Poison Priestess Read online

  “Else men like these will break you on their will.”

  The next morning, we wake at the matins bells to find that Agnesot has vanished from the dormitory. Though our pallets are crammed so close we nearly sleep atop one another, somehow none of us heard anything in the night. Not even a stray creak or whimper to betray her departure.

  “But where could she have gone?” I wonder, dragging a comb through my unruly hair. “The doors are still barred.”

  “They must have taken her,” Eugenie insists as she dresses hurriedly next to me. “You saw how she was yesterday, styling herself after the martyrs. Refusing to submit. She should have known the maître wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “Or maybe,” little Berthe offers timidly, “she walked through the walls. You heard her say she was a divineress. They can do such things, you know.”

  “Oh, please,” Eugenie retorts, starting toward the doors. “As if a sorceress would have allowed herself to fall under a whip.”

  They are still debating as they join the swarm of girls by the doors, eager for our morning repast of barley gruel. I linger by Agnesot’s pallet instead, running my hands over its threadbare quilt, as if her bedding might yield some silent answer. I find nothing beneath the thin square of her pillow, nor captured in the tangle of her sheets. But caught between the prickly straw-tick of the mattress and the wooden frame, my fingertips meet the corners of something hard and cool.

  My heart drumming, I ease out a black bound book, casting a quick glance over my shoulder to ensure I am not being watched. Whatever Agnesot left behind, I find myself loath to share it with the others. The leather cover flips open to reveal yellowed pages dense with text and odd illustrations—sketches of creeping plants with labeled parts, and charts of strange and angular symbols. I cannot read the words, having never been taught letters, but as I cradle the pages to my chest so tightly they seem to hum against my skin, I am struck with the certainty that someday I will.

  Because wherever Agnesot has gone, I know beyond the cobweb of a doubt that she escaped on her own power.

  And whatever this book is, I suspect the divineress left it behind for me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Sigil and the Door

  PARIS, FRANCE

  June 5, 1667

  Should the waters guard their secrets close, make certain you have not overlooked the strongest of the scrying herbs.

  “But I added the agrimony already, devil take you,” I grouse into the grimoire’s pages, resisting a powerful urge to slam the spellbook shut. “Why won’t it simply work properly for once?”

  As if sensing my high dudgeon soaring to even greater heights, Alecto slithers up my arm, tucking her wedge-shaped head against my collarbone. Her tongue flickers against my skin in a ticklish caress, urging me to settle down. I take a calming breath, running my hand gratefully along her cool, muscular length. In my view, anyone who believes snakes to be cold or unfeeling has never taken the proper time to get to know one. And of my three king snakes, Alecto is the most affectionate, supremely attuned to the shifting squalls of my whims and moods.

  If she were a person, one might call her solicitous.

  “I know, mon trésor,” I murmur to her, tracing the outline of her dainty head with a fingertip. “Failing to conjure a vision is hardly the end of the world. But it is galling to be foiled when one is so very close, n’est-ce pas? Perhaps we try again, just one more time?”

  Alecto tightens briefly on my arm before relaxing again, the serpentine equivalent of a long-suffering sigh. But it seems she is willing to indulge me for at least a little longer. When I rest my hand on the table’s edge, she pools down my arm like a sentient spill of ink, arranging herself in a coil around the obsidian scrying bowl. I refill the bowl with the mixture called for in the book: ewe’s milk, water strained through cheesecloth to rid it of impurities, a blend of herbs, and a dash of my own tears. After my years in the fabrique, precious little moves me to weep, and I had to pinch myself rather viciously to eke these out.

  Against the unremitting black of the bowl, the murky liquid roils like a storm front crawling over an eventide sky. It lurches into tantalizing shapes, which scatter into ripples as my breath skates across the water’s surface.

  Once the waters are waiting, bring the sight to bear upon them—but gently and with forbearance, the book directs, somewhat prissily. Do not be insatiable in your hunger to know, nor overeager in your demands. The veil does not bend readily to the will of a boorish divineress.

  Be patient, in other words. Reasonable enough, yet the enjoinment still rankles me. Patience has never been among my virtues.

