Poison Priestess Read online

  “At least I’m not the only simpleton taken unawares, non?” she mutters, then claps a mortified hand over her mouth. “Not that you are a simpleton, of course, I did not mean to—”

  “I did not think you meant to say so,” I reassure her, giving her shoulder a light squeeze. “Tell me, what is your name?”

  “Oh, how rude of me—I am Mademoiselle Claude de Vins des Oeillets,” she adds, dipping into a curtsy. “No one of any particular note, I’m afraid. My parents are both actors of some renown, but the family art of artifice seems to have ended with them. I am certainly no great comedienne.”

  “In my experience, there are far worse afflictions than a lack of artifice,” I reply, making her smile again. “Take it from me. You are entirely charmante just as you are.”

  “Thank you,” she says, bobbing another endearing, unnecessary curtsy. “And are you a friend of Adam’s?”

  “Something like that. Though I would call us more colleagues than friends. I’m the Sorceress La Voisin, in service to the Marquise de Montespan.”

  “Truly?” Her rosy mouth drops open, eyes flying wide. “You are the maîtresse-en-titre’s divineress? But you, you are so young! It must be très glamereux, being in such a grand lady’s employ.”

  “Would you perhaps like to find out?” I ask her, a wisp of an idea taking shape. “If you are interested, something might be arranged.”

  I know the marquise recently lost a trusted companion who doubled as her lady’s maid, and has been woebegone over the loss. I’m sure she would be quite as taken with the novelty of this girl’s artlessness as I am.

  And given the way the wind is blowing, it would not be unwise to begin protecting myself. There would be worse things than having someone in the marquise’s household firmly in my debt.

  “What?” the girl breathes, as if not daring to believe her luck. “You think the maîtresse-en-titre may have some need of me?”

  “Stranger things have happened, chère,” I say, taking her by the arm. “Come, and I will tell you what I’m thinking.”

  On the morrow, I wake better disposed. Before I left the fete, I made the introductions between Mademoiselle des Oeillets and the marquise, and just as I anticipated, my patroness was instantly taken with the girl. Enough to accept her on the spot as a replacement for her lost lady’s maid.

  Now all I must do is continue to cultivate my friendship with Mademoiselle des Oeillets, and, gently but insistently, never let her forget to whom she owes the elevation in her rank.

  And there is more wind to fill the sails of my restored mood. Tonight, I have a reading scheduled for someone new, a noblewoman who sought me out on her own rather than yet another of the marquise’s stale sycophants. The novelty of a session with a stranger has yet to lose its savor, and as she seats herself in my pavilion, I stir eagerly in my chair.

  “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” she says, adjusting her voluminous velvet manteau over her legs and flashing me a wan flicker of a smile, vanishing almost as soon as it appears. “Illustrious as your roster is, I thought I might have to wait weeks if not months to meet with you.”

  “I make it a point to set time aside for newcomers,” I tell her, inclining my head graciously. “Were I to read only for those whom I know well, it might render my powers sluggish and stale.”

  Her lips twitch at the mention of my powers, curling a little as if in skepticism. Something about the expression renders her face, large-eyed and dainty as a madonna’s, vaguely familiar. I squint at her for a moment, trying to pinpoint the source of this odd sense of recognition. Perhaps it is no more than her stylish aspect; surely a thousand well-bred women sport such tight curls, rouged cheeks, and velvet beauty marks speckling heavily powdered skin.

  Even more oddly, she watches me with a bewildered crease between her own brows, as if I might be familiar to her, too.

  “But enough about me, madame,” I say a bit uneasily, thrown off by her keen attention. “Shall we begin?”

  She nods, though I can still feel her assessing eyes as I bend over her hands. A vision washes over me almost immediately, nearly painful in its force, yanked brutally forth by the ferocity of her need.

  “Two men on either side of you,” I whisper, a little dizzy with the onslaught of the sight. It pounds in my skull like a pendulum swinging from side to side. The vision crystallizes before me in the form of an otherworldly chessboard, in which she appears as a queen flanked by both a bishop and a rook. “One, you are shackled to by the ring on your hand. The other, you long for, just as he yearns for you.”

