“My sincerest apologies, mademoiselle,” Desgrez says with a bow. “Thank you for healing me.” He offers his hand and the girl considers it, chewing her lip before cautiously placing her small hand in his. Desgrez kisses the back of her wrist, and at the same moment, drives his other fist into the side of her face. Leveling the girl who just saved him. She collapses like a rag doll, slides off the bench, and sinks into her black and red petticoats.
I can’t stop the cry that surges up my throat.
Desgrez rubs his knuckles and gives me a hard look. “What?”
Shame and indignation burn my cheeks. “Are you going to kill her?” I ask, trying and failing to keep my voice from cracking.
A sly grin crawls across Desgrez’s face, and he shakes his head. “Not yet. You’re right. I think we can use her … in more ways than one.”
7
MIRABELLE
Merde.
I writhe against the ropes but the knots hold fast, and the more I struggle, the soggier I become. Shivering and choking, I turn on my side to avoid the freezing puddles that reek of urine. Mother would be appalled if she could see me—tied up like a hog, rolling around in the muck. The longer I squirm and cry, the more I’m certain she’s here. Watching. I catch glimpses of her dark eyes in the undulating blackness. I hear snatches of her voice in the biting drafts of wind.
Serves you right for running away. For brewing forbidden tinctures and healing our enemies.
Perhaps she’s right. I saved a boy’s life, protected him and his friend from Lesage’s magic, and this is how they repay me: by binding me and leaving me to rot in a moldering dungeon. A chamber pot!
“Help me! Please!” I scream through the gag in my teeth. The muffled cries reverberate off the cramped walls, growing softer and softer until they fall away completely. No one comes, and the hours pass. The darkness is so complete, I am unable to make out my own feet, let alone an exit, nor can I determine how long I’ve been trapped here. It was sundown when that ungrateful lout put his fist to my face. After I healed him.
I should have let him perish on the Pont Neuf. His friend, too.
A ribbon of guilt slithers beneath my ribs. That’s what Mother would have done. But we are supposed to be protecting and caring for the people. We are supposed to be better than Louis XIV. And I promised myself I would test my antidote if Lesage unleashed his magic. Which he did. And it worked!
I bark out a laugh, my breath puffing like a cloud above my face. A flood of pride, as warm and sweet as the lemon verbena tea Father used to drink, seeps through my core, combating the cold a fraction. It is the sole spark of light, of hope, in this dismal situation—in this dank, dripping cavern or dungeon or wherever it is they’re keeping me.
I try to cling to that monumental victory, but with every passing hour the ground grows colder and my skin grows wetter. The puddles soak through the flimsy silk of my gown, chilling me to the bone. The men relieved me of my cape, and this deplorable dress offers no protection. The rocky floor digs into my hips and bites at my shoulders, and it isn’t long before shivers overtake me. My teeth clink together, making my head pound and my thoughts jumble. Will I freeze to death before Mother finds me? Do I want her to find me?
A tear streaks down my cheek and drips off my chin. And then another. They come faster and faster until great, gasping sobs hammer my sides like fists. I tell myself I’ll only carry on for a moment. Then I’ll pull myself together and devise a plan. But waves of fear and regret continue to pummel me, so fast I can scarce catch my breath between swells.
I cry for Gris, whom I left in the chaos of the procession to be trampled beneath the horses’ hooves.
I cry for the innocent people who were caught in the crossfire of Lesage’s lightning or scorched by his smoke beasts.
And I cry for myself because I am a fool, deceived on too many counts to fathom.
It feels as if I’ve been lying here for days, months even, when something rustles far off in the blackness. I cock my head and strain to hear. Slowly, like an eerie, disjointed melody, the sounds form into footsteps and voices. Pounding and arguing. Drawing nearer.
My captors have returned to kill me. Or torture me.
I flail against my bonds with renewed determination, twisting and straining and stretching. But nothing has changed in the hours or days since they left me. The ropes dig bloody rivets into my wrists and ankles. My shoulders howl in agony—bent at awkward angles like an injured bird. Crying with pain, I press myself against the dripping wall and pray for deliverance, though my pleas are surely in vain. I doubt God looks kindly on the killer of a king.