  Taking another breath, I do my best to heed its command. I let my eyes go hazy, my vision thinning at the edges like unraveling gauze, letting the swirling of the water lead the way. As if sensing the slow gather of my focus, Alecto begins to seethe around the bowl, her body forming a circle around a circle. This addition is of my own devising; there is no mention in the grimoire of snakes. Yet the few times I’ve managed to fish a full-fledged vision from the water, it has always been with my girls’ help.

  But today, not even Alecto can tip me over the edge. The milky water remains obstinately inert, speckled with herbs and on its way to curdling.

  With a sigh, I stand and gather Alecto up, carrying her back to the immense glass vivarium she shares with Megaera and Tisiphone. Antoine built it for me as a birthday gift, and installed it close to the fireplace so my snakes might bask in its heat. As I lower Alecto into its mossy depths, the sight of its clever compartments tempers my disappointment and reminds me of my new life’s many blessings. I am now a jeweler’s wife with a stately home near the Pont Marie, wed to a husband who loves me in his way. Enough, anyway, to permit me my snakes and cabinet of occult treasures, when another man might have had me clapped in brodequins or even burned at the stake.

  But we understand each other well, Antoine Monvoisin and I. Well enough to know that certain forbidden desires must be given their head.

  This life is so much more than I could have imagined during my years of drudgery, that I cannot help but believe in the magic of Agnesot’s grimoire. Out of all the girls desperate to escape their indenture, Antoine chose me to wed. Which means that wherever she is now, Agnesot managed at least part of what she swore to do; she sprang me free from the fabrique, set me loose to pursue my own power. The power that she predicted would one day surpass even hers.

  And if the spells in her grimoire yet fail to corral the wild tempests of my visions, to bring them fully under my control, then I must only work the harder. Perhaps, once I have come into my own as Agnesot predicted, the true freedom she promised me will also follow suit.

  A freedom far beyond the small one I have now, ever hinging on my husband’s continued beneficence.

  A light knock sounds at my door, followed by a courteous pause. Enough time for me to clear the scrying bowl away, tuck the grimoire behind the more innocuous books that line my shelves, and sit back down by the fireplace with embroidery spread across my lap. I trust Antoine, but not enough to have him entirely privy to my doings.

  A moment later, the door creaks open to admit my husband.

  “Bonsoir, Catherine,” he says mildly, crossing over to blandly buss my cheek. Though we’ve been man and wife for almost three years now, he has never laid a hand on me in passion. When he came to Prudhomme’s fabrique to avail himself of an amenable young wife, it was not the allure of the marital bed he wished to purchase, but the outward trappings of marriage. A respectable veneer. “Am I interrupting?”

  “Oh, not at all.” I set aside the embroidery, which has not progressed beyond the odd thread in well over a year. I cannot abide such insipid pursuits, not when I can always feel the grimoire’s tidal pull. “Are you finished at the atelier, then? Shall I see to dinner with Suzette?”

  “Ah, no, actually.” He pulls a regretful face, stroking his silver-shot beard. “I’m meeting with my colleague Sebastien for dinner a
gain tonight. I … I expect it will go late. I’m sorry, I should have thought to tell you earlier.”

  My practiced eye runs over his hair, neatly clubbed and pomaded away from his silvering temples, his dove-gray satin justaucorps and crisply tied cravat. Though we leave each other quite unmoved, Antoine can be handsome when he tries. And not only has he put effort into his appearance, but this makes three times that he has seen Sebastien this week. Their romance must be flourishing indeed.

  Though I reap the benefit of his false life, it still gives me a pang that they must steal this time together, that my husband cannot simply have the love he truly wants. Especially when the king’s own brother, the duc d’Orléans, rides into battle bejeweled and rouged, and it is widely known that the Chevalier du Lorraine shares his bed.

  But while the noblesse dally as they please, such latitude does not apply to common folk, especially not when it comes to any love beyond the pale.

