Poison Priestess Read online

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-4592-8

  eISBN 9781683359449

  Text © 2021 Abrams

  Cover illustration © 2021 Jen Wang

  Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura

  Published in 2021 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  Amulet Books® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  ABRAMS The Art of Books

  195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007

  abramsbooks.com

  To Anne, for helping me bring some very bad and bloody ladies (sort of) back to life

  PROLOGUE

  PARIS, FRANCE

  May 12, 1661

  Sometimes when I fear I may expel my very soul into the cauldron’s fumes, I like to imagine that the fabrique is truly hell itself and I one of its lesser demons. A wraith, a capering imp, a nightshade wreathed in wisps of smoke. Some diabolical creature made entirely without mercy.

  Anything but the prisoner I am in truth.

  My ghoulish fancy requires only the barest stretch of imagination. Despite its soaring ceiling, the converted ballroom of the hôtel particulier that houses Maître Prudhomme’s candle factory feels as cloistered and scorching as any furnace. Cast-iron cauldrons of tallow and beeswax bubble all along the great room’s length, two dozen of them suspended by chains above roaring braziers. Each is tended by a barefoot girl clad only in a flimsy, sweat-soaked chemise, the linen slipping sideways to reveal jutting collarbones like blades, whetted by the ruthless wheel of hunger. In the room’s relentless heat, any more clothing would only be a punishment.

  Though perhaps, I remind myself as I wipe searing spatter off my cheek, it could be worse. Perhaps we are all fortunate the maître has not yet decided we would work more ably in the nude.

  I would not put it past him to strip us of the few scraps of dignity we have left.

  As they bend over the kettles, shoulder blades flexing like little wings with the effort of churning each blistering mass, the stirring girls remind me of nothing so much as fallen angels. Discarded and cast into perdition, forced to tend to the instruments of their own torment in penance. Save that my fellow captives are innocents, I think bitterly as I stir. Guilty only of being girls, unwanted and poor enough to wind up in this enfer.

  The ballroom’s curdled decadence only bolsters the illusion of hell. Above our heads swing ruined chandeliers, studded with blackened crystal shards like rotting teeth, dangling from rafters smeared with the tallow’s fatty smoke. While beeswax melts much more cleanly, releasing a warm, delicious smell, not even the royal candlemaker can afford to ply his craft in costly wax alone. Instead, only the maître’s favored girls are assigned to the five beeswax cauldrons, while the rest of us choke in the tallow’s charnel reek. The rendered sheep fat is bad enough, but the pig lard that yields the cheapest candles could roil even an iron stomach. Only the wildest girls, the banshees who court daily thrashings by the overseers, are consigned to that particular misery.

  For all my quiet wickedness, the curses I whisper into the tallow, I make sure never to be a banshee girl.

  But the new dipper who attends to my cauldron does not take such heed.

  Instead, she mutters mutinously to herself as she works, uncaring of who might hear. “May the pox speckle his manhood until it rots like grapes left too long on the vine,” she hisses, dipping the lines of cotton wicks looped over her broach into the tallow. “May his own maman grow to loathe the sight of his vile face.”

  Though she is plainly furious, the turmoil does not disrupt the deftness of her movements. She expertly dips, then lifts the broach, letting the tallow harden just enough before lowering it again. Never allowing it to linger in the molten heat too long.

  At least this one will not bring a beating down on our heads by overdipping the candles or melting them with haste.

  “May everything he touches fade and crumble,” she continues, “turning to the palest ash and sourest dust.”

  The ferocity of the words, the eerie malevolence of their rhythm, plucks some deeply buried string inside me and sets it aquiver. Though she does not rhyme, it still sounds like some wicked song, a perverse sort of prayer not intended for the ears of notre Dieu but something altogether else. Though I doubt the devil attends to mortal pleadings any more than God himself, who is certainly all but deaf to our predicaments, the savage sound of her curses appeals to me nonetheless.

  But for all that I like it, I am certain the foreman would not feel the same.

  “Would you hush already,” I snap at her under my breath, flicking her a barbed arrow of a look. “Unless you yearn to feel a bullwhip on your back. Beelzebub may not be near, but those cabbage ears of his are keener than you’d think. If he thought you might be speaking of Maître Prudhomme, I wouldn’t wish to be in your shoes.”

  She pauses in her labor, knuckling away a trailing drop of sweat. When she meets my eyes, hers are as dark as banked coals and unaccountably amused.

  “Did you say ‘Beelzebub,’ p’tite?” Her chapped lips quirk, tugging to one side, and her eyes ignite with interest. “That is what you call the foreman, I take it?”

  I hesitate, cursing myself for this slip of the tongue. There was no need to allow this stranger such an undue glimpse into my mind. Not when the morbid fancies it devises are the only things I can still afford to call my own.

  “It’s all right, p’tite,” she coaxes. “You can tell me of your thoughts. I will not turn them against you, I swear it.”

