Chapter 4 4

Celeste

Dawn in December in Paris is not a dramatic thing. It does not arrive with colour or announcement. It simply becomes less dark, slowly, the grey of early morning replacing the deeper grey of night in increments so gradual that the moment you could call it daytime is impossible to identify.

I watched it happen from the guest room window, already dressed, my coat on, the envelope in my inner pocket, because sleeping had not been an option and getting ready to move felt like the only form of control available to me.

Edouard's car was a black Citroen, large and silent in the way of vehicles owned by people who have decided that comfort is not a luxury but a requirement, and the driver loaded my two bags without comment while Edouard and Lucien came down the townhouse steps and my mother stood at the top of them, in her coat over her dressing gown, and looked at me with the expression she had not been able to put away since last night.

"I will come as soon as I'm permitted to visit," she said.

"All right," I said.

"Celeste." She came down the steps and took my face in her hands the way she had done since I was small.

Her hands were cold. "I love you. Everything I have done has been because of that."

"I know," I said. "I'm not sure that's the point, but I know."

She pressed her forehead to mine for a moment. Then she stepped back and let me go, and I got into the Citroen, and Lucien got in after me, and Edouard sat in the front, and the driver pulled out into the December streets of Paris and headed south.

For the first forty minutes nobody said anything. The city gave way to the outer arrondissements and then to the suburb roads and then to the long straight lines of the national road heading into the French countryside, bare winter fields on both sides, the occasional farmhouse, the grey sky sitting low and consistent over everything.

I watched it out the window and thought about the letter in my pocket and tried to construct a useful picture from the pieces I had.

Lucien was on the other side of the back seat with the window between us and approximately thirty centimeters of empty bench seat, and he was looking at something in a small notebook that he had produced from somewhere and was reading without appearing to be interested in whether I noticed him doing it.

"How long is the drive?" I asked. Not to him specifically. To the car in general.

"Most of the day," Edouard said from the front, without turning. "We stop in Vendome at midday. There is someone joining us from Lyon for the second part of the journey."

"Who?" I asked.

"Another student," Edouard said. "She's been at the academy for a year. She'll be useful company for you."

I looked at the side of Edouard's head. That's probably very much empty.

Useful company!? As though people were resources you deployed at the appropriate moment. I was beginning to understand that this was not a metaphor for him. It was simply how he thought.

"Lucien," I called out his name almost awkwardly.

He looked up from the notebook.

"Is the person in Vendome someone who knows about the letter?" I asked.

He held my gaze for a moment. "No," he said.

"Does she know what I am?"

"She knows you're a Convergence candidate," he said. "The whole academy will know by the time we arrive. The ceremony was witnessed by forty people, none of whom will have kept the information to themselves."

"Wonderful," I mused.

"It would have been worse to arrive unknown and have it come out later," he said. "This way you control the narrative by being present for it from the beginning."

I looked at him. "Is that what you'd do?"

He looked back with the measured quality. "It's what I did," he said simply, and went back to his notebook, and I went back to the window, and the French countryside moved past in its winter grey.

Vendome was a small city of the Loire that I had been to once when I was twelve, on a school trip that had involved a cathedral and a great deal of cold and a friend who had twisted her ankle on the cobblestones.

We stopped at an inn on the edge of the market square where there was lunch waiting, which I ate without much attention because my appetite was operating at the level that it operated at when I was managing a significant amount of information at once, which was:, enough to continue existing, not much more.

And then, finally, the person from Lyon arrived while I was still at the table.