Poison Priestess Page 17

  He feels like some beast’s gaping maw, insatiable in his desire to amass ever more gloire. To cement his legacy, to stamp the likeness of his face upon the kingdom like a blistering brand.

  “L’etat, c’est moi” is more than just his motto; “I am the nation” is the creed by which he lives.

  But Louis XIV is more than just leaping flames, the all-consuming inferno of his desires. He is also terribly afraid, of dying young and of being forgotten.

  “Louis Dieudonné,” I whisper so that only he may hear. “Even the Morningstar himself cowers before your ferocious light. You need not fear an early death, nor any violent end. Instead you will hitch France to the bright star of your soul, and bring her to such heights as she has never known. For three score and ten, your rule will cast a shadow over neighboring lands and even across the seas. History will know your name as the monarch who would not be denied.”

  The king hisses through his teeth, a great, ravening grin splitting his face. “Tell me more, sorcière jolie,” he commands, reaching up to grip my wrists. “Whether or not Satan truly feeds your gift, I would hear more of your sweet blasphemy.”

  So I speak and speak until I am dizzy and breathless, listing a grand litany of achievements I barely even understand. I push myself harder than I have ever done, feeling desperately powerful and strange. As though his future is an entire ocean I have somehow scooped up between my hands.

  Le Roi Soleil demands ever more from me, until I have spoken myself hoarse. The only thing I leave out is the dismal torment of his end, the gangrene that he will succumb to well into his old age, when he has finally exhausted the last dregs of his mighty will.

  By then, my vision has begun darkening at the edges, curling inward like a burning scroll. I am so tired I give in almost gratefully, my hands leaving scarlet trails as they slip from His Majesty’s cheeks.

  I can hear Adam’s voice calling to me as if from across a great expanse, but I do not even bother to struggle against the onslaught of unconsciousness.

  Now that I have done this great work for us, the least Adam can do is close out the ceremony himself.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Mother and the Duchesse

  Due to the unsavory nature of our magic, Adam and I are not granted permission to spend the night at Versailles despite my fainting spell. It is just as well; we would not have enjoyed its splendor anyway, utterly spent as we both are.

  Instead we celebrate on the ride back home, passing a flagon of the château’s exquisite wine back and forth between us. Though I am beyond exhausted, a triumphant satisfaction drips sweetly through my veins like some slow sap.

  “Did you see how he could not get enough of me?” I crow to Adam, tossing back a mouthful before passing the flagon back to him. “I thought he might keep us there forever, to hear his future spun like a story rather than living it at all. Like some greedy child listening to a fairy tale.”

  Adam casts me a cut-glass grin, lifting the wine in an ironic toast.

  “You heard what he called it, your ‘sweet blasphemy,’ ” he mocks, giving the words the king’s refined intonation. “I daresay he could not have liked hearing it more. And how did he style you again? Pretty witch, siren of the damned?”

  “Sorcière jolie, yes. It was a fine idea you had, to use me as the altar.” I wince a little at the memory of the marquise’s face. “Though I hope the marquise does not take against me now, thinking he means to have me. Did you see the way she looked at me when I disrobed?”

  Adam shakes his head decisively. “I would not worry. I watched her closely afterward, while you had him under your spell. She was fairly beside herself, all umbrage forgotten, delighted to see him enjoying her thoughtful gift.”

  “And you!” I smile at him, unabashed in my admiration. “The flowers and the bats! They will be chasing them about the room for weeks. I can still barely fathom how you did it, and I saw you prepare.”

  A furious trembling overtakes me then, without any warning—the overexertion of my sight finally catching up to me.

  Though we are protected from the freezing cold outside, the air inside the carriage seems to take on a bitter chill. Seeing my teeth begin to chatter, Adam swings over to sit by me, draping his cloak over my shoulders and tugging me close.

  “You should try to sleep, Cat,” he says into the top of my head, his breath blissfully warm against my scalp. “I cannot imagine your fatigue, after spinning such fictions for him for so long.”

