stalls. And as her father guides Maxime to a stop, Adeline stands on the bench and marvels at the marketplace, the heady smell of bread and sugar on the air, and people, people, everywhere she looks. She has never seen so many of them, let alone ones she does not know. They are a sea of strangers, unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar clothes, with unfamiliar voices, calling unfamiliar words. It feels as if the doors of her world have been thrown wide, so many rooms added to a house she thought she knew.

Her father leans against the cart, and talks to anyone who passes by, and all the while his hands move over a block of wood, a small knife nested in one palm. He shaves at the surface with all the steady ease of someone peeling an apple, ribbons falling between his fingers. Adeline has always loved to watch him work, to see the figures take shape, as if they were there all along, but hidden, like pits in the center of a peach.

Her father’s work is beautiful, the wood smooth where his hands are rough, delicate where he is large.

And mixed among the bowls and cups, tucked between the tools of his trade, are toys for sale, and wooden figures as small as rolls of bread—a horse, a boy, a house, a bird.

Adeline grew up surrounded by such trinkets, but her favorite is neither animal nor man.

It is a ring.

She wears it on a leather cord around her neck, a delicate band, the wood ash gray, and smooth as polished stone. He carved it when she was born, made for the girl she’d one day be, and Adeline wears it like a talisman, an amulet, a key. Her hand goes to it now and then, thumb running over the surface the way her mother’s runs over a rosary.

She clings to it now, an anchor in the storm, as she perches on the back of the cart, and watches everything. From this angle she is almost tall enough to see the buildings beyond. She stretches up onto her toes, wondering how far they go, until a nearby horse jostles their cart as it goes past, and she nearly falls. Her father’s hand closes around her arm, pulling her back into the safety of his reach.

By the end of the day, the wooden wares are gone, and Adeline’s father gives her a copper sol and says she may buy anything she likes. She goes from stall to stall, eying the pastries and the cakes, the hats and the dresses and the dolls, but in the end, she settles on a journal, parchment bound with waxy thread. It is the blankness of the paper that excites her, the idea that she might fill the space with anything she likes.

She could not afford the pencils to go with it, but her father uses a second coin to buy a bundle of small black sticks, and explains that these are charcoal, shows her how to press the darkened chalk to the paper, smudge the line to turn hard edges into shadow. With a few quick strokes, he draws a bird in the corner of the page, and she spends the next hour copying the lines, far more interesting than the letters he’s written beneath.

Her father packs up the cart as the day gives way to dusk.

They will stay the night in a local inn, and for the first time in her life, Adeline will sleep in a foreign bed, and wake to foreign sounds and smells, and there will be a moment, as brief as a yawn, when she won’t know where she is, and her heart will quicken—first with fear, and then with something else. Something she does not have the words for yet.

And by the time they return home to Villon, she will already be a different version of herself. A room with the windows all thrown wide, eager to let in the fresh air, the sunlight, the spring.

IV

VILLON-SUR-SARTHE, FRANCE, Fall 1703

It is a Catholic place, Villon. Certainly the part that shows.

There is a church in the center of town, a solemn stone thing where everyone goes to save their souls. Adeline’s mother and father kneel there twice a week, cross themselves and say their blessings and speak of God.

Adeline is twelve now, so she does, too. But she prays the way her father turns loaves of bread upright, the way her mother licks her thumb to collect stray flakes of salt.

As a matter of habit, more automatic than faith.

The church in town isn’t new, and neither is God, but Adeline has come to think of Him that way, thanks to Estele, who says the greatest danger in change is letting the new replace the old.

Estele, who belongs to everyone, and no one, and herself.

Estele, who grew like a tree at the heart of the village by the river, and has certainly never been young, who sprang up from the ground itself with gnarled hands and woody skin and roots deep enough to tap into her own hidden well.

Estele, who believes that the new God is a filigreed thing. She thinks that He belongs to cities and kings, and that He sits over Paris on a golden pillow, and has no time for peasants, no place among the wood and stone and river water.

Adeline’s father thinks Estele is mad.

Her mother says that the woman is bound for Hell, and once, when Adeline repeated as much, Estele laughed her dry-leaf laugh and said there was no such place, only the cool dark soil and the promise of sleep.

“And what of Heaven?” asked Adeline.

“Heaven is a nice spot in the shade, a broad tree over my bones.”

At twelve, Adeline wonders which god she should pray to now, to make her father change his mind. He has loaded up his cart with wares bound for Le Mans, has harnessed Maxime, but for the first time in six years, she is not going with him.