  I hesitate another moment, but there is something beguiling about her interest. She looks about nineteen, a little older than most of the young women indentured here; at thirteen, I am among the youngest, though little Berthe is only ten. In the sallow gleam of firelight reflected by the tallow, the girl’s face is stern and wary. Her mouth sits slightly askew, dragged sideways by the sliver of a scar where someone must have split her lip. But though she is as flushed as any one of us, with damp hair plastered to her head, there is something oddly regal about her bearing.

  As if she is some secret queen merely disguised as a wretch.

  “Yes,” I admit, casting a look over my shoulder to make sure no one else is listening. The foreman, Etienne, is still nowhere to be seen, though he usually drifts stealthily about the floor like some malign wind. “Beelzebub, because he is le Diable’s general and his right hand.”

  “So we are in hell, then,” she surmises with a solemn nod. “And Prudhomme our presiding Lucifer, I suppose. Stands to reason, sure enough; certainly reeks like the very pit in here. Tell me, p’tite, how long have you been here?”

  “Three years,” I reply, gritting my teeth as the tallow resists my stir. “Since the bonnes soeurs at the orphanage indentured me to the maître. There is a contract, they said, a sum I must repay for my freedom. But if there is truly such a paper, I have never seen it.”

  “Such an irony, to be sentenced to this mis
erable enfer by a clutch of nuns,” she mutters, her mouth twisting viciously against the seam of her scar. “I’ll tell you, should I ever find myself cast into true perdition, you had best believe I will have earned my own way there, rather than allowing myself to be tricked by a man again.”

  “What happened to you?” I cannot keep myself from asking. “How did you come to be here?”

  “I gave my heart to a gutless canaille with a cherub’s face,” she grinds out, spitting into the tallow. “He dragged me to the gaming halls in Montmartre nearly every night, gambled on my sight. But even a gift of prophecy like mine may sometimes grow clouded with such overuse. And then when I could not always see which cards would come, the bastard sold me to repay his debts! Can you imagine such a bedamned, shortsighted fool, to sell a divineress into servitude?”

  A divineress. I sneak another look at her, wondering if it could be true. If those shrewd eyes, the sense of steel and outrage about her, are truly the marks of a sorceress rather than a mere survivor.

  “And to be indentured to one such as Prudhomme …” She shakes her head bitterly. “You are right to liken him to the devil, p’tite. I have heard vile rumors of him for years, never thinking myself unlucky enough to wind up in his domain. They say he likes to inflict punishment for his own twisted pleasure.” Her eyes narrow with revulsion. “Sometimes, even, to kill.”

  I swallow hard, an icy flurry coursing down my spine despite the stifling heat. I have only seen the maître a handful of times, a smallish man strutting about the floor in his thread-of-gold waistcoat and red-soled shoes. Bewigged and powdered like a fop, yet gimlet-eyed in his inspection of the candles. The rest of the time the overseers act as his hands, whisking away the comeliest older girls from the floor and ferrying them to his rooms. Most times the girls return, wan and mute but dressed in finer chemises, allotted larger portions of our morning gruel at dejeuner.

  Sometimes they do not.

  “Maybe it’s only stories,” I attempt, more to reassure myself than because I believe it. Several of the girls around me have heard her, too; I can see them turning over their shoulders to flick fearful glances at her, murmuring uneasily among themselves. “Empty breath and bluster. People will say anything to stir up scandal.”

  “Not to a divineress, they won’t,” she counters. “Most would not risk crossing the likes of Agnesot Brodeur with lies.”

  The girl at the cauldron next to mine scoffs through her plump lips, rolling her eyes disdainfully. Seventeen-year-old Eugenie is as lovely as the icons of Marie-Madeleine that hung on the orphanage walls, her face a dainty oval, eyes enormous and velvety brown.

  “A divineress among us! How very lucky we are, to have such a sorceress amidst our ranks,” she croons mockingly. “And what are your powers, Agnesot, besides poor taste in men? Perhaps you can inflict the overseers with such dreadful cauchemars that they wet themselves in the night, and wake too afraid to whip us? Or no, that is too modest. Perhaps you can fly.”

  Agnesot laughs lightly, almost to herself. “That depends,” she replies, twitching one shoulder in a careless shrug, “on what I am called to do. What do you wish for, Eugenie? What do you want most, in all the world?”

  There is something about the way she says Eugenie’s name, like a menacing caress, that unnerves the other girl. I can see Eugenie tremble, as if nails have been raked down her spine. She blinks rapidly, struggling to compose herself.

  “A … a husband, I suppose,” she finally manages, faltering a little. “A wealthy one like the maître, so I need never be anyone’s drudge again.”

  “Easy enough,” Agnesot replies, inclining her head. “It will be done.”

  Eugenie stares at her with flat incredulity, then sweeps her gaze theatrically around the room. “And yet here I still stand, with beef suet in my hair and burns all along my arms. My miracle of a husband nowhere in sight.”

  She shakes her head contemptuously, turning back to her cauldron. “Don’t waste your time listening to her idle talk, Catherine. She is nothing but a charlatan. If she could do real magic, why on earth would she be stuck here toiling with the rest of us?”

  “Because magic takes time and sacrifice, chère, much like anything worth doing,” Agnesot responds with another shrug, transferring her blithe gaze back to her dipping broach. “And whether you believe or not makes no difference to me.”