  “They w-were not f-fictions,” I reply through clicking teeth, nestling into the crook of his neck. “Every word of it was true. H-he will truly be remembered as France’s most majestic king.”

  He is silent for so long that I grow warm enough to become drowsy, thinking he must have fallen asleep himself. When he finally speaks, it nearly startles me.

  “How unfortunate,” he says, bitterness curdling his quiet tone. “I had rather hoped to see his court fractured in my time.”

  I stir against him, lifting my heavy head. “I did not know you took such exception to the court. Are we not angling to become the king’s dark counselors together?”

  “We are, to be sure, but I would prefer both. The noblesse are a tangle of heartless vipers, good for nothing other than being milked—as I mean to do with our Louis.”

  “Not that I do not agree, because you know I do,” I say. “But it sounds as though you have some particular bone to pick with the peers of the realm. Beyond what you have told me.”

  He swallows hard, his throat bobbing with the motion.

  “My father was a duc, you know,” he says in an unwontedly somber tone. “And my mother a chambermaid who caught his eye. He was quite taken with her, from what I recall before she died.”

  “I am sorry to hear you lost her. What happened?”

  “An ‘accident,’ ” he replies with a wry devastation that makes my heart hitch up against my ribs. I have never heard him sound so human before, so nearly vulnerable. “The story was that she fell into the lake on the estate and drowned. But she was a robust swimmer, and she never would have swum at night alone. Not without me by her side.”

  “Adam,” I begin, not knowing what to say. The snatch of vision I saw when we first began our work together floats up before me again, in the form of the black-haired woman’s lovely face. And that he is a noble’s son from the wrong side of the blanket explains so many things; the scope of his learning, his unstudied arrogance. “That is … that must have been truly terrible for you.”

  “It was the worst heartbreak of my life,” he says softly, gathering me closer. “Maman was such a sunshine. There was no proof of any malefaction, of course, but of course that’s what it was. The duchesse could not stand having my mother under her roof—especially once I grew old enough for my father to show in my face. For him to begin taking an interest in me.”

  “And was the duchesse punished for her crime?”

  “Come now, Cat, you know better than that,” he scoffs, barking out a scornful laugh. “When I caused a ruckus, the duchesse had me sentenced to the galleys for an invented crime. My father did not even bother to fight for me, not when she was mother to his legitimate son. It took me years to claw my way back to France’s shores.”

  I breathe for a moment, trying to grasp the stunning extent of this betrayal. No wonder Adam has no compunction when it comes to poisoning the noblesse.

  “We will make them pay, Adam.” The words fly loose before I can properly consider them, but I find that I mean what I say. “Your father and stepmother both. Your half brother, too, if you wish.”

  “Of course we shall,” he says, his voice snapping with a quiet fervor. “Once we ascend to our rightful place, all these degenerates will dance upon our strings like marionettes.”

  I tip my head back against his shoulder, moved that he should choose to share so much of himself with me.

  “Thank you for trusting me,” I whisper. “You did not have to tell me any of that.”


  “If I cannot trust my prêtresse with my blackest secrets,” he murmurs into my hair, “then whom could I hope to trust?”

  I lapse into silence, unable to think of a reply. I suspect this is the closest either of us will ever come to any true feeling for each other. Though there is no love between us, at least there is this: the embracing of our mutual darkness, the love of shadow that we share.

  The reflections of ourselves that we each see in the other’s eyes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Lieutenant and the Prisoner

  I barely have time to bask in our success at Versailles before Gabriel-Nicolas de la Reynie comes to call on me.

  “It is the lieutenant general of the Paris police for you, madame,” my chatelaine informs me when she comes to fetch me from my study, three days after my return from Versailles. Though Simone is typically the epitome of composure, immaculate as the household that she runs, today she looks distinctly rattled. “He is rather insistent that you make the time for him.”