He has promised to bring her a fresh pad of parchment, new tools with which to sketch. But they both know she would rather go and have no gifts, would rather see the world outside than have another pad to draw on. She is running out of subjects, has memorized the tired lines of the village, and all the familiar faces in it.

But this year, her mother has decided that it isn’t right for her to go to market, it isn’t fitting, even though Adeline knows she can still fit on that wooden bench beside her father.

Her mother wishes she was more like Isabelle Therault, sweet and kind and utterly incurious, content to keep her eyes down upon her knitting instead of looking up at clouds, instead of wondering what’s around the bend, over the hills.

But Adeline does not know how to be like Isabelle.

She does not want to be like Isabelle.

She wants only to go to Le Mans, and once there, to watch the people and see the art all around, and taste the food, and discover things she hasn’t heard of yet.

“Please,” she says, as her father climbs up into the cart. She should have stowed away among the woodworks, hidden safe beneath the tarp. But now it is too late, and when Adeline reaches for the wheel, her mother catches her by the wrist and pulls her back.

“Enough,” she says.

Her father looks at them, and then away. The cart sets out, and when Adeline tries to tear free and run after the cart, her mother’s hand flashes out again, this time finding her cheek.

Tears spring to her eyes, a vivid blush before the rising bruise, and her mother’s voice when it lands is a second blow.

“You are not a child anymore.”

And Adeline understands—and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up. She is so angry then that she wants to run away. Wants to fling her mother’s needlework into the hearth and break every half-made sculpture in her father’s shop.

Instead, she watches the cart round the bend, and vanish between trees, with one hand clenched around her father’s ring. Adeline waits for her mother to let her go, and send her on to do her chores.

And then she goes to find Estele.

Estele, who still worships the old gods.

Adeline must have been five or six the first time she saw the woman drop her stone cup into the river. It was a pretty thing, with a pattern pressed like lace into its sides, and the old woman just let it fall, admiring the splash. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving, and when Adeline ambushed the old woman—she was already old, has always been old—on the path home, Estele said she was praying to the gods.

“What for?”

“Marie’s child isn’t coming as it should,” she said. “I asked the river gods to make things flow smooth. They are good at that.”

“But why did you give them your cup?”

“Because, Addie, the gods are greedy.”

Addie. A pet name, one her mother scorned as boyish. A name her father favored, but only when they were alone. A name that rang like a bell in her bones. A name that suited her far more than Adeline.

Now, she finds Estele in her garden, folded in among the wild vines of squash, the thorny spine of a blackberry bush, bent low as a warping branch.

“Addie.” The old woman says her name without looking up.

It is autumn, and the ground is littered with the stones of fruit that didn’t ripen as it should. Addie nudges them with the toe of her shoe. “How do you talk to them?” she asks. “The old gods. Do you call them by name?”

Estele straightens, joints cracking like dry sticks. If she’s surprised by the question, it doesn’t show. “They have no names.”

“Is there a spell?”

Estele gives her a pointed look. “Spells are for witches, and witches are too often burned.”

“Then how do you pray?”

“With gifts, and praise, and even then, the old gods are fickle. They are not bound to answer.”

“What do you do then?”

“You carry on.”

She chews on the inside of her cheek. “How many gods are there, Estele?”

“As many gods as you have questions,” answers the old woman, but there is no scorn in her voice, and Addie knows to wait her out, to hold her breath until she sees the telltale sign of Estele’s softening. It is like waiting at a neighbor’s door after you’ve knocked, when you know they are home. She can hear the steps, the low rasp of the lock, and knows that it will give.

Estele sighs open.

“The old gods are everywhere,” she says. “They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods. They are in the sunlight on the wheat, and under the saplings in spring, and in the vines that grow up the side of that stone church. They gather at the edges of the day, at dawn, and at dusk.”

Adeline’s eyes narrow. “Will you teach me? How to call on them?”

The old woman sighs, knowing that Adeline LaRue is not only clever, but also stubborn. She begins wading through the garden to the house, and the girl follows, afraid that if Estele reaches her front door before she answers, she might close it on this conversation. But Estele looks back, eyes keen in her wrinkled face.

“There are rules.”

Adeline hates rules, but she knows that sometimes they are necessary.

“Like what?”

“You must humble yourself before them. You must offer them a gift. Something precious to you. And you must be careful what you ask for.”

Adeline considers. “Is that all?”

