Archive of Our Own ^beta

The Café Musain’s patio (“Great for brunch,” Musichetta had advised, “so probably decent for magic; please no fire though, we just stained the trellis,”) was relatively dry, which was something. There was shelter under the patio’s curved, fluttering awning, which was where Éponine lurked; she had wedged herself between the building’s outer bricks and Musichetta’s trellis, which had been dragged close to the wall to keep it out of the weather. Éponine could smell the stain, even under the thick perfume of storm and window box flowers. It was there, in her nose, the sharp curl of something chemical and volatile, and if she closed her eyes, she could see it happening: a spark, a breath of friction, the whole thing whooshing up in merry, short-lived flames.

Éponine shivered, partially because the idea sounded nice, and partially because she was cold. Maybe it was still technically summer, but it was near midnight, and the world beyond the patio was a sheet of black night and rain. Also, Éponine had shaved her head at the beginning of June, mostly because Gavroche had ended his school year by bringing home lice, but also a little bit because she had suspected that it would make her look like a badass; it had, but now she was left with hair that had only just started to grow out properly. Her collar was pulled up to her chin, and her ears were numb.

The street wavered dimly when Éponine peered at it, like a scene hidden behind a layer of static. She had been waiting long enough; where the fuck were they? Shops and cobblestones flickered in and out, and if Éponine stared too long, shapes emerged in white, tingling flashes. She dragged her eyes away often. She disliked divination on the best of days, but scrying unintentionally was sure to show her things she didn’t want to see.

She blinked three times to try to clear away the static, and let her eyes linger instead on the dull yellow of a streetlight, the way it edged sidewalk and stone and wooden wall with its wavering light, the way it nearly brought color back to the blush pink and violet petunias under the window. Éponine ran the back of a finger against the petals, just lightly, just once. She had helped plant them, back in the spring.

When she breathed in, it smelled like things growing. It smelled like things so near to being grown that soon they would be dying instead.

Éponine pulled her phone out to check the time: 11:56. Did nobody care for punctuality? It was cold. It would be so easy to change her mind, to go back home to the couch and the bad movie where she had left her siblings falling asleep. And, yes—she probably should, shouldn’t she? Except when she slid her phone back into her pocket, she felt it brush against her fingertips, and knew she would wait.

And then—there it was, the only hint that someone might be coming up the street: a solid spot of black that bloomed out of nowhere. The shimmer of rain seemed to move around it, and Éponine scowled. Trust Montparnasse to take for-fucking-ever just to avoid a little water.

Only when Montparnasse stepped over the chain enclosing the patio, tall and graceful and perfectly dry, repelling rain like he was at the center of an oiled bubble, did Éponine move away from the wall. “That’s a waste of magic,” she said, disapproving. “Where’s Jehan?”

“Are you kidding?” Montparnasse’s lip curled scornfully. “This is a velvet blazer. It is raining. The cost in magic more than makes up for the dry cleaning bill I’ve avoided.” His long fingers went to his lapels, which were embroidered with tiny, delicate flowers. He brushed his fingertips against them absently. “And Jehan is—somewhere. Coming.”

“Here,” called a third voice. The figure clambering over the chain now was decidedly less nimble than Montparnasse had been, but was no less welcome. Éponine smiled, just a little. She could not remember ever being unhappy to see Jehan.

“Sorry,” Jehan continued, clearly out of breath. “I let Parnasse get ahead of me, there was this fantastic grape vine growing along a fence, the kind that turns all crimson in autumn, I think, and I had to get a cutting—for Chetta, you know, for her trellis—and anyway, Éponine, it took me a solid month to embroider that blazer, and if he had let it be rained on I never would have forgiven him.”

Éponine rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well. I suppose we wouldn’t want to incur your wrath, oh vine whisperer.” She glanced at Montparnasse. He looked pleased, and had leaned into Jehan’s space to tug at the end of Jehan’s long, silky braid.

“I don’t know why you bother with the ribbon, it’s always falling out. Look,” Montparnasse said, slipping his hand along Jehan’s hair and then presenting the small, sky blue bow that had been tied at the end. “It came right off. I didn’t even have to try.” Montparnasse pushed his fingers through Jehan’s hair and began undoing the braid.

Jehan shrugged, allowing his wet hair to be carded through and freed. “You know how it is. You like pretty things as much as I do. It’s always beautiful while it lasts; and anytime I lose a ribbon, I just imagine someone else finding it, and picking it up and tying it into their braid; and that’s just as good as having it myself, I think.”

Éponine’s mouth turned down as Montparnasse chuckled indulgently. She was sure that this was something he did not want her to notice, but how could she not? It was a miracle that Jehan hadn’t figured it out, really, but it wasn’t Éponine’s place to speak. It definitely wasn’t her place to tease, either, especially considering the reason she had asked them to meet her.

As if on cue, Jehan and all of his wild, waving, ink-black hair turned his attention to Éponine. “So what are we doing, Ponine? I’m excited. It’s certainly a night for it.”

It was, at that. The air was water logged and electric. Éponine wriggled her hand into her pocket—the jeans she was wearing might have actually been Azelma’s, tight and just a bit too short, but with deep pockets—and after fumbling past cell phone and lip balm and house key, she withdrew a ring.

The ring was small and lovely, a twisting band that gleamed silver in good light, although there, on the patio, it was just as yellow as everything else the streetlight touched. It was set with three stones—two were dark and glossy, while the third was a gaudy, over-large sphere that bulged out from between the two smaller stones. Éponine held it up for inspection.

Montparnasse gave her a shrewd look. Jehan only bent to examine it more closely.

“Obsidian,” he murmured. “Right? And what is that, in the middle? Goldstone?”

Éponine nodded.

“You know goldstone is man-made, right?” Montparnasse asked critically, reaching for the ring. “What are we meant to do with this?”

“Of course I know that goldstone is man-made, I’m not a complete idiot,” Éponine snapped. She snatched the ring away before Montparnasse could touch it. “And I need help. It’s for Cosette.”

Montparnasse snorted. “A little early in the relationship for rings, isn’t it?”

Éponine fumed. “There is no relationship,” she hissed, aiming a kick at Montparnasse’s shin. He skittered back, looking scandalized. “She’s not even meant to know it’s from me. It’s to help with her magic.”

“What is it she does again?” Jehan asked. His curiosity was genuine. “Something with auras, right?”

“She reads the colors of people’s souls, and all of the nuances and risks and compatibilities contained within, as Éponine has told us one or twelve times,” Montparnasse said sarcastically. He jumped back again, before Éponine could even lift her foot for another kick. “So, again, I ask: What are we meant to do with this?”

Éponine charitably decided to ignore Montparnasse’s tone. She did need his help, after all. “She said…well, I heard that she sometimes finds it challenging to describe what she sees in a way that paints an accurate picture for the people she reads. I want to enchant this so that when she uses it, the colors she sees appear in the ring for everyone else to see, too. Make things easier, you know.”

“God, you’re pathetic,” Montparnasse muttered, though his voice was exasperated rather than judgmental. “Out in the rain at midnight for a trinket.”

“I think it’s sweet,” Jehan declared. “I assume the goldstone is what we’ll alter?”

“Yeah.” Éponine scuffed her foot along the ground, twisted the ring between her thumb and forefinger. “I tried to get it on my own, but I couldn’t, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Montparnasse echoed. “You should’ve just come to us first. Even if you did have enough to get there by yourself, it wouldn’t have worked as well. Everything is better with three, Éponine.”

Fondness for Montparnasse and Jehan flashed in Éponine’s chest, warm and strong enough that they both felt an echo of it, as well. A grin split Jehan’s face and he laughed delightedly; Montparnasse allowed a smile, as well, rueful though it was. “We love you too, E,” Jehan assured her. “Question, though—do you and I need to switch places? Do you need to be the one to hold it, I mean? Or is it okay if it’s me?”

A selfish part of Éponine wanted to say of course it needs to be me, if she touches it I want to touch it first, but she knew that was not the best answer. “We don’t need to change the order,” she told Jehan instead. “I don’t want to dilute our power. And, anyway, I think this is more your kind of thing than mine. I can’t even see it, not really. I bet you can see it already.”

She handed the ring to Jehan. He took it, squinted at it, then folded it into his palm and closed his eyes. The hiss of the rain seemed to fade, just slightly, and when Jehan opened his eyes again they were dark, dark, dark.

“I can see it,” he whispered.

Montparnasse shivered. Éponine held a noise of anticipation in her throat. She used to hate this part; she had once prided herself on being solitary, being self-sufficient, and the three of them together was the complete opposite of that, but now. Now, she loved that first moment when they stopped being people and became an entity.

Jehan reached out his right hand, and brushed it against Montparnasse’s forehead, then reached out his left, and brushed it against Éponine’s. She could see it too, then: a glass sphere around a universe, stark negative space, tiny specks of white rotating around each other like dust in a sunbeam, buzzing, ready to fly together into something new at a moment’s notice. Yes, that was good, that was part of it.

Some part of Éponine registered Montparnasse make a small, considering sound, and then his cool, smooth fingers joined Jehan’s on her face, though his fingers pressed against her cheek instead of touching her forehead. She knew that Montparnasse’s other hand was stretched out soft along Jehan’s jaw.

Montparnasse’s contribution was yes, but and then over top of Jehan’s receptive little orb was the idea of one of those mood necklaces that little kids sometimes have, the kind that turn blue or purple or green based on the heat of your hand. After that was a tide pool, clean and elbow-deep, colored that sweet ocean blue-green that could almost be tasted, until the shadows shifted and the sun slid across, turning it clear and glassy.

Éponine’s breath caught. Yes, that was all good. She reached her own hands out, finally, and tucked her fingers against the hollows at the bottoms of each of their throats. Good, she thought, then gave the last bit that the image needed. Compassion, first; she fed warmth into it, understanding—not her own, but what she knew would be Cosette’s; reception, next, an image of a radio antenna catching waves of information and broadcasting them back out; a taught, steady bridge between the two, gold and shining and conductive; and, finally, a magnifying glass overtop of all of it, defining everything and bringing it to the surface.

She could feel Montparnasse’s approval, Jehan’s tripping excitement. Yes? She thought. Yes, they said. Yes.