  “Tell him I will be with him in just a moment,” I say weakly, trying to master my dismay, though I abruptly feel like a rabbit with a fox nosing a snout down its warren. “And see if he should like anything to eat or drink while he waits.”

  Simone shakes her head, nervously licking her thin lips. “He has already declined refreshments, madame. He says to tell you that this is not, alas, a social call.”

  What does he know, I think wildly as I rise, when there are so many things for which I might be caught? But if he came here to arrest me, would he not already have done so?

  When Simone withdraws, I toss back a brimming glass of wine before I go attend to the lieutenant general, hoping it might curb the tempest brewing in my chest. I take my time traversing the halls, and when I reach the salon I am almost back in control.

  “Monsieur de la Reynie,” I say smoothly, offering him a cool but courteous smile. Presenting a demeanor of slight inconvenience, as though he has parted me from some crucial task. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance. To what do I owe your visit?”

  La Reynie surveils me from under beetled eyebrows, his fleshy mouth twisting with some vague displeasure. He perches uncomfortably on my delicate love seat, as though it might give way at any second beneath his weight. With his bold features and officer’s coat, he looks disconcertingly hawkish and masculine against the salon’s ladylike décor. As if a peregrine falcon has come to roost among all the cream-and-rose brocatelle. He sports a dark riot of hair that rivals the Sun King’s own curling mane—I have a fleeting, nonsensical thought that the Marquis de Cessac would be envious of its natural splendor—and the late-morning sunlight slanting through the window shines off his golden epaulets. At least he has doffed his imposing feathered cap.

  “Madame La Voisin,” he says with a curt nod. “My apologies in coming unannounced. But per the king’s own command, my investigation into l’affaire des poisons could not wait.”

  The affair of the poisons. So Adam’s and my exploits have somehow emerged from the shadows and into the light, enough to acquire an actual name.

  My head tolls as if a clapper has been struck against my skull, and it is only the icy composure I have cultivated for so many months that keeps my knees from turning to water.

  “I’m afraid this is the first I have heard of any such affair,” I say briskly, clasping my hands behind my back to still their sudden trembling. “Might I ask you to explain?”

  The lieutenant general’s piercing glare shifts between my eyes, a touch perplexed, as though he senses that my stillness masks something untoward.

  “You have heard nothing of it?” he queries, as if finding this curious. “Four members of the court have met an untimely end in the last two months alone. There is … some suspicion of the use of pernicious substances. I should think that given your somewhat unique position, word of such foul play would surely have reached your ears.”

  “The marquise keeps me busy,” I reply shortly, though inwardly I am quaking. How could this have happened, when we were so very careful to leave no trace behind?

  But I remember how Blessis recognized the ingredients for Aqua Tofana, even without having ever made any himself; a reminder that the poisons I have been relying on exist even beyond the pages of Agnesot’s grimoire. Rare as they are, perhaps one of the king’s more shrewd and open-minded advisers recognized their effects.

  And if the cunning marquise was able to divine that something untoward was taking place, perhaps I should not be quite so surprised that it might occur to the law as well.

  “Too busy to spend my time on idle rumor,” I add, biting down on the inside of my cheek to keep my teeth from chattering.

  “Oh, it is rather more than idle rumor now,” La Reynie replies, puffing out his chest. “The king has appointed me commissioner and rapporteur to the newly created Chambre Ardente, to investigate and try any individuals found to have been implicated in the affair.”

  Chambre Ardente—the “burning chamber.” I can almost feel a hungry tongue of fire licking at my toes.

  “And has …” I clear my throat to force the faltering words out. “Has anyone been implicated thus far?”

  “Oh, yes.” An unsettling expression, somewhere between professional satisfaction and a more intimate sort of malice, drifts across La Reynie’s face. “We have a suspected poisoner in custody at Vincennes at this very moment, but our efforts to draw out a confession have been unsuccessful. The king suggested that you might be of help. He believes you have some … insight, a certain innate wisdom that might be of use to us.”

