Page 14 of Truth in the Treme

“The same thing I keep asking. Tell me your side turned something up. Tell me there is a piece of this only you can see.”

“There is nothing I can prove,” he said, which was the truth, and the whole frustration of it lived in the word prove. He had three burned houses with no trace of his world in any of them, and a woman who dropped into a dead woman's life every time the smoke reached her, and he could not lay the two facts side by side and make them into one story. “I am still working it. I am working it from an angle I cannot show you.”

“I figured.” She did not push. She had learned long ago which of his doors stayed closed. “Work it faster, Durand. This one is not going to wait for us to be ready.”

Tib met him on the steps of the cathedral, because the wolf refused on principle to talk business indoors when the morning was fine.

“We went back over both blocks,” Tib said. “Wider this time, the whole quarter around each scene. Same answer as before, only I am more sure of it now. No scent that should not be there. No other pack, no court, no witch working a corner, nothing dead walking where it ought not. If somebody from our side of things lit those fires, they did it without leaving one hair of themselves behind, and I have never met the creature that careful.” He squinted out at the square. “I will tell you what I think, for what it is worth. I think you have been asking the wrong neighborhood. You keep looking at the ground where the fires happened. Maybe the thing you are hunting was never standing there at all.”

“Meaning what.”

“Meaning my nose has done all it can do, and you have got friends with stranger talents than mine. If it were me, and it was eating at me the way this is eating at you, I would stop walking the same two lots and start knocking on every door I had.” Tib clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Go bother your people. That is what people are for.”

Tib held his look a moment past what the talk required. “You look bad, Durand. Not tired. I have seen you tired across a hundred years. You look like a man with skin in the game, and I never once saw that on you before her.” He let his hand drop, not unkind. “Whatever she is to you, she has made you breakable. I did not think anything left could.”

“She has,” Bastien said, because there was no use denying it to a creature who could smell a lie at ten paces.

They spent the afternoon in Jackson Square because he had promised himself their life would not become only this.

The square was full of its usual trade. A tarot reader under a striped umbrella. A man making animals out of balloons for a ring of children. The cathedral throwing its long shadow across the flagstones as the sun came around. He bought her a praline she did not need and split it with her on a bench, and for the length of it he managed what she had asked of him. He listened. He watched the square instead of watching her, and he let himself believe, for an hour, that they were only two people in love with nowhere they had to be.

A street musician had set up near the corner of the garden fence with a violin tucked under his chin. He had been working through the easy crowd-pleasers, the songs that filled a hat. Then he eased into an older tune, a slow waltz in a minor key, and Delphine went still on the bench beside him.

Not the deep stillness. The other kind. She turned her head toward the music with her lips parted, and when she spoke her voice had gone soft and far away.

“You always hummed that one,” she said. “Before you asked me to dance. You would hum the first few bars under your breath, and that was how I knew to put down whatever I was holding.” She blinked, and her own words seemed to startle her back into the afternoon. “I did it again. I do not know where that came from. The violin started, and I just knew.”

He knew the tune. Of course he knew the tune. It was the one he had hummed over the washing-up and over a thousand breakfasts, the one she had carried in her sleep without ever learning its name, the one he had turned her around a kitchen to with no music at all. Here it was on a stranger's violin in the middle of a bright afternoon, and it had reached into her again and handed back one more small true thing. He kept his face easy for her. He filed the moment away with the others, where it joined a record that was getting longer and made no more sense for its length.

“Dance with me, then,” he said, because she had asked him to live and not only to guard. He stood and held out his hand.

She laughed, surprised, and took it, and he turned her once under the violin in front of the tarot reader and the balloon man and the indifferent pigeons, and for the space of a waltz neither of them was afraid of anything at all.

Walking home with her hand in his, she said it without looking at him. “The little ones do not scare me. The ones that come and go without pulling me under. I have started to want them. Is that mad? Each one is a piece of a life I get to keep.” Her fingers tightened around his. “It is only the long ones I am afraid of. The dark on the far side of them.”

He did not tell her that the long ones frightened him for a reason she did not yet have. He only held her hand and walked her home through the blue of the evening.

That night he wrote the waltz into the notebook, the violin and the minor key and the few bars under his breath that had told her to set down whatever she held.

Then he spread it all out in front of him, everything he had, and made himself look at the whole of it at once. Three fires, set by a steady human hand, carrying no breath of magic he could find. Three times the smoke had reached her and taken her into a life that had ended before this one began. Two smaller moments, a hummed tune and a violin, that had slipped past without taking her under at all. Maya's evidence pointed clean and hard at a person with a can and a purpose. His own senses pointed at nothing. And underneath both of those, refusing to line up with either, was Delphine, remembering more of a dead life with every fire that burned.

None of it told a single story. The fires would not explain the memories. The memories would not explain the fires. The absence of magic explained least of all, because in two hundred years he had never once met a true working that left no trace, and he had also never met a grief that reached out of a grave to climb into a living woman without one. Both things were impossible. Both things were happening. He was missing the piece that made them one, and he had walked the same two lots and questioned the same two friends until there was nothing left in either to find.

He closed the notebook and held his hand flat on the cover, and he made the decision quietly, alone, in the dark, where every choice that had ever mattered to him was made.

Tib had been right. He had been asking the wrong neighborhood. Tomorrow he would stop walking the ground the fires had touched and start working the only resource he had not spent. He would go to every ally he had earned across two centuries, the practitioners and the old things and the keepers of records no human had read, and he would lay the whole impossible knot in front of each of them and ask the question he could not answer alone. If there was magic in this that he could not see, then somewhere in this city was someone who could see what he could not.

He slid the notebook back into the drawer and shut it. The evidence in front of him refused to tell one story, and there was only one thing that meant. He had not yet spoken to the right person.

NINE

Marcelline Renault received him in the long room of her house on St. Charles, where the lamps stayed low and the heavy drapes held the avenue's noise at bay. She wore midnight silk and her usual stillness, and she watched him come in with an attention she had not spent on him so freely before the night he showed the city his wings.

“You have become interesting, Bastien,” she said. “I find I answer your calls faster than I used to. Sit. Tell me what brings a man who avoids my house to the door of it twice in a season.”

He sat, and he told her. He gave her the fires, three of them, set by a steady hand and carrying no trace of his world. He gave her the symptoms without the heart of them, a woman close to him who fell into a stillness near the smoke and surfaced remembering a life that was not her own, a death in a theater fire a long way back. He laid it all out plainly and watched her take it in, and he kept the deepest part of it behind his teeth, the part that named whose life and whose death and what he himself had been when it happened.

Marcelline did not interrupt. She turned each piece over slowly, from several sides, looking for the angle that would tell her what it was worth. When he finished she was quiet a while.