Wine was much the same, Elena reflected. The aroma was as important as the taste, adding layers of experience to the flavor. The smells detected in the glass shaped perceptions before a single sip was taken.
“Do you run your own shop?” Elena asked, curious to know how the woman plied her craft.
“I’m the eldest daughter at Le Maison des Amoureux.” The woman reached in her overnight bag and removed a brown paper package. “I’m on my way there now after briefly visiting the cousins. Here, try a bite, if you like.”
Camille unwrapped the paper to reveal a white nougat treat filled with nuts. Elena paused. It was always a tricky proposition to accept food or drink from a witch you didn’t know, but there was something very open about this one’s intent, as if she would have shared food with anyone she met as a matter of politeness. Elena accepted the offering, passing it under her nose first. The nutty, sweet smell of almonds, honey, and pistachios made her mouth water, accentuating her hunger after she’d turned away her food with the jinni the night before.
“It’s not bewitched. Merely an old recipe the locals are becoming deliciously famous for. Not bad for mortals,” Camille added and popped a bite of nougat in her mouth.
Elena thanked her, then stared out the window as she ate her treat. The dog reappeared, hurdling over hedgerows and dodging around fence posts to keep up with the train.
Camille followed her gaze. “Is he with you?”
“Possibly. It’s complicated.”
“Always is when jinn are involved.”
Jinn?
“You think he’s a jinni? But how could you know that?”
“Oh, several hover hereabouts. I’d developed quite a good working relationship with a young jinni in my perfume factory a time ago. Poor man was tragically killed last year. But as I understand it, a fair number of jinn gravitated to the area after being drawn by the wishes of the people who emigrated from across the sea. Been here for centuries.” She raised the nougat up as an example. “The recipe traveled with the immigrants as well. Lucky thing,” she said and licked a finger after putting the last of her treat in her mouth.
Elena found the woman’s remark about the jinn astonishing. Until she’d been incarcerated with Sidra and later abducted by Jamra, she’d been quite ignorant about the prevalence of jinn around her. Grand-Mère had always made them out to be more myth than truth, and Elena had accepted that without further proof to contradict the idea. But she knew now that being isolated in the Chanceaux Valley, only venturing out occasionally to the city to procure essentials for spells, had left a hole in her knowledge. A great gap of understanding that others possessed from living and traveling in far-off regions of the country. Even Yvette had known more about the jinn than most simply by traveling the country while in the carnival.
“So, I have another jinn after me?”
“Another? Oh dear, you are in trouble.”
Camille sprayed a second layer of lemon verbena mist in the compartment to be safe, then stated what she knew from personal observation and general gossip. From what she’d gathered, dogs were a very common form of animation for the jinn. It wasn’t necessarily a bad sign that one was stalking her. Not all jinn relished mischief, though she couldn’t be certain about that. She’d heard most were rather aloof about mortals and witches, not interested enough in their mundane behavior to interfere on most occasions. The jinn were fiery, unpredictable, yet mostly concerned with their own affairs, to which Elena concurred.
Perhaps the dog was merely a local returning home, same as this perfume witch. But no. He had been at Château Renard. At the depot. And now running alongside the train she was told to get on after she’d been snatched away from Jamra. And just when the jinni had been about to strike her. She looked again at the animal loping with ease along the fields. An ally of Jamra’s? Or something else? Her intuition prickled as if brushing up against a stinging nettle, and yet the train rolled on, taking her to her destination and Sidra and Yvette. Perhaps she wasn’t the only passenger on this fated journey.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The sorcerer’s talisman was gone. Sidra stared at the three others they’d stolen from her devotees and felt ashamed. Without the fourth, they were useless to her. She would have to return them and take the chance of being called upon for a favor. Curse that Yanis for breaking into her apartment. She would flay his brain open and sear the rotten insides with flame, though she half expected to find the space hollow.
And how had a half-rate sorcerer discovered where she lived anyway? Only one of her own could have seen through the illusions. So, who was helping that camel’s ass of a sorcerer?