Estele’s face darkens. “The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.” She leans over Adeline, casting her in shadow. “And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

Two days later, when Adeline’s father returns, he comes bearing a fresh pad of parchment, and a bundle of black lead pencils, bound with string, and the first thing she does is pick the best one, and sink it down into the ground behind their garden, and pray that next time her father leaves, she will be with him.

But if the gods hear, they do not answer.

She never goes to market again.

V

VILLON-SUR-SARTHE, FRANCE, Spring 1707

Blink, and the years fall away like leaves.

Adeline is sixteen now, and everyone speaks of her as if she is a summer bloom, something to be plucked, and propped within a vase, intended only to flower and then to rot. Like Isabelle, who dreams of family instead of freedom, and seems content to briefly blossom and then wither.

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.

She hefts the laundry on her hip and crests the rise, making her way down the weedy slope to the river. When she reaches the banks, she turns the basket out, dumping the soiled clothes into the grass, and there, tucked like a secret between the skirts and aprons and undergarments, is the sketchbook. Not the first—she has gathered them year after year, careful to fill every inch of space, to make the most of each blank page.

But every one is like a taper burning on a moonless night, always running out too fast.

It does not help that she keeps giving bits away.

She kicks off her shoes and slumps back against the slope, her skirts pooling beneath her. She runs her fingers through the weedy grass and finds the fraying edge of the paper, one of her favorite drawings, folded into a square and driven down into the bank last week, just after dawn. A token, buried like a seed, or a promise. An offering.

Adeline still prays to the new God, when she must, but when her parents are not looking she prays to the old ones, too. She can do both: keep one tucked in her cheek like a cherry pit while she whispers to the other.

So far, none of them have answered.

And yet, Adeline is sure that they are listening.

When George Caron began to look at her a certain way last spring, she prayed for him to turn his gaze, and he began to notice Isabelle instead. Isabelle has since become his wife, and is now ripe with her first child, and worn with all the torments that come with it.

When Arnaud Tulle made his intentions clear last fall, Adeline prayed that he would find another girl. He did not, but that winter he took ill and died, and Adeline felt terrible for her relief, even as she fed more trinkets to the stream.

She has prayed, and someone must have heard, for she is still free. Free from courtship, free from marriage, free from everything except Villon. Left alone to grow.

And dream.

Adeline sits back on the slope, the sketchpad balanced on her knees. She pulls the drawstring pouch from her pocket, bits of charcoal and a few worn-down precious pencils rattling like coins on market day.

She used to bind a bit of cloth around the stems to keep her fingers clean, until her father fashioned narrow bands of wood around the blackened sticks, and showed her how to hold the little knife, how to shave away the edges, and trim the casing into points. And now the images are sharper, the edges contoured, the details fine. The pictures bloom like stains across the paper, landscapes of Villon, and everyone in it, too—the lines of her mother’s hair and her father’s eyes and Estele’s hands, and then there, tucked into the seams and edges of each page—

Adeline’s secret.

Her stranger.

Every bit of unused space she fills with him, a face drawn so often that the gestures now feel effortless, the lines unfurling on their own. She can conjure him from memory, even though they have never met.

He is, after all, only a figment of her mind. A companion crafted first from boredom, and then from longing.

A dream, to keep her company.

She doesn’t remember when it started, only that one day she cast her gaze about the village and found every prospect wanting.

Arnaud’s eyes were pleasant, but he had no chin.

Jacques was tall, but dull as dirt.

George was strong, but his hands were rough, his moods rougher still.

And so she stole the pieces she found pleasant, and assembled someone new.

A stranger.

It began as a game—but the more Adeline draws him, the stronger the lines, the more confident the press of her charcoal.

Black curls. Pale eyes. Strong jaw. Sloping shoulders and a cupid’s bow mouth. A man she’d never meet, a life she’d never know, a world she could only dream of.

When she is restless, she returns to the drawings, tracing over the now familiar lines. And when she cannot sleep, she thinks of him. Not the angle of his cheek, or the shade of green she has conjured for his eyes, but his voice, his touch. She lies awake and imagines him beside her, his long fingers tracing absent patterns on her skin. As he does, he tells her stories.

Not the kind her father used to tell, of knights and kingdoms, princesses and thieves. Not fairy tales and warnings of venturing outside the lines, but stories that feel like truths, renditions of the road, cities that sparkle, of the world beyond Villon. And even though the words she puts in his mouth are surely full of errors and lies, her stranger’s conjured voice makes them sound so wonderful, so real.

If only you could see it, he says.

I would give anything, she answers.

One day, he promises. One day, I’ll show you. You’ll see it all.

