The Conjurer (The Vine Witch)

by Luanne G. Smith

  “I can’t,” she said to whoever was there, thinking of Jean-Paul and the jinni’s hex still controlling his mind. “What if I escape and my husband dies?” But whatever force had magicked her away from Jamra wasn’t taking no for an answer. A gust of wind blew hard out of the north, concentrating like a funnel inside the corridor. Elena was nearly pushed off her feet as it forced her toward the stairs to exit the traboule.

  She didn’t want to run, not like this, but instinct told her to obey whoever or whatever was manipulating her escape, and so she did. The high-pitched whistle sounded a moment after she boarded the train. A plume of gray smoke trailed over the rooftop as the engine pulled out of the station. Steam billowed out from the pistons below to envelop the passenger cars in a cloud of white. Though partially obscured by the veil of vapor, Elena dared to peek out the window for any sign of Jamra on the platform. The steam prevented a clear view, so she lowered the window a few inches to listen for threats or angry curses as the train chugged forward. When she heard none, she closed the window uneasily, but not before spotting a large shaggy dog sitting at the edge of the platform, his eyes on the passenger car. Before she could sense for any hint of shadow in the animal, the train gained speed and she was off in a puff of smoke.

  Elena looked down at her ticket and read her destination. The train was heading south to the very place Sidra and Yvette had gone. She only hoped whoever was sending her there was friend and not foe, though the lines between the two had become awfully muddled of late.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sidra and Yvette stood on the roof of the cathedral, their bare toes curling around the lip of the clay tiles. Spread below was the hillside village still waking with the dawn.

  “Tell me again what we’re doing up here?” Yvette took a step back from the edge.

  “Listening.”

  “For?”

  “Tidings.”

  “Of course.” The girl tucked her gown behind her knees and sat with her face tilted toward the scattering of morning stars. “You’re not worried someone will see us up here and wonder?”

  “Nobody ever looks up in a town. Ah, here they come now.”

  Sidra turned east toward the dawn as a flock of starlings swooped over the rooftops. They made a wide circle over the village, dipping their wings as they chased some unseen prey that zigzagged through the air. The starlings’ voices cackled full of self-importance and alarm.

  Yvette looked as if she might say something, then changed her mind and rested her head on her knees. The girl didn’t know the power of birds. The visions they carried on their wings. The omens sung out of their mouths.

  Sidra held still. The flock had grown to a thousand birds as more gathered. They painted the sky, a black cloud against the pink dawn, tipping their wings one way and then another. And then she saw her sign form as the birds swooped as one in front of her. A crescent tail. A dog’s tail? Unmistakable. But how to interpret such a shape?

  A cry came out of the south, high and piercing. The murmur of starlings scattered in a panic. Then straight as a dagger, a merlin flew into the heart of the flock, snatching a single bird in its talons before veering toward the clock tower on the opposite side of the street. There he pecked and plucked until he swallowed globules of raw meat and bone by the gullet full.

  The beating-heart panic she’d seen in the birds transferred to her breast. “We must go. We must gather the other talismans. Quickly.”

  “Is it Jamra?”

  “I believe so.” And yet she couldn’t be certain that was the thing making her want to disappear. She checked the sky once more, but the birds had fled, taking their squawking with them.

  On the ground the girl practiced her newly learned levitation, pretending to walk when she was actually floating. Let her feel that freedom, Sidra thought. A precious thing, when all around uncertainty is closing in.

  “Here,” Sidra said, pointing to a blue door.

  “Why can’t you take the medallions back from the people yourself?”

  “I’m akin to a patron. I cannot steal from my own people. Not even a small trinket like the ones we’re after. How would that look if they found out the thief was me?”

  “Mon Dieu.” Yvette rolled her eyes and knocked on the door as soon as Sidra dissipated. A middle-aged man with a stomach that protruded under a mustard yellow thawb answered. The girl smiled, glowing with the power of her glamour. The man’s face brightened, as if he’d been revisited by a long-forgotten dream. He stepped aside when Yvette asked if she could come in. Five minutes later she reemerged, flipping the talisman from one palm to the next.

