How does Josse do that? Make a person feel needed and confident, no matter their status. He makes you want to help him because he genuinely wishes to help in return. I think of how he spirited me from the sewer and snuck me into the Louvre, how passionately he argued to convince me to join him on this crazy venture to unite the people, and warmth rises within me like heat in a forge.
My eyes flit to his face, but he stiffens and clenches his jaw, refusing to turn.
Gavril spits into his palm and offers it to Josse, who returns the handshake with gusto. Something a true royal would never do. “A pleasure doing business with you, Master Gavril,” Josse says with a bow. The children burst into applause, whistling and clapping.
“Now, about that curative …” Gavril says.
“That, you’ll have to take up with her.” Josse gestures over his shoulder at me, and after a deliberate pause, he finally meets my gaze and grinds out, “Mademoiselle La Vie.”
A lump of emotion gathers in my throat. For a moment, I can’t speak. It’s far from absolution, but if he’s still willing to call me that, it gives me hope that someday I might be able to crawl out from beneath the weight of my crimes. It gives me the strength to stand a little taller and hold my chin a little higher and make a somewhat unorthodox request.
“Of course,” I say, bobbing a curtsy at Gavril. “I just have one small favor to ask. If we’re all headed in the same direction, would you mind helping me carry the body?” I point to the hulking smoke beast, and the gaiety dies out. The children stare as if I’ve lost my mind.
Desgrez, who hasn’t stopped grumbling since Josse began negotiating with Gavril, slaps a palm to his forehead and groans. “What could you possibly want with the creature’s body?”
“What any good alchemist would want,” I say fiercely. “To experiment.”
18
JOSSE
The millinery feels oppressively quiet after Gavril and his gang depart with their tincture. Every crackle of the fire makes me jump; the steady drip of the smoke beast’s blood on the floor bores a hole into my brain.
I would have left with them, but the majority of the orphans made it clear they’re not comfortable rubbing elbows with a royal just yet. And I couldn’t return to the sewer with Desgrez to check on my sisters, despite how desperate I am to see them. Apparently Louis isn’t ready to see my “traitorous, double-crossing face.” I’m not ready to see his haughty, piggish face either. Which means I’m trapped here, inside these four shrinking walls, with Mirabelle.
We both retreat to our separate corners and fall asleep immediately—a welcome reprieve. But as soon as she wakes, I can feel her looking at me. She’s pretending not to, hunched over the grotesque body of the creature on the counter. It looks like a gutted fish on the wharf—or a whale, more like. She had to cut it into pieces to fit it through the door. Most are still piled in the alleyway behind the millinery. A portion of its belly is splayed across the board, and despite being elbow-deep in its foul black innards, she glances my way every few seconds. Hoping to catch my gaze as she did on the street.
Stare all you’d like, I want to snap. It’s not going to help. But that would require speaking to her, which I’m also unwilling to do. With an overloud sigh, I turn to face the wall and tip my tricorne hat over my face. It’s the easy way out, but I don’t know what she expects me to say. I can’t pretend I’m not bothered by the fact she murdered my father—and Rixenda, too, in a way—then conveniently omitted those details when I asked her about Versailles.
So, I settle in and pretend to be exhausted. Which doesn’t require much acting at all. My limbs still feel like curdled pudding, and I’m covered in cuts and bruises from the bedamned smoke beast.
The creature continues to assault me, even in death. Its drying scales reek of rotting eggs and it makes horrid squelching noises as Mirabelle drags a knife down the center of its gut and peels back the pulpy skin.
My stomach flips and I gag. This is, without a doubt, the most disgusting thing I’ve ever witnessed. Even worse than helping Rixenda disembowel lambs. I stuff my nose down my shirt and close my eyes, but after three more nauseating incisions, I can’t take it anymore.
“Haven’t you cut it into enough pieces?” I wave at the hunks of mutilated flesh lying across the table.
Mirabelle’s eyes flit to mine, but she must not like my expression—which I admit feels rather hostile—because she hurriedly wipes her sweaty forehead on her sleeve and returns her attention to the beast. “Not until I discover its inner workings. The beasts are half mine, so I should be able to control them the way Lesage does.” She blows a curl away from her eyes, slices off another hunk of meat, and tosses it into the nearest pot.