The girl stood outside on the steps smoking a cigarette. Sidra wondered if she should order her inside. The omen in the sky had been bad. A dog was coming, death reeking on its breath. She was convinced it marked the impending arrival of her enemy. But who was the starling and who was the hawk?
Sidra ought to call the girl in from her haze of smoke. The apartment was no longer safe, not if the likes of Yanis could be led inside to rummage through her things. The scent spell should still cloak their whereabouts, but that only worked if the person looking didn’t already know where to find you under the haze. And someone had led that thief Yanis straight to her door.
“Collect your things,” she called. “We have to go.”
“Figured,” Yvette said and crushed the cigarette under the sole of her shoe. “Where to now?”
For a moment Sidra was stumped. Indecision and fretting seemed to have seeped into her psyche like smoke through a sieve. What was happening to her? She shook her head even as a new panic began to rise. If her apartment wasn’t safe, what if the dagger wasn’t safe either? Everything would have been for nothing if the relic was discovered. But where to fly with so many ill omens coalescing at once?
“The old one,” she said as the thought flitted through her mind like a bird dipping its wings against the wind. Yes, that would settle her. His logic always did that for her. “But first, enough of these games. We need to pay another visit to Yanis the Dishonest.”
“To get your talisman back?”
“To get everything back.”
Yvette brightened at the thought of another excursion to the town’s center. She slipped a borrowed shawl around her shoulders, then stuffed her cigarettes and new perfume in her bottomless pockets. “Lead on,” she said, and they shut the door to the apartment.
When the two arrived at the market, the sorcerer wasn’t at his stall. Another witch, gray-haired and knock-kneed, stood behind the counter grinding herbs with a mortar and pestle.
“Where’s the hyena who owns this stall?”
The witch sprinkled a generous portion of dried marjoram and thyme into the mortar. He looked up at Sidra and gave a shrug. “Stall was abandoned, near as I could tell. Seemed a shame to let such a good location go to waste on a busy market day.”
Did he take her for a fool? Sidra set fire to the witch’s herbs with a hard glint from her eye, sending them up in a cloud of smoke that singed his beard.
The man fiddled his fingers against his whiskers, snuffing out the fire before it reached his chin. “There’s no cause for that.” He double-checked his eyebrows for damage. “He warned someone was looking for him. Didn’t say you were a jinni.”
“Tell me where to find Yanis or see your day’s profits go up in flame.” The twigs of lavender atop the stall began to smoke.
“All right, all right,” the witch said, patting down the stems. “He lives that way. A few doors from the top.” He pointed toward the crooked lane that wound up the hillside. Sidra followed the trail with her eyes, remembering the times she’d seen Yanis walk that way with his wooden leg thumping the sidewalk while she lurked in the shadows of the adjacent loggia to watch the people come and go.
“Come,” she said to Yvette. “And do not waste a smile on that one.”
They headed in the direction the witch pointed, and at the end of the winding pathway,
where the buildings closed in overhead and stubborn shrubbery grew in the loose mortar between stones, Sidra caught the whiff of fear. Trembling, sweating, hormone-rich fear. Behind a door painted blue.
“He’s in there.”
“What are you going to do to him?” Yvette asked.
Murder generally came to mind when dealing with Yanis, but she always grappled with the balance of deeds in this world against the consequences met in the next. “Convince him to tell me the truth,” Sidra said and grinned at all the ways she knew how to get someone to talk just short of death.
She tapped lightly and pressed her ear to the door. The sound of a rat scurrying inside its cage came from the other side. She tried the doorknob. Locked, naturally. Perhaps even secured with a dead bolt. Sidra would have blown the door down with the heat of a thousand fires, but a woman and child approached from the top of the lane, eyeing her and the fair one with suspicion.
“Allow me,” Yvette said and nudged the jinni aside once the woman and child passed. She uttered her burglar’s charm, and the locks ticked open one at a time. “You don’t always have to burn the place down, you know.”