  I glance up to see her eyes widen with surprise, then narrow with satisfaction.

  “Good,” she says shortly. “Good, so far. And what else?”

  “The bishop,” I say hoarsely, the words sour in my mouth. I watch as the piece chivies the queen ruthlessly across the board, badgering her back and forth, never allowing her a moment’s rest. “Your husband. He … he uses you ill.”

  “That he does,” she says with a terrible equanimity. As though this abuse has come to be simply a matter of course for her.

  “And the other man …” I begin, trying to see beyond the vision’s symbolism. “Not only your lover, but an artist. His art is how you first fell in love.”

  “The painter my own husband commissioned to paint my likeness, yes. And he is everything my husband is not,” she bites off with a shake of her head so furious it near unseats her wig. “Penniless yet rich in talent. So gentle, and unfathomably kind. A man the likes of which I did not even think existed.”

  In my vision, the queen begins to shed a glow onto the dreamscape board, emanating a dreadful crackle of light like a thunderhead. Then she rears back and cracks into the bishop, sending him spinning off the board, which rives itself in two beneath the force of her quaking rage. But the solitary rook remains, safe by the queen’s side.

  “And you wish your husband dead so you might be free of your torment—and free to wed this other man instead.” I sit back, letting the remnants of the vision slip away as I release her hands. “But since the law gives you no recourse, you have come to me for help.”

  She nods ardently, eager eyes fastening to mine. There is a new light to them now, a sort of certainty. Something like recognition.

  “They speak of your potions with such veneration at Versailles, you know,” she says, her voice taking on a wheedling tone. “I’ve heard rumor that the marquise even credits your love philters with having won her the king’s affections. And I thought, if you could manage something so grand and all-encompassing as love …”

  “That I should not blink at a spot of murder,” I finish wryly, shaking my head. “I am sorry to disappoint you, but you have come knocking at the wrong door, madame. I am no widow-maker. Not even when it comes to heavy-fisted louts.”

  She blinks at me, taken aback by the staunchness of my refusal. Then a small, strange smile overtakes her face, sparking an unnerving glimmer in her eyes.

  “Not even at the request of an old friend, Madame La Voisin?” she says with deceptive lightness, tilting her head. “Not even then?”

  “What are you saying?” I narrow my eyes, scrutinizing her in the pavilion’s flickering light, unease nudging in my belly. That eerie familiarity beckons to me again, crooking its finger at me from the shadows. “What friend?”

  “Come, Catherine.” She leans forward, letting the candlelight bathe her face. “Have so many years passed since the fabrique that you truly do not recognize me?”

  At the mention of the fabrique, my heart thrashes like a snared rabbit, fit to escape the confines of my chest. When I still say nothing, she shakes her head with mock disappointment, pushing her pointed sleeves up to her elbows.

  “Here,” she says flatly, stretching her arms across the table for my inspection. “Perhaps this will help.”

  My lungs suddenly shrunken with fear, I look down to find that the insides of her arms are silvery with scars. A gallery of little burns exactly like
my own.

  Where both of us were scalded by droplets of tallow spitting from a cauldron too vigorously stirred.

  “Eugenie!” I breathe, my eyes flying up to her face—which seems to waver and then resolve, hardening like wax into the memory of the girl I knew at the fabrique. Pretty, sharp-tongued Eugenie, who once tended to the cauldron beside my own. “Is it—Could it truly be you?”

  “I am afraid so,” she retorts, pulling back her arms and crossing them over her chest. “I was not sure of you, either, at first, but I could not mistake that hair for long. Little Catherine, grown up to be nothing less than the maîtresse-entitre’s divineress. You really have come up in the world, just as that bedamned Agnesot said you would.”

  “And you wished for a husband!” I blurt out, remembering her mockery and taunts, her challenging scorn. “When Agnesot offered you a wish to prove her powers. A wealthy husband, so you need never toil in the fabrique again.”

