The Vine Witch

by Smith, Luanne G.

  She lowered her gaze to where a chain looped from the button on his vest to the watch in his pocket. He didn’t need to pull the watch out for her to know what the case looked like. The image had never left her mind—a sickly green dragon’s eye with a vertical slit overlaid by an elaborate golden eyelid. Tick tock, tick tock, the lid had snapped shut and her life got sucked away. But his ordinary appearance threw her. What if he wasn’t the right person after all? What if the watch was more common than she’d thought?

  And then he raised his voice.

  “How dare you accuse me of subterfuge,” he said, pounding his fist against the table so that it rattled the silverware. “You practically begged me to fix your little problem. As I recall you handed over a pretty stack of cash and told me I was free to do whatever it took so you could be rid of the situation. That’s what I did.”

  The nasal tone, the air of superiority, the twinge of false aristocracy—his identity came flying into focus. The face without the dramatic pasted-on eyebrows and pointed goatee. The eyes wiped clean of their black kohl. A wizard without his flowing robe and false nails.

  “You!” she said, throwing back the curtain.

  Rackham startled, then narrowed his eyes. “You?” Once he made the connection, he balked at his tablemate. “What is this?”

  “Good heavens, what are you doing here?”

  Elena pushed back the other curtain. Sitting opposite of the man who had cursed her and left her for dead was the woman who had raised her from a child.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Was it a chance meeting? Coincidence? The All Knowing’s idea of a cosmic joke? Elena’s mind grasped for any reasonable explanation for why Grand-Mère would keep company with that man.

  Then she spotted the brown vial gripped in her mentor’s trembling hand. The missing bottle from her workroom. The one she’d filled when deranged with the need for revenge.

  Of course. It was the only explanation that made sense. Grand-Mère had sussed out the witch who’d cursed her and was willing to retaliate. Perhaps even commit murder in the name of vengeance.

  Elena slid into the booth beside Grand-Mère and put her hand over hers. “Please don’t do it. I know what I said before about needing revenge, but it isn’t worth it. You don’t have to do this for me.”

  Rackham pushed his glass of wine aside and leaned toward Grand-Mère. “What does she mean you don’t have to do this for her? What kind of setup is this?”

  The old woman pushed Elena’s hand away. “It was never supposed to be permanent, Edmond. You promised me you knew what to do. That she wouldn’t be hurt.”

  “You’ve always known how I make my living.” He took a swallow of wine before pleading his case to Elena. “I did what I was paid to do. Purely business.”

  Grand-Mère’s eyes swelled with tears. “Your lies ruined everything.”

  Rackham leaned back in his seat, lifting his eyes heavenward as if it were his curse to try and reason with a woman about business. To cope, he drained the contents of his wineglass in one swallow.

  “How is it you even know this man?” Elena said, turning to Grand-Mère. “He’s a shady carnival palm reader who works out of the back of a wagon.”

  Rackham snorted, indignant at the description. “Oh, Ariella and I go way back. I was the one who sold you to the Gardins after your parents died.”

  Sold?

  He set his empty glass down hard for emphasis. “That’s right. I know exactly who you are. You may disparage my carnival work,” he went on, “but it was your mother and father who were actually—”

  “Edmond, no.”

  “You knew my parents?”

  “Of course I knew them. All those dark magic books you were so interested in—who do you think I procured those from?”

  Intuition knows the truth when heard, but the sound can leave a terrible ringing in the ears.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Yes, you’ll find he’s rather good at that,” Grand-Mère said.

  Rackham paused to cough into a handkerchief. “Clearly Ariella has kept you in the dark about your heritage, but it was your mother who taught me everything I know about curses and poison. Esmé and Raul were my mentors. That is until they were both hanged for selling their poisons to society women in the city who’d grown bored of their wealthy husbands.” He made a comme ci, comme ça gesture with a wave of his handkerchief before stopping to cough again. “I didn’t fully see the resemblance before, but I should have known by the way you were drawn to the book on curses you were Esmé’s daughter. But then I expected you’d still be hopping around your swamp, plucking flies out of the air with your tongue. Or giving some stray dog indigestion by now.”

