Poison Priestess Read online

  But I am still not at all certain what drives Adam’s own ambitions—something I would very much like to understand.

  “So, we are agreed, then?” I ask him, taking up my goblet in toast.

  “We are agreed.” He clinks his wine against mine, holding my eyes even as we take our drinks. “A ta santé, Catherine.”

  “And now that we are partners, will you tell me about the skeleton and the demon’s face?” I burst out before I can contain myself. “The ones you conjured in your act. How was it done? Mirrors, accomplices in costume? I have racked my brain over it, and am still no closer to understanding.”

  He shakes his head, amused by my enthusiasm. “No accomplices. Much like you, I prefer to rely exclusively on myself.”

  “Until now, that is,” I correct.

  “Until now.” He rises from the table and holds out a hand. “And what I will show you, no one else has ever seen.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Devilmaker and the Mark

  Adam’s magician’s atelier is in the attic, the ceiling steeply canted from the pitch of the mansard roof. Unlike the rest of his tumbledown home, there is no dilapidation here; the air is kept scrupulously clear of dust, and all the wood has been stripped and buffed smooth. A large cage sits in one corner, holding ravens with their heads under their wings. My eye lands on the wall of masks hanging from hooks—a series of the diabolic visages I remember from the maréchale’s bal, along with uncanny, flattened replicas of Adam’s own face, unnerving in their eyeless stares.

  “Magnifique,” I murmur, drifting closer to run them between my fingers. Each is even more stunningly detailed when viewed up close, the features painted onto silk so thin it must be nearly sheer beneath the paint. The likeness to Adam is exceptional. “What intricate work.”

  “And see how they fit, one over the other,” he explains, layering them and then lifting them over his face to show me. “I paint them using a mold of my own face, to account for the distortion caused by my features beneath. My nose, my lips, even the projection of my brow—it all affects the verisimilitude.”

  “So when you intend to pull this trick, you begin the performance already masked,” I say, putting the pieces together, marveling at the ingenuity. “And from the distance at which the audience stands, no one is any the wiser. Damnably clever.”

  “Thank you, my lady,” he replies with a little half bow. “I like to think so. And if such trifles impress you, I suspect you will like my lanterna magica even more.”

  He leads me to a worktable in the corner, beside one of the dormer windows. An odd contraption sits upon it: a mahogany box with a protruding brass cylinder affixed to its front.

  “Behold,” he says grandly with an ironic flourish, though I can see genuine excitement and even a touch of self-consciousness in his eyes. It lends him a surprising and sweetly boyish air. “The magic lantern. Or as I prefer to call it, my devilmaker. It’s a Dutchman’s invention, one I came across and purchased during my … time abroad.”

  I glance at him curiously at this halting mention of travel, but he does not elaborate. Smiling, he lights a candle from the table and hinges open a door in the contraption’s wooden body to reveal the contents within. Peering inside, I see a concave piece of glass set into the center, a transparent slide slotted in front of it. Adam tucks the lit candle stump behind the glass, then jerks his chin toward the black velvet screen we’d passed on our way into the room, strung up by the door.

  “Take a look,” he says with a wink. “You might spot a familiar face. Or, rather, the absence of one.”

  I turn around to look over my shoulder, my heart hitching up and then lodging at the base of my throat. Adam’s magic lantern casts a haunting image onto the velvet backdrop—the leering skeleton from his act at the Pomme, though its outlines are crisper and more static without the smoke. Now it is more obviously a picture, a one-dimensional projection, not a revenant summoned from beyond the grave.

  “Mon Dieu,” I say under my breath, glancing between the skeleton and Adam, utterly enthralled. “It is so well rendered! Though not quite so terrifying without your artificial fog.”

  “Indeed,” he agrees, tipping his head. “The smoke is crucial to presenting the illusion—and to obscuring the black screens I use as a backdrop for the projection.”

  “And the dancing … How do you make it move?”

  “A simple mechanism,” he explains, gesturing me close to the device. I peer inside along with him, and he shows me the clever clockwork that rotates the slide back and forth, alternating between a series of images. “You see how different depictions of the skeleton are painted onto the slide? To foster the illusion of movement, one must only set the mechanism into motion. I wind it exactly like a watch, set to begin at a certain moment in the act.”

  “How clever,” I breathe, glancing at him for permission before I reach in to touch the delicate gears and threads that surround the slide. “And the slides, where do you obtain them?”

  “Oh, I do not obtain them,” he replies, grinning with evident pride. “I paint them myself.”

  He removes a walnut chest from one of the drawers beneath the worktable, lifting the lid to reveal glass slides stacked like playing cards. He riffles through them delicately before selecting one, plucking it out and offering it to me. I peer at its surface, a tiny landscape of withered trees hung with snakes—the fallen Eden from his Messe Noir, rendered in exquisitely miniature detail.

  “They are so little and perfect,” I say softly, awestruck by the artistry. “Downright breathtaking. Why do magic at all, when you have a talent such as this?”

  “If I could paint my way to power, I’ve yet to discover how,” he says, baring his teeth in an approximation of a smile, charmless in comparison to his usual beguiling grins. “Who are the painters who gain renown in Louis’s court? White men to the last, waxen as withered lilies. Do you expect their well-heeled patrons might be inclined to welcome me into their ranks?”

