by Lana Popovic
As soon as I receive notice that the king has kept his word and Marie has been released, Adam and I set about curating the guest list to our blasphemous festival. We spend the next few weeks meticulously mapping out the marquise’s death. I have already secured her participation, having extended her the “honor” of serving as our living altar—a special offering to the devil to secure his blessing of our supposed, secret undertaking, the murder of the king.
As I expected, she had been only too eager to agree.
Rather than a ritual blade gone awry during the Messe, Adam and I settle on the use of a venomous snake instead—a demise even more easily presented as an accident. We also concoct an intoxicant incense, a mixture of belladonna, mugwort, and henbane to confound our audience’s senses, render them more credulous. More willing to believe that what befalls the marquise is of the devil’s doing. The rest of my time is spent training the chosen serpent—a coral snake so indistinguishable from my own king snakes that the marquise will not be alarmed by its presence—so that it will strike eagerly at the opportune moment.
A week before the Messe, all invitations have been sent and the necessary preparations made. We are ready as we will ever be to execute our plan. Though I am confident in our success, I have been so alive with nerves during our active plotting that I have barely slept for days. But now that there is no more to be done, I retire to sleep early for once, in hopes that I will actually find some rest.
I succumb to sleep as soon as my head touches the pillow and plunge immediately into a dream both vastly terrible and strange.
In it, I look down upon myself as I was at the fabrique—a young starveling with wax burns along her arms, standing in a torn shift against a backdrop of toppled cauldrons and writhing flames. Then the girl that was once me begins to walk, following a twisting path that leads her out of hell. Her road glitters with fragments of green glass, the crushed remnants of the many jars and bottles of ingredients I purchased from the alchemist Blessis. There are coins, too, along the way, warped and half melted, searing hot under her soles.
Though the broken glass and molten metal must torment her, the girl’s face remains adamant, betraying not a hint of pain.
I see her continue her journey as the road takes on an incline, beginning to wend around a mountain’s sheer face. She climbs and climbs, not sparing a glance for the vertiginous drop, still with that resolute look stamped across her face. By the time she crests the mountain’s summit, she has aged fully into a woman, several years older than I am today.
And the king waits for her upon the summit, his glorious hair billowing around him, his hand outstretched.
As soon as she takes it and moves to stand beside him, a black crown materializes upon her head. It wavers like a mirage, as if wrought not of any metal but of a poisonous inky mist, like snake venom turned to breath. Her ragged shift transforms into a grand habit both majestic and macabre, sewn of batwing leather and cobwebs instead of lace. A smile splits her face, wider than wide, a grin so grotesquely broad it contorts her features into something other than human.
Then my perspective shifts—and suddenly it is me gazing outward from the mountaintop, occupying her place. The king’s hand burns like an ember in mine, and all of France sprawls out before us: rows upon rows of vineyards with curling vines, swaths of grassy meadow, pools of glimmering lakes. A dark sun blazes above our heads amid a churn of clouds, like an eclipse shedding a noisome light.
And I understand that this no mere dream, but something more. A sleeping visitation of the sight. It tells me that, should I follow through with the deadly Messe, I will become much more than even what the marquise dreamed for herself. Louis will take me as a morganatic wife, a left-handed queen. Wearing his matching crown in all but name.
As triumph grips my heart like some crushing fist, I make the mistake of looking down—to meet the rictus grin of the skull that lies at my feet. Beneath it is another, and another, and another, along with yellowed piles of longer bones clustered haphazardly together.
Because the mountain is made not of stone, but of skeletons. The bodies of my murdered victims, the many dead I climbed over to ensure my own ascension.
And if I pledge myself to Louis XIV, there will only ever be more and more and more.
I rip myself awake with the sound of my own animal howls. My hands twist into my balled-up sheets, and tears sluice hotly down my face.
“Pardieu, what have I become?” I whisper to myself, burying my knuckles into my eyes. Sobs rack through me with a tearing force, fit to split me asunder. Here, then, are all the tears I have not cried since my days at the fabrique, coming upon me all at once. “What bane, what fiend? What bedamned monstrosity?”
And I know at once that I cannot do it. Dieu keep me, but I cannot kill the marquise.
I cannot kill anyone again.
Villainous as the marquise doubtless is, I cannot continue to gather power as others’ bodies continue to tumble around me; victims fallen to my ambition, innocent and deserving all alike. Though I appease my conscience by styling myself a Fury—for dispensing justice that was never mine to administer at all—in truth, I have killed largely for my own benefit. How many more Claudes must I fell to secure my place beside the king? And when I am finally on that mountaintop, how could I possibly be any better than the marquise?
How would I not be even worse than the dead Prudhomme himself?
I have succumbed to my own hubris like Icarus, flown too close to the king’s dread sun. And all of it, for what? I ask myself through tears, keening into my pillow. For the false power of being in a powerful man’s thrall, when he may discard me whenever he likes?
I do not want to be this person anymore; seizing for myself at any cost, telling myself whatever lies I need to hear. Perhaps I never truly wanted it at all, at least not in the easy and guiltless way that Adam does.