“And how do you plan to do that?”
“By boiling it down to a broth, which I will then drink—if I can swallow it,” she adds when she sees my horrified expression, “with the hopes that it will join my composition with the beasts’.” I shudder and avert my gaze. “I still don’t understand why we can’t allow Gavril and the orphans to take care of them. They’re good at it, and they seem to enjoy it.”
“It’s not enough. No matter how many they kill, Lesage can always conjure more. In order to defeat the Shadow Society, we will need command of the monsters.”
“And if your putrid stew doesn’t work?”
She looks down at the pot with a wary yet determined expression. “Then I’ll try making its skin into an amulet or grinding its bones into powder.”
“So much to look forward to,” I groan.
“You can leave if you need to,” she says, and I spring to my feet faster than a jackrabbit. But before I reach the door she adds, “Or you can help.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
“Not help with the beast, obviously.”
“What, then?” I turn and let my arms slap against my sides. “I’m not permitted to do anything other than chop herbs, and as much as I enjoyed that …”
Mirabelle purses her lips and pushes her father’s red grimoire across the table toward me. “Help me brew another antidote to Viper’s Venom.”
My laughter is sharp and cynical. “I thought I’m not to be trusted with your father’s recipes.” Which I’ve decided is fine by me. I don’t trust myself with them either. Not after seeing Mirabelle, a trained alchemist, fail to create the proper antidote. “I know nothing about alchemy.”
“Lucky for you, I’m an excellent teacher. I’ll walk you through each step. I haven’t enough hands to dissect the smoke beast and distill the antipoison at the same time. I need you, Josse. Please.” The way she says please—so soft and beseeching—it sounds more like an apology than a request. But I’m even more dumbfounded by what she called me—my name, rather than “princeling.” I can hardly bear to look at her, yet my traitorous ears revel in the sound of my name on her lips.
“Fine,” I grumble, and skulk back to the counter. “But if this goes horribly—”
“You will be held blameless,” she promises. “Now take up a gallipot and set it on the fire, then pour two measures of hyssop into the mortar bowl and grind the leaves to a fine pulp. I think that’s what the previous antidote was missing.”
“Two measures of what?” I stare down at the cluster of herbs and instruments, most of which I can’t begin to describe, let alone operate. I wipe my palms down my breeches, but they’re as cold and clammy as a herring.
“Father’s notes should answer all of your questions.” Her lips are pinched and her hand hesitates, but Mirabelle eventually opens the grimoire and sets it on the tiny corner of the counter not overtaken by her beast.
I stare at the lines and lines of messy, cramped writing and puff out my cheeks, once again feeling like the incompetent little boy listening in on Louis’s lessons. Mirabelle is making a grand gesture including me like this, so I’m not about to ask her to read it to me, but I feel even more uncomfortable and out of place than I did among the courtiers at Versailles.
Take it o
ne word at a time. Pretend you’re in the kitchens with Rixenda and her recipes. How hard could it be? But the thought of Rixenda makes my stomach twist with rage and grief. She’s dead because of Mirabelle.
The pain is still sharp, like the tip of a poker burning my flesh, but when I start to stagger back, I’m overwhelmed by the memory of Rixenda’s craggy face. The scent of her lavender soap tickles my nose, and her rasp of a voice fills the smoky shop.
Be strong, Josse.
Holding a grudge will help nothing. It’s not what she would have wanted.
I roll up my sleeves and lift the pestle and mortar bowl.
Despite my struggles reading, in an hour’s time I’ve made decent headway on the anti-venom. Turns out alchemy is quite similar to working in the kitchens, and I’m more proficient than I could have hoped. I know this because Mirabelle keeps checking my progress and humming with surprise. Or lifting her brows in shock.
We work like this for several hours. Neither of us say much, but the silence isn’t uncomfortable like before. And I no longer stand at an arm’s length as if she has the pox. I even ask her to pass me a stirring spoon and neither of us recoils when our fingers accidentally brush on the handle.