A flare of light pricks the darkness. It’s so bright against the suffocating gloom, it scorches my pupils. I yelp and shut my eyes, but the imprint of the flame continues to dance behind my eyelids. Footsteps splash through puddles of filth, and the voices slowly become discernible.
“It’s been one day. You cannot feed her yet,” someone complains.
“I most certainly can,” another voice answers. This one, I recognize. Bit by bit, the boys from the bridge emerge through the shadows, ducking down a long, low-ceilinged passageway. The single torch they carry between them highlights their faces from below, making them look devilish and menacing. My heart beats so erratically it pulses in my throat. I dig my heels into the floor and thrust deeper into the corner.
“She isn’t going to die after one day without food,” the boy I healed says. “If anything, it will make her more cooperative.”
“She saved your life. She eats,” the other one says firmly.
They’re close now, maybe twenty paces from where I lie. I’m in some sort of cavern, it seems, because they’re no longer stooped but standing at their full height, looking like giants from where I squirm on the floor. I’m determined not to look like a sniveling worm, so I raise my chin.
The boy I saved shakes his head and clenches his fist on the hilt of his sword. “Were it up to me, she wouldn’t eat until she’s healed the girls and we’ve heard from her mother.”
So that’s it. They plan to ransom me back to the Shadow Society?
“Well, it isn’t up to you, is it?” the other boy says through gritted teeth.
The first boy throws his hands into the air and storms back down the tunnel. The other glares after him for a moment before yanking his tricorne hat lower and striding toward me. He’s even more haggard and filthy than the last time I saw him; not even the beggars in the streets look so ravaged. His brown hair is a tangle of knots, his doublet is torn, and a thick layer of grime covers his breeches. His cheeks are gaunt, and his chin is scruffy with stubble. If I didn’t know better, I would say he was a prisoner himself.
My eyes break away from him and scan the cavern, taking in the few details I can distinguish in the torchlight—the dripping walls, the rusted grate in the far corner, the tunnels branching off in numerous directions. I should have gathered where I was from the dampness and smell alone. This isn’t a dungeon or a cave—it’s the sewer. Not even vagabonds would inhabit such a place. Which means my captors are more desperate still.
The boy lumbers closer, and I scrutinize him with greater care, looking for a crest on his doublet or some feature that might identify him. He’s taller than average with a strong chin, green eyes, and a thin scar through the corner of his lip. And his friend mentioned healing “the girls.” What girls?
“What are you looking at?” The boy glowers down at me.
I avert my eyes but refuse to cower, channeling Mother’s cold, imperious demeanor. She would never grovel to these ruffians. Then again, she would never be in this situation because she would have left them to die on the bridge.
The boy squats down beside me, and I squeal. My head knocks against the cavern wall and bursts of light explode like stars in the darkness. He waits for me to steady my balance before speaking. “I thought you might be hungry.” He reaches into his coat and procures a butt of bread.
I stare at the offering and c
hoke on a fresh wave of tears. My stomach is so knotted with hunger it feels as if a sword is sawing through my middle, but I cannot accept a morsel of food. It’s undoubtedly poisoned. They probably think themselves clever—poisoning the girl who poisoned the king—but I won’t eat.
“Don’t you want food?” he says more forcefully.
I shake my head and press myself against the moldy wall. Naturally, my stomach chooses that moment to gurgle, making noises more befitting a cow than a girl.
The boy’s sigh sounds as weak and exhausted as I feel. He scoots closer, and the heat of his body sends shivers through my frostbitten skin. When his fingers slide through my hair and untie my gag, I quiver at the wrongness of his touch. It paralyzes me from head to toe, as if I’ve ingested monkshood. Long, painful seconds tick away, and when at last I regain control, I peer through my wet, clinging eyelashes and find the butt of bread hovering before my lips. It’s old and stale, the crust flaking off in brittle pieces, but it smells like garlic and rosemary, and my empty stomach roars with longing.
I shouldn’t eat it. I will not eat it.