  “What did you do to him?” Sidra asked, animating from the mist once the girl ducked into the alcove around the corner as arranged.

  “I don’t know how it works exactly, but mortal men turn to absolute mush when I look at them a certain way. Titania tried to explain it once, how the glittery energy that wells up in the glamour mesmerizes a certain part of their brain. Stuns them, really, so the only thing they can focus on is making sure I’m smiling at them. I can get away with just about anything while they’re in that state.”

  “Astonishing.” Sidra had to admit it was a good trick, though somehow still tawdry.

  Yvette handed her the medallion, and they traveled across town to knock on the door of the second known owner, another older man who lived alone. Five minutes later the medal was in Sidra’s palm, same as the last. The third bearer of the talisman was the woman Sidra had spoken about, the one who didn’t know if she should leave her husband. She worked a stand in the market selling packets of anise, cardamom, cloves, and coriander. To save time, Yvette simply nicked the thing out of her apron pocket. In recompense for stealing from a woman in such doubt, she bought five packets of cardamom at full price, claiming the smell was too divine to pass up.

  In possession of the last three talismans, Sidra let herself relax. There would be no summons, no whispering of her name into the ether over the village. The augury earlier hadn’t given her the information she’d hoped for, though she should have known better. One shouldn’t carry expectations into any conversation with birds. She had to accept the threat was getting closer. What preparations she could make must be completed.

  The jinni didn’t argue when the girl asked if they could walk back to the apartment so she could see the perfume shops along the way, claiming the scents had been driving her mad with curiosity since they arrived. Sidra didn’t argue because she, too, had once been a young single woman attracted to pretty things and expensive, alluring smells bottled up in crystal. And, too, it was on the way, so there was time enough to give the girl this thing of pleasure in exchange for getting her the medallions. With the Fée, she’d learned it was best to keep things in equilibrium. Such a volatile people.

  The two emerged from a narrow lane that emptied onto a larger street. A building on the corner, with an iron railing and two Greco columns flanking the front door, presented itself as a parfumerie, though it was obvious enough from the overly saturated scents of bergamot, jasmine, and rose seeping through the walls and windows. The fragrance lured the girl in, so she followed.

  Sidra hadn’t entered the shop before. Perhaps it was newly opened since her last days in the village a year earlier. The parfumerie was an upscale establishment, one specializing in “modern” scents created in a laboratory, as if there was anything wrong with the pure extracts derived from the distillation of centuries of knowledge.

  “Isn’t it divine?” Yvette asked, accepting a dab of cologne on the back of her hand from the woman working behind the counter.

  Sidra detected an underlying citric fragrance that reminded her of sitting by a fountain surrounded by an orange garden on the other side of the sea, but she was otherwise unimpressed with the more pungent scent of alcohol that evaporated off the girl’s skin almost immediately.

  “Buy some if you like it. We have to go.”

  “I spent my only coins on the spices back there,” Yvette said o
ut of the side of her mouth.

  The shopkeeper put the stopper back in the bottle. Her lips puckered as if drawn taut by a string of judgment. Sidra expected the woman to make a tsking sound next. If not for the tone of disapproval, she would have told the girl to leave without the perfume. Instead she waved her fingers behind her robe and produced several fat coins in her palm. She set them on the counter, and Yvette walked out with a box of perfume wrapped in a dainty blue ribbon.

  Kindness toward lesser beings didn’t come naturally or often, but Sidra found it buoyed her spirits on this occasion as the girl radiated with happiness at being bought a present she couldn’t otherwise afford. The jinni smiled and covered her head with her scarf as they walked back to the apartment, happy in the knowledge she had collected the last of the outstanding talismans. Jamra’s job of finding her was just made that much more difficult, which meant it was a good effort. Confrontation would come, but not on this day. She tilted her face to the sun, letting its glow shine bright and hot against her skin.