  “But you have the Vicomte de Couserans’s patronage now,” I point out.

  “Only because he believes I practice a low art like the occult, deemed appropriate for the likes of me. In the Sun King’s court, what could be considered a baser skill than magic?”

  There is a rancor to Adam’s voice, a bitterness even beyond that warranted by the arbitrary cruelties of the beau monde’s glittering world.

  “You hate them, too, don’t you?” I remark with sudden understanding. “The noblesse. Perhaps even more than I do.”

  “I do, because why should they have it all?” he demands, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Glory, luxury, even infamy. When they’ve earned it through neither talent nor perseverance, but only through a fortunate accident of birth. I deserve wealth and renown more than the lot of them—and I mean to have it, Catherine. And if I must struggle and claw my way to what should be mine, then so be it. People like us … we are never promised clean hands. Not if we wish to leave any sort of mark.”

  For a moment I can feel the wellspring of his throbbing need, the force that propels him forward. It kicks loose a fragment of a vision—an image of a woman’s lovely face, her eyes long and narrow as Adam’s but an even truer black, with a frank luster to them like freshwater pearls.

  Then her smooth cheeks grow purple and mottled, her eyes blowing open wide and horrified even as her mouth gapes in a scream.

  The meaning of this snippet is clear to me; this woman met her death by murder. And though I cannot grasp exactly what befell her, I think, with a sweeping sadness, that I understand who she might have been.

  “What is it?” Adam says sharply, jerking me out of my reverie. A thread of tension pulls taut between us again. He stares suspiciously at me, his face tightening with sudden mistrust. “Why are you looking at me so, Catherine?”

  His eyes flick between mine, leery and searching—as if he suspects what I was doing, and without his consent. But I know better than to admit to such an intrusion, even if uni
ntentional, when our partnership is still so new.

  “I am only thinking,” I say instead, “how much all those heathens at Versailles deserve to be knocked down a peg.”

  His forbidding mien loosens at that, softening into something more inviting.

  “I could not agree more,” he says, setting the slide aside to reach for my hands and thread our fingers loosely together. When he speaks again, we have drawn so close, nearly mouth to mouth, that I can feel his next words carried on the heat of his breath. “And who better to cut them down than you and I?”

  Adam and I decide to make Louis Guihelm de Castelnau, the Marquis de Cessac and the king’s own Master of the Wardrobe, our first mark.

  Four days later, the marquis sits across from me in the pavilion, having responded to my urgent summons with agreeable alacrity. I wrote to him only that morning that I’d had a vision, sent to me by our shared master—presuming he could read between the lines enough to surmise whom I meant, without me committing to paper any outright mention of the devil—and that I needed to speak with him forthwith.

  Now the chill September breeze stirs his elaborate russet wig, one of his ludicrous affectations. Only the king himself boasts a more boisterous head of hair, though his curls are said to be au naturel. The marquis grits his teeth against the prickle of cold, chilled even under his rich port-wine velvet.

  “While I am eager to hear what you might have to share with me, madame, might I ask that we retire inside? It is becoming blasted frigid, even this early into fall.”

  “Of course, if that is what you wish, messire. But out here, I can ensure privacy.” I sweep out a hand to gesture at the still garden around us, the last of the roses bobbing their heads in rhythm with the wind. I have dispensed with Pascal’s music for tonight, wishing to underscore the need for both discretion and urgency. “Whereas inside, as they say, even the walls have ears.”

  Interest sparks in his shrewd, pale eyes. “And what you have to tell me … it is of a very delicate nature?”

  “Exceedingly delicate.” I take a deep breath, as if to calm myself, and drop my tone urgently low. “As I said, I have been visited by a vision. As his devoted servant, sometimes the daystar communicates this way with me. And I saw you, messire … and not just you, but your brother. And his very charming wife, Gisele.”

  The marquis sucks in air, his palms flattening on the table, eyes roving between mine. I can see the frantic turning of the gears behind his eyes as he considers what I’ve said. While the wish he professed during my first Messe was to steal away his brother’s wife, it was written in such oblique fashion that its essence only became clear after hours of my scrying and some subtle research on Adam’s part, discreet delving into the marquis’s private life.

  Now he wonders how I could possibly know what he had meant without having truly been visited by the devil. I can see the precise moment he dismisses any doubts he may yet have held about my powers, any lingering skepticism quelled.

  “And what … what did you see?” he asks, his voice a rusty croak.

  “I saw how you yearn for her, messire, and how very unhappy she is with your brother. Were he not there, there is no reason to think her affection would not fall on you. Does she not steal glances at you when his attention is otherwise occupied? Has she not always been unusually kind in your exchanges?”

  “Yes, perhaps—but the scoundrel does stand between us,” the marquis mutters. “Though he knew I favored her long before he did. I would not even put it past him to have married her largely out of spite for me.”