  “Edmond!”

  Hanged?

  He leaned in and inspected her more closely. “How is it you’re even here in the flesh? That curse was taken straight out of Esmé’s grimoire.”

  For a moment she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. The world tilted off its axis, spinning into oblivion. A storm of stars and dust expanded inside her head as her shadow vision intruded of its own volition, forcing her to glimpse the past and the parents she’d barely known. Memory whirled her to an apothecary wagon, its shelves lined with bottles that rattled as the wheels rolled down a narrow brick lane lined with shops smelling of red and yellow spices. Jars hung above her head filled with shriveled seedpods, dried animal hearts, and scaly toes with long claws suspended in formaldehyde. One bottle, she recalled a voice telling her, held the sweet-smelling extraction from a red flower that could make a man dream of the past forever. Another contained a jade liquid that fumed with gray smoke when bits of nail clippings and hair were added with a swirl of the wrist—her mother’s wrist, which jangled with the music of a dozen gold bracelets as it mixed the poison.

  The truth of her bloodline tugged at her. It knocked against the center point of her nature, beyond learning, beyond intuition, beyond instinct. It injected itself into her consciousness until she could no longer deny the truth. She’d been born a potions witch, a conjurer of poisons and curses. A venefica.

  The sound of harsh coughing broke her meditation. Urgency summoned her back through the liminal space, accelerating her from the past to the present. When she opened her eyes the proof of her lineage stared her in the face. She saw it in the dilation of Rackham’s pupils, the beads of sweat on his temple, and the blue tinge of his lips. Her poison was snaking through his veins, looking for his heart. Grand-Mère had already slipped it into his wine. It would have only taken a drop or two. Nothing to taste, nothing to see, and nothing she could do for him, except give him the chance to tell her the truth and clear his conscience before death dropped him at the feet of the All Knowing.

  “Apparently my mother didn’t teach you everything,” Elena said. “That toadstone might protect you from getting sick on spoiled food, but it won’t help against a tailor-made poison.” She waited while he coughed and gave the ring a twist. “And to answer your question, if you knew half of what you claim to know, you’d have understood that when allowed to build up in the body over time, some poisons—such as self-ingested bufotoxins—degrade the energy holding a transmogrification spell in place. It took seven years, but the bonds of your curse disintegrated. That’s how I’m sitting here, Professor. And why you are now dying.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been poisoned,” Elena said. “It’s already moving through your bloodstream, circling your heart, waiting for the right moment to squeeze.”

  Rackham’s head snapped up from his handkerchief. He stared at Grand-Mère, horror-struck. “You poisoned me?”

  “Yes.” Grand-Mère tilted her glass, savoring the last of her wine.

  He blinked at her in disbelief. “You’re mad. Both of you.” He tried to leave when the first spasm hit. He gasped for air and tore his silver tie loose from his neck. “Help me—damn it, someone help me.”

  The room was full of witches reeking of healing herbs, but only
the Charlatan sisters stopped their celebrating to push through the crowd. The one nearest reached in her embroidered jacket and brandished a useless rabbit’s foot, likely with the hope of demanding two coins for it, until she saw who sat at the man’s table. She sneered and backed off.

  Elena dug in her pocket for the rue amulet she’d brought with her. “Here,” she said, dropping a pinch of the herb into Rackham’s hand. “Put it on the back of your tongue. It might lessen the pain.”

  He greedily inhaled the herb, crunching it between his teeth. “Will it stop the poison?”

  “Elena doesn’t use half measures, Edmond.” Grand-Mère calmly set the empty vial on the table and folded her hands together as if her work was done. “She’s Esmé’s daughter, after all, and my protégé. I’d guess your heart is going to explode in a matter of moments.”

  Rackham’s voice rose in pitch as if desperate pleading might change his fate. “It was nothing personal. ‘Take the girl away’ she said, so I did.” He reached out and grabbed Elena’s wrist with surprising strength. “Now give me the antidote!”