  Minutes later, her good mood vanished. The moment they entered the apartment she knew something was off. A scent of maleness that didn’t belong. The fringe on the rug out of alignment. Grains of rice scattered on the floor. And yet it could be no ordinary intruder. The apartment was kept inside an illusion inside an illusion.

  Only a jinni could have found the room on their own. Or someone led there by one.

  Yvette looked over Sidra’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  “Give me light.”

  The girl glowed bright like a lamp, illuminating the deep shadows of the room where the jinn liked to hide. Sidra sniffed the air again. Not Jamra. Nor any jinn she knew, but there was another scent hanging in the air above the male musk. The reek of nervous sweat and common market incense.

  Yanis.

  “Where did you hide the sorcerer’s talisman?” Sidra asked.

  “In the rice jar like you said.”

  Sidra rushed to the jar and dug her hand through the grains of rice, finding nothing.

  The fourth medallion was gone again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The dog stood on the platform, watching the train trail off through the veil of smoke and vapor as it carried the witch to her destination. That one, he observed, was motivated by love. A shiver went through his body.

  “Did she make it on?”

  The dog twitched his ear. The creature standing at the edge of his ear canal tickled the fur there, making him want to scratch with his paw. He refrained and nodded.

  The creature whispered, “All is well, though so much scheming to get the desired outcome is proving more challenging than first imagined. Like paddling a boat with one oar.”

  The dog knew nothing of the water and so he yawned. The creature jumped off, disappearing into the station’s woodwork. Such a small, complicated being, that one. He scratched his ear, digging deep with the nails on his rear paw.

  The alliance was an unusual pact but well worth the annoyance if the outcome was what they hoped. Events had taken longer than promised, but the original scheme churned toward its conclusion at last. The dog sniffed the air and caught a familiar scent full of char and destruction swirling in the ether one street over. So angry, that one. But he would be angrier still when he could not find the witch. The dog grinned, then sprang from the platform to lope after the train.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Once the locomotive had pulled sufficiently far enough away from the station for her to be certain Jamra hadn’t followed, Elena let herself relax. The train had been full of passengers when she got on. Some carrying shopping bags, some reading newspapers, others already leaning their heads against the windows for a quick nap between destinations. She’d finally ensconced herself inside a compartment at the rear of the train, one occupied by an elderly woman and a businessman who merely grumbled into his newspaper when she slid into the seat across from him. Her ticket stated the train was headed all the way to the coast, so she settled in for the hours-long journey. If her benefactor had other plans, she assumed they’d make their intentions known when they were ready.

  And just who had been there with her in the corridor? Who knew she’d been taken by Jamra? She glanced out the window as she thought it over, and there, along the fallow fields and stalks of emerging sunflowers, where blooming apricot trees lined the road, was a dog running to keep pace with the passenger cars. She had no doubt now it was the very same quick-moving animal Jean-Paul had seen lurking around Château Renard for three days. And the one she had moments ago observed on the platform in town. So, which side did he fall on, ally or assailant in waiting?

  Her new predicament had her wishing she could quietly slip off to the shadow world to check on Jean-Paul’s condition, but the elderly gentleman in front of her was making a great effort to look down his nose at her over the top of his newspaper. And the woman seated beside her hadn’t even uttered a bonjour when she sat down, merely offering one of those small smiles meant to show an effort at congeniality when the bearer felt anything but.

  Elena was rather shabbily dressed, even for riding in a coach-class compartment on a thinly padded bench seat. Her sabots were still caked in mud, and her apron, while well stocked with various essential herbs in the pockets, was streaked with grime from working the vine row. Her outfit, a midnight-blue wool skirt and pleated chambray blouse, was otherwise respectable enough but nothing to impress. As nonchalantly as she could, she untied the strings on the apron and stuffed the article in her satchel alongside her spell book. One more thing the lady and gentleman likely wouldn’t approve of either.