The words ache, even as she thinks them, the game giving way to want, a thing too genuine, too dangerous. And so, even in her imagination, she guides the conversation back to safer roads.

Tell me about tigers, Adeline says, having heard of the massive cats from Estele, who heard of them from the mason, who was part of a caravan that included a woman who claimed to have seen one.

Her stranger smiles, and gestures with his tapered fingers, and tells her of their silken fur, their teeth, their furious roars.

On the slope, the laundry forgotten beside her, Adeline turns her wooden ring absently with one hand as she draws with the other, sketching out his eyes, his mouth, the line of his bare shoulders. She breathes life into him with every line. And with every stroke, coaxes out another story.

Tell me about dancing in Paris.

Tell me about sailing across the sea.

Tell me everything.

There was no danger in it, no reproach, not when she was young. All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.

The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it, and suddenly the charcoal beneath her nails is unbecoming, as is the idea that she would choose her own company over Arnaud’s or George’s, or any man who might have her.

She is at odds with everything, she does not fit, an insult to her sex, a stubborn child in a woman’s form, her head bowed and arms wrapped tight around her drawing pad as if it were a door.

And when she does look up, her gaze always goes to the edge of town.

“A dreamer,” scorns her mother.

“A dreamer,” mourns her father.

“A dreamer,” warns Estele.

Still, it does not seem such a bad word.

Until Adeline wakes up.

VI

NEW YORK CITY, March 10, 2014

There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone.

You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.

Addie thinks of her father and his carvings, the way he peeled away the bark, whittled down the wood beneath to find the shapes that lived inside. Michelangelo called it the angel in the marble—though she’d not known that as a child. Her father had called it the secret in the wood. He knew how to reduce a thing, sliver by sliver, piece by piece, until he found its essence; knew, too, when he’d gone too far. One stroke too many, and the wood went from delicate to brittle in his hands.

Addie has had three hundred years to practice her father’s art, to whittle herself down to a few essential truths, to learn the things she cannot do without.

And this is what she’s settled on: she can go without food (she will not wither). She can go without heat (the cold will not kill her). But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.

What she needs are stories.

Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.

Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.

Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

Two blocks up Flatbush, she sees the familiar green folding table on the sidewalk, covered in paperbacks, and Fred hunched in his rickety chair behind it, red nose buried in M is for Malice. The old man explained to her once, back when he was on K is for Killer, how he was determined to get through Grafton’s entire alphabet series before he dies. She hopes he makes it. He has a nagging cough, and sitting out here in the cold doesn’t help, but here he is, whenever Addie comes by.

Fred doesn’t smile, or make small talk. What Addie knows of him she has pried out word by word over the last two years, the progress slow and halting. She knows he is a widower who lives upstairs, knows the books belonged to his wife, Candace, knows that when she died, he packed up all her books and brought them down to sell, and it’s like letting her go in pieces. Selling off his grief. Addie knows that he sits down here because he’s afraid of dying in his apartment, of not being found—not being missed.

“I keel over out here,” he says, “at least someone will notice.”

He is a gruff old man, but Addie likes him. Sees the sadness in his anger, the guardedness of grief.

Addie suspects he doesn’t really want the books to sell.

He doesn’t price them, hasn’t read more than a few, and sometimes his mood is so coarse, his tone so cold, he actually scares the customers away. Still, they come, and still, they buy, but every time the selection seems to thin a new box appears, the contents are unpacked to fill the gaps, and in the last few weeks, Addie has once more begun to spot new releases among the old, fresh covers and unbroken spines in with the battered paperbacks. She wonders if he is buying them, or if other people have begun donating to his strange collection.

Addie slows, now, her fingers dancing over the spines.

The selection is always a medley of discordant notes. Thrillers, biographies, romance, battered mass markets, mostly, interrupted by a few glossy hardcovers. She has stopped to study them a hundred times, but today she simply tips the book on the end into her hand, the gesture light and swift as a magician’s. A piece of legerdemain. Practice long given way to perfect. Addie tucks the book under her arm and keeps walking.

The old man never looks up.

VII

NEW YORK CITY, March 10, 2014

The market sits like a cluster of old wives at the edge of the park.

Long thin from winter, the number of white-capped stalls is finally beginning to swell again, drops of color dotting the square where new produce springs up between the root vegetables, meat and bread, and other staples resistant to the cold.