When the sun falls behind the buildings, melting like a pat of butter into the river, Mirabelle lights the tapers situated throughout the room. She pauses after lighting the final one beside me and whispers, “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. There’s a good chance I’ve fouled this up completely.”
“It couldn’t be worse than my first attempt.” She flashes a strained smile. “That’s not what I was thanking you for, anyway—at least not only that. Thank you for coming when I ran after the smoke beast. I would have died had you and Desgrez not followed.”
She waits for me to say something, but I didn’t make a conscious decision to follow her. My feet just carried me down the steps as if an invisible cord was tied around her waist and the other end was wrapped around mine. I’m not about to tell her that, though, so I mumble unintelligibly and return to spooning the antipoison into phials.
“Why did you come after me?” she presses, looking at me with those big black eyes. “You could have let me die and had your vengeance.”
I pound the phial down harder than necessary, partially to fend her off and partially to harden my focus. “You may be a liar, but aligning with you is still my sisters’ best shot at freedom. And our only chance of reclaiming the city from the Shadow Society.”
Mirabelle gives a tight nod and bustles behind the counter, biting her lips to conceal their slight trembling. I want to ignore it, I command myself to ignore it, but it’s so pitiable and heartbreaking, words spew from my lips. “And I suppose a small part of me might understand why you withheld the truth.”
Her knife clatters to the table, and she peers at me from beneath her messy curls, the brown turned to gold in the candlelight. “You do?”
I sigh and scrub my hand over my face. It would’ve been so easy for the common people to blame me for my father’s negligence, but they were willing to hear me out and judge me by my own merit. Doesn’t Mirabelle deserve the same?
“We were both blind,” I say slowly. “You may have brewed the poison, but you had no way of knowing how your mother planned to use it. You were doing what you thought was right. If I condemned you for that, I’d have to condemn myself too. I knew I was acting like a wretched miscreant. I tried to cause as much mayhem as possible. If I’d spent a little less time raising hell and a little more time educating myself on important matters, trying to be the prince the people needed, perhaps I would have seen how terribly my father was failing them. Perhaps none of this would have happened.”
“This situation is bigger than any one person,” Mirabelle says. “And you’re no wretched miscreant. A hoodlum, certainly. And a scoundrel, definitely. But not wholly wretched.” She gently knocks my shoulder, and our sides press together. To my astonishment, I don’t lean away. Neither does she. We shiver there beside each other for a breath of a moment before the millinery door slams open.
Mirabelle yelps and stiffens. I turn, the spoon still in my fist, expecting to see Gavril returning with additional demands, but it’s Mirabelle’s assistant from the Louvre.
The one who doesn’t know I exist.
“Gris!” Mirabelle’s voice is an entire octave higher than normal. “What a pleasant surprise. I thought I’d have to wait another two nights to see your smiling face.”
Which is the wrong thing to say, since the expression on his face is hardly a smile. His lips are curled back so far that he resembles a growling dog. And his brows crumple as his gaze darts between Mirabelle and me, as if he can see tiny, invisible threads connecting us from every place we’ve touched. He tightens his grip on his leather satchel, and his knuckles shine like bone.
“Who’s this?” Gris says, looking me up and down. “I didn’t realize you’d recruited additional help.” The way he growls the word help makes it perfectly clear the sort of help he thinks I’m providing.
I set the spoon on the counter, don my most innocent smile, and wipe my hands on my tunic before offering one to Gris. “Pleasure to finally meet you. Mirabelle speaks of you constantly. I’m Jo—”
“Just a blacksmith’s apprentice,” Mirabelle interrupts. She brushes past me, links her arm through Gris’s, and pulls him into the shop—decidedly away from me. “One of the pots cracked, and he came to repair it.”
“What’s he still doing here?” Gris asks. “He doesn’t seem to be fixing anything. He didn’t even bring tools.”
“Oh, he fixed the pot days ago. Turns out he knows a thing or two about alchemy and offered to help me,” Mirabelle says with a forced laugh, compulsively tucking the same wayward curl behind her ear.