  “Do not trouble yourself over it, cher,” I tell him, waving a hand. “Perhaps I will meet a friend tonight as well.” My heart lifts joyfully at the prospect of seeing Marie, a light fluttering like a lacewing swarm tickling in my belly. I have been so consumed with studying the grimoire that over a week has somehow flown by since I last spent time with her. “See you in the morning?”

  Antoine’s face slackens with relief at the lack of judgment in my voice, as though I would ever see fit to condemn his predilections when they are not so unlike my own.

  “Bien sûr, we’ll have breakfast together,” he says. “But you will be careful tonight, yes? Colbert has hiked the taxes yet again; it seems the Sun King’s Dutch war has gnawed the royal treasury so thin that the peasantry must yield ever more of their meager earnings to replenish it. I wouldn’t have you assailed by some malcontent staggering about after drowning his woes.”

  I smile at Antoine, moved by his concern, even though I have no fear of the city’s restive streets, no matter how many times Louis XIV’s royal comptroller sees fit to turn the screw yet tighter. Anyone fool enough to cross me and Marie would soon live to regret it. I always carry a knife belt on our outings, while Marie wears vicious little stilettos strapped about her person at all times, along with hollow rings filled with corrosives ready to be flung into an offending face.

  “I’ll be fine,” I reassure him. “I always am, non? Though before you leave, could you see to your haberdasher’s bill, cher? It arrived over a fortnight ago.”

  “Bien sûr,” he replies quickly, drawing a palm over his pomaded hair. “I had meant to attend to that already, but … the shop has been such pandemonium that it must have slipped my mind. Thank you for the reminder, Catherine. Though you really need not fret over our finances.”

  “Oh, it is no trouble. And I do not want us to find ourselves in accidental arrears again,” I add a touch pointedly, referring to an incident a year ago in which Antoine “misremembered” to pay his irate tailor for over a month. “Now go enjoy your night, mon cher.”

  Excusing himself, he withdraws from my study. As soon as he is gone I rise, casting the embroidery away with an exasperated huff. My mind already tumbling ahead to when the last rind of sun peels away from Paris, revealing the dark and inviting pith of night.

  Before I pen an invitation to Marie, I move to the window to twitch aside the heavy brocatelle curtains. Beyond the ranks of mansard rooftops still glistening slick from a brief afternoon shower, the sky is a velvety plum. At the sight of it, a sense of vast potential strains inside my rib cage, unfurling against my lungs. I have little use for the Paris of the day, marinated in horse piss and hazed with chimney smoke, clamorous with carriage wheels, church bells, and the racket of a hundred thousand shrilling voices.

  But night … night is another matter altogether. A beguiling province of promises and whispers, secrets traded like coins behind shielding hands.

  Night is when the dark sun of my city truly rises.

  By the time I arrive at the Pont Neuf bridge to meet Marie, Paris has plunged fully into darkness. The river ripples like an oiled snake hide, winding through the stone arches of the bridge that spans across the water to the Île de la Cité—the city’s oldest district and its beating heart, an island suspended in the silty lifeblood of the Seine.

  Marie waits for me by the bridge’s base, torch in hand; after nightfall, Parisians make their own light if they must have it. She always undertakes to arrive before me, as if even a few minutes without her might land me in some grave peril. Though she’s my elder by only a year and a half, she was my fiercest protector at the orphanage as well as my best friend, before I was indentured to the fabrique and she took to the streets. While I’ve severed all other ties to the wretched girl I used to be, I pined for Marie during the years we spent apart, and sought her out almost as soon as Antoine sprung me free.

  Though I have never said it to her aloud, I cannot remember a time before I loved Marie.

  “Ma belle,” she cries out now, surging forward to embrace me with her free hand, her thin brown cheek brushing mine. Everything about Marie is sleek, including her narrow face, slim frame, and shining spill of hair dark as chestnut shells. My skin tingles where our cheeks press together, and I breathe in the familiar, subtle scent of her, orange blossom and sandalwood, a faint and spicy sweetness that makes my heart swell like a waxing moon.

  She draws back to pout playfully at me, with lips that are ripe and full and creased down the center just like midsummer cherries. “I thought perhaps you’d cast me aside in favor of that bedamned grimoire. It has been ages since you last came out to play.”