Addie weaves between the people, heading to the little white tent nestled by the front gates of Prospect. Rise and Shine is a coffee and pastry stall run by a pair of sisters that remind Addie of Estele, if the old woman had been two instead of one, divided along the lines of temper. If she had been kinder, softer, or perhaps if she had simply lived another life, another time.

The sisters are here year-round, come snow or sun, a small constant in an ever-changing city.

“Hey, sugar,” says Mel, all broad shoulders, and wild curls, and the kind of sweetness that makes strangers feel like family. Addie loves that, the easy warmth, wants to nestle into it like a well-worn sweater.

“What can we get for you?” asks Maggie, older, leaner, laugh lines around her eyes belying the idea she rarely smiles.

Addie orders a large coffee and two muffins, one blueberry and the other chocolate chip, and then hands over a crumpled ten that she’d found on Toby’s coffee table. She could steal something from the market, of course, but she likes this little stand, and the two women who run it.

“Got a dime?” asks Maggie.

Addie digs the change from her pocket, coming up with a few quarters, a nickel—and there it is again, warm among the cold metal coins. Her fingers graze the wooden ring and she clenches her teeth at the feel of it. Like a nagging thought, impossible to shed. Sifting through the coins, Addie is careful not to touch the wooden band again as she searches her change, resists the urge to fling the ring into the weeds, knows it will not make a difference if she does. It will always find its way back.

The darkness whispers in her ear, arms wrapped like a scarf around her throat.

I am always with you.

Addie plucks out a dime and pockets the rest.

Maggie hands back four dollars.

“Where you from, doll?” asks Mel, noticing the faintest edge of an accent in the corners of Addie’s voice, reduced these days to the vanishing end of an s, the slight softening of a t. It has been so long, and yet, she cannot seem to let it go.

“Here and there,” she says, “but I was born in France.”

“Oh la la,” says Mel in her flat Brooklyn drawl.

“Here you go, sunshine,” says Maggie, passing her a bag of pastries and a tall cup. Addie curls her fingers around the paper, relishing the heat on her cold palms. The coffee is strong, and dark, and when she takes a sip, she feels the warmth all the way down, and she is back in Paris again, in Istanbul, in Naples.

A mouthful of memory.

She starts toward the park gates.

“Au revoir!” calls Mel, landing hard on every letter, and Addie smiles into the steam.

The air is crisp inside the park. The sun is out, fighting for warmth, but the shade still belongs to winter, so Addie follows the light, sinking onto a grassy slope beneath the cloudless sky.

She sits the blueberry muffin on top of the paper bag, and sips her coffee, examining the book she borrowed from Fred’s table. She hadn’t bothered to look at what she was taking, but now her heart sinks a little at the sight of the paperback, the cover soft with wear, the title in German.

Kinder und Hausmärchen it reads, by Brüder Grimm.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Her German is rusty, kept in the back of her mind, in a corner she hasn’t used much since the war. Now she dusts it off, knows that beneath the layer of grime she will find the space intact, undisturbed. The boon of memory. She turns through the fragile old pages, eyes tripping over the words.

Once upon a time, she loved this kind of story.

When she was still a child, and the world was small, and she dreamed of open doors.

But Addie knows too well now, knows that these stories are full of foolish humans doing foolish things, warning tales of gods and monsters and greedy mortals who want too much, and then fail to understand what they’ve lost. Until the price is paid, and it’s too late to claim it back.

A voice rises like smoke inside her chest.

Never pray to the gods who answer after dark.

Addie tosses the book aside and slumps back into the grass, closing her eyes as she tries to savor the sun.

VIII

VILLON-SUR-SARTHE, FRANCE, July 29, 1714

Adeline had wanted to be a tree.

To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.

But here is the danger of a place like Villon.

Blink—and a year is gone.

Blink—and five more follow.

It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things to get lost. The kind of place where time slips and blurs, where a month, a year, a life can go missing. Where everyone is born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.

Adeline was going to be a tree.

But then came Roger, and his wife, Pauline. Grown up together, and then married, and then gone, in the time it took for her to lace up a pair of boots.

A hard pregnancy, a ruinous birth, two deaths instead of one new life.

Three small children left behind, where there should have been four. The earth still fresh over a grave, and Roger looking for another wife, a mother for his children, a second life at the cost of Adeline’s one and only.

Of course, she said no.

Adeline is three and twenty, already too old to wed.

Three and twenty, a third of a life already buried.

Three and twenty—and then gifted like a prize sow to a man she does not love, or want, or even know.

She said no, and learned how much the word was worth. Learned that, like Estele, she had promised herself to the village, and the village had a need.

Her mother said it was duty.