  Elena turned her face to the window to dodge any further side glances from her compartment mates. She thought she’d caught a glimpse of the dog again, though his movements seemed much more furtive now. Elena presumed she would find evidence of shadow in the animal’s eyes if she were to come face-to-face with him. She hoped the creature hadn’t been cursed. She knew too well the sensation of being trapped inside another’s skin not of one’s own will. She wiggled her toes—minus one—inside her sabots at the thought. But whatever condition had magicked the dog into its present form—for instinct whispered in her ear that it was undoubtedly a case of transmogrification—he was keenly invested in her whereabouts. She was likewise growing more interested in his as she watched him emerge from a field of sunflowers to leap over a rock wall.

  An hour later the train pulled into the station of a sprawling rural village typical of the south, with its buff-colored buildings and red roof tiles. It was too soon to be her destination, but the gentleman gathered his belongings and disembarked, leaving Elena and the dour woman alone. For a moment she worried the station stop might allow the dog the opportunity to board and find her. What if he turned out not to be the friendly sort? But then she shook her head at such nonsensical thinking. At the speed the animal was running, he could have leaped aboard at any time while the train was moving if he’d wanted. The entire ordeal had knocked her off course emotionally as well as physically, literally flinging her farther south than she’d ever traveled before.

  “May I join you?” A petite woman dressed in a powder-blue skirt and bodice with a lace-trimmed fichu tucked in the front entered the compartment. She wore a narrow-brimmed straw hat with a bouquet of pink roses affixed to the band, which did a decent job of hiding the few strands of gray hair beginning to show at her temples but not quite. The scent of flowers was everywhere, as if it were infused in her skin, though not so strongly as to offend the nose. And there, peeking out from her lace shawl, a violet aura that shimmered ever so slightly above her collar. A perfume witch, by all indications.

  Elena sat up a little straighter, saying, “Bonjour.”

  The dour woman on the seat beside Elena gave no objection, moving her feet so the woman could sit near the window where the older man had been. Elena smiled politely and tried not to think of her clumsy muddy clogs. The perfume witch nodded in recognition, then gazed out the window as the
train churned up a cloud of steam and chugged away from the station.

  Once they were on their way again, the perfume witch made eye contact with Elena.

  “You make wine,” she said as her nose twitched. “Beaujolais?”

  “Chanceaux Valley.”

  “Ah, of course. I should have recognized the stronger scent of the tannins.”

  Their exchange drew a look of bewilderment from their fellow passenger. The perfume witch lifted her left eyebrow and reached in her purse. She removed an atomizer, gave the pump three quick squeezes, and released a lemony aroma into the car. As the droplets descended through the air, a veil of illusion dropped from the compartment ceiling. The mortal was still there, but it was as if they were hidden behind a curtain.

  “It’s my own creation,” said the witch. She smiled at her resourcefulness. “An illusion spell in a bottle. All the mortal sees are two women staring out the window at the passing countryside. As long as she doesn’t look too closely and notice the same tree going past the window every minute, we may talk at will.” The perfume witch put her atomizer back in her purse and smiled. “I’m Camille, by the way. Camille Joubert.”

  Elena introduced herself, then glanced over to make sure the other passenger wasn’t listening in on their conversation. “But how does it work without an incantation?”

  Camille held up a finger. “Scents affect the mortal brain in specific ways that can be rerouted. You can send their thoughts hurling in any direction you wish with the right combination of fragrances. Lemon verbena works wonders on distraction. But, to be fair, I shouldn’t single out mortals. We all respond to smells in ways that can be manipulated. There’s no stronger connection between thought and memory than there is with scent. I simply bond a little spell to the mixture as I pour it into the bottle. Depending on the ingredients, I can inspire passion, anger, or”—she nudged her head toward the dour woman—“complete disinterest. Works the same as any other potion meant to be ingested, only mine are airborne.”