Gris glowers down at her. “You’re lying. You’re doing that thing with your hair. The question is, why are you lying?” He glances to me.
“Don’t blame her,” I say. “It’s a common problem. Most people are embarrassed to be seen with me. I’m Josse de Bourbon.”
“Bastard son of the king,” Mirabelle cuts in, emphasizing my title—or lack thereof.
“I know who he is,” Gris mutters. “But I still don’t understand what he’s doing here. I’m happy to help you, Mira, but this … I was under the impression he was dead. And what’s all that?” The color drains from his face as he finally looks beyond Mirabelle at the carcass of the smoke beast splayed across the table. “Is that one of Lesage’s creatures?” He stumbles back, shaking his head. “What are you really up to?” He shoots another look at me. As if I somehow forced her into all of this.
“I’m only healing, as I told you,” Mirabelle says quickly. “And Josse is assisting me.”
“Why would a royal do that?”
Mirabelle shoots me a look that says she’ll toss me into one of her pots and boil the skin off my bones if I speak. “The princeling sought me out after I escaped because he wishes to be a different sort of royal than his father. One who actually cares for the people. He’s more like us than any of the nobility. His mother was a scullery maid. The king was ashamed of him and banished him to the kitchens. The courtiers rejected and reviled him.”
“I love when you extol all of my finest accomplishments,” I say, pretending to be stung. Which isn’t difficult because I do feel a little stung. I told her those things in confidence, not so she could disparage me to strangers. I part my lips, but Mirabelle shoots me another dangerous look.
“Josse sought me out because he wishes to heal the people. Who am I to refuse help? You know how having such a purpose can change a person.” She stares up at him until he grudgingly sighs.
“And the other royal children?” he asks. “Do they live as well? I’ve been hearing rumors about the dauphin and some ill-conceived rebellion.” Again, he glowers over at me, as if my brother and I are one and the same.
Mirabelle’s eyes briefly catch mine, radiating both fear and elation. News of our re
bellion is spreading, just as we hoped. But neither of us had considered what might happen if the rumors got back to the Shadow Society.
I hold up both hands. “If the dauphin is alive and leading a rebellion, I’m the last person he would recruit. He loathes me.”
The lie is true enough. If the rebellion were Louis’s idea, I wouldn’t be included. Just as he isn’t included in our plans—not yet.
“When I escaped, all of the royals were ailing in a dilapidated hovel,” Mirabelle adds. “It would’ve taken a miracle for them to survive.”
Another clever half-truth. And deliciously ironic since she was our miracle.
“I’ve heard nothing about the royals or a rebellion,” she continues, “but the smoke beasts are rather worrisome.” She artfully steers the conversation to the carcass on the board. “I found this one dead in the road and decided to study it to see how I might help the innocent people caught in the crossfire of their attacks, since they are evidently roaming the city.”
“I didn’t know Lesage had set them loose.” Gris studies the beast with a concerned expression.
There are a lot of things you don’t know, I’m tempted to say. But since I’m certain Mirabelle would kill me for admitting this, I keep my lips tightly stitched.
“Thank you for bringing more supplies,” Mirabelle says, reaching for Gris’s satchel, but he steps back and holds it out of reach.
“I want to help you, Mira, but you’re putting me in a difficult position.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “I would never ask you to go behind Mother’s back unless I was certain it was the right thing to do. And I’m certain. This is best for the people—I’ve already healed scores of men and women on the rue du Temple as well as the infirm at the Hôtel-Dieu—just as the Society used to. I’m asking you to trust me over her this once. To choose me this once.”
Gris looks down at Mirabelle, who clasps her hands before her chest and makes a pleading face. With a final glance at the smoke beast, then me, he relinquishes the satchel with a sigh. “Very well. But only because I’m slightly afeared for the people—that’s the reason I came tonight. I overheard Fernand and Marguerite whispering earlier today of a mass execution of the fishmongers on the Quai de la Grève. I’m certain La Voisin is only trying to appease the masses, but—”
An Affair of Poisons Page 19