  The animosity between the brothers is a well-documented affair. Moreover, the younger de Castelnau’s reputation for malfeasance is so prominent, even in the cesspool of the court, that few of the noblesse have managed to acquire quite so many enemies as he has. The man has made a blood sport of challenging lesser noblemen to duels over minor offenses, and then dispatching them. Adam confirms that even the Vicomte de Couserans loathes the younger de Castelnau, and the vicomte is so otherwise blase that he rarely bothers with vitriol.

  In other words, the vicomte’s brother is a victim well suited to our needs.

  “But what if he were to be removed?” I ask, fixing the marquis with a somber gaze.

  “… removed?” He blinks at me, brow knitting with confusion. “Madame, what do you mean to say?”

  I spread my hands, as though the answer should be obvious to him. “That Lucifer himself is inclined to grant your wish, using the both of us as instruments. Much nobler and worthier men than your brother meet their end before their time, messire. Through mishap and accident.”

  “Are you suggesting murder, Madame La Voisin?” His voice dips so low and circumspect, as if shocked by my suggestion, that I might even be alarmed if I could not feel his true response—the need festering beneath his skin like something long buried yet still living.

  “I am not suggesting anything,” I clarify delicately. “You are the one who drank the devil’s wine and ate of his apple, messire. You are the one who set this into motion with your entreaty. I am only relaying what I saw, and what our master conveyed to me. Whether or not you choose to accept his dark blessing is entirely up to you.”

  The marquis mulls this over, caution warring with that writhing hydra of need that lives within him. With a flush of pleasure, I see that Adam and I have chosen well. Not only is the marquis motivated and amenable, but he is exactly the sort of mark we wish to cultivate; a noble so highly placed he has occasional access to the king himself.

  It takes him even less time than I had expected to come to terms with fratricide. The alluring prospect of a widowed Gisele, waiting for him on the other side of his decision, likely helps.

  “And if I did?” he asks, teeth worrying at his lower lip. “What must I do?”

  “First, an oath upon your soul to Lucifer himself: that you will never speak of this again to anyone, lest he reap your soul before your time, and you spend eternity roasting in perdition’s flames for your betrayal.” I can see from the flare of true fear in his eyes that the gravity of the oath has sunk home. “Then, a payment to me, for the preparation of the poison. And for the rituals I will undertake to ensure our master’s continuing favor, to see this endeavor safely through.”

  When I name the sum, he nearly staggers bodily in his chair.

  “But, madame, you … you cannot be serious,” he stammers, blinking at me. “That is … that is a quarter of my yearly allotment from His Majesty, that is—”

  “That is what it costs,” I say, cutting him off. “Not only is the substance itself comprised of rare ingredients and difficult to make, but you must understand, messire, that each time I court our dread lord’s attention, I risk the very substance of my own soul. And he is a fickle master, as you must surely know. We must always be certain to appease him.”

  “I suppose that stands to reason,” he murmurs. “And what will happen to my brother?”

  “The poison you shall slip into his drinks at each royal banquet will drive him out of his wits over the course of a month, before finally killing him. It will appear as though he has been stricken with a sudden malady of the mind, one so potent that it eventually overwhelmed even his body.”

  I am not planning on using Aqua Tofana this time, as it would be terribly unwise to cause two identical deaths within such a short span. And the marquis does not need his brother dispatched with any particular haste. No, secret du crapaud would do well instead—

  Toad’s Secret, another of the occult poisons from the grimoire. Much less demanding to prepare, and in some ways even more heinous in its effect.

  A fitting end to such a bloodthirsty bane as de Castelnau.

  The marquis nods, undisturbed by the notion of inflicting such suffering on his brother—just as Adam and I had expected.

  “He has more than earned it, has he not?” the marquis says under his breath, echoing my own thoughts, anticipatory triumph sparking in his pewter eyes. “Detestable as he has been all his
life. No wonder even the devil can see as much. I do wish to proceed, madame. I wish to proceed now.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Bacchanals and the Ultimatum

  The marquis’s brother dies in less than a month, before the leaves have even completed their turn. The secret du crapaud drove him so utterly out of his mind that he simply walked off his own balcony in the dead of night, desperate to escape the hallucinations that had flocked to plague him.

  It could not have ended better for us, giving rise to not even a whiff of foul play.

  In the meantime, Adam and I have reworked our joint Messe Noire into a decadently gruesome spectacle far beyond what either of us could have achieved alone. Adam supplies a phantasmagoria of illusions with his devilmaker, while I invent lavish new rituals and procure ever more exotic snakes. We host them in my home twice a month, at both the full moon and the dark of the moon, in a banquet hall I’ve lined with vivariums for my more venomous additions. Each Messe devolves into a lurid bacchanal more outlandish and debauched than the last—dancing with the devil, Adam calls it—while Adam and I hold ourselves regally above the fray.

  Sitting side by side on black cast-iron thrones I’ve had custom built for us, both crowned with curling antler’s horns.

  The reigning king and queen of our own finely orchestrated hell.

  At each subsequent Messe, we allow guests to bring a companion of their choosing, someone they deem both trustworthy and worthy of the devil’s favor. And the Marquise de Montespan, taken by the glamor of our partnership and the twisted opulence of the new Messe, continues to introduce us to her closest cronies—ever widening the pool of suitable marks.