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

She guides me through the expanse of the banquet room and the skylit library, through a conservatory equipped with a harpsichord, a lute, and a collection of lustrous violins. The master suite is next, and its expanse fairly strips me of breath. Antoine’s and my entire home could fit within its walls with space left over to spare.

As we walk, I imagine myself here alone. Drifting through these airy corridors with my snakes slung about my shoulders, or sitting in the spacious study refurbished to meet my darker needs. On the topmost floor, the marquise and I pause before the grand Venetian window at the end of the hall. It overlooks the flawless green expanse of the garden below, the clustered rooftops of Villeneuve shimmering beyond, against a cotton-clouded sky.

Watching it all, an unexpected calm settles over me like the finest satin cloak.

After my turmoil, there is no true choice here at all, only a decision I find I’ve already made.

I cannot forfeit this opportunity to move up in the world, not even for Marie’s sake. Not when another such may never come around again. And it is not as if I will lose her altogether, I reassure myself. Though I know the marquise would not countenance my inviting Marie here, I will still visit her as often as I can, of course, and write to her whenever I cannot come in person.

“So, what do you think?” the marquise asks, mildly enough. But I can feel the trembling needle of her need tugging at me like a compass. Though our acquaintance has been brief, I understand her well enough already to feel the fire raging just beneath her skin, to know that her desires are colossal and implacable. And this time, what she wants above all else is my skill. “Do you need more time to consider? Or will this suit?”

I draw a breath, granting myself one last chance to think. I understand the gamble that I am making here, throwing in my lot with a scheming noblewoman who does not tolerate rejection—but though Marie may be right to fear for me, I trust myself to see this through.

And I see no advantage in not playing the boldest hand I hold.

I turn to the marquise slowly and extend my hand, unable to suppress the tiny, triumphant smile that curls my lips. “Oh, yes, my lady. I do believe it will.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Spirits and the Maréchale

August 23, 1667

“And you are quite sure they will not bite during the ritual?” Maréchale Madeleine de la Ferté asks me yet again, her eyes flicking warily to where Megaera surges around my left wrist. “It is only that they look rather hungry. The one around your neck has not stopped glaring at me askance since I sat.”

The Maréchale de la Ferté is here at the marquise’s recommendation, as one of her coveted inner circle. Which means only that the marquise finds this lady’s company acceptably diverting, without excusing her from any of the jockeying for favor that the noblesse engage in as their daily fare. The maréchale is plump and mildly pretty, popular among the male courtiers and a favorite of Queen Marie-Thérèse, though I see little of her alleged charm on display tonight. She’s skittish and wide-eyed as a cornered deer, her powdered ringlets quivering atop her head.

It likely does not help that she’s terrified of snakes.

“They have not bitten one of my callers yet,” I reply, biting back my own amusement. “I have no reason to think they will not continue to demonstrate restraint.”

The maréchale blanches in the candlelight, swallowing audibly. Her eyes dart to the invitingly lit windows of my home, where the rest of her coterie are enjoying a lavish salon while they await their turn with me. As the marquise’s sorceress, I do all my readings in my pavilion in the garden. Rain or wind or bracing night, I make all my callers come outside to me like supplicants, always one at a time.

It is not only that I enjoy making these spoiled aristocrats leap through hoops, though that is surely part of it. It is also that I would not be privy to half of their vile secrets, were they not assured of total privacy.

Sometimes they object to my rules, but even the most peevish of them quiet once they reach my pavilion, its pillars almost obscured by the clinging rush of ivy, the cupola limned by moonlight. I wait for them within, always swathed in black, with snakes coiled up my arms and twined over my bare shoulders. I’ve also stolen a page from that magician I saw in the cité, and the haunting strains of a violin emanate all around me. I make sure my violinist always stays well out of sight, playing from a grove tucked behind the pavilion where my clients cannot spy him. A busker I discovered in Montmartre, Pascal costs me next to nothing but plays like magic made sound, his harmonies burrowing beneath the skin and snagging in the soul.

I could have engaged one of my acquaintances from the cité, rife as it is with bawdy minstrels. But the marquise has made clear that she wishes my guests to witness nothing that might sully her reputation by linking her mystical divineress to Catherine Monvoisin’s own seedy past in the cité. As far as the rest of the court is concerned, I have only ever been the Sorceress La Voisin: the marquise’s mysterious and eldritch creature, my origin as secretive and other-worldly as my gift.

And it is true that though I have only been gone two months, my grateful husband and our house at Pont Marie, the house I saved for him, feel very far away already. Everything of that old life seems distant now, somehow tarnished and dim, drawn away from me. Like the memory of the sun, when one wakes into the black depths that mark the dead of night.

Everything but Marie,