Page 25 of The Dagger and the Flame
‘Or are you sorry you got caught?’ Madame Mercure pursedher lips. ‘That’s not even the part I’m angry about. You told me your mother died of the plague.’
Sera flinched. She had forgotten about that.
Mercure tossed the paper at her. It slid across the table and landed at her feet. Sera didn’t have to pick it up to know what it said. It was dated last Sunday. She could see the headline from here.
FANTOME SMUGGLER MURDERED BY DUFORT’S DAGGERS.
‘You neglected to tell me that your mother was murdered,’ said Madame Mercure. ‘The night you came to House Armand begging for sanctuary, you were running from the Daggers, weren’t you?’
Sera nodded, slowly. There was no sense in denying it now. ‘I didn’t know where else to go.’
Madame Mercure’s lips twisted. ‘I read they burned your mother’s farmhouse.’
Again, Sera nodded. For as long as she lived, she would never forget the sight of the smoke rising over the hills.
‘Why did they burn it?’ said Madame Mercure.
‘I don’t know.’ Sera was still wrestling with the same question. ‘Pippin and I were out hunting for rabbits.’
Madame Mercure’s frown deepened the lines around her mouth. ‘Between them, the Cloaks and Daggers trade with seventeen other smugglers outside Fantome. None of those smugglers have been murdered. Why would Gaspard Dufort choke his own supply chain?’
Sera bristled at that name. ‘We—Mamarefused to sell to Dufort. She only dealt with the Cloaks.’
All these years, Sera had never been able to tell who Mama hated more – the Daggers or Dufort himself. But one thing she knew, deep in her blood and her bones, was that no matter how many times she declared herself a simplego-between, Sylvie Marchant had been no innocent bystander. She hated Dufort with the kind of rage that made her eyes blaze like two bronze coins. By the end, Sylvie had been unable to stomach sight or sound of him, or tolerate anything he stood for.
Sometimes Sera had watched the way her mother looked at those vials of Shade as she bottled them and wondered just how close she had come to tasting that power, and what she would have done with it if curiosity had got the better of her. And in the endless hollow hours since Mama’s death, Sera had often found herself wishing Mama had got to Dufort before he got to her.
‘Why?’ pressed Mercure. ‘Why did your mother choose to only sell to the Cloaks?’
‘Because Gaspard Dufort is a depraved monster,’ said Sera. ‘Mama wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.’
A cold, yawning silence filled the room. Sera swallowed her next words:Dufort knew that and killed her for it.
Madame Mercure did not argue the point. There was no one who despised the Daggers more than the Cloaks, their age-old rivalry stretching all the way back to the warring Versini brothers, and Armand’s gruesome death at Hugo’s hands. And then there was the matter of their little sister, Lucille, the poor girl who got caught in the middle of their bloody feud simplyby trying to help them. ‘But Gaspard is also a clever man, Seraphine. And a clever man has a reason for everything he does.’
‘Maybe he’s started to lose it.’
Madame Mercure went on, as if she hadn’t heard her, ‘So, the question remains: what threat did Sylvie Marchant pose to the most powerful man in Fantome?’
‘Mama lived in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. She never went anywhere or did anything of note. Unless you count making wine and tinkering with jewellery in her spare time.’ Sera clasped the teardrop at her throat, wanting to defend her mother from the implication that she had somehow deserved her own gruesome murder. Banishing the fear that it might be true. ‘She was hardly a threat.’
Madame Mercure pressed her lips together, levelling a hard look at Sera. ‘I think you know more than you’re letting on.’
Sera folded her arms, but said nothing. Of course there were other sides to Mama. She was clever, cunning, curious – not just about the beauty of nature, but about its secrets, too. She read widely and often, and sometimes, after a glass or two of wine, she experimented – with metals, plants, even rocks dug up from her own garden. And once –only once– with something darker, something secret and strange and deadly that Seraphine had never quite made sense of.
She still thought of Fig sometimes, the yowling tabby that had fallen victim to Mama’s midnight experiment and become something…other. But over time, the memory of that strange night had turned hazy, and the more she thought about it, the less sense it made. Sera didn’t like to dwell on it, to considerthat her mother might have lied to her, or that there were things about Sylvie that she simply didn’t know.
‘Your mother was part of the underworld of Fantome.’ Mercure laboured her point. ‘She was part of the trade. And by the sounds of it, so were you.’
Sera glared at her. ‘Mama only fell into the trade to keep us afloat. The least I could do was help her out when I was old enough.’ She recalled those early years with a pang of guilt, Mama labouring at her workbench by the light of the moon, her shoulders so hunched that some nights she could barely tuck Seraphine in. Back then, they were so poor they had to share a cup of milk for breakfast, Mama pretending to take sips she never swallowed so Sera wouldn’t go hungry. They often had to rely on the kindness of Farmer Perrin or Maria Verga just to survive. ‘Mama did the real work. Thehardwork. I just helped her bottle it.’
‘Tell me the rest,’ Mercure pressed. ‘What else was your mother up to in that little farmhouse of hers?’
‘I’ve already told you everything.’ Sera was seized by an image of her mother sitting at her workbench on a warm sunny day, her dark hair falling across her face as she tinkered with a strand of wire. She was surrounded by vials, as she always was, and on her left, the discarded nub of a boneshade root, its head of golden leaves still attached. There were others scattered across the table, and in the air, beneath the smell of lemon blossom, was the barest hint of gunpowder.
What’s that strange smell, Mama?
Mama had set the wire down to smile at her.That, my little firefly, is the smell of creativity.