Jehan moved his hand from Éponine’s forehead to grab Montparnasse’s hand from her cheek. Éponine fluttered her fingers up from Montparnasse’s throat to his forehead, and took Jehan’s hand. Montparnasse trailed his fingers down Jehan’s neck, and tangled his fingers with Éponine’s.

They brought their paired hands down into a knot at the center of their circle. Immediately Éponine felt the way they were connected, limitless, like a cold breath of air they all drew in with one set of lungs, and she felt the rush of magic, spinning from her and into them and from them, through her, and it raced around and around until it was thrumming at its highest speed. Hold it, Jehan thought fiercely, and Éponine clamped down on all of her loose edges before Jehan let go of her hand and Montparnasse’s at the same time.

Jehan wiggled the ring off of the tip of his pinky finger, where he had stuck it for safekeeping, and placed it in one palm before covering it completely with the other. Okay, Éponine shot at Montparnasse, and then she let go of his hand to bring both of hers up to cover the top of Jehan’s. Montparnasse followed suit, though he cupped Jehan’s hands from below.

That had always been their way, unless it was unavoidable: Jehan in the middle, Éponine on one side, Montparnasse on the other. It worked best that way, for them to keep Jehan as their grounding force, their mediator, simply because they both cared for Jehan more than they cared for each other. Not that Éponine and Montparnasse weren’t close, as well, but if they were to ever find themselves in a situation where they were told two of your three must die; who lives? they would both choose Jehan to survive without hesitation. That was just how it was. Maybe other people would have found it unnerving, but it was something that never even had to be discussed amongst the three of them. Jehan was their soul, and he loved them for it; Éponine and Montparnasse loved each other, as two people who share a soul must learn to do.

The three of them were all parts of the same picture, really, which was why they worked together so well. They were a triptych: each piece on its own was beautiful, useful, intriguing—but put back together, a complete story was told. Éponine, short and brunette and fierce, little pocked scars under carved cheekbones on dull, desert-brown skin, black eyes alert and gleaming; Montparnasse, lithe and sharp and beautiful, well-tailored, with dark, airy curls and skin the color of parchment, brown eyes hooded and calculating; Jehan, sweet and dreamy and brilliant, eyes a warm, rich hazel, skin a tone of gold somewhere between Éponine’s and Montparnasse’s, everything about him eccentric and poetic. In their trinity were a hundred other trinities of tastes and behaviors and beliefs. Together, they were a gradient, a whole, at least where magic was concerned.

In their layered hands, the ring gleamed. The rush of their magic had centered, then steadied, then sunk into their fingers, where they focused on channeling every bit of it into the stones and metal pressed between Jehan’s palms. They held themselves that way, still, concentrated, until even the tail of their spell was in the ring, coiled and settled. Jehan blew gently across the top of Éponine’s hands to end it.

Éponine opened her eyes. She wanted to hold her breath, but didn’t; instead, she settled for vibrating in place. Had it worked? She wanted desperately to know if it had worked.

Montparnasse took his hands back, and then Éponine. Even Montparnasse, confident as he always was, looked curious to see if they had achieved what they had set out to make.

Jehan glanced around at them—always dramatic—and then slowly, slowly, prized his hands apart.

There it was, still a ring, still intact, but when Éponine plucked it from Jehan’s palm she took in a sharp breath of air. The goldstone, which had once been blue and glassy, was now, for lack of a better word, empty. A drift of bright, tiny specks spun lazily inside, catching green, then rusty red, then purple in some nonexistent light. When Éponine pressed the ring against her chin, it was warm.

Jehan laughed. Montparnasse, who had apparently been holding his breath, let it all out in a rush.

“I think it worked,” Éponine said quietly, then smiled at her companions. She felt like the same light that illuminated the inside of the goldstone was glowing in her chest.

Jehan pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Of course it did,” he said, then flitted over to Montparnasse and strained up to kiss his cheek. He turned next to the trellis; illogically, Éponine expected him to give it a kiss, too, but instead he bent down in front of it and came back up with a fistful of foliage. “Would you two like to stay at mine tonight?”

“Yes,” Montparnasse said, answering for himself as well as Éponine. Éponine would have been annoyed by the presumption, but they had done this so many times that Jehan had only asked out of habit. The answer was the same every time. None of them liked to be apart right after combining magic; it ached, like yanking out an IV needle. And Azelma was eighteen, nearly an adult, and was constantly assuring Éponine that she and Gavroche would be fine, was constantly reminding Éponine of all the ways she had taken care of them when she was far younger than either Azelma or Gavroche were now.

Éponine eyed the plants Jehan was clutching. Jehan, seeing where she was looking, brandished them at her. “Vines, remember? For Chetta? I’m just going to duck into the Musain—yes, I know it’s locked, hush—and put these in water for her. Wait for me, it’ll only take a moment.”

Once at the patio door, Jehan trailed his fingertips up and down over the stretch of door seam nearest the handle, whispering something the whole while, and then—amazingly—opened the door and slipped inside.

“Ridiculous,” Éponine muttered. Then, “Thanks for coming tonight, Parnasse. I know you think it’s stupid.”

“I don’t,” he answered, almost too softly for Éponine to hear. His eyes were tracked on the door, where Jehan had just disappeared.

Éponine sighed. “Have you thought about just…telling him?”

The look she got for that was sharp. “Of course I’ve thought about it—and how would that go, do you think?”

It wasn’t hard to imagine how it would go, not really: Jehan, kind by nature but kind to them, especially, would not want to hurt Montparnasse, but would also be worried about changing the dynamic the three of them shared. Regardless of his true feelings, Jehan would either give Montparnasse what he wanted or withdraw until he could pretend to have forgotten the conversation, depending upon which thing he thought most likely to keep their magical bond intact. His actual emotions toward Montparnasse would be impossible to divine.

“Right,” Éponine said a moment later. “I see what you mean. We’ll just have to come at the issue sideways, then, instead of head on.”

“I have no fucking clue what that means, Ponine,” Montparnasse replied flatly. “There is no ‘we’. You are not to do anything that will make me look stupid.”

“Of course there’s a ‘we’, you imbecile, there’s always a ‘we’.” Éponine flashed the ring at him in demonstration. “See? I’m not going to do anything terrible. I’ll talk to R, maybe. See if he knows anything.”

“He doesn’t. Grantaire is too far up Enjolras’ ass to know anything other than the finer points of Enjolras’ digestive tract.”

Éponine’s eyes narrowed. “Grantaire is smart, and a good person, and my friend—but more importantly, he’s Jehan’s friend, too. You know that Jehan wouldn’t talk to me about something like this if it involved you. If anyone knows anything, it’s R.” She slipped the ring into her pocket. “And besides, he hasn’t managed to get anywhere near Enjolras’ ass yet. If he had, I would have heard.”

The patio door opened and shut, and then Jehan sidled up to squeeze between Montparnasse and Éponine. “What’s all this about Enjolras’ ass?”

“Grantaire,” Montparnasse said darkly, as explanation. Jehan hmm’ed in understanding.

The walk to Jehan’s apartment was slow going; the rain had died down, but Jehan insisted upon going the whole way with one arm hooked through Montparnasse’s and the other hooked through Éponine’s, which made it difficult to do things like avoid ditches full of water or walk at a normal pace. They did get there eventually, though. Jehan’s housemates, Bahorel and Feuilly, were already home and asleep, but they had been kind enough to leave the porch light on.

Once inside, Jehan fumbled around in the kitchen for a few minutes to make a thermos of tea, and then he, Éponine, and Montparnasse migrated to Jehan’s bedroom in a sleepy trail. The tea turned out to be chamomile; Éponine took a few sips, then surrendered the rest to be shared between her companions.

Jehan’s bed was queen sized, and the shelf in his closet was stacked with blankets, which was why they usually ended up at his apartment if all three of them meant to sleep in the same place. Éponine retrieved her favorite of Jehan’s blankets—a blue and brown quilted number, made out of fabric depicting the most horrifyingly disproportionate horses Éponine had ever seen—and settled in along the outside edge of the bed, curled with her knees tucked against Jehan’s and her face covered in blanket all the way up to her nose. When she fell asleep, Montparnasse and Jehan were still murmuring to one another, passing the thermos back and forth.

*

The door to Grantaire’s apartment was the sort of gray that a thing turned when it had once been white, before life happened to it. The paint near the doorknob was smudged to near black, made that way from Grantaire pushing the door open and shut with fingers covered in charcoal or graphite or paint. The wood near the threshold was scuffed and dirty. Grantaire had painted a wide, unblinking eye to stare out at visitors: the lines of eye and eyelash were curves of paint in a rich shade of burgundy, the iris was a searing golden-yellow, and the door’s peephole acted as the pupil. Éponine knew that there was a second eye painted on the inside of the door, a mirror to the first eye except that it was closed, painted as a swell of eyelid and a fan of lashes pointing to the floor. It was a very Grantaire kind of spell: I am watching you. No one is watching me.

Éponine kept her fists balled up in her pockets, and kicked at the bottom of the door a couple times instead of knocking. Most of the threshold scuffs were her fault, which she was proud of.

“Hang on,” Grantaire’s voice called from inside the apartment, and Éponine stepped back to wait. She could hear Grantaire’s footsteps as he approached the door, and when it swung open, the scent of cedar rushed out to stroke her face.

The reason why all of Grantaire’s air smelled like tree became obvious pretty quickly. He was covered in wood shavings so small that they were closer to being splinters; his brown curls wore a veil of sawdust; his left hand clutched a bouquet of tools, some stabby looking, some scrapey looking, some just soft brushes or sharp-tipped pencils, all poking through his fingers like artsy claws. His right hand held a hefty wooden box.

“Hey, Ponine,” Grantaire said, not bothering to look up from the box, which he was scrutinizing as if some secret message was hidden in the wood grain. He immediately moved away from the door, back into his apartment and toward the stub of counter in his kitchen, which was also covered in sawdust. “Will you close that behind you?” he added, gesturing vaguely toward the door with the stabbiest of his tools.

Éponine closed the door. She locked it, too, because she was not the sort of person to leave a lockable door unlocked.