Maybe playacting the part of Satan’s priestess in the Messes had some part in this dread transformation, nudged me to stray so far from any path of sanity and reason. Perhaps with all my false prayer and ritual, I truly summoned something infernal and took it into myself.
Or more likely, I think bitterly as I unwind myself from the sheets, this is merely me. The bitter dregs at my own bottom, all the very worst of myself given its head.
I fling myself from my bed, a pall of dread settling over me as I consider the extent of my predicament. Should the investigation of the poison affair continue, certainly the king will not save me from La Reynie, not once I have incurred his wrath by defying him.
Even if the inquiry does not continue, thinking of the frosty rage in Louis’s eyes at the marquise’s betrayal convinces me that should I thwart the king’s desires, I will not have long to live.
There are no two ways about it.
If I do not kill the marquise, I will likely die myself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Predicament and the Plan
I sit on the floor for hours, my back huddled against the bed with my arms around my knees. My mind swooping and darting like a cornered bird at the mercy of a broom.
There must be a way out of this, I exhort myself. There always is, even when there seems to be no apparent escape; even walls closing in should not be able to contain a clever enough divineress. Agnesot herself was proof of that. And though I am less inclined than ever to follow in her footsteps by entreating the devil in earnest, for fear of further blackening my already tainted soul, I still have my wits at hand, along with everything I’ve learned of trickery under Adam’s tutelage.
Finally a notion occurs to me, a tiny flame of hope kindling in my chest. It is smaller than a feather, and about as substantial. But it is enough to keep the scourging wind of hopelessness away.
There is one thing, after all. One possible way.
Within an hour, I am knocking on the door to Marie’s little garret in the cité. As I wait on her doorstep, bouncing on my toes, I am wreathed in fear and uncertainty, unsure that Marie w
ill even let me in.
And why should she, with everything I have cost her, with how little I’ve given back?
“Catherine?” she exclaims when she finally opens the door, her mouth rounding into an astonished O at the sight of me. “What in damnation are you doing here?”
“I am so sorry to come bursting in on you like this,” I say, my chest welling with trepidation, lifting a hand to gnaw nervously on my knuckles. “I know I deserve no succor from you, after all the grievous wrong you’ve suffered on my account.”
“Like the gaol, you mean?” she asks flatly. “I rather suspected you had some hand in my imprisonment. But then the warden informed me that I owed my freedom to you as well … so, thank you, I suppose? Truly, the protocol escapes me.”
“I would never have let you languish there,” I say. “No matter what I had to do. Even so, I do not deserve your help. But I need it, Marie, more desperately than ever. And there is no one else that I would trust, in any case. Not when it comes to my own life.”
“Your life?” she exclaims, her face darkening. “How in the world has it come to that?”
“I’ve made mistakes,” I say simply, biting my cheek against the tears that spring to my eyes. “Bad ones. The very worst. And now I am afraid it has come time to pay.”
She scrutinizes me for a moment longer, her mouth drawn to the side, hands on her hips. Still far too thin, but so beautiful, more beautiful than I even remember. Though I have forfeited any right to her affection, I yearn to close the distance between us, to crush her into an embrace. To press my cheek against hers, bury my face into the achingly familiar scent of her hair.
“Very well, then. I may as well hear you out,” she says, stepping to the side and beckoning me in. “I suppose I owe you that much, at least.”
As I follow her into the tiny garret, floored with splintered planks and furnished only with a listing table, two stools, and a straw-tick pallet, I find myself desperately wishing I had taken a different path. Rejected the marquise’s offer and come to live here with Marie instead, leaving Antoine to fend for himself. I almost even wish Agnesot had never given me the grimoire and instructed me to guard my evil, inspiring me to chase after power at any expense.
How different everything might have been.
Though I cannot pretend that, at bottom, I can truly blame anyone else for this ultimate predicament in which I now find myself. It was my choices that brought me here, one wicked step at a time. And it will have to be my own choices that walk me out of it as well.
“So, what is it that you’ve done?” Marie asks once she has set a kettle to boil on the cast-iron woodstove and turned to face me with her slim arms crossed over her chest. “Though given what La Reynie accused me of, I suppose I might hazard a guess.”
“You will hate me,” I whisper, hanging my head. “It is much worse than anything you have ever done. What is it you said once? That your evil was of the smallest sort, the kind just enough to keep you in wine and baguettes? This is not like that, Marie. Nothing like that.”
“Why don’t you tell me, all the same?” She shrugs, coming to sit across from me. “Clearly you’ve no other choice, anyway.”
So I do, sparing her no ugly detail, laying bare both the flawed and selfish reasoning that has brought me to this juncture, and all the crimes I committed with Adam at my side. I tell her of the false Black Masses and of Prudhomme’s death, then of the ones that followed. Even what I was forced to do to Claude, and finally, the king’s command that I kill the marquise for him.
“And so you were always right,” I breathe once I have finished, afraid to meet the judgment in her eyes. “About me and the grimoire, though it did not imperil my soul itself; I did as much entirely of my own volition. And you were right, too, that such a life would consume me in the end.”