  From the sour skepticism in his voice, it is evident La Reynie does not share the king’s confidence in my abilities. At the thought that I am not a suspect—to the contrary, I am to serve on the side of the authorities—my trepidation lifts, to be replaced by an almost hysterical elation.

  What an utter absurdity, to be summoned to weigh in on someone else’s guilt for my own crimes.

  And something in me gives a strange and joyful flicker that the king did not even mention Adam’s name, nor call upon him to consult with the police. No, the golden weight of Louis’s regard clearly rests solely on me.

  “Bien sûr,” I say, spreading my hands. “I am at your service, Lieutenant General. What would you have me do?”

  “Accompany me to the fortress, if you please,” he says, hefting his bulk cumbersomely from the love seat. “It would be best if we went now.”

  The fortress of Vincennes sits to the city’s east, near the lush forest of the Bois de Vincennes, almost an hour’s carriage ride away from the Villeneuve. Despite the golden pour of sunshine over its towers and battlements, which hint of its stately past as the royal family’s ancestral home, the grimness of its stone exterior leaves no doubt as to its dire purpose now.

  And if its outsides are forbidding, the dungeon proper is far, far worse.

  As I trail La Reynie through the rank passageways that tunnel beneath the château, I feel as though I am traipsing through some nightmarish terrain. Sepulchral voices wail from each barred cell, and the cold, dank air crowds into my nose, reeking of rotting wood and sweating stone. I keep my eyes averted from the rusting spikes of the bars, having no wish to witness the misery of those trapped behind them.

  But for the grace of notre Dieu, or whatever more diabolic deity watches over me instead, I could very well be chained up here myself.

  “No place for a woman, to be sure,” La Reynie remarks, though his easy tone indicates he is unfazed by the captives’ distress. “Which makes what follows an even more thankless task.”

  Before I can ask him what he means, he draws to a halt in front of a corner cell. “Bosse,” he orders briskly. “Come forth, will you, and let us see your treacherous face.”

  I nearly choke on my own suddenly deadened tongue, feeling as though a blade has pierced my gut at the mention of Marie’s name.

  But it cannot compare to the devastation that tears through me at the sight of her face,
when she shambles out of the darkness and closer to the light shed by La Reynie’s torch, wrapping her frail hands around the bars. Her wrists are chafed to bleeding from the manacles clapped around them, their long chains looping back to the crumbling walls. She wears some coarse gray scrap barely long enough to cover her thin legs, and her beautiful dark hair has tangled into a wooly snarl, littered with shafts of the dirty straw that line her cell.

  And she has been beaten almost beyond recognition, the flesh around the slits of her eyes taut and glossy as a split plum.

  “What do you want now, you misbegotten putain de batard?” she spits at La Reynie, not yet noticing me behind him. “Do you not tire of hearing my thoughts on your maman?”

  I nearly double over at the injustice of our respective lots—her consigned to this barbaric place, and me free on the other side of the bars. The worst of what she feared for me has come to pass, and yet it has been inflicted on her instead. I can think of no greater punishment for myself than to have damned her in this way. And though I rack my brain, I cannot even fathom why she should be in here at all.

  Though she must be in an agony of pain, I am slightly heartened to see that her eyes still glint with their usual clarity. As her glare locks with mine, burning with banked intensity, I can almost hear an echo of her unspoken command:

  If you value either of our lives, do not dare to recognize me.

  “And who is this … this unfortunate?” I ask, barely containing the quaver in my voice.

  “Mademoiselle Marie Bosse,” he replies, instilling “mademoiselle” with an acidic twist. “A minor grifter and fortune-teller who plies her illicit trade in the cité. Her name was already known to us from the raids on the occult havens; we suspect she may be the mastermind behind the spate of recent noble deaths.”

  “A lowly grifter from the cité, to have orchestrated the murders of those in the highest ranks?” I ask, pitching my voice high with incredulity. “You would understand such things better than I, of course. But I’m afraid it sounds rather far-fetched.”