The boy tears off a corner and holds it out, and, curse my lacking discipline, I bite it from his fingers as if I am a mangy, starving mongrel. He doesn’t say a word as he breaks off bite-sized chunks and holds them to my lips, nor does he look at me. Whenever I lift my gaze, he is examining the floor, the puddles, the walls. Anything else.
Too soon, the bread is gone, and the boy brushes the crumbs from his fingers and stands. My insides still throb with emptiness, and I’m tempted to slither forward like a snake and lick up every speck. But I tighten my fists and keep to the corner. He cannot see my desperation.
“You saved my friend’s life. It’s only right I return the favor,” he says brusquely. “If you cooperate, I think we can continue to help each other. There are others in need of healing. Save them, and perhaps we can negotiate your freedom.”
I had resolved not to speak, but his suggestion is so ridiculous, I can’t help but laugh. “Negotiate my freedom? How dim-witted do you think me? I healed your dreadful friend and look where it got me? I’ll heal no one else.”
The boy grinds his teeth, and his voice rumbles low. “Consider your actions carefully. If you fail to oblige, we will have no reason to spare you.”
I shrug as if my own life is of little consequence, but in truth, I’m so terrified, my hands twitch and tremble behind my back. I don’t want to die, but it’s not that simple because I don’t want to return to my former life either—back to Mother and the Society to dole out poison and death. So where does that leave me?
I squeeze my eyes shut, wishing I had developed a draught to render myself invisible. How blissful it would be to vanish, to slip away to some other city and live some other life. To shed the skin of Mirabelle Monvoisin and become someone new, someone who doesn’t have to live in fear of her mother and compete with her sister and flounder every second, wondering if she’s crossed a line. Or if she was standing on the correct side of the line to begin with. At what point does gray bleed into black?
I wave the boy off. He can offer nothing I want. I don’t know the answer myself.
The boy’s face hardens. “You will help us, La Petite Voisin.” That cursed moniker makes me flinch. I am not Mother’s perfect miniature—not anymore—and that anyone thinks so, even this boy, makes me want to scream. He marches into the curling shadows down the tunnel, and my fury escalates with every step he puts between us. “I am not La Petite Voisin,” I shout.
To my surprise, he halts, shoulders tense, as if he’s forgotten to breathe. “What do you mean, you’re not her? Of course you’re her.”
Maybe the food in my belly is making me bold. Or maybe I know, deep down, it doesn’t matter what I say or do: I’m dead regardless. But I glare up at him and shake my head.
“Then who are you?”
“Mirabelle.”
The boy grips his forehead. “I don’t give a damn what your given name is. It makes no difference to me.”
But it makes a difference to me, and I shout my real name, Mirabelle, again and again as he vanishes into the blackness.
The boy returns with bread the next day. And the day after that. At least, I assume another day has come and gone. In the dark, there’s no telling how much time has passed, but I’ve noticed a pattern in the routine. Each time after I eat, the faint sounds of coughing and crying reach me from somewhere down the tunnel. It lasts for what feels like an eternity—through the day?—then it’s quiet as death until the boy comes again.
He hasn’t bothered retying my gag. I stopped screaming days ago because I lost my voice, and it’s pointless besides. No one can hear me in this dank, dripping place. After a week of imprisonment, my hips and back are covered in raw, oozing sores and my fingers and toes are so cold, I’m afraid they’ll need to be amputated.
But I haven’t given up.
Each time the boy comes to feed me and beg me to heal the girls—I still haven’t figured out which girls—I pepper him with questions of my own, hoping he’ll slip and say something I can use against him.
“Who are you?” I ask through mouthfuls of bread. “I know you’re someone of consequence.”
Nothing.
“My mother will never let you get away with this. She will hunt you and kill you. Lesage will torture you with désintégrer.”
Still nothing.
After several days, I blurt, “Are your girls dead yet? They must be getting close. Supposing they weren’t hit directly by Lesage’s fire, they haven’t much time. The longest I’ve seen anyone survive is a month.”