Sidra stood in rare, brief awe before pushing the door open.
Inside, Yanis didn’t even have the decency to look abashed when she confronted him. Instead he hobbled to a table and turned it over as if he could hide behind the solid oak top and be safe.
“It wasn’t my idea,” he pleaded.
“Which part?”
The sorcerer blinked. “The talisman. I knew you took mine yesterday at the market. Figured you ought to have it again after what happened. But then the lady told me I had to get it back. Didn’t give me a choice.”
“What lady? Who was she?”
“I don’t know. I swear it. She was wearing a hood so I couldn’t see her face. But she was, I don’t know, forceful.”
“Jinn like me?”
The rat wrung his hands together and nodded. “Could be. She magicked us to the apartment. One minute we were talking under the loggia at the market, the next I was standing among your things. She whispered that the talisman was buried in the rice, and then as soon as I dug it out, she was gone. So I ran.” He reached in his pocket. “Here, have it back. It’s yours. Keep the damn thing.”
Sidra took the medallion from him and held it up to the light coming through the window. But it wasn’t her talisman. She threw the cheap brass counterfeit at the man. “Do you toy with me?”
“What? No.” He scrambled on the floor to retrieve the medallion, seemingly confused at what he found instead. “But I had your talisman in my pocket.”
Yvette stepped forward and held her palm open in front of Yanis as she smiled. He placed the thrown object in her hand without question, as if mesmerized by her wordless command.
“It’s an orphan’s medal,” she said, rubbing her thumb over the imprint of a flower girl. “The kind mothers used to leave with their babies when they had to give them up. So, where’s the talisman from the rice jar?” Yvette stared at Yanis, glowing brighter with each inhale.
“I don’t know. It was here. In my pocket. But I’m a simple potions witch. I can’t do magic like what’s happening here.”
Someone was playing a game with them. Drawing Sidra out, knowing she would go to Yanis to retrieve the talisman, only to find it gone for good. Unable to silence the pleas in her name. One less protection against Jamra.
Sidra pulled up a chair and sat in front of Yanis, who knelt on his one knee. “Yes, since your muddled brain can’t seem to tell us anything about the jinni who stole the talisman, let’s talk about your potions,” she said.
The sorcerer shook his head helplessly. “I made them exactly the same. I swear on my mother. Both potions from one bottle.” He shrugged with more helplessness. “I don’t know what went wrong. You must believe me.”
“And yet I don’t, because I woke from the supposed same potion that killed my husband.” She leaned forward and grimaced to show her teeth. “Do you know all that your mistake has cost me?”
“I still can’t believe you drank something from a man who sells potions from a market stall,” Yvette said with a chin nudge toward Yanis.
“Bah, it was a drop in each eye. But I was given assurance from a trusted friend he knew what he was doing,” Sidra said, her voice full of regret. “That friend was obviously wrong. But now we’ll learn the truth.” The jinni blew hot air on her fingertips, and a flame came to life. The fire danced in her palm, winding and cooling until the smoke formed into a snake, a pit viper hungry to taste the air with its tongue. She moved the snake’s curious tongue closer to the man’s face. “Did someone put you up to trickery? Murder?”
“What? No! You, Hariq, and the old one. It was always just the four of us who knew,” he said and leaned back as far as he dared to get away from the snake. “I never said a word to anyone. I never did anything I wasn’t asked to do. Ever.”
Yanis’s eyes had shifted from the snake to Yvette. The fact he was wary of speaking openly in front of a stranger was a good sign. The pact had been kept secret since the plan’s inception, bound by a spellword each was required to speak to seal the deal. And this weasel had, as far as she could tell, abided by the terms of their agreement—aside from the potion’s failure. The three of them had never told him the full truth and the real reason for the deception. Only the same story she’d told the girl.
The half-truth.
Yanis shifted his weight to abide the odd angle of his false leg, hesitant to change position too fast. Good. She preferred him scared.
