Page 66 of The Dagger and the Flame
He frowned, and Sera sensed he had been wrestling with the immorality of his position here long before this conversation. ‘But to be a Dagger… They’re an abomination. A stain on thegoodness of this city. They’ve turned the Age of Saints into an Age of Darkness. Your mother was hardly the first person ever to dream of destroying them. She was just the first to come up with an effective way to actually do it.’ He paused, voice tightening. ‘Only, the problem is, those monsters aren’t killing Dufort’s Daggers. They’re killing…’
‘Anyone,’ said Sera grimly. ‘Everyone.’ She rolled to her feet. ‘It’s one big devastating mess. And now, she’s not around to fix it.’
‘So, we’ll fix it,’ said Theo, as if they were talking about repairing a ripped seam and not reversing the plague of monsters that now terrorized their city. He grabbed her satchel as he stood up and set it down on the glass island. A head of boneshade tumbled out. He set it aside, then peered in at the rest. ‘Why do you have a satchel full of bloom?’
‘I found them stashed in our shed back at home.’ She turned her satchel upside down now and the pamphlet about Lucille Versini slipped out. ‘I found this too,’ she said, sliding it towards him. ‘I think it might be a clue to the magic I wear around my neck. Mama was working on some kind of antidote to the monsters.’
He opened the pamphlet, squinting to make out the print. Much of it had been faded by time, some sentences trailing into nothing. But the Shadowsmith rose eagerly to the challenge, fishing a pot of ink from a drawer. As he unscrewed it, she caught the unmistakable whiff of Shade. ‘I call this cloying ink,’ he said. ‘It clings to darkness, pushes the light away.’
He stoppered the bottle with his thumb, then tipped it over the pamphlet, letting the ink out, drop by drop. Serawatched it fall onto the lines of faded text, clinging to every word. In a matter of seconds, the entire page became legible, that wordLightfireso black, it seemed to leap from every paragraph.
‘You really are clever,’ she said, leaning closer until their heads touched.
‘I know.’
They read a while in silence, Sera carefully turning the pages while Theo tipped cloying ink onto each new paragraph, painting the words back into place. ‘Look. There.’ She traced a paragraph that Mama had underlined almost in its entirety, reading the words aloud.
‘In the last days of her young life, Lucille Versini was entrenched in her research, spending long nights in the library of the Appoline, edging ever closer to a new kind of magic. Not the Shade that her brothers had discovered almost a decade earlier. Rather, it was the antidote to such darkness, the secret of which, according to Lucille’s journals, resided in the bloom of the very same plant. She called this magic Lightfire, and she sought to extract it, but the art of alchemy is never quite so simple.
The pursuit of Lightfire was to be her undoing. For there was nothing in all the world that frightened Hugo Versini so much as his little sister’s avid mind. Some believe that Lucille discovered how to make Lightfire just before her death. A secret that Hugo Versini made sure to bury with her.’
‘He killed her for it,’ Sera murmured. ‘His own sister.’
Theo curled his lip. ‘There’s nothing more dangerous than a frightened Dagger.’ He reached for a head of bloom, holding it up to the light. It shone like a fallen sun. ‘At least we know why your mother was storing these.’
‘She was trying to make Lightfire.’ Sera couldn’t tear her gaze from the glinting bloom, caught suddenly in a surge of hope. ‘She was trying to finish what Lucille Versini started.’
‘Not just trying.’ Theo looked meaningfully at Sera, his gaze falling to the bead at her throat. ‘She had succeeded.’
She grasped her necklace, feeling the teardrop warm up in her fingers, as if agreeing with her. With a jolt, she remembered what Ransom had called her magic – anantidote. Mama had managed to make it after all – this little spark of Lightfire. It was not enough to protect Fantome, but it had protected Seraphine, hadn’t it? It had fought the Dagger’s Shade and saved her life at Villa Roman. ‘But how did she do it?’
His face fell as he set the bloom down. He didn’t need to say it – they both knew that the answer to that question had likely gone up in flames along with Mama.
Sera stilled, caught in the grip of another realization. ‘He must have known.’
Theo cocked his head. ‘Who?’
‘Dufort,’ she said, half-choking on the name. ‘You said it yourself. There’s nothing more dangerous than a frightened Dagger. When Hugo discovered what his sister was working on, he killed her for it. Lightfire was the only thing that could beat Shade. It was the same for Dufort. He knew the rediscovery of it would destroy his reign over the underworld.It would destroy the entire legacy of Hugo Versini.’
Theo’s face tightened. ‘Do you think Dufort was watching her?’
‘Yes,’ said Sera, without a beat of hesitation. The truth was a horror inside her. Dufort had been watching them all their lives. Watching Mama, a lot more closely than she’d thought. Perhaps he had always known what Seraphine knew – that Mama’s ambitions stretched far beyond the petty act of smuggling, that Shade was merely a gateway to another, greater dream – another, better, version of Fantome. ‘Maybe the monsters evaded him. That wine was made on Maria Verga’s land, bottled in her barn. But Lightfire…’
Lightfire was Mama’s life’s work.
Memories flooded Sera. All those hours spent in bookshops and libraries, the stacks of encyclopaedias that teetered in the corners back home, the smell of herbs and spices that always clung to her, the plants that lined their kitchen shelves, the stray cats that disappeared as quickly as they came. Those endless nights at her workbench where she tinkered beneath the light of the moon, the permanent hunch in her shoulders, the spark of every untried idea kindling in her eyes and tearing her away from conversations at dinner, from mugs of coffee and warm bubble baths, from bedtime stories and half-sung lullabies.
Those flashes of golden light that came in the dead of night, jostling Sera from her slumber, sending her to the window to search for falling stars. It was not the sky that sent those lights. It was Mama, always working, always reaching beyond the dark. Up, and up, and up.
Magic.It was all suddenly right there in front of Seraphine.As loud and bright as the fire that had come afterwards. ‘Mama spent her whole life chasing the memory of Lucille Versini. Chasing Lightfire. And…’ She tipped her head back, trying to breathe.
‘And when she finally found it, Dufort killed her for it,’ Theo finished quietly. There was a heavy beat of silence. ‘But he didn’t kill you.’
Sera started to pace. Trying to calm down, to subdue the sudden urge to scream and smash everything in sight. ‘I’m going to kill him, Theo. I’m going to find him and I’m going to tear him apart. And I swear to Lucille and the rest of the saints that I’m going to do it with Lightfire.’
‘Breathe, Sera,’ he said, watching her battle through the storm of her emotions. ‘Let’s start with the magic. Once we figure that out, we can talk about the rest.’
She could have kissed him for his calmness, for not shaking her and telling her she was idiotic to consider moving against Dufort. But he had already returned his attention to the pamphlet, his brows knitting as he flicked through the rest of the pages. There was nothing more about Lightfire, no other clue beyond the bloom glowing dimly between them.