  How could she tell him there wasn’t one? Murder had always been her goal when the poison was mixed. Rackham let go and coughed into his handkerchief, staining it with bright-red blood. Panicked at the sight, he slid out of the booth to beg for help from the other witches. But by then the poison had ensnared his heart. His eyes bulged and his sallow skin drained of color. He clutched his chest, wincing in disbelief. “I am dead,” he said and folded to the floor.

  One of the young tarot readers screamed, igniting a low-grade panic that spread across the room. Morbid curiosity followed, drawing the crowd nearer to the body. The effect proved temporary, however, as a green-and-black aura formed around the dead professor. The crowd recognized a revenge poisoning when they saw one. Madame Grimalkin shooed the witches back to their celebration, reassuring them a pigeon would be sent to the authorities.

  Jean-Paul, however, didn’t have the benefit of reading auras. He pushed through the crowd, knocking over empty chairs and spilling mugs of beer to get to Elena.

  “What happened? I heard a scream.” He paused and gaped at the body. “Is that man dead?”

  Elena didn’t trust her legs to hold her up, but she took his hand when he offered it.

  “Let us hope,” Grand-Mère answered.

  “Madame. You’re all right? We’ve been looking for you.”

  “Monsieur Martel, I hoped I might see you again.”

  He slid into the empty booth across from them. “Of course. Why wouldn’t you?”

  She gave him a weak smile that was interrupted by a fit of coughing. When she regained her composure, she smiled and patted his hand. “I fear my fate is tied up with the dead man’s on the floor. My heart is in retreat, but it can’t evade answering for what we did much longer,” she said with a c’est la vie flick of her hand. “I won’t be returning to Château Renard. But know that it was everything to me, and I leave the estate in the best of hands.”

  “Madame?”

  We?

  The old woman cleared a tickle in her throat, then unhitched the silver chatelaine, with its keys, amulets, and small tastevin, and held it out to Elena. “I won’t ask for your forgiveness. That’s between the All Knowing and me. But I hope, in some way, I’ve given you the peace of mind you needed, knowing the person who cursed you is gone.”

  “Grand-Mère, no.” Vertigo gripped Elena as if she were standing on a ledge overlooking a canyon of secrets too vast to see the bottom. She shook her head, willing the words to be a mistake, even as her mentor laid the silver chain in her hands.

  “As for my part, I only wanted you to come to your senses. You were in such a rush to marry Bastien. You couldn’t see how he was manipulating you. Trying to steal you and your talents away from me. After everything I taught you? I couldn’t allow it. Joseph and I had worked too hard to build the vineyard up from nothing to have it stolen by that man. I just couldn’t let you leave to be his vine witch.”

  “How could you think I would turn my back on you and Château Renard?”

  Grand-Mère demurred. “I’m not proud of it, but for a time I worried your blood’s true calling had finally churned to the surface. Edmond warned it might happen when he first brought you to us as a child.”

  Sympathy drained from Elena’s voice. “Because he’d sold you the daughter of a venefica?”

  “Yes.”

  The word deflated her, and she stared at her hands in her lap. But as much as she hated hearing it, there was a spark of truth in the admission. Hadn’t her first impulse been to brew a poison so she could get her revenge on Bastien? Wasn’t a man lying dead on the floor because of that compulsion?

  “I know what you’re thinking, Elena. And, yes, you’ve always had an impeccable instinct for what deadly root went with which warty fungus. Or which spotted leaf was more potent steeped as a tea versus crushing it into powder. The art of poison has always come naturally to you. It’s probably what saved your life in that swamp.”

  The old woman went silent for a moment but waved off any concern when Jean-Paul questioned if she was all right. The exchange made Elena look back up, and it was enough encouragement for Grand-Mère to reach out and take her hand.

  “Even though you were an imp of a child when I first saw you, I recognized your potential. You didn’t belong on the back of a carnival wagon. And, I thought, alcohol is its own form of poison anyway. The disciplines aren’t as far apart as some might think. And you adapted brilliantly. No one could say otherwise. The art of poison might run in your blood, but never doubt you were meant to be a vine witch.” The old woman paused, closing her eyes again as she pressed her hand to her chest. “But then that damn Bastien came along, ambition and greed pulling him to our front door like a team of horses. I was so afraid . . .”