His eyes flick down the tunnel—the only reaction I’ve been able to provoke. Which means I’m on the right path. “They’ll die a horrible, painful death. A death I could prevent, if only I could trust you… .”
But the boy doesn’t spare another glance for the tunnel. He is made of stone: cold and hard as granite.
It near kills me, but I refuse his bread and water the following morning. He grunts and scowls and even tries to wedge the bread between my lips, but I eat nothing and drink only from the puddle beneath me. The water tastes of silt and iron and all manner of dreck. With every swallow, I feel it tainting my innards and poisoning my humours. Sickness gathers in my chest. Fever heats my cheeks. My limbs grow steadily heavier until they become boulders, too dense to budge. My head is an anchor, an anvil, a cannonball. I don’t even have to remind myself to close my eyes and take only rasping breaths in the boy’s presence.
After I have refused food for four days, the boy doesn’t even attempt to feed me. He sighs and drags his feet to where I lie, nudging me with the toe of his boot. “Damn you,” he mutters. “Do you want to die?”
When I don’t respond, he limps back across the chamber, but he doesn’t make it more than three steps before he halts, his breath quickening. I hear it too—the heavy tread of boots and garbled stream of cursing. I slit my eyes just enough to see his hateful friend burst into the cavern. His black hair is tangled across his face and he’s heaving for breath, waving a torch in one hand and an opened missive in the other. A bit of parchment stamped with a crimson double-headed eagle seal.
Mother’s seal.
Hope surges through my frostbitten body. Little as I wish to return to the Louvre and the Shadow Society, anything would be better than perishing of jail fever at the hands of my captors. A hint of a smile bends my lips at the thought of dry clothes and a full belly.
But then the boy I healed begins shouting. “She refuses to negotiate!” He thrusts the letter in the other boy’s face and points at me. “La Voisin doesn’t want her.”
What?
The smile melts off my lips. My heart ceases to beat. I’m tempted to launch up from the floor and demand to see the missive, but I bite my tongue at the last second and keep still, swallowing the bitter panic gathering in my throat.
“Impossible,” the boy who feeds me cries.
He’s lying, I assure mysel
f. Of course Mother wants you. She needs you in the laboratory. Only that’s no longer true. I’ve been stripped of my title, barred from my concoctions. She caught me with Father’s grimoire.
“Give me that.” The boy snatches the letter from his friend and paces as he reads, silently mouthing the words. I wish he’d read aloud, and at the same time, I’m grateful he doesn’t.
Mother has always led the Society with an intensity bordering on ruthlessness, but she has always been my mother first: teaching Marguerite and me the arts of chiromancy and face reading, supporting our family with her fortune-telling when Father shirked the task, and even after he died, when her eyes brimmed with tears every time she looked at me, she protected me by enforcing stricter laboratory rules. I will never be her favorite, but she would never disown me like this. She wouldn’t.
Unless it was for the “greater good.”
The boy stops abruptly, crumples the terrible note in his fist, and hurls it across the chamber. When that doesn’t satisfy him, he snatches the tricorne hat off his head and slams it to the ground with a curse. His eyes are wild and manic in the torchlight, laced with strands of molten lead. His voice rumbles low and hoarse. “What do we do now?”
The boy I saved stares at the battered, soggy hat. “What can we do? We have no leverage to negotiate our way out of Paris and no allies within.”
“We have to do something,” the other boy shouts. “Anne and Françoise—” he cuts himself off and glances at me. I hold my breath, hold every muscle still.
“Is she dead?” the boy I healed asks.
“Probably,” the other says.
But I am not dead. And finally, finally, he has said something useful. Anne and Françoise are the names of Madame de Montespan’s daughters. The girls he’s been speaking of are the bastard daughters of the king. And without his hat, I can better see the prominent cheekbones and gooseberry green eyes of the boy who feeds me.
Devil’s claws, I could slap myself for being so blind!
For weeks, the Sun King’s face has haunted me, and the boy is his exact likeness. Not the dauphin, as he’s fair as a fawn, but undoubtedly a bastard son. And if three siblings survived, I’d wager the dauphin and Madame Royale are nearby as well.
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