  I watch her for a long moment as she dips her broach again, mesmerized by the conviction that radiates off her like heat. As if she is powered by an inner furnace of her own belief. “Can you truly grant Eugenie’s wish?” I ask, unable to keep a shade of marvel from my voice.

  She favors me with a smile, small and secretive. “I think you already know I can, p’tite. And I can grant yours, too, if you tell me what you want.”

  I think on it for a moment, frowning, but I cannot quite imagine what I might wish for, beyond the impossible dream of being away from here.

  “To be truly free,” I say finally, because it is true. Freedom is what I crave. To be unfettered, owned by no one but myself.

  “True freedom,” Agnesot repeats thoughtfully, drawing out the word. “That is harder than a husband—but not impossible, given enough time and the right tools. But, are you sure that this is what you want? No wish is granted without a price, and true freedom comes only at the dearest cost. Much more than most would choose to pay.”

  “All the same,” I say, lifting my chin in an attempt to mimic her enviable steel. “If this is all there is to life, to be forever shackled and in service to some cruel master or another, why even bother to live it?”

  In truth, I am nowhere near as bold as I strive to sound, my innards roiling with doubt; what sort of cost might seem high to a brash divineress like her, whose tongue flows so easily with curses? As if she can sense this hidden weakness, Agnesot searches my face for a long, fraught moment, her eyes sliding between mine. The firelight from the brazier licks up her face, flinging her cheekbones and eye sockets into stark relief. For a moment her youth seems to desert her, as if some withered crone peers down at me instead. At once ageless and ancient, delving past my eyes and into my heart.

  Then she seems to come to some internal decision, her lips pressing white and thin as she gives me a brisk nod.

  “Freedom it shall be, then, for petite Catherine.”

  “Cat. I prefer just Cat.”

  “Cat,” she echoes, reaching out to tip my chin with a light fingertip. “Un petit chat. You have the feel of a canny little soul, Cat. Tell me, have you found that you sometimes … see things? Perhaps know what might happen even before it does?”

  My mouth drops open. How she might know this is beyond me, but she isn’t wrong. Sometimes, when I stare into the creamy runnels of the tallow, it is as if my sight softens and parts, like a curtain sliding open to reveal a glimpse of what lies ahead. A few months ago, I saw a fortnight before it happened that Patrice would lose an arm when her cauldron slipped its chain and overturned. And when shy Mathilde’s belly began to burgeon, swelling with child, it was a surprise to everyone but me.

  “Yes,” I whisper, through a throat suddenly full of sand. “But I thought … I thought perhaps I only imagined it.”

  “Now you know better than to doubt yourself again,” she says, a touch reprovingly. “Given the chance to come into your own, mon petit chat, you will grow strong. Stronger, even, than I could dream of being. And I mean to make sure you have the opportunity you deserve. Once I’ve slipped loose from here and regained my strength, you can be certain the first Messe Noire I cast will be to set you free.”

  Before I can ask her what a Messe Noire might be, Beelzebub appears behind Agnesot, snatching her by the hair like a cat seizing a kitten’s scruff. Her head snaps back so hard her eyes fill with tears, but she doesn’t make a sound.

  “Is this what you’re here for, you trull?” he snarls into her ear, his crude face contorted with wrath. There is something base about his features, his massive, ungainly limbs. Be
rnadette calls him a golem—a lumbering clay monstrosity of Jewish legend, animated by its master’s will and malice. “To fill hardworking girls’ ears with such fanciful rot, instead of seeing to your work?”

  Agnesot swallows hard, her lips compressing into a defiant line. When she does not respond, he shakes her by the head so fearsomely that I cringe, afraid for her neck and spine.

  “Fine,” he grinds out, turning on his heel and whipping her around with him. “Have it your way, you impudent dolly-mop. If you won’t deign to speak, then I mean to make you weep instead. The rest of you, back to your tasks,” he commands over his shoulder as he drags her to the dim corner beside the candle-drying rack—the alcove reserved for our discipline. “And do not let me see your efforts slacken even a jot, unless you aim to be next.”

  I bend over my cauldron, stirring furiously as another dipper steps up to take Agnesot’s place. With each crack of the whip and muted howl, I grit my teeth harder, force myself not to flinch. Her pain is not your pain, I remind myself. This is no place for sympathy.

  Still, hours later, when the foreman and his minions come to herd us to the dormitory, I creep over to the corner where Agnesot sprawls in her bloodied shift. As she slings an arm over my shoulders and slumps gratefully against me, she whispers in my ear.

  “See how it is done, p’tite? Given the chance, always resist.”

  “But he beat you to a pulp,” I whisper back vehemently. “How could that possibly have been worth it?”

  She shakes her head as she staggers along beside me.

  “Pain is unpleasant, but it ends,” she rasps, almost panting with the effort of speech. “And it is a … a good reminder that evil exists. Always remember this, and let no one tell you that salvation might be found through your woman’s goodness. Protect a measure of your evil, p’tite. Keep it safe in cupped hands, and nurture it.”

  She stumbles on a crack in the floor, blanching as the movement jerks her ravaged back. And for just a moment, her bitterness seeps through.