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

as gently as I can, desperate to find some way to bend her back toward reason. “Even the most shattered heart still knows how to mend.”

“Even if that were true, how am I to stand seeing another bask in all that comes with being his maîtresse?” she demands, throwing up her hands. “After a fashion, France herself was mine while I was with him. How will I return to being only myself again?”

Unhinged as she is, there is some bright pearl of truth nestled deep in the slick flesh of her madness. Having witnessed the king’s dazzling aura for myself, I can understand why she should fear the coming deprivation.

Losing the love of such a gilded, God-touched king must surely be akin to being struck blind after having reveled in the most heavenly color.

And to be stripped of everything she had become, by virtue of being by his side? His love has turned her into something of a demigoddess, a temporary queen. I can almost see how the prospect of losing her status, of shrinking back into the space she previously occupied, might be sufficient to fracture her mind.

That I should understand a madwoman’s motivations so well terrifies me most of all.

“I know this is a tragedy for you,” I try again, shaking my head as if to clear it of such preposterous notions. “Truly, I do. But please, consider your future. Should we ever be found out, we would both pay the price with our own heads. And the risk is greater now than it ever was; the king has already established a commission headed by La Reynie to investigate the other poisonings. Surely nothing passes his royal lips that has not been vetted.”

“Then I expect you will simply need to be more adept and devious than ever,” she says with maddening complacency, as if I have already agreed to help her. “Certainly you have had the requisite practice, wouldn’t you say?”

I grit my teeth at the needling reminder of what she holds over my head. “This is different. This is the king. We would almost certainly be caught.”

“Even so, I trust that you will find a way to administer the poisons and to evade suspicion.” She shrugs, pursing her lips. “You will, because you are nothing if not enterprising. And you will because you must.”

“If you mean to blackmail me again, I assure you any such attempt will fail,” I counter, far more assertively than I feel, my hands clawing into the chair’s wooden arms. “The king will take no heed of your accusations now that you are no longer in his favor, especially as there is no proof of my involvement. I know as much from La Reynie himself.”

“No proof?” She feigns surprise, then lifts an elegant eyebrow almost indulgently, like a mother amused by a precocious child. “Have you forgotten poor, sweet Claude’s demise so soon? I kept every single vial you provided me with, you know. They still smell quite strongly of whatever vile substance it is you used to ruin her.”

I barely manage to keep from dragging a despairing hand over my face, cursing myself for being an utter fool. Of course she would have preserved the means to blackmail me even further, when she has already done so once armed only with supposition.

“And how would you implicate me in her death without also implicating yourself?” I challenge her, grasping for straws.

“You are my divineress, are you not? I would say you gave them to me under the guise of a healthful elixir, that you murdered Claude for your own loathsome ends.” She leans back, steepling her hands in front of her chest. “I imagine Louis would not be best pleased to hear it; he was much distraught over her passing. And after that spectacular Messe, surely he knows that you are Satan’s wench.”

She has me cornered, and she well knows it, especially now that I have earned the enmity of La Reynie. All she would need to do is whisper my name to the lieutenant general to have him clap me in chains.

I dangle, caught and helpless, trapped like a half-gnawed fly in Athenais’s odious web.

And though everything in me bridles at the notion of agreeing, of becoming complicit in a plot to kill a king, I can see nothing for it but to at least pretend to acquiesce.

“All right, my lady,” I bite off. “You have won, as you always do. It will take time, but I will devise some stratagem. An untraceable way to give you what you wish.”

“My clever Catherine.” She smiles, madness still sparkling in her azure eyes like sunlight breaking upon the peaks of a storm-tossed sea. Smug as a cat that has glutted on too much cream. “You do always come around. And do not tarry too long, please. My patience is already in tatters, and is only fraying further.”

She is exactly right, I think once she is gone and I have racked my brain for hours, trawling for an answer to no avail. I must indeed become more adept and devious than ever before. And if my own cunning fails to light my way, then perhaps I might use my sight as an oar.

To bail myself out of this predicament before the waters close over my head.

Though I have come a long way since my days of fruitless tinkering with Agnesot’s grimoire, I have never truly succeeded in scrying for myself.

And though my need is immense, caught as I am between Athenais and La Reynie like a ship trapped between Scylla and Charybdis, dwelling on my nemeses does not so much as stir the gift. I consult my scrying sphere and obsidian bowls, using everything from wine to milk to drops of my own blood.

But my sight does not budge an inch, sitting tucked and quiet in the very back of my skull like a scorpion concealed beneath a stone.

And so, as I have always done in trying times, I turn to my snakes.

Along