Poison Priestess by Lana Popovic (classic books for 7th graders txt) 📕

“Where is everyone, Jeanne?” I ask her, taking a bracing slug of abysmally cheap wine. “I’ve never seen it so quiet in here.”

“They are all out back,” Jeanne grouses, irritably wiping down a goblet. “Some new magician is putting a show on in our courtyard, have you not heard? It’s only been the talk of the cité for weeks. Stephane left me to man the till, the heartless canaille. So now everyone will have seen Lesage’s magic but me.”

“Lesage … I have heard of him,” Marie says slowly, her eyes agleam with interest. “A young magician newly returned to Paris after some years spent abroad. They call him an unparalleled prodigy of minor magic, though I shall believe that only when I see it.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” I demand, tossing back my tankard before I seize her by the arm and drag her toward the tavern’s back door. “Let us go see him for ourselves!”

We tumble together out into the courtyard, where it seems half the cité has gathered to watch the show. The crowd presses in against us from all sides, a shifting crush of ale-rank breath and unwashed flesh. Even standing on our tiptoes, we can barely see the wooden stage that has been hastily erected against the crumbling stone wall in the back.

“Well, this obviously won’t do,” Marie mutters, then raises her voice. “You there; move, if you please.”

Disgruntled rumblings and mumbled oaths die almost as quickly as they’re uttered, as soon as those being elbowed meet her basilisk glare. Marie’s aptitude with her stilettos is well known across the cité; none of these spectators are quite so attached to their spots, it seems, as to risk being speared between the ribs for them.

It is not until we reach the crowd’s lip that I hear the music.

I have seen minor magic shows before, of course, though most have left me cold. Even the most elaborate rely on benign deceits, sleight of hand, and cheap trickery of the eye. Most magicians keep up a steady stream of patter to assist in their misdirection, and wear billowing robes to conceal their multitude of props.

Compared to them, the magician Lesage might as well be a shadow cast onto the strange, pale smoke that roils across the stage.

He does not speak at all, relying instead on his accompaniment. A trio of black-robed violinists plays for him just beside the stage, their faces hidden by hooked plague doctor masks, their hands encased in black gloves. All three keep uncannily still even as they coax a macabre, meandering song from their strings. Their heads do not so much as twitch, and even the gusts of summer wind seem to barely stir the heavy pooling of their robes.

And yet they are not nearly so captivating as the magician himself.

He wears black, slim-fitting garb that matches his unfashionably short hair, which is inky as a raven’s wing and cropped into feathery spikes. Even the ruffles that cascade above his trim waistcoat are basalt black. Though matching ruffles at the wrists are customary, he wears his shirtsleeves plain and rucked up to the elbows, leaving him with seemingly nowhere to hide the sly tools of his trade.

Yet he conjures an endless spool of scarlet ribbon out of thin air nonetheless.

And he makes the most arresting faces as he loops the blood-red ribbon around his wrists, a quicksilver deluge of them. Sly bemusement melts into rakishness, which gives way to sheer confounded glee, as though he himself cannot comprehend his own astonishing legerdemain.

“How is he doing that?” I ask Marie, thoroughly baffled. “I don’t understand.”

She shakes her head, her lips parted with wonder. She is so lovely that for a moment I cannot even look back to the stage, held captive by the unguarded softness of her profile, the enraptured luster of her eyes, even the way her paintbrush lashes swoop down to her cheeks with every blink. My best friend is always pretty, but rarely quite so overtly tender. The sight of it stirs something dangerous to life; a tenderness of my own that I prefer to keep firmly bricked away and hidden.

But for once, I let myself give in, reaching down between us to thread our fingers together.

She squeezes back, casting me a slantwise smile without shifting her eyes from the stage. “I’ve no idea, chérie,” she replies in a whisper. “You know I have nimble fingers myself, but I cannot say I have ever seen anything quite like this.”

As though he has heard us, the magician’s gaze rakes our way. His dark eyes snare mine for a single heart-stopping moment, glimmering as if with unspoken promise.

This is only the beginning, they seem to say. And you cannot begin to imagine what comes next.

I lift my free hand to my plum-stained bottom lip, coyly tracing its outline as I wait with bated breath. Then he tips me a roguish wink and flings the mass of ribbons up—where they burst into a shower of petals so dark they must be either deepest crimson or truest black.

As they rain over him and fill his waiting hands, he tosses them up again, even higher above his head. There they transmute through some unknown alchemy into an unkindness of ravens, cawing shrilly as they wing their way above the cries of the crowd below. I wheel around to track their progress as they flap above the courtyard’s wall and disappear into the dark beyond, where Notre Dame’s colossal silhouette blots out the stars.

“Pardieu, that was marvelous,” Marie crows beside me, breathless with shocked laughter. “Would you look at them, ma belle, they are real, they are still flying—”

Surely that was the finale, I think wildly, turning back to the stage with my heart still throbbing in my throat. For what could possibly follow such a coup?

Except there is still more; the magician no longer stands alone. A spectral skeleton has appeared beside him, all rictus