“He must really not be very happy with you, and I guess you don’t like him much,” Mack said, probing for any lingering loyalty she might have for her half brother.
But her eyes blazed with sudden fury. “Why do you think I traveled to Scotland with my grandparents and not my mother and father?”
“I—”
“Valin!” She spit the word out like it was a bad olive pit. “He sought to control me by placing a Vargran spell on my parents.”
“What spell?”
“My parents are no longer merely the owners of the merry-go-round,” she said. “My father is one of the wooden horses. My mother is a wooden swan.”
Mack felt as if his heart had stopped. And he had been suspicious of her.
“They go round and round now, in a meaningless dance to music they cannot hear, twirling through the void.”
At which point, with a shuddering thud, the jet touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport, outside Paris.
* * *
Sixteen
* * *
Mack, Jarrah, Dietmar, Xiao, Sylvie, and Stefan took the train from the airport into the city. Needless to say, none of them had ever been to Paris before, except for Sylvie.
It’s quite a city.
You start with the river that runs through it: the Seine. It’s a moderately large river, much more than a stream, but not quite the Mississippi, either. It doesn’t hurry, but it doesn’t meander. It sort of chugs along.
There are lots of bridges, most fairly modest but some with golden lion statues and whatnot. There are lots of boats—barges and tugboats and especially the bateaux mouches, which are amazingly long and narrow and usually glass-bubbled with tourists staring out at the city.
In the middle of the river is a pair of islands, one of which is home to the Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame—a very Hunchback of Notre-Dame kind of place.
There’s the Arc de Triomphe, which is a sort of massive stone arch marooned in the middle of a crazy traffic circle with about nine different roads coming in.
But the most identifiable sight in Paris is the Eiffel Tower. When the Eiffel Tower was first built (coincidentally by a guy named Eiffel, what are the odds?) everyone was all like, “Man, that sucks.” Or in French, “Mais, que cela sucks, n’est-ce pas?”
The problem was that the Eiffel Tower looked like it was made out of an Erector set, which was what kids played with before the invention of Legos, which was what kids played with before the invention of iPad games.
But over time people were like, “Maybe we were hasty in saying it sucks.”
Followed by, “It’s actually not bad.”
Followed by, “It’s epic!”
Followed by, “Are you dissing my tower? Because I will totally kick your butt!”
The tower is visible from just about anywhere in Paris. It will be at the end of an avenue, or you’ll be floating down the river and, hey, there it is, or maybe you’
ll see the top poking above a building. It’s ubiquitous. It’s a cliché.
You know what else it is? Beautiful. Especially at night when it’s lit up.
So anyway, add in a bunch of sidewalk cafés, the Métro, a few more churches, a scattering of museums, and you basically have Paris. So now you don’t even have to go, you’ve already experienced it.
One other interesting feature of Paris: the sewers.
Back in days of yore (say a thousand years ago, round numbers), when Paris was growing larger, people were saying, “Hey, we don’t have sewers, so we’re dumping our poop into the streets. Also our unused chunks of butchered hog, our dead rats, our rotted fruit, our three hundred and fifty-two kinds of cheese rind, and of course, during plague years,26 our dead relatives. The result is, shall we say, not as pleasantly fragrant as a nice glass of vin rouge.”