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

“I’ll be fine,” I reassure him. “I always am, non? Though before you leave, could you see to your haberdasher’s bill, cher? It arrived over a fortnight ago.”

“Bien sûr,” he replies quickly, drawing a palm over his pomaded hair. “I had meant to attend to that already, but … the shop has been such pandemonium that it must have slipped my mind. Thank you for the reminder, Catherine. Though you really need not fret over our finances.”

“Oh, it is no trouble. And I do not want us to find ourselves in accidental arrears again,” I add a touch pointedly, referring to an incident a year ago in which Antoine “misremembered” to pay his irate tailor for over a month. “Now go enjoy your night, mon cher.”

Excusing himself, he withdraws from my study. As soon as he is gone I rise, casting the embroidery away with an exasperated huff. My mind already tumbling ahead to when the last rind of sun peels away from Paris, revealing the dark and inviting pith of night.

Before I pen an invitation to Marie, I move to the window to twitch aside the heavy brocatelle curtains. Beyond the ranks of mansard rooftops still glistening slick from a brief afternoon shower, the sky is a velvety plum. At the sight of it, a sense of vast potential strains inside my rib cage, unfurling against my lungs. I have little use for the Paris of the day, marinated in horse piss and hazed with chimney smoke, clamorous with carriage wheels, church bells, and the racket of a hundred thousand shrilling voices.

But night … night is another matter altogether. A beguiling province of promises and whispers, secrets traded like coins behind shielding hands.

Night is when the dark sun of my city truly rises.

By the time I arrive at the Pont Neuf bridge to meet Marie, Paris has plunged fully into darkness. The river ripples like an oiled snake hide, winding through the stone arches of the bridge that spans across the water to the Île de la Cité—the city’s oldest district and its beating heart, an island suspended in the silty lifeblood of the Seine.

Marie waits for me by the bridge’s base, torch in hand; after nightfall, Parisians make their own light if they must have it. She always undertakes to arrive before me, as if even a few minutes without her might land me in some grave peril. Though she’s my elder by only a year