Read Chapter 33: The Tide of War

The light in the room had shifted from the desperate blue of pre-dawn to the pale gold of morning when Étienne’s fingers twitched against the bedsheet. Camille, who had been dozing in the hard-backed chair with her head resting on the edge of the mattress, felt the movement like a small electric shock.

She was on her feet before she was fully awake, her hand hovering over his. His face was the color of old parchment, the wound at his shoulder wrapped in bandages that had been changed three times through the night. The physician had warned her not to hope. The physician had not seen the way his brow furrowed now, as if he were fighting through deep water toward the surface.

“Étienne,” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

His eyelids fluttered. Once, twice. Then they opened, unfocused and glassy, searching the canopy above before finding her face. His lips moved, but no sound came out. She pressed a cup of water to his mouth, letting a few drops wet his cracked lips.

“Camille.” His voice was a rustle of dry leaves. “You’re still here.”

“Where else would I be?” She tried to smile, but her face felt stiff with fatigue and unshed tears. “You took a chandelier for me. The least I can do is sit by your bed.”

A weak laugh escaped him, ending in a cough that made her wince. The physician had said the ribs were bruised, possibly cracked. Viscount Drouet’s men had done their work well, and the marble floor of the grand salon had finished it.

“How long?” he asked.

“Two days. The full moon is tonight.”

Something flickered in his eyes at that, a shadow of the fever that had gripped him through the first night. She had held him down when the delirium took him, listening to him cry out names she didn’t recognize, dates that hadn’t happened yet. 1789. The Bastille. In a voice raw with terror, he had screamed about heads in baskets and blood running in the gutters of Paris.

She had tried to soothe him, to tell him it was only fever dreams. But his words had been too specific, too terrible to be random.

Now, awake, he looked at her with those clear gray eyes that had seen too much. The eyes of a man who had been forced to reconcile his honor with survival in a court full of snakes.

“I saw it,” he said. “The future.”

Camille’s blood went cold. She had been careful, so careful, never to reveal too much. But in the fever, had she said something? Had she confirmed the visions his own mind had conjured?

“You were delirious,” she said carefully. “You were burning with fever. Men see all manner of—

“I saw the King’s head fall into a basket.” His voice was stronger now, urgent. “I saw the Queen, her hands bound, her hair cut short like a common criminal’s. I saw the palace empty, the halls echoing with nothing but dust and the memory of music.”

Camille gripped the edge of the mattress. Her knuckles went white.

“And I saw you,” he continued. “Standing in a room full of strange machines, dressed in clothes I have never seen worn by any woman of this age. You were older, but you were there. In my time. Watching it all happen.”

The silence between them stretched like a wire about to snap.

“You know what I am,” she said. It was not a question.

“I suspected from the beginning. The way you spoke, the things you knew. The clothes you made—beautiful, yes, but wrong somehow. Too clean, too simple, without the weight of our convention. And then in the fever, I saw what you were hiding. I saw your world.”

Camille’s breath caught. She had been so careful. But fever had no filter, and apparently, neither did visions.

“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I never meant to—

“Don’t.” He reached for her hand, his fingers cold but insistent. “Don’t apologize. You saved the Queen. You exposed Bertin. Everything you’ve done since you came here has been to protect people. To save lives.”

“Then why do you look at me like that?” she asked. “Like I’m a ghost?”

“Because I understand now.” His grip tightened. “I understand that you have the power to leave. To go back to your world, your time, where none of this has happened yet. And I understand that you chose to stay. For me.”

The tears she had been holding back broke free, slipping down her cheeks. She didn’t bother to wipe them away.

“The full moon is tonight,” she said. “The portal will be open. The needle and locket are still in my possession. But I’m not going to use them.”

“No.” His voice was fierce despite his weakness. “You must.”

She stared at him, uncomprehending. “What?”

“You don’t understand what I saw.” He tried to sit up, failed, and fell back against the pillows with a grimace of pain. “The Revolution—it isn’t just a change of government. It’s slaughter. The guillotine doesn’t stop with the royal family. It takes everyone. The nobles, the clergy, the servants who worked beside them. Thousands of heads, Camille. Tens of thousands. And then the wars, the chaos, the terror that follows. France will bleed for a decade, and the world will be remade in blood and fire.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I studied it in school. But I can’t—

“You can change it.” His eyes burned with desperate intensity. “You know what’s coming. You know the mistakes they will make, the moments where one decision could have saved thousands. The Queen trusts you now. The King has seen you expose a poisoner. Even the court—the ones who matter—they listen to what you say, because your clothes speak louder than any voice.”

“I’m a seamstress, Étienne. I make dresses. I don’t—

“You craft narratives.” His voice cracked. “You told me that once. That beauty is a story you tell with silk and thread. So tell them a different story. Tell them about the starving poor, about the tax system that crushes them, about the grain that rots in storehouses while children die in the streets. Tell the Queen to open her purse, to embrace reform, to become the symbol of a new France rather than a target of the old one.”

Camille pulled her hand free and stood, pacing to the window. Outside, the gardens were coming alive with the morning. Servants moved along the gravel paths. A coach was arriving at the gates, bearing some noble or other who had no idea that within a few short years, their head would rest in a basket.

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “I can’t stop a revolution with fashion.”

“No.” His voice was soft now, almost gentle. “But you can’t stop it from here either. And if you stay, if you bind yourself to this time, you will die with the rest of us. Do you understand that? You will watch your friends—Elise, the Queen, me—we will all die. And you will either die with us or watch it happen, helpless.”

She turned to face him. “You’re asking me to leave you.”

“I’m asking you to save us.” Tears stood in his eyes, the first she had ever seen there. “Go back to your time. Find a way to change this future. Even if it means I never know you, never hold you—if it means the world is better for it, I will pay that price a thousand times over.”

The words hung between them like a sentence.

“But if I go,” she said slowly, “if I use the portal tonight, you said yourself that doing so might destroy this timeline completely. The man at the masquerade—

“Was a fraud. You proved that yourself.” He smiled weakly. “I remember you telling me. The swindler who knew less about history than you do. He was playing a game. That doesn’t mean the truth of what you are is a lie.”

Camille pressed her hands to her face. The room spun. Everything she had decided, everything she had committed to in the long dark hours of his unconsciousness, now crumbled beneath her.

“There’s another way,” she said finally. “I can’t change the whole revolution. But I can prepare the court for it. I can use my position to—

“That will take years. Years we may not have.” He reached for her again, and she moved back to the bed, taking his hand. “Your world is ahead of mine in knowledge. You know the patterns of history, the failures of kings. Use that knowledge to stop it before it starts. But you can’t do that from a palace that is about to burn.”

She looked down at their joined hands. His was calloused from riding and papers; hers from needles and thread. They had crossed some boundary together, some line of time and fate, and now they stood on the other side of it with no map home.

“If I go,” she said slowly, “it will be to find a way back to you. To this time. To change its course without erasing it entirely. I will not let you sacrifice what we have for a possibility that may never come to be.”

A sound from the door made them both turn. Elise stood in the threshold, her face pale, her hands twisted in her apron. She had clearly been crying.

“Madame,” she said, her voice trembling. “Forgive me for interrupting. But there is word from Paris.”

“What is it?” Camille asked.

“The people have gathered in the streets,” Elise said. “They are calling for bread. The King has refused to lower the price, and the guards have been ordered to fire on the crowd.”

The blood drained from Camille’s face. She looked back at Étienne, whose expression had gone sharp and knowing.

“The Revolution has already begun,” he said. “It began the moment you and I both knew its name.”

Outside, the bells of the palace chapel began to toll.