Sidra bent forward with the snake sliding over her hand as she stared at the pitiful sorcerer. “So how does a single potion from the same bottle kill one and not the other? What does your experience as a sorcerer say about that?”
The man swallowed uneasily as his eyes roamed the room in search of an answer. Beads of sweat began collecting along his brow. Soon they would trickle down his face. “I’m not sure. Unless Hariq ate something that interfered with his blood? Said the wrong words for the spell?” Yanis grew more animated, as if he’d stumbled on an answer that would save him. “Or maybe he used . . . something other than what I gave him? Maybe someone else switched the potions.”
Sidra stared back at the human weasel as anger built a chimney fire inside her. “Who? Who could have done such a thing if only the four of us knew?”
The fallacy of his suggestion struck home. If what he said was true, then either someone had shared the secret—impossible because of the words binding them to the pact—or the potion had been switched or altered, which was very bad news for Yanis since he was the one who created it.
Sidra stood and kicked the chair out of the way. She cooed at the snake in her hand, kissed the top of its head, then let the serpent loose on the floor, where it coiled in front of the sorcerer. Yvette touched the jinni’s sleeve and the pair dissipated from the room, leaving the man to wrestle for his life against the slithering smoke and fire.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The train pulled into the station in a cloud of steam. When the air cleared, Elena peered out the window to see if the dog had materialized, but all she saw was the usual bustle of people, mortals all, coming and going with luggage in tow. Though if the dog was truly one of the jinn, she imagined he could take any shape he wanted. Not a comforting thought when arriving in an unfamiliar town for the first time after having been abducted on a flying carpet by an angry jinni with a vendetta.
The passengers scattered across the platform. Elena watched for a furry face and a bearded one with a scowl, just in case Jamra had followed after all. When nothing obvious presented itself, she sat on a bench to collect her thoughts. Surely whoever put her on that train had a plan for when she arrived. She could sense expectation in the air.
“Have you no luggage?” Camille glanced from the baggage attendant and his empty trolley to Elena sitting on her bench.
“I had to leave in a hurry,” she said and patted her satchel.
Camille nodded her head as if she understood. “May I at least give you a ride somewhere?” The perfume witch pointed to a goose-nosed yellow automobile with a black hardtop and two rows of seats parked in the street.
“Is that yours?”
Camille grinned. “Bought and paid for with a little patchouli oil, bergamot, and jasmine potion mixed with the right words in the right order. Our Fleur de Sable perfume sells faster than we can make it.”
Elena took one last look around the platform, ready to accept a ride if nothing presented itself, when the dog’s tail poked up by the railing on the other side of the track. Curious brown eyes stared back as though trying to decide whether to trust her. That put both of them in the undecided camp, she thought. His ears lifted and he pointed his nose upwind. She swore he nodded to himself after that.
“Thank you for the offer, but I see my guide has arrived,” she said.
“Are you sure? It’s quite a way up the hill to get to the center of town.” But then Camille spotted the dog and wished Elena a friendly “Bonne chance à toi.”
Elena walked to the end of the platform. The dog trotted out from behind the railing, remaining wary, keeping his ears on alert. She knew better than to reach a hand out for fear of being bitten, so she instead nodded and said, “Hello.”
The dog sat, his head reaching as tall as her midthigh. He was a rather ordinary-looking dog with brown fur that grew darker around the face, paws, and tip of a tail that curled. There was no collar, no sign of abuse or neglect that she could see, though he did look a bit hungry after his long run to keep up with the train. She was hungry herself. Unfortunately, she had nothing for either of them.
“Was it you who put me on the train?” she asked. The dog blinked once between solemn stares. “There’s something we need to talk about? Something you need to show me?” The dog wagged his tail. “Very well, but first it’s imperative I send a message home. Is that all right?” The dog’s nose twitched, and he pointed it in the direction of the train station. “Ah, merci. Good thinking,” she said. “It would be quicker to send a telegram than a dove from this far south, not to mention the more humane choice, given the distance the poor bird would have to fly.”
The Conjurer (The Vine Witch) Page 9