  “Of what?”

  “Of losing everything to his damnable greed.”

  “So you had me cursed? Abandoning me to die alone and half out of my wits?”

  “No,” said Grand-Mère. “I would never have done that. Not on purpose. That you must believe.” Grand-Mère removed a silk cloth from her sleeve and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “It was that man,” she said, eyeing Rackham’s body. “The carnival was pulling up stakes to leave town, and I thought if you just got some distance from Bastien you’d come to your senses. Time apart might help you see the truth. So I asked Edmond to take you with him. Only he said there wasn’t enough room in any of the wagons, and the money I offered would barely cover the expenses to take care of you for an entire year so . . . he asked if he could transform you as a matter of convenience. I thought he meant to keep you as a bird, or maybe a cat, just until he returned the next summer, and then he’d release you from the spell.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “It was horribly wrong—I know that now. But then I was wrong about so many things.” She turned her head away to cough. “When the carnival returned to the valley the following year and you didn’t come home, I went to his wagon. He seemed surprised to see me. Made some excuse about you meeting someone and running off. I had no choice but to believe him, until you showed up years later and I learned the truth of his deception. I never dreamed he was capable of cursing you and dumping you on the side of the road like that. Not Esmé’s daughter.”

  Grand-Mère held her handkerchief over her mouth, coughing until her eyes watered. When the fit passed she brought the cloth away and found the silk stained bright red. Her eyebrows rose with curiosity at the sight. “Blood and silk, mud and milk, never the twain should meet,” she muttered. “No, that’s not right, is it?”

  Jean-Paul looked sidelong at the old woman, then back at Elena in alarm. “What’s the matter with her?”

  It was then Elena took note of the empty wineglass. She’d been so focused on sorting out the truth inside the betrayal she’d missed the early signs of poisoning in the old woman. She grabbed the vial and shook it against the light to see how m
uch liquid remained.

  Empty.

  A shudder of fear ran through her, as if she was falling and her lifeline had just slipped through her fingers. “She’s poisoned herself,” she said and threw the vial on the floor.

  “Can’t you do something? Use your magic?”

  She emptied the pouch of rue on the table and began grinding the leaves between her palms. “I’m going to try a purge chant to empty her stomach,” she said, knowing she’d used a powerful binding spell on the poison to prevent exactly what she hoped to do.

  But before she could chant her spell, Grand-Mère winced and slouched in her seat. Her head tipped back so that she stared at the ceiling. “I never meant to cause you any pain,” she said, gasping for air. “I was just so scared I was going to lose everything. But it was never meant to be permanent. You must believe me. You were always supposed to come home again.”

  Elena blew on the herbs and asked the All Knowing to purge the poison, but it was too late. Grand-Mère’s body made a tiny rattle as her breath slipped out, then she went slack, the heart cornered at last by the deadly potion.

  There were no screams to follow the second death. After an initial collected gasp, there were whispers of concern, a spoon laid gently on a table, and a quick inhale of awe as the mentor’s aura rose in a silver cloud, acknowledgment of the wisdom and experience lost when one so old passes. A final hush settled over the witches as Elena, still reeling from the confession, raised her hands in the sacred pose to praise the All Knowing and plead forgiveness for the woman who had taught her the art of the vine, and life.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The vines sagged with heavy clusters of fruit. Their broad leaves exalted palms up to the sun while secret tendrils threaded around the hardened canes, seeking their next anchor point. It humbled Jean-Paul to see the vineyard respond with such robust growth. As he walked among the vines, he plucked off a grape, testing the fruit’s firmness between his thumb and finger before taking a bite. The sweet juice ran over his tongue. For three days he’d been telling her it was time, but she would put her hand on his and say, “Not yet. Not until the full moon passes.” He was beginning to think Elena’s patience for the harvest was as much a part of her magic as were her spells.