  “They do say to be careful what you wish for,” she says darkly, setting her teeth. “Especially when spurning a divineress. She certainly made a fool of me in the end. Because when I said I wished to wed a wealthy man like the maître, rest assured I did not actually mean Prudhomme himself.”

  “Maître Prudhomme,” I whisper through numb lips, suddenly struggling to breathe. “That is whom you wed?”

  “Trust me, I did not become the royal candler’s wife of my own choosing.” Her eyes burn, dancing with the candle’s reflected flame. “He took, shall we say, a special shine to me.”

  I shake my head, jittery with panic, a terrible weakness seeping into my limbs. Like the remembered feeling of being helpless beneath a pinning weight, the burn of a bullwhip scored across my back. “What … what do you mean?”

  “Catherine, please.” She pins me in place with an unwontedly tender look, a dreadful sort of gentleness that leaves me with nowhere to hide. Where could I even hope to conceal myself, from a girl who once dwelled alongside me in hell? “You may not have met with such a fate yourself, but you must have known—or at the very least suspected—what happened to those of us he summoned away from the floor.”

  I bite down on the insides of my cheeks until I taste the iron tang of blood, fighting a tide of tears so inexorable I fear it might sweep me away.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper through trembling lips, though I can feel the stirring of some great and vicious fury beating inside me like bat wings, both leathery and clawed.

  Eugenie leans forward, propping her elbows on the table and fixing me with an unflinching stare.

  “You are not the one who should be sorry, Catherine,” she whispers, her face setting in a bright mask of rage. Crimson splotches burn high on her cheeks, visible even through the thickly obscuring powder. “We were all damned in that fabrique, one way or another. Either tormented by the overseers, or doomed to become my foul husband’s playthings.”

  “But it must have been terrible for you. So … so much worse.”

  “Worse is that he chose to keep me,” she spits out. “Why, I could not say; perhaps Agnesot would know. But I do know that he is a monster who does not deserve to live. And that is why I ask that you help me kill him.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Recipe and the Alchemist

  Once Eugenie leaves, I retire to bed with my snakes. Usually it gives me comfort to have them coiled around me, but tonight I cannot even conceive of sleep.

  I feel as if I burn from within with stifled memories, swept up in a flood of scorching tallow that ravages all the defenses I have so fastidiously built. Over the years I have surrounded myself with instruments of darkness, from the pet Furies slung around my neck to the occult curiosities I collected. I enjoyed them for their own sake, too, but there was always more to it than that. A secret hope that it would all amount to some protection, a shielding rampart to guard me from the remembered horrors of the past.

  An effort to convince myself that I would never again be so trapped, nor so vulnerable. That I would never live through such a misery again.

  But now that I know others suffered even worse evils there than befell me, none of my efforts matter so much as a whit. The monster Prudhomme still walks the earth, more demon than any I could pretend to conjure. And though I have never been a murderer, I know what I must do. His death would not be true murder but rightful justice; the kind no one else will ever grant us.

  The kind no one ever grants unwanted and forsaken girls.

  Sometime past three, my bed comes to resemble less a place of respite and more an instrument of torture. Abandoning the thought of sleep, I rise and drape my dressing gown over my shoulders. By the leaping light of a candle clutched in my unsteady hand, I drift to my study to pore over a section of the grimoire that, before tonight, I have left untouched.

  Agnesot’s recipes for poisons.

  I flip through them, shuddering a little at their repellent ingredients, rejecting one poison as too obvious, another as too painless. Finally, my finger stills halfway down the fifth page.

  “ ‘Aqua Tofana,’ ” I read to myself. “ ‘A fearsome and fleet poison, bringing about a quick yet agonizing death without leaving any trace. Take two buds from the nightshade flower, an executed convict’s powdered finger bones, a handful of a virgin’s locks, three feathers from a black albatross …’ ”

  The rest of the entry reads as if it were half recipe, half spell. There is a lengthy incantation to be spoken over the brewing potions, runes to be drawn into its bubbling surfaces. The entire process is risky and time-consuming, unforgiving of missteps and taking well over a week to complete. But it is nothing I cannot handle with the grimoire’s careful instruction and my own steely temperament.

  However, the ingredients themselves are both grotesque and arcane, and I will require help procuring them. What I need, I decide just before the sun comes crawling over the horizon like some fat-bellied yellow spider, is a proper alchemist.

  The kind one finds in the cité.

  I crept out of the house in the freezing hours just after first light and made my furtive way to the cité.

  At such an early hour, I doubted I would be spotted by anyone in the marquise’s employ. But still I took every precaution, including taking a hired coach and swathing myself in a heavy cloak with the hood drawn over my face. Should my patroness hear of my foray here anyway, my pretense will cleave close to the truth: that I required rare ingredients for the love philters I still regularly brew for her, which I have not yet managed to procure anywhere else.

  I remembered the name of the alchemist Marie preferred to deal with, from whom she purchased the tinctures she peddled to her own clients. Once I arrived in the cité, it only took a few well-placed questions at several of my former haunts to find my way to the alchemist Blessis’s workshop, tucked into an alleyway off the Rue de Glatigny. I rapped lightly on his weathered door, and when it swung open with a wheezing creak, I presented myself to the man within as a colleague of Mademoiselle Bosse.

  Aside from his gaudy alchemist’s robes, richly embroidered with the discipline’s traditional white, black, and vermillion, Blessis is a small and innocuous man with a reedy voice.

  “Do come in, the air has such a snapping bite to it today,” he says with a curt half bow, waving me over his threshold. “A friend of Mademoiselle Bosse is always welcome here.”

  I incline my head, my throat tightening with the knowledge that at this moment, Marie likely does not consider me any sort of friend.

  As he bolts the heavy door behind us, I wrinkle my nose against the odd assault of odors that mingle within the workshop. The room smells both heavenly and rank, of fragrant herbs like meadowsweet and some acrid musk like a tomcat’s stench. Though he is arguably more dangerous than the alleged charlatans the Sun King means to stamp out, as a practitioner of science Blessis appears to have no need to hide the trappings of his trade.

  Or perhaps he poses as a simple apothecary to the uninitiated—and though trading in medicinal h
erbs does form part of his trade, even the most naive might balk at the contents of his shelves.

  They are stacked with bell jars of wildly varying sizes, bright liquids glimmering in some, others holding dried sprigs of plants or greasy powders. A few contain such oddities as live and crawling beetles, the pearls of tiny teeth, and iridescent feathers tied together at the shaft like unlikely bouquets. The trestle worktable in the center supports a collection of beakers, flasks, and some finicky contraption that I assume is used to measure weight. An armillary sphere sits beside it, golden and elaborate, winking in the light like a complex jewel.

  “And what can I help you with, madame?” Blessis asks, standing decorously by the hearth with his hands clasped behind his back. A cast-iron kettle burbles behind him, emitting a greenish smoke I pinpoint as the source of that offensive smell. “Arcane ingredients for spellwork? Herbs for a physick? I assume your interest does not lie with the transmutation of base metals.”

  “No, indeed,” I say, wandering over to the table to flick the armillary sphere into motion with a fingertip. It spins beautifully, the celestial rings whirling around the earth in a shimmering golden blur. “Here, I’ve brought a list of what I need.”

  “So you are attempting Aqua Tofana, then,” he says, his sparse gray eyebrows shooting up as he peruses my list. “One of the rarest and deadliest of the occult poisons—and devilishly difficult to make. I have never known anyone to try their hand at it. Unless I am mistaking your intentions?”

  I hesitate for a moment, leery of admitting to planning something so lethal.

  He flicks me a mildly exasperated look. “Come, now. What else might you mean to do with this particular assortment of magically endowed items and herbs? Do forgive my bluntness, but it is a necessary part of my profession’s creed. We value discretion, but cannot afford to court confusion.”

  “You are not mistaken,” I finally admit. His matter-of-fact tone sends a flush of misgiving rolling through me like a thunderclap, from the pit of my stomach up to my tingling scalp. Now that I am actually here, what I aim to accomplish suddenly feels all too gruesomely real. No hazily vengeful fever dream, but a cold reality only inches beyond my grasp.