  “Hardly ages, chérie. And as if I could ever forsake you for much longer than a week,” I soothe, looping my arm through hers. “It’s only that I have been so busy.”

  “Yes, busy attending to that book-shaped devil’s snare,” she replies, her mien darkening. “As if you have any notion what evils you might unleash with all your idle tinkering.”

  This is not the first time Marie has cast aspersions upon the grimoire’s worth, suggested that a strange divineress’s spellbook might contain dangers best left untouched. But for all that she can cut a purse as deftly as pretend to read a palm, Marie is only a talented grifter. She could not possibly feel or understand the pure power that beats from within the grimoire’s pages like a living heart—much less judge its nature.

  “The grimoire is a tool, and a tool cannot be evil,” I reply by rote, as I have the countless other times we’ve had this conversation. “Besides, you of all people should know that a little evil can come in useful.”

  “My evil is only of the most innocuous sort, ma belle. The kind meant to keep me in cheap wine and baguettes.” She presses her lips together disapprovingly, then gives over. “But since you insist on prodding at it, at least tell me it has been going well?”

  “I wish,” I reply as we merge onto the trottoir. A troupe of fire-eating acrobats capers past us like a demonic horde, swallowing curved blades alive with flames. As we pass by the half-moon alcoves set atop each stone pile, the wheedling voices of quacksalvers and merchants assail us, peddling their wares from covered stalls. My stomach stirs at the smell of crisp-baked wafers and nuts roasted in sugar and cinnamon, sweet above the river’s brackish tang.

  “But the scrying spells are damnably difficult to master,” I continue as we dodge a cackling guttersnipe pelting away with someone’s purse. “Sometimes I can nearly feel how they should work. But they almost always evade me in the end, wriggling between my fingers. It is beyond maddening. I was meant to do such magic, Marie, I can feel it—and yet I simply cannot summon it up at will.”

  I am articulating it poorly, which is nothing new. I have never been able to properly explain it to Marie, the potent yearning that I feel for dominion over my magic. The sense that drawing it under my control will also bring forth the freedom I so crave, as if the two are somehow inextricably linked.

  Marie cants her head to the side like a sparrow, tiny replicas of the torch flame da
ncing in her eyes as she considers me. Then she gives a little nod, as if she has come to some decision.

  “Then perhaps there is another way,” she says, picking up her stride as she tugs me along, until I nearly struggle to keep up despite my longer legs. “A better way than battering yourself against that book—and certainly safer.”

  “What do you mean? And why the sudden rush?” It is not as if our outings ever follow some set schedule. “Has Stephane earmarked a particularly choice wine bag for us? An entire barrel, perhaps?”

  Marie merely shakes her hooded head, cryptic as a sphinx. She maintains her silence as we walk, only piquing my curiosity further. By the time we set foot on the Île de la cité, I am so ablaze with anticipation I feel as though I could light our way myself.

  The Île cleaves itself uneasily between the city’s richest and its poorest, with Notre Dame’s grand spire presiding over its eastern point, the king’s Palais Royal and its lush gardens sprawling across the west. But Marie and I make straight for the island’s shabby center, the cité itself, an ancient maze of run-down tenements and taverns, seedy hospitals and churches. And in it the notorious Val d’Amour, beating like a secret heart within a heart, with the Rue de Glatigny as its central artery. The wealthy only venture here when they have a pressing need, or some burning wish. The death of a rival, a glimpse into the morass of the future. Or perhaps only some stolen hours with one of the Val’s many filles de joie, with their threadbare corsets and garishly rouged lips.

  Though I do not live in the cité as Marie does, I’ve dallied in her demimonde enough to know that any twisted dream the mind devises can be purchased here.

  As we whisk by shuttered storefronts, keeping our skirts hitched high above the mud-slick cobbles, I glance curiously at Marie.

  “But we’ve passed La Pomme Noire already,” I protest, naming our favorite tavern. “Surely you were not thinking of La Sirene et la Pierre, not after the rotgut swill we had there last time? My innards are likely to never be the same.”