It occurs to me that perhaps even Agnesot had some inkling of what end I might come to all those years ago, when she warned me that the freedom I yearned for came at a cost higher than most would choose to pay. Perhaps she should have been more clear as to just what I would be risking; but even if she had been, I doubt I would have chosen differently, forged anything other than my own willing path to here.
Across the table from me, Marie says nothing, turning to stare out her tiny window at the peaked roofs that flock beyond, still glistening with dew under a pewter sky that promises rain. A pigeon wings by her window with a long screech and ruffling of feathers, something painfully melancholic to its shrill cry.
“I see. And what sort of help is it that you would ask of me?” she says in a leaden tone, making no comment on all that I have told her.
I take a deep breath, and then sketch out my plan, detailing her minor but crucial role in it.
“Should it work, I would have to run afterward, of course,” I finish. “Paris would never be safe for me again. I would have to reinvent myself elsewhere, disappear from here.”
She nods once, teeth worrying at the inside of her lip, then turns back to the window.
“Well, what do you think, now that you have heard it all?” I prompt, my lungs feeling like an overinflated bellows, the taste of metal tanging in my mouth.
“What do I think of what, Catherine?”
“Of the plan. Of me, I suppose. Do you … do you hate me, Marie?”
She sighs at that, long and grievous, and when she turns back to face me, her eyes are pools of pain. There is a fatigue to her face, a kind of drawn exhaustion. As if she is beyond weary of contending with my foolishness.
“Of course I do not hate you,” she replies with a ghost of a smile. “Perhaps I wish I did; it would certainly be far easier on me. But I don’t, because I cannot, Catherine. I know you well enough to understand what it is you thought that you were doing, misguided though it was. And most of all, I cannot hate you because I love you still, foolish and driven and heedless though you have shown yourself to be. I have always loved even the very worst of you.”
“You … love me?” I whisper, my insides swooping with shock, half afraid to draw another breath. “Even now, after everything? Even though I left you?”
“Yes, even now. Such a painful irony, is it not, ma belle? That after all your fear of me, this should be the very freedom you have been questing for all this time,” she says ruefully, tilting her head. Her full lips tremble, a wealth of restrained emotion gleaming in her eyes. “That no matter what you do—no matter how far off course you find yourself—you can do anything you wish and still find safe harbor with me in the end.”
After my many months of meticulous give-and-take with Adam, I can barely fathom so unconditional a love. Much less that I should somehow be so fortunate as to find myself on its receiving end.
Overcome, but still terribly leery of overstepping, I reach across the table to Marie. When she does not twitch away, I take her hand and gently lift it to rest against my cheek.
“Have I truly not ruined everything with all my foolishness?” I whisper into her palm. “For all that I do not deserve you, you must know that I have loved you always. Loving you … it is my first real memory. I know that does not begin to make up for anything. But it is true nonetheless.”
“Well, I will not lie and say that we are not badly broken, ma belle,” she whispers, tears spilling over her cheeks even as my own drip onto her hand. “But perhaps, with a great deal of luck and time, we might yet be mended. Perhaps even be made whole again.”
That is enough, more than enough, for me.
I push back from the table, half stumbling as I reach for her with blind yearning, elation flooding me to the bones when she allows me to wind my arms around her neck. The sweetness of her answering kiss, of the fragrance of her skin and her arms sliding around my waist, is worth all that I have left behind, and much more besides.
Her love is the greatest gift I have ever known, and a freedom freely given.
One that I need not chase down with bloody tooth and claw.
When we pull back from each other, sh
e traces her fingers down my cheek.
“And can you truly give it all up?” she asks, searching my eyes. “I know you have become accustomed to the finery, all the luxurious trappings that come with being the sorceress La Voisin. Will some modest new life with me, in whatever hamlet or backwoods we find ourselves, ever be enough? How can I trust that you will not change your mind? That you will not throw me over for the king himself?”
“So if it should work, what we spoke of … would you go, too?” I ask her, nearly trembling with trepidation. “Would you truly come with me?”
“Bien sûr,” she says simply, tipping her forehead against mine. “Where else would I wish to be?”
“Then even I can learn from my mistakes, my love,” I murmur, drawing her close. “If you can be so generous as to love a murderess, then the least I can do is make myself worthy of your heart.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Phial and the Bite
I feel as if I cannot catch my breath the entire week before the final Messe.
Nightmares plague me, of all sinister variations. Sometimes I dream that no matter what I do, the marquise dies in the end; all the dream deaths she suffers are the most awful sort, dreadful combinations of the ones I have inflicted with my poisons. Other times I die in her place, and the last thing I see before I burst awake, my heart pounding like a battering ram, are the clods of soil being tossed into my open grave. Black earth raining onto my cold, dead face.
This is made all the worse by the necessity of keeping Adam in the dark. Fortunately, he is already baffled enough by my abrupt coolness, my utter lack of desire to allow him back into my bed, that personal communication between us has all but petered away. I could not begin to trust him with my plan, not when I know how fervently he wishes all this to pass without a hitch. Our final step to winning the favor of the king.