Grantaire’s tiny studio apartment managed to cram in a bed, a dresser that was piled three feet high with books, a secondhand drafting table, and a tall cabinet that was overflowing with art supplies, as well as the bathroom, closet, and kitchenette area. The state of the place could charitably be called a train wreck: between the apartment complex’s terrible maintenance, and Grantaire’s explosion of clothes and half-finished projects, it was not the most inviting of spaces. Grantaire might have apologized for the mess to some people, but Éponine was not one of them.

“I’m putting this on the floor,” Éponine called, as she removed the collection of hemorrhaging watercolor and tracing paper pads that was stacked on the rolling desk chair. She tossed them on top of an already started pile of similar supplies, and settled onto the chair. Something crackled ominously when she leaned back.

“Okay,” Grantaire agreed, then looked up from the box, which he was scraping at studiously. “Wait, what is it?” Éponine pointed at the paper she had moved. “Oh, yeah, that’s fine,” he reaffirmed, leaning back over the counter. He blew on the box, and sent a few more wood shavings flying.

Éponine scooted the chair away from the drafting table, and used her feet to pull it and herself across the floor. It scratched along the hardwood more than it rolled, but eventually she reached Grantaire’s counter. “What’s all this, then?” She asked, jerking her chin to indicate Grantaire’s general situation.

Grantaire pulled a face. “It occurred to me that carving the spells into things as well as painting them on might make the spells last longer. Figured I would try it out.”

“Makes sense.” Éponine dragged a fingertip through the closest patch of sawdust, and then again, and then a third time, to make a smiley face. “How’s it coming along?”

“Horribly. Looks like shit and I hate it. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing.”

Éponine peered over at Grantaire’s little box. She could see a few lines of filigree hewn out, some leaves carved with smooth, thin veins raised in contrast, and sketches of various runes interwoven on the lid. She thought it looked fine, but she didn’t tell Grantaire this; he only appreciated compliments he agreed with, and regarded anything else as charitable bullshit.

Grantaire did something fiddly to a leaf using the tool he was holding, cursed loudly, and set the box and tool down on the counter in a precise, gentle fashion that meant he really wanted nothing more than to throw both things across the room. “I hate art,” he said conversationally, and then began to sweep wood shavings off of the counter into a white, plastic trash can.

“Mhmm.” Éponine added an angry V of eyebrows to her smiley face, right before Grantaire’s broad palm sent it to an early grave. “So what’s Jehan’s deal, do you think?”

“What, like—just in general? I mean…he once told me that his earliest memory is of being startled by a gargoyle, so that might have something to do with it.” Grantaire set the trash can down. “Was that the answer you were looking for? Or are we talking more specific?”

“That gargoyle thing makes so much sense,” Éponine mused. “But yeah, more specific. As in, any great loves of his life he may have mentioned?”

Grantaire tilted his head in consideration, then bent over the sink and began shaking sawdust out of his hair. When he straightened up, he looked somewhat less like the ghost of a lumberjack. “He’s not mentioned anyone to me, no. But,” he advised, “If you want my professional opinion, I think there must be somebody. Sometimes the tone of his sighs sounds far too similar to mine—and if I were to be called an expert in anything, surely it would be in unrequited love.” He mimed tracking a tear down his cheek, eyes rolled to the heavens in exaggerated Romantic sorrow, and then pulled his shirt off and shook it over the sink, as well.

Éponine snorted. “Also in dramatic bullshit, R, don’t forget about that.” She slid out of the rolling chair, which creaked a loud goodbye to her as she did, and patted her jeans just to make sure she still had everything she came with. “So are you almost done? I’ve got an errand.”

Grantaire raised a dark eyebrow as he ducked back into his shirt. “Does that mean I’m meant to go with you? What kind of errand is it?”

“The gay kind. Or, the stupid kind.” Éponine shoved her left hand into her pocket, and curled it around Cosette’s ring. “The kind of errand that is both gay and stupid,” she decided finally, and stuck her right hand into its pocket too, just for good measure.

“Well,” said Grantaire, “making gay, stupid decisions happens to be my third area of expertise. Where are we going?”

“The Stalls,” Éponine said. She gave Grantaire an appraising look. “Also, your shirt’s on backwards.”

*

The Stalls were Paris’s worst kept secret—“secret” because the customers liked the mystery, and “worst-kept” because the vendors liked the customers.

If certain streets were taken, and certain corners were turned down on those streets, and a certain archway choked in moss and morning glories was walked beneath, a long courtyard of gray, chipped stone could be found.

The archway and its fence of warm Parisian limestone hemmed one side of the courtyard; the other three sides were walled in by the backs of graceful buildings that winked sunlight back and forth from their narrow windows. Green things fought their way through cracks at every turn, spurred by nature’s magic and nothing more.

Along the walls of the courtyard, and in a row down the center, little knobby structures rose in improbable peaks and mesas. Here, there was an oversized wooden well, with a door cut into the side to reveal a table full of polished stones and coins; here, a quilt was spread across the ground, piled with further quilts, as well as the wizened woman who made them; here, a salvaged library card catalog slouched, each drawer fitted with a tiny lock; here, a canopy made out of bed sheets hung over a round, empty coffee table.

The Stalls were a summer-long market where magic was bought and sold. It was open every day from sunrise to sunset, though some things could still be found at night. Different vendors arrived at different times, on different days; some tables rotated vendors, and some held the same person and the same wares no matter what. This was the place to go to have tarot cards read, to buy wellness tinctures, to take home a tomato plant that grew through the winter and produced iridescent, eye-shaped fruit. It was a place that drew the curious youth of Paris, as well as the older, more practiced generations. It was a place where, on any given day, Éponine and Grantaire were likely to find at least a handful of their friends.

It was a yellow, rain-damp Saturday, and The Stalls were humming and crowded. The sun felt like water on Éponine’s shoulders; the puddles still shrinking into the ground reflected the sky, and showed the sun. She wished for a moment that Jehan were with her, to translate the world into poetry. The day felt like it was made for it.

Cosette’s ring pressed against Éponine’s leg through her pocket.

Grantaire squinted at the scene, then at Éponine, and stuck his hands under his armpits. “There are a lot of people here today,” he observed.

“Yes. And we are about to add to the number.”

“Mmm.” Grantaire’s mouth turned down into a skeptical slant. “So what’s the plan, then?”

Éponine withdrew the ring, and flashed it in front of Grantaire’s face. “The plan,” she said, “is to somehow get this to Cosette without her knowing who gave it to her.”

“And to also communicate what it does?”

“Yes, preferably without her thinking it’s cursed.” Éponine scanned the crowd. She could see the flutter of purple fabric that she knew hung over Cosette’s table; a tangle of nerves crept into her throat. “Do you have any other errands here that we should do first? Not at all as procrastination, obviously, but just, like. You know. A different thing from what I need to do? Something that I could do other than this thing that I’m doing?”

“Right,” Grantaire agreed. His grin was as easy as the afternoon. “Just, a long, complicated task that isn’t evasive, but, wow, that took forever, it’s sure a shame we didn’t do that thing we wanted to get done today.”

“Exactly. Like, maybe we need to catch up on Mme. Brouillette’s adventures in magical mold removal. I’m certain it’s not going well. She’s wearing those pink gloves still, see?”

Grantaire cringed. “I am never talking to that woman again, I swear to God, Éponine.”

They set off together into the eddy of people, and sidestepped the woman in question, who was gesticulating wildly at a wide-eyed group of teenagers. She was encased in fuchsia rubber from fingertip to elbow, and was frenetically clutching a flyer emblazoned with a picture of a dog. Éponine felt sorry for the dog; she was sure that it could feel its image being wronged, wherever it was.

“I do actually need to find Feuilly, though,” Grantaire admitted, once they had cleared the danger zone. “I have some questions about box carving, and about how bad I am at it.”

“Men and boxes,” Éponine agreed.

Grantaire flashed his eyes sideways. “You’re the worst person I’ve ever met.”

“Yeah,” Éponine conceded, and then paused, taking in the tables nearest to them. One was stacked with plastic bags of shimmering, multicolored rolags; the other was set with three large, shallow bowls containing a liquid that somehow reflected nothing. It made her nervous, and she nudged Grantaire forward before the woman behind that table could make eye contact with them. “So, on a different subject, where do you think a girl could find some free paper, if she theoretically wanted to write a reverse ransom note?”

“Probably from Combeferre. I’m not going over there, though.” Grantaire stubbornly kept his eyes fixed forward.

Over there referred to a Stall that was three walls of bookshelves bracketed by several buckling tables. Every surface was piled with books and pamphlets and journals: they towered, and overflowed, and created new landmasses. Produce boxes and wooden crates set in front of the tables contained further mounds of books.

This was the Stall that Combeferre and Enjolras managed, part magical bookshop and part library, because of course everyone should have access to knowledge, and the unavailability of magical tomes to those of lesser means was what kept magic inaccessible, and being strictly for profit would contribute to the idea that magic is meant for the upper class, and blah blah blah. Éponine had heard the Enjolras Rant plenty of times.

She sighed. “Fine. Go find Feuilly, and I’ll go see if paper falls under Enjolras’ loan policy, or if it’s a profitable item, but he’ll let me have it for cheap.”

Grantaire laughed a humorless laugh, and Éponine watched him shuffle off in search of Feuilly’s Stall. She knew that Grantaire wanted nothing more than to paw through discounted hardbacks and argue with Enjolras, which was why he couldn’t do it. She sympathized. She was no braver than he was.

When she got to the book jungle, however, she did not find Enjolras and Combeferre being serious and scholarly; instead, she found Courfeyrac sprawled on the ground eating Doritos, and Combeferre fondly allowing it. It was a bit of a relief. While she liked Combeferre, and—well, had some type of feeling about Enjolras, Courfeyrac was a friend. He would understand about all the bad ideas Éponine was having.

“Hello, Combeferre,” Éponine said, in her most polite Dealing-With-People voice. She waited until he had acknowledged her with a small, impersonal smile, and then she turned brusquely to Courfeyrac. “Courf. I need paper.”

Courfeyrac dusted his orange fingers off on his thigh—Éponine could not believe that Combeferre was allowing this—and performed a backwards, pretzel-y movement that somehow ended with him on his feet. “We’ve got lots of paper. What would you like the paper to have printed on it?”

Éponine shifted from one foot to the other, and peered around at the tables. Most of the paper she could see was firmly embedded in the binding of some book or other. “Preferably nothing. I was thinking of adding the words myself—kind of an old-fashioned, do-it-yourself thing. It’s called writing? I don’t know if you’ll have heard of it.” It was an old joke; they had attended school together, where Courfeyrac had cultivated a terrible habit of neglecting essays until the last minute, at which point he would beg for a look at hers.

Courfeyrac grinned. “I always was better with the tongue than the pen,” he said, with a lascivious wink, and then began rifling through a tote bag that was leaning against Combeferre’s chair. “Is it the green notepad this month, ‘Ferre?”

“Yes, but it’s not in there,” Combeferre said, with an idle glance at Courfeyrac’s bent shoulders. “Enjolras put it somewhere.”

“God, of course he did.” Courfeyrac straightened, and turned to dig around on a shelf. “Beneath that Van Eyck book, do you think? I saw him looking through it earlier.”

“No. I mean he put it somewhere at home. I can’t find it at all.”

“Oh.” Courfeyrac frowned. His hand found its way into his hair, and, by doing so, earned him another lingering glance from Combeferre.

The corner of Éponine’s mouth twitched. So that was why Courfeyrac hadn’t been reprimanded for bringing contraband into a sacred space.

Combeferre’s eyes turned to meet hers, a beat too late. “Would the back of a business card do, Éponine? I have plenty laying around.”

She flicked her eyes toward Courfeyrac and back, raising an eyebrow. Immediately, Combeferre raised one back.

Éponine was surprised, and amused, by the lack of hesitation with which he countered her nonverbal judgment. She choked a laugh before it left her mouth, and, after a moment, offered a genuine grin; in response, his face produced a reluctant pair of dimples.

She really did like Combeferre. She would have to remember that for next time.

“Could you use a business card?” Courfeyrac interjected, with all the awareness of a bird flying into its own reflection in a glass door. “We really do have a lot. We’ve started giving them out as bookmarks.”

“What? No, sorry.” Éponine’s stomach gave a weird twist, as if to remind her that she was meant to be nervous. “I think a business card would be too easily traceable.”

Courfeyrac blinked. “That…was not a great sentence.”

“Not like that,” Éponine amended impatiently, “not anything illegal. It just wouldn’t work, is all.”

“What about one of those flyers from the animal shelter? We have a stack of them, but we’re not the only ones. They’re all over today.” Combeferre’s voice was still kind and impartial, but it was clear that he had decided to be on Éponine’s side. Éponine appreciated it.

“I don’t know,” Courfeyrac said with fake concern, “maybe an animal adoption advertisement is too traceable for Éponine’s purposes.”

“No, actually, that’s great,” Éponine said, already elbowing her way through books to get to the stack of flyers. “I think the heartwarming dog will make me seem more trustworthy.” She held the poster up for Courfeyrac’s scrutiny. “This good boy would never deliver a cursed object, would he?”

“Éponine,” Courfeyrac replied, “the things you are saying? Are not reassuring at all.”

“Cool.” Éponine took a pen (click-top, purple, branded with a white, delicate font reading the library : stall 36, an Enjolras idea if she had ever seen one) from a coffee cup bristling with them, and flipped the flyer over.

Cosette, she scribbled, in handwriting as unlike her own as she could make it, put this on when you do your next reading. I think it will help.

“I need to find R,” Éponine said, still bent over the paper. “He went to Feuilly’s. Can either of you see him?”

“No,” said Grantaire’s voice from in front of her. Éponine jumped; Courfeyrac made an amused noise.

“Asshole,” Éponine grumbled. “I need you to do your origami envelope thing to this dog picture. Also, what did Feuilly say?”

Grantaire rolled his eyes, and cast about the table for an empty surface; finding none, he settled for smoothing the paper onto a creased copy of Corps pour corps. “Feuilly said that it will probably take practice to reach the ‘particular standards I hold myself to’.” He ripped a skinny rectangle off of the unlettered portion of the flyer, and then set to work turning the square he had created into an orderly series of triangles. His hands, knobby and dry and over-large, set to the task with an effortless kind of grace. “He also said that his customers will be interested in whatever I make, and that I should focus on bringing him products rather than obsessing over their aesthetics.”

“I appreciate Feuilly,” Éponine said. “It’s almost like he knows you.”

“It’s almost like I’m helping you right now, and could stop at any point,” Grantaire countered.

“Courfeyrac,” said a third, disapproving voice, “please tell me that you are not eating those near my books."

This, of course, was Enjolras.

Éponine supposed he was beautiful; he had a lot of hair, at any rate. Absurdly symmetrical features. Brown eyes that caught gold in the sunlight. He was wearing a sweater with the sleeves pushed up around his elbows, and was looking as busy as ever.

Grantaire had told her once that the problem with Enjolras was that when he looked at a person, he seemed to really see them. Grantaire had also told her that he would do anything to be looked at by Enjolras—and would do anything, anything at all, to avoid being seen by him.

That was Grantaire’s perception of Enjolras, at least. Éponine wasn’t sure how true it was—she could feel the ache in Grantaire’s chest radiating from him in waves, a hurt thick enough to touch, and Enjolras had never seemed to notice it at all.

“I thought they were everyone’s books. Or is that not how a library works?” Grantaire couldn’t help himself; arguing with Enjolras was an old habit. He did, however, keep his eyes trained resolutely on the creases he was pressing into Éponine’s piece of paper.

“I—you know very well that—anyway,” Enjolras fumbled. “How are you today, Grantaire?”

“Positively bathed in divine light,” Grantaire countered sarcastically, “and also sawdust.” He straightened, and held the completed envelope out to Éponine. “And now, unfortunately, we must take our leave.”

“Oh.” The little shadows at the ends of Enjolras’ mouth deepened, just slightly. “Must you? Already? I had actually hoped to catch up with you a bit, regarding our last conversation—I read something fascinating about the link between Flemish Baroque painting and the development of French rococo, and I wondered if you might have time to share your thoughts.”

Éponine used the distraction of Grantaire’s mouth opening and making no sound to turn her back, slip the little ring out of her pocket, and slide it into the envelope. She shook it around slightly, to make sure Grantaire’s handiwork would hold up—it did, of course—and then she unobtrusively tucked the envelope into her pocket.

When she turned back to the conversation, Enjolras was saying, “Then perhaps I could walk with you?” and Grantaire was saying “Um,” and “Well, Éponine," and—inevitably, inconveniently, “I—sure, that would probably be fine.”

So that was how Éponine was left to pick a vague path that wandered through several unnecessary conversations and an unplanned purchase (a tiny bottle of glowy liquid that promised to stimulate rapid, healthy plant growth—a gift for Musichetta, to go with Jehan’s vines), all with Enjolras, Grantaire, and their passionate discussion following her like a cloud that rained words like “chiaroscuro” and “fête galante”.

Eventually, however, through the cloud came sunlight in the form of a purple cloth canopy, a small wooden table varnished a glassy red, a big water boiler, sachets of tea, cups, tiny pots of lotion—and Cosette.

All at once, Éponine remembered that she did not have a plan.

What was she doing? Her skin prickled with hot panic, her tongue was bigger than her mouth, there was a stone or a fist or a planet swelling in her throat, oh god, was she breathing? Could she breathe? Her lungs were too small, too big, they were growing wings—

—and then none of it mattered, because Cosette looked up, eyes dark as an apocalypse, hair light as a new day, and gasped, looking delighted.

“Éponine!” It sounded like she was saying, and, yes, she was beaming, standing up, waving with her small, precise hands. “Éponine, hi! I didn’t think I would see you today!”

It was a dreamlike thing, to step forward into the shade of Cosette’s Stall, to rest her fingertips against the smooth edge of the folding chair that sat in front of the table. Éponine echoed Cosette’s smile with a soft, true smile of her own, the sort of expression that Montparnasse would have absolutely eviscerated her for. “Hi,” she said. She gripped the chair, then ungripped it. Gripped it again. “It was kind of a last-minute thing, usually I work Saturday afternoons, but I switched my shift. Anyway. I dragged Grantaire here; you can see how that went.” Éponine cast a meaningful glance over her shoulder, where Enjolras and Grantaire stood, gesturing widely, blocking the flow of traffic.

“I swear,” Cosette said, “if either of them would just sit down for a reading, I could sort them out…speaking of,” she continued, with a sly glance at Éponine. “Is today the day you let me read you?”

“Oh! Nope,” Éponine said, as firmly and cheerfully as possible. “Maybe some other time.”

“That’s what you always say,” Cosette sighed. “I’ll get you in the chair someday. I even have a new tea, I’ve been wanting to try it out on someone.” She nudged a round metal tin with her pinkie finger. Her fingernails were unpainted, and the soft blue drapery of her sleeves gathered to an end halfway down her forearms. Éponine found everything about her absurdly delightful. “It’s sort of strong, but I think you might really like it.”

“The way you said that makes me think that I won’t like it at all,” Éponine accused, though her accusation didn’t manage to sound anything but fond. “What’s in it? Sage?”

“Well, no,” Cosette said. A small smile hovered around her mouth. “Orange peel, mostly.”

“And?”

“And? It is a psychic tea, so—”

“So, mugwort? Oh my god, Cosette.” Éponine loved her, she loved her, she loved her. There were no nerves left, no remaining uncertainty. Just the same realization she had every time she and Cosette were together, that there was no one in the world easier to talk to, no possible way to feel more comfortable than Cosette made her feel, no one alive who could love her if Cosette couldn’t. “I’ll buy some of your gross tea, but holy shit.”

“It is strong,” Cosette warned, as she twisted off the tin’s metal lid and began spooning loose leaf tea into a small mesh tea bag. “This is enough for a full cup,” she continued, as she set down the spoon, tied the little bag shut, and tucked it neatly into a larger muslin bag. “If I were to make some for you here, before a reading, I would steep a quarter of this amount. Keep that in mind.”

Éponine nodded, and as she drew the remains of her spending money out of her pocket, a sharp corner of folded paper scratched against her hand.

Right. That.

“Oh, no,” Cosette said, tucking some of her impossibly blonde hair behind her ears. “Eponine, don’t.”

Éponine’s heart raced. Had she seen? Did she know?

“Keep your money for next time, when you come for a proper reading. You really should let me do one, you know.” Relief hit Éponine instantly, cool and shivery like the breeze on her cheeks. Cosette offered her a smile, seeming rueful. “Actually, this time, would you pay me in your company? I want to wander a bit, and I’m a little too good at spending money if there’s no one to remind me that I’m supposed to be here making money.”

The answer, of course, was yes. Could there be any other answer? “Mme. Brouillette is about,” Éponine said, rather lamely. “We’ll have to wander carefully. Let me just tell Grantaire where I’m going.”

Grantaire would have to deal with the envelope, that was the only option. Éponine wished she could just hand it over herself, but she couldn’t, Cosette would take one look at her face and know, and Cosette was too good at knowing things to begin with. There would be no going back from it; she could picture Cosette’s face, polite and confused and sweet, disappointed, closing off.

Éponine would be left with no way to pretend that this girl could love her.

She turned back into the bright sun, ducked through it and a milling group of seventy-something-year-old men who were examining a fan of seed packets, and found Grantaire right where she had left him: arguing with Enjolras.

“It’s a nice idea, but do you have any idea how long it takes to carve a woodcut? It takes so fucking long, Enjolras, and I’m just not good at it, if I can’t make a box work for me—”

“Okay, you say that, but if magic holds better to wood than paint anyway, the production time would be more than made up when the woodcut was done and you were making instant prints rather than painting a hundred individual pieces of art! And you would have something that actually does what you want it to do! Would that not be worth it? You could do prints in person, Feuilly would lend you the space, people would pay for that, Grantaire—”

“Perfect, but you missed the part where I’m not good at it—”

Quickly, before Cosette could see, she pressed herself against Grantaire’s side, and slid the envelope out of her pocket and into his.

He started at the sensation, glanced at her, did a double take. His eyes were a little hazy, and he blinked to bring his focus onto her. “Hi, sorry, hang on Enjolras—is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’m going on some kind of adventure? Leave the ring on her chair or something,” Éponine muttered desperately.

She was just in time, because there was Cosette beside her, pretty as a cloud, if clouds had sun-pink cheeks and black, eerie eyes. “Enjolras, love,” Cosette said sweetly, “would you mind watching my Stall for a bit? Éponine and I wanted to look around, we won’t be gone long.”

“Of course,” Enjolras said, after a moment. Mostly, people did not tell Cosette no.

Éponine and Grantaire threw each other identical, bewildered facial expressions that fell somewhere between what is happening to us and good luck, and then she and Cosette set off through the patchworks of color, through the groups of shoppers and socializers. Éponine felt much kindlier toward them than she had when she’d arrived, now that they were all witness to Cosette’s decision to spend time with her.

They walked; they looked at cut bundles of sinisterly perfumey flowers; they waited in line for a cinnamon roll. There, with cinnamon-sugar in the air, Cosette reached up with her cool, narrow fingers—Seer’s fingers—and touched them to the dip of Éponine’s collarbone. “You have a line of this coral-y orange color today,” she said, quietly, secretly. The sound around them dimmed like an oil lamp being turned down. “Like the last little bit of sunset left before night comes. It makes me feel like I’m swimming. Or floating.” Cosette blinked, and drew her hand away. The sound turned back up. “You should really let me read you, Éponine,” she said, for the third time that afternoon.

They got cinnamon rolls.

*

When Éponine finally made it home that night, it was late, and she was tired, and she smelled like garlic. The left side of her head throbbed; one of her tables had tried to demand free bread without paying for any other food, and had thrown an absolute fit when she explained that bread came free with an entrée only. It would have been so easy to stir their drinks three times clockwise and once counterclockwise; it would have been so easy to stare at the man’s patchy dirty-dishwater mustache and think of fire.

She had not done either thing. Instead, she had brought home a lot of discounted pasta, which was something.

The house was only dimly lit, nighttime brown and black and orange under lamplight. It was quiet; she suspected that Gavroche was already asleep, so she set her bags down on the counter, kicked off her shoes, and allowed herself a moment to close her eyes. They burned, and so did her nose when she breathed. She was exhausted. She dug her sock feet into the carpet, trying to stretch out the ache in them, and she suddenly felt very young, younger than she was, younger than she had ever been allowed to feel.

Cosette, her brain reminded her, unprompted, and Éponine smiled, and then clapped a hand over her mouth to hold in a laugh. God, she was ridiculous. She opened her eyes and glanced at the front door, trying to refocus on the things she still needed to do before she could sleep. Had she locked it? Yes: the door lock was vertical, the deadbolt turned. The painting that Grantaire had made for her, the one of three black birds with a dozen protective runes hidden in the lines of their feathers, was still level on the wall. She lowered her hand from her mouth, fist clenched as though it held the laugh she had stifled, and padded silently down the narrow hallway.

Gavroche’s door was closed. Éponine took a moment to lean her head against it and listen. Hearing nothing, she stepped across the hall and knocked gently on Azelma’s door, which was cracked open and spilling light.

“Yeah,” Azelma said quietly, in her scratchy nighttime voice. “Come in.”

Éponine edged into the room, pushed the door shut behind her. Azelma was sitting cross-legged in her bed, staring dully at a textbook in a way that made Éponine’s headache worse.

The room was plain: there was the bed, the dresser, the night table. Éponine’s dirty clothes in one pile, Azelma’s in another. Éponine’s belongings shared space in this room, but Éponine usually slept on the couch. She liked to think that Azelma at least had the pretense of her own room.

“How was work?” Azelma asked, rubbing at her jaw with her thumbnail. She had also gone to work today, cashiering at the grocery store two metro stops over, a summer job which she hoped to keep even when school started. She was two weeks past her eighteenth birthday, and two weeks away from starting university. Éponine was so proud of her that it hurt.

“It was work,” Éponine answered blandly. “I brought home so much pasta, have you eaten?”

“Kind of,” Azelma said. “We should save it for tomorrow.” She snapped her book closed, and yawned. Her skin was the same brown as Éponine’s, her eyes the same smeary twin bruises. Her dark hair had the same noncommittal waves that Éponine’s would if she let it grow back out, though she didn’t think she wanted to.

“Bed time?” Éponine asked, kicking a pair of sweatpants off of the floor and into her hand. She thought she saw a shirt there, too, and worked on it next, hoping that it didn’t smell like her job.

“Bed time,” Azelma agreed, and then, “oh no, wait—Éponine, I almost forgot, your friend was here like forty-five minutes ago looking for you.”

The t-shirt Éponine was foraging from the floor tumbled from her hand. “Wait, someone was here? Which friend?”

Azelma shrugged. “I don’t know. The pretty one.”

“Azelma.” Éponine’s eyebrows spiked judgmentally. “Clarify.”

“Alright, fine,” Azelma’s tired eyes flickered to Éponine and away, very quickly. “The scary one.”

Ah. “Montparnasse?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. He just said to tell you to call him.”

“That’s weird.” Éponine fumbled for her phone, wondering what Montparnasse could possibly want badly enough to come to her house. “Thanks, Zelma. And, excuse me, but pretty? Don’t think that I’m going to let that one go so easily.”

Azelma pulled a hair tie off of her wrist, and scraped her almost-wavy hair into a sloppy configuration on top of her head. “All of your friends are pretty, Éponine.”

That was fair. Éponine leaned back against the wall, and thumbed her phone on. The screen was crowded with missed calls and unread text messages.

“Fuck,” Éponine muttered. She scrolled down the list: Montparnasse, Montparnasse, Bossuet, Montparnasse. She opened her texts from Montparnasse and scanned them.

Éponine, call me when you get this.

Are you at work? I’m freaking out there’s something wrong with Jehan

Bossuet is watching him for a sec I went by your house Azelma said you’d be home in an hour but if you can leave sooner please do

ÉPONINE ANSWER ME

Come to J’s house literally the second you can I don’t know what to do

“Oh, fuck,” Éponine said again. “I have to go, Azelma, I’m so sorry, I hate leaving you guys for two nights in a row, something’s wrong with Jehan—”

“Oh no,” Azelma said, with real worry. She loved Jehan. When she was thirteen, he had taught her that if you knotted string together over and over and over again, you could end up with a bracelet. “It’s fine, Éponine, just go.”

“Okay.” To Éponine’s horror, her eyes were prickling, starting to go blurry with a precursor to tears. She was so tired, she was so tired, what did Montparnasse mean when he said something was wrong with Jehan? “I’m sorry, I promise I’ll call when I know what I’m doing, fuck.”

Azelma uncrossed her legs and followed Éponine out to the living room, to where her shoes and her bag were. “We’re okay here, Éponine. I wouldn’t say so if I didn’t mean it. I’ll lock the door behind you, okay?”

Shoes, phone, keys, bag, jacket, all accounted for. She still smelled like fucking garlic. “I love you, I’ll call,” Éponine promised again, and threw herself out the door.

Their flat was on the second floor, so she raced down the stairs as quickly as she could, and started hurtling toward the metro stop. She still had a little over an hour before the trains stopped running, thank god, thank god, and she dashed across black, empty street after street until she saw the blessed green Metropolitain sign.

Éponine went down stairs until her legs were numb, god, she was going to have to inject herself with espresso, she might have tried to use magic to wake herself up more but she didn’t want to waste any before she got to Jehan. She swiped her Navigo, went down a few more stairs, because why not, and waited somewhere between two minutes and four thousand years for a train.

There wasn’t anyone else in the train car, so she sat, and closed her eyes. She had taken this trip enough times that she could count the stops and doze at the same time. The time passed, finally, and she swayed to her feet, rushed out the door, leapt over the gap. There were more stairs, and every time her feet hit the ground, the impact shuddered all the way up into her teeth.

When Éponine reached her friends’ apartment, she could see that all of the lights were on inside. Her breath was ragged and burning. She pounded on the wooden door with the side of her fist and tried not to imagine splinters, tried not to imagine anything that might be happening inside in case she accidentally created it.

Montparnasse pulled the door open almost immediately, and Éponine fell forward into him. He squeezed her tightly, just for a moment, and then pulled her inside. His long arm reached behind her to lock the door after he shut it and that, she thought, was exactly why she loved him.

“Tell me,” she said.

“I will show you,” he replied.

They passed Feuilly and Bossuet, who were looking worried and aimless in the kitchen. “I’ll make you some tea, Éponine,” Feuilly called softly, and Éponine gave him a thankful, desperately tired look—the same look that Feuilly usually wore himself, the same look he was wearing.

“I don’t know what he was thinking,” Montparnasse spat as he pushed open the door to Jehan’s room. “We were supposed to get dinner, and when I got here to pick him up, I found him like this.”

In the room, there were the normal things: the bed that was sometimes Éponine’s bed, the basket of knitting, the long mirror with the golden frame that had pictures and ticket stubs and scraps of small, pretty nothings tucked under the edge. There were these things, and then on the floor, in front of the mirror, there was Jehan.

He was cross-legged, and very still. He was slumped forward in a liquid, tensionless way that somehow made his limbs look more angular. His chest moved, but barely; it was nearly flat against his lap, and it brushed his thighs every time he breathed. His eyes were wide, wide open, all pupil, fixed unblinkingly on the mirror.

The most unsettling thing was that, with the lights on, the horror of the scene was stripped of its shadows, of its mood. The stark brightness made Jehan terrible in a way that might be missed, if no one was paying attention.

“No,” said Éponine.

“I know you hate it, Éponine,” Montparnasse said. His voice was flat, like it had already been filled to the brink with emotion and had no room left to carry more, the way a piece of paper starts to spit back crumbs of charcoal when too much has been ground in. “I wouldn’t ask if I hadn’t already tried myself. He’s too far in for me to get to. It’s just not something I’m good at.”

“What would he have even been scrying for?” The hazy, teary feeling was back in Éponine’s throat, and she swallowed against it. “Sit behind him, Parnasse. Straighten his legs and pull him up against you—he’s going to hurt from sitting like that, and he’ll just fall over if no one’s holding him.”

“I don’t know what he was thinking,” Montparnasse repeated as he dropped to the floor, shuffled his expensively clad knees across the carpet, and did as he was told. “I was afraid to move him. I wasn’t sure.”

“It’s okay,” she said mechanically. She hated scrying. She hated it. “I’m going to get Feuilly to make me tea. I bought some today, with mugwort in it.”

“For this?”

“Apparently.”

Éponine took Feuilly her tea—Cosette’s tea—and tried to prepare herself.

Once upon a time, Éponine had been very much in love with a boy called Marius. Or, she had wanted him to love her, had wanted proof that someone could, and it had felt a lot like love when it was the only thing she thought about.

Teenaged Éponine was magical, was untouchable, and she had loved Marius through the city, through run-down buildings and alleyways she shouldn’t have gone near, had loved him right under her father’s nose. Because they knew each other, Marius and her father, just like Marius and Courfeyrac knew each other. Marius knew everyone in Éponine’s life, it seemed, so surely they were meant to be.

Except Marius had come to her one evening, face burning with a smile that wasn’t for her, and had said, Éponine, I saw a girl and I need you to find her for me.

She would find the girl, she had promised. Marius’ smile had lit his entire face.

Éponine had wanted to see who would have all the things she would never get to have. So she had filled the bathroom sink with water, and settled in front of it, heart full of longing, head blank and clear. She had stared at the water until her vision went fuzzy around the edges, until it finally went black, and she had tried to push through the blackness to find the place in the past where Marius had met someone he could love. But Éponine had discovered that scrying was a lot like being deep underwater: when she had thought she was swimming backwards, she was actually swimming sideways, to a moment happening parallel to hers.

What she had found, instead of a pretty girl, was her father being thrown into the Seine. There in the blackness, she had watched him choke down water, and struggle, and gasp, and float.

Éponine had watched her father drown, and drown, and drown, and by the time she had managed to claw her way back to her body, her limbs numb and her heart a little bird with its bones crushed, she was no longer the person who had cared if Marius loved her.

It had been the worst moment of Éponine’s life, worse even than the next day when she was told that it had all been real. She had been out of control, ungrounded, lost; when she tied herself to Montparnasse and Jehan, she did it so she would never have to feel that way again.

Sometimes, Éponine wondered how Marius was doing. She was glad he hadn’t loved her. She was glad that she hadn’t loved him.

When Feuilly handed Éponine her tea, she squeezed his hand. “You can go to sleep,” she said. “We have it handled.” And they did. There was no point in putting it off, or hesitating. The tea steeped as she went back to Jehan’s room, and it steeped some more as she set it on the floor. She sat next to Montparnasse and Jehan, her hip tucked against Montparnasse’s long leg, and she watched him sweep his thumb across Jehan’s.

When the tea was done steeping—she had told Feuilly to use the whole bag—she drank half of it, and then held the cup to Montparnasse’s mouth so he could drink the rest.

“I am going to go,” Éponine said, when the tea was gone and she could feel it like an echo bouncing back and forth between her mind and Montparnasse’s. “I need you to stay here so I can find my way back to my body.”

“I’ll be here,” he said, his mouth moving so little that she wasn’t sure it had moved at all. Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe they were at that point.

Éponine reached her hand out to Montparnasse’s throat; he freed one of his hands to press it against her cheek. She breathed, in for seven seconds, held for seven seconds, out for seven seconds. The tea made her feel like she was dreaming, and when she turned her eyes to the mirror, the rest of the room had already turned to greyish fuzz.

Scrying wasn’t exactly like traveling to a different place; it was more like stepping fully into the place where thoughts lived, and out of the place where physical bodies lived. Everything was black—not black like a black room, but black like not having eyes. And somewhere, in all of that nothing, was Jehan.

Éponine was much better at scrying than she had been that first, awful time, though she didn’t like it any better than she had then. But being better meant that she would not let herself drift; the tea helped, and so did Montparnasse, who felt like a glowing thread woven into her consciousness. And if Montparnasse was a thread, she reasoned, so was Jehan.

Finding the Jehan-thread was not easy. Éponine dug around until she felt the piece of herself that was also a piece of Jehan, and imagined it twining tightly around her dream-fingers, imagined it like a fishing line that she looped around her hands, her wrists, her arms, as she followed it deeper. Flashes of white tugged at her from her periphery as she went: these were things she could stop and look at, if she wanted to.

She did not want to.

In this non-space, Jehan was not Jehan, but a cool, soft something the deep green color of things growing. When Éponine finally found him, she had been wading through the same endless, timeless minute for so long that she could hardly feel herself underneath the bulk of Jehan-thread she had collected. She fed it all back to him, bit by bit, as if she were a drop spindle emptying itself, and then pressed herself against him until she was sure that when she moved, he would move with her.

It was not comfortable. They were a loop of terror and relief as they moved toward the bright pressure of Montparnasse’s hand on Éponine’s cheek, and there was a sick, raw feeling that came with that kind of closeness, like touching the edges of a wound. It was the difference between being known by your friends, and allowing them unrestrained access to your entire consciousness: the first thing felt like love, and the second felt a lot like shame. But at least it was only Jehan, seeing those parts of her, only her seeing those parts of Jehan. If it were anyone but Jehan, Éponine didn’t think she would have been able to stand it.

There were parts of being human, Éponine thought, that no one else should have to feel for you.

Thank you, I love you, I’m sorry, Jehan was saying, and then they were separate, they were a pile of limbs on real, solid floor, leaning against Montparnasse like a stack of kindling arranged for a campfire. As soon as Éponine felt grounded in herself, she moved, first her feet, then her head and hands.

Montparnasse made a choked, surprised noise as Éponine drew away from him. Dimly, she realized he must have been crying, because her fingers were wet where they had been touching his skin.

“Ow,” Jehan whispered, and then Montparnasse was sobbing in earnest, drawing them both against him with his absurdly long arms. Éponine laughed a giddy, half-hysterical laugh, hid her face against Jehan, and burst into tears herself.

“Please don’t do that again, Jehan,” Montparnasse said, from somewhere above the soft, dark curtain of Jehan’s hair.

“I won’t,” Jehan promised. The words sounded small, and hearing them felt like a blessing. “Éponine—”

“It’s okay,” she said into the space below his ear, voice crackling with emotion and exhaustion. Her own breath was a hot cloud around her face. Éponine knew that if she continued crying she wouldn’t be able to stop, so she allowed herself one more moment of closeness before she wriggled away. Montparnasse’s gaze was shrewd and swollen as he watched her sway to her feet and began the last of the night’s necessary work: finding a blanket to throw overtop of the mirror. She didn’t think any of them would want to look at it for a while.

“Okay,” Jehan said, and their eyes met for a slow, steady second. She knew what he had been scrying for; he knew that she knew. “Tomorrow,” Jehan continued, “will you take me to see Cosette?”

“I will,” Éponine replied, before picking up the tea cup, and carrying it off to the kitchen.

When she returned, some tugging instinct led her to pause outside the door before entering. She waited, unsure of what she was waiting for—and then she understood.

She could hear Jehan’s voice first. “Tastes like dirt,” he said.

Next was Montparnasse’s voice: “Éponine had me drink mugwort; of course my mouth tastes like dirt.”

Éponine backed up very, very quietly, and tiptoed to the couch.

She only meant to sit there for a moment, to give them some time, but the road from sitting to falling asleep was short and swift. And as she fell asleep, she remembered that mugwort, at its core, was for dreaming.

When Éponine dreamed, she dreamed of a bathroom sink, filled to the top with water. The water reflected nothing, revealed nothing, but Éponine knew that beyond it was the girl Marius needed her to find, so she took a deep breath, and plunged her face into darkness.

On the other side, she saw Cosette.

*

The Stalls; the morning. Éponine had the dull ghost of a headache, a shift at work in three hours, and Jehan alongside her like a shadow. Normally, Jehan was lively and sociable, but after the night before he was quiet and kept his hand pressed to Éponine’s arm as they walked. She let him take as much comfort as he wanted. She was just glad he was alright.

The sky was a flat grey color that made Éponine think of cold mist on her cheeks, of wind from the countryside blowing in to mix the smell of honey with all of the city’s smoke and exhaust. Yesterday’s world of pretty yellow light seemed impossibly far away, but the nudge of fall wasn’t bad either, in the same way that The Stalls on a Sunday morning was a quieter place than the Stalls on a Saturday, but not a worse one. A place where Eponine could see Cosette could never be entirely bad.

As Cosette’s Stall came into view, Éponine’s heart rate increased in self defense.

“I think she’ll be able to help,” Jehan said suddenly, as if trying to convince himself.

“You do?” Éponine’s hands were starting to sweat. She wiped them on the sides of her legs.

“Yes.” Jehan looked at Éponine, and then looked away.” “Don’t you?”

“Of course,” Éponine said, and then they were there, and all of Éponine’s nervousness drained away, just as it always did when she remembered that she loved Cosette for a reason.

Cosette, with her white-blonde hair, and her strange, dark eyes, and her soft gray sweater, warm gray like a cat and so unlike the hard shell of the sky, smiled at Éponine and Jehan as if she had been expecting them.

Éponine smiled back, happy to have been expected. “Good morning—I’m still not here for me. I did bring you a different client, though.”

Jehan gave Éponine’s arm an approving little squeeze. “I’m Éponine’s friend, and I’m here for an outside perspective on the inside of my head. You come highly recommended; I’ve heard plenty from Éponine about how talented you are.”

Cosette laughed, before Éponine’s blush had a chance to get too inconvenient. “Well, you’ve come on a good morning. I have a new tool in my arsenal, and you can be the first to help me try it out.” She held up her hand and there, glinting in shifts on her middle finger, was the ring.

“Oh, how enchanting,” Jehan exclaimed, and Éponine experienced a brief moment where she wasn’t sure if she wanted to hug her friend or strangle him. She settled for gently removing his hand from her arm, and taking a step backwards.

“Isn’t it? A gift from a friend, I think,” Cosette mused, as she brushed her fingertips against the little bottles and jars and tins on her table. Finally, she selected a white tub of hand cream and a tin with a cluster of rosehips illustrated on the label, and pushed them forward. “I’ll give you the whole spiel, Éponine’s friend—”

“Jehan,” Éponine interjected.

“Jehan,” Cosette repeated, and Éponine was momentarily distracted by the way that Cosette’s eyes were at once lovely and bottomless. “My job, Jehan, is to look at all the things you are, and advise you on what to do with them. I am not a mind reader; I am not a psychologist. To my inner eye, people are made up of colors, and I read those colors the way other Seers read cards. It’s not quite the same as reading auras, because auras shift based on factors like mood and health, and the colors I read are intrinsic to each person—for example, many people have very red childhoods, and I can see that as a layer underneath the other colors they became as their lives progressed. Certain colors complement other colors. Your friends might have colors that are complementary to your own.” Cosette spared a moment to raise a sly eyebrow at Éponine—if only I knew anything about your friends’ colors!—and then continued speaking. “Some people are very loud on the inside, and I can see things immediately. Most people are not loud, and I need some sort of amplifier to see what they ask me to see. The two amplifiers that work best for me are physical touch,” here, she gestured to the little tub of hand cream, “and imbibed substances meant to temporarily lower your mental guard.”

“That’s code for gross tea,” Éponine muttered.

“It is,” Cosette agreed. “Now, do you feel like a hand massage, or a cup of tea this morning?”

“I think,” Jehan said, “I would love some tea.”

This was Éponine’s cue to leave. She had warned Jehan that she would not be staying for his reading, partially to make things easier for Cosette, but also because Éponine had been as close to Jehan as she ever wanted to be when she had returned him to his body the previous night. She didn’t feel the need to see that deeply into him again.

“I’ll find you when I’m done, Ponine,” Jehan promised. Cosette smiled reassuringly at both of them, and Éponine kept that smile in her mind’s eye as she wandered away.

Éponine’s wandering was aimless. She didn’t come to the Stalls as often as she might have, because she was always faced with the same problem: she had no idea what to do once she got there. Today, like most days, she didn’t want to spend any money. She might have gone to chat with Feuilly, but his usual booth was occupied by an extremely large man selling tiny iron ear cuffs and delicate, highly polished metal combs, and Éponine had no desire to find out what made them special. She was considering just finding a comfortable spot along the side of a building to sit and play games on her phone, when her decision was made for her by a sudden drop of rain, followed by another, and then fifty more.

There was one Stall that was guaranteed to be protected at all times from the rain, so that was where Éponine went. The library (stall 36, unforgettable thanks to Enjolras’ pens) was a dry oasis. Rain slid off of an invisible dome surrounding the small village of books as if it were hitting an invisible umbrella, or an oiled cloth; it was the same spell that Montparnasse had used to keep dry when they had made Cosette’s ring, just amplified by a hundred. The library was one of the few fixed Stalls at the market, so the spell had to be fixed, as well, which was not easy to do. It made Éponine think that there might be something worthwhile in one of Enjolras’ books, after all, if they taught him how to do something like that.

Today, Enjolras was perched on the same uncomfortable-looking metal chair that Combeferre had occupied the day before. Éponine would much rather have found Combeferre there this time, too, but she supposed that if Enjolras was good enough company for Grantaire, he would have to do for her as well.

Enjolras, for his part, was bent over scribbling in a little green notebook, with a second book filled with glossy pictures of paintings balanced on his knee, and had not noticed her at all. It was possible that the library was only a library and not a bookstore because none of its proprietors paid any attention when people took things.

The magic bubble only kept out water, not air, so Éponine shivered when the wind snuck its way onto the back of her neck. So much for August. She picked up a slim book bound in brown leather, and flipped it open for something to do with her hands; a dusty scent hit her as she did, like a bouquet of roses covered up by an old curtain. Éponine paged through, examining blank, yellowing paper soaked and stamped with the brown ghosts of flowers, which seemed to be there in place of words.

“Isn’t that book interesting?” Enjolras asked quietly, from very close by. Éponine jumped: she had not heard him approach her. Perhaps being deeply distracted by one’s own thoughts was an effect of being surrounded by all those books, Éponine decided. She wouldn’t be able to work there, either.

“I guess so,” Éponine answered. She closed the book gently, and ran her thumb along the side of the pages before setting it down.

“Someone used it to press flowers, of course,” Enjolras continued. He was frowning faintly, as if the idea of pressed flowers concerned him. “Combeferre thinks that it was used for more than that, though. There’s a type of magic that can be done with any sort of plant, where you split its essence--the physical plant in one place, the Idea of the plant in another. If, for example, you had a dying rose bush, the Idea of a living rose could be used to give the dying roses a push in the right direction.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Éponine said. “People use more than plants for that kind of magic. It can be done with anything alive.”

“I know.” Enjolras’ frown deepened. “It’s not legal anymore, even with plants, because of the atrocities that are possible with magic like that. They think that some of the Dutch still life masters used Ideas to make their flower paintings more than just paint--that’s why they’re so beautiful. Grantaire told me that. It’s a shame that we had to take something that could be used to save a dying rose bush, and turn it into horror.”

“People are good at turning nice things into horror.”

“They are.” The two of them were silent for a moment, before Enjolras tapped the cover of the book twice with his index finger. “I think Jehan would like this.”

Éponine looked up, surprised. “I didn’t know you knew Jehan.” She supposed there was a lot she didn’t know about Enjolras; this was probably the longest conversation she had ever had with him.

Enjolras smiled. It made his face even prettier. “Everyone knows Jehan.” He considered the book one more time, and then set it aside. “Speaking of your friends,” he said carefully, “I am wondering something about Grantaire, and I’m hoping you might be able to help me.”

Éponine raised her eyebrows. “Okay,” she said cautiously.

“Do you happen to know,” Enjolras said, without looking at her, “if Grantaire is interested in Cosette? Romantically, I mean.”

“What?” Éponine was so caught off guard that she immediately let out a laugh so violent that it made her chest hurt. “Why would you think that?”

Enjolras’ smile became rueful. “Yesterday, while you and Cosette were walking, Grantaire left a gift for her at her Stall. It seemed...very specific, from what he was willing to tell me. It made me curious.”

“That gift was from me,” Éponine said, immediately followed by, “oh, shit.”

“Ah.”

“I mean--I had Grantaire leave it, you know, because Cosette, and I didn’t want her to see that I--well. You know.”

“I do.” Enjolras’ expression cleared, but only for a moment. He glanced at Éponine, and then began shuffling books around in a way that did not look at all productive. “Sometimes I feel like Grantaire and I are friends, and then other times--well.”

“You feel like you’re more than friends?”

Enjolras dropped a book. He blinked, and stood very still for a moment, and then bent deliberately to pick it back up. “No, actually I was going to say that sometimes, I don’t think he likes me at all.”

Éponine stared. “You’re joking.”

The rain was slowing. Enjolras spent a pensive moment watching the drops of water skid off of the air above the Stall, completely oblivious to the fact that he looked like a scene out of a dramatic movie. “His moods can shift suddenly. We will be having a pleasant conversation one moment, and then the next it’s as if we’re enemies. I never know if I’ve done something wrong, or if that’s just his nature.”

The urge to turn to the mounds of books and begin shuffling them around was sudden and powerful; Éponine was really beginning to understand why the people who spent time here did the things that they did. Instead of further displacing the contents of the table, however, she settled for extracting a dog flyer from under an orange hardback called Poets for a Modern Era and folding it in half.

How much could she say? Her actions in this moment could either make Grantaire very happy, or could devastate him. The problem, really, was that no one wanted to speak for themselves--Éponine included. Éponine found herself thinking, again, that there were some parts of being human that no one else should have to feel for you. Somehow, she kept finding herself in those scenarios anyway.

Finally, after chewing on her words, Éponine said, “Grantaire thinks very highly of you. Sometimes too much so. His issue is with himself.” Enjolras’ eyes were shrewd; she kind of understood what Grantaire meant about him seeing people. She folded her paper again, because her hands were restless. “The thing about Grantaire is that he has these very specific ideas about what is possible and what isn’t. You probably know that about him already. The only way to change Grantaire’s mind is to show him proof that he’s wrong.”

Enjolras let out a long breath, and met Éponine with the full force of his gaze. His eyelashes were like tiny swords. “Okay. I can do that. I think. Do you know if he’s home this afternoon?”

The rain had died off for the moment, but Éponine knew that the likelihood of Grantaire leaving his apartment on a drizzly morning was near zero. “Almost certainly. You will probably find him covered in wood shavings.” She grinned suddenly, wickedly. “Also, if you kick the bottom of the door instead of knocking, he’ll open it without even trying to see who you are first.”

“That is good to know.” Éponine knew from observation that Enjolras’ smile was kind, when he used it on his friends. The smile he gave her in that moment was kind; it made her glad that he was the person Grantaire had chosen to love. “I think I will knock anyway.”

“If he doesn’t answer,” said Jehan, “take him to see Cosette. She’s awfully good at sorting these things out, as I just discovered.”

Enjolras and Éponine both made startled noises. Apparently, people were forever sneaking up on one another at stall 36.

Jehan tucked his arm through Éponine’s. “Are you ready to go, Ponine? I have a few things I want to share with you about the incredibly bizarre experience I just had.”

“Yes, hold on--if you do seek counsel from Cosette,” Éponine said, turning back to Enjolras, “bring Courfeyrac with you. He has no idea that Combeferre’s in love with him.”

Enjolras’ laughter as they walked away was bright and true, and it made Éponine smile. She hoped that he really did go visit Grantaire; she could think of few things better. Jehan’s shoulder was perfectly positioned for Éponine to lean her head against it, so she did, at least until it became too difficult to avoid puddles and take a walking nap at the same time.

“It’s always raining when we walk like this,” Jehan said, swinging their locked arms. “I wonder if that means something.”

“Probably not.” Éponine smiled at a vague acquaintance at the Stall they were passing, and steered away from them so as to avoid a conversation.

“But maybe?”

“But maybe.”

Éponine’s shoes were thin, and she could feel the cobblestones pushing on her feet. She was still cold; that was the one thing she disliked about having short hair, the fact that she was always cold now. Jehan was warm along her side, and smelled of something bitter and vaguely floral that she was sure Cosette had encouraged him to drink.

Cosette. Éponine glanced across the market to her Stall, just to see her exist. She was talking up hand cream to a middle aged cyclist. She was laughing, because she was always laughing.

“So.” Jehan swayed their arms again, and looked resolutely forward. “Your ring works. It was fantastic, actually.”

“I’m glad,” Éponine said gently.

“Mhmm. So,” Jehan tried again, “I asked her. About Montparnasse.”

Éponine slowed next to one of the walls surrounding the market, and Jehan slowed with her. “I asked what would happen, with the way our three energies combine, if I. You know.”

“I do know.” Éponine was fairly sure she had just had this exact conversation with Enjolras, except reversed.

“I love him,” Jehan said, staring absently at the milling crowd, which was larger now that the rain had subsided. “But what the three of us have is important.” He turned his eyes from the crowd to Éponine. “What you and I have is important. I love you, too.”

Éponine was not going to cry for the second time in twenty-four hours, she wasn’t, she wasn’t. “It is. The three of us--in a lot of ways, it’s saved me.” Éponine closed her eyes against the burning. “And of course I know that you love me. But it’s okay for you to love him a little more.”

“Not more,” said Jehan, suddenly fierce, looking at Éponine with his hair, eyes, skin the complementary set to hers. Jehan, the middle painting in their triptych, green something pressed against her soul. “Not more. Just differently. That’s what Cosette said. She told me that our natures are not so changeable as to shift out of balance with every new thing we do. If two people go together, they go together. And we can do with that what we will, but it doesn’t make it untrue.”

“Ever the poet,” Éponine murmured, and scrubbed her eyes against Jehan’s shoulder.

“It was your girl who said it,” Jehan murmured back.

“Not mine,” Éponine said. “I’m glad you love him. I’m glad he loves you. I’m glad Cosette showed you what was true in the ring we made.” She took a big breath, and it was only slightly shaky. “And now that we’ve done a lot of good sharing, I have to leave for work, like. Very soon.”

A few raindrops fell--just a few, like an afterthought. Jehan caught one on the back of his hand, and pressed it to Éponine’s forehead; at his touch, her thoughts became cool and quiet and full of possibilities, just like Jehan and his magic, a seed planted in good dirt.

“I think,” said Jehan, “that you should let Cosette give you a reading.”

“I think that you’re right,” whispered Éponine.

*

There were more difficult things in the world. Éponine had done plenty of them. Her friends were getting scared, and asking questions anyway, doing the difficult things anyway, and so would Éponine.

She had Cosette’s phone number; she had never used it. It had always felt like it would be an intrusion, for her to send the first message to Cosette, who would accommodate her even if she didn’t want to. Who was beautiful and otherworldly and out of reach.

Those were the same excuses Montparnasse and Grantaire had made. Who was Éponine to judge them for their excuses when she was making the same ones? And, anyway, things were turning out alright for them. Maybe it was the season for it. The end of August, rain and sun, good things coming.

Éponine sent, I would like to take you up on that reading

Cosette, less than a minute later: I am so happy and would you like to meet at the Musain this afternoon? We could sit on the patio

That afternoon, they met at the Café Musain. They sat on the patio. Cosette was wearing a long, flowy skirt, and Éponine wanted to feel the fabric, clutch a handful of it and know what it would be like if she were allowed. Instead, she smiled at Cosette like an idiot, and meant the smile so much, and did not feel self conscious at all. There was no one easier to love than Cosette, and being near her made it easy to extend that love to others, Éponine thought. Even to herself.

“I am really, truly so happy to read you,” Cosette said, with sincerity in every word. Her shoulder brushed the very edge of Musichetta’s trellis as she sat.

“I want to let you,” Éponine admitted. She sat across from Cosette, and tried, as always, not to stare. Cosette wasn’t wearing mascara, and her pale eyelashes were odd, pretty in a jarring way against her black eyes.

“I don’t see anything you don’t want me to see,” Cosette promised. “This isn’t a microscope into your soul. It’s an interpretation. The stuff that’s in you, from its language into ours.”

“Okay,” Éponine said. “Okay.”

“No tea today,” Cosette said. She fanned her fingers out to stretch them; the ring was perfect on her finger, the light inside golden like honey and sunflowers and dust in a beam of light.

“Is that you?” Éponine asked, pointing to the glinting movement in the goldstone she had modified in this exact spot, only a few days before.

“It is.” Cosette’s smile was nearly shy. “No tea today, okay?” she said again. “Jehan told me what happened.”

Éponine shifted in her seat. The metal edge of the chair cut into the backs of her thighs, and the feet of the chair made a horrible scraping sound against the cement as she tried to move it closer to the table. “I’m okay with no tea. I’ve had enough tea for a while.” Éponine ignored the phantom urge to tilt her head, run her fingers through long hair that didn’t exist anymore. Even while Cosette was looking at her, she was thinking of ways to make Cosette look at her.

“No hand creams, either,” Cosette said. “I think, if it’s okay, I just…” and she laid both hands on the table, palm up, and looked at Éponine with something like hope.

Éponine copied her, hands face up on the table. Cosette slid her palms on top of Éponine’s, holy palmers’ kiss, desert meeting sky.

The bright outside noises of the world turned down in one smooth gradient, like air deflating from a tiny hole in a balloon, like a hot coal in a campfire, cooling. Cosette’s ring gave one more lazy turn of goldenrod light before it dimmed to indigo and purple, with an occasional flash of green or rust, with moments of color so dark Éponine couldn’t see anything, and lightning-fast flashes of burning white.

“Thank you for the ring,” Cosette said, from miles away.

“I’m sorry,” said Éponine. She didn’t quite feel dizzy, but then she also didn’t not feel dizzy.

“Please don’t apologize for making me happy,” Cosette chided gently. Éponine had been looking at Cosette’s hands, seer’s hands on Éponine’s own, but she looked up at that, and saw a double imprint of sparks spinning in Cosette’s eyes, light tracers of what was in the ring that went away when Éponine blinked.

Jehan was right; they had done a good job.

“Look, now, Éponine. The ring shows you what I see.” It felt like the gravity had been turned up where their hands met. Éponine was sure they would sink right through the table. “I’m not sure how much you know about color theory, but colors interact with each other based on certain rules. Someone with dark purples, for example, might blend well with their direct neighbors--blues and pinks--but the combination might not be too exciting. There’s just not that much contrast there.”

Éponine watched it, indigo like the outside of a plum, purple the color of a bruise, ringed with subtle blues and magentas like the northern lights. Was this really all in her, or just in Cosette?

“Triads are better,” Cosette continued. “Three is a good number for magic.” The ring changed to show Éponine’s purples, pulling and pushing spring green and rusty orange in a slow wave.

“That’s a triad?” Éponine knew those colors, of course she did; that was Jehan, and Montparnasse, and herself.

“That’s why I knew you made the ring,” Cosette confessed. “Magic leaves a mark. Most people can’t see that mark, but I can. It’s all colors.”

“Colors and magic.” Éponine wanted badly to lace her fingers through Cosette’s. A line of coral-orange shot through the ring as she thought it.

“Like a sunset.” Cosette closed her eyes. “Like floating. When I get close to you, Éponine, you feel like night on its way somewhere, or getting into bed at the end of the day with all your responsibilities cared for, or the deep sea poured into a wine glass. There is so much of you, on the inside.” Cosette was whispering, and Éponine could feel it, the way she expanded inside herself when she became very still.

The sun was shining on them, but it still felt like midnight, where everyone was asleep but them. “Each color has a true complement,” Cosette said.

“Purple and yellow,” Éponine added. “I know that one. Grantaire taught me.”

“Purple and yellow,” Cosette agreed. “Exciting and lovely and easy. Impossible to miss.” She slid her hands off of Éponine’s; daytime returned, and brought its sounds with it. “It doesn’t always have to be your complement, that you fall in love with. But sometimes, it just is.”

When Cosette moved around the table to kiss her, Éponine did not think of fire, which was good, because the trellis would have gone up in a blaze. Instead, she thought of how lucky she was to live a moment like this. This was something she wanted more than anything else; this was something that was made for her; this was a flash of brilliance in the void, something to look at if she chose, and she did, she did choose it.

“I really wanted to read you,” Cosette said into the side of Éponine’s mouth, where it was turned up in a smile. “I thought we would both like to hear it.”

“You were right,” Éponine said, and she kissed Cosette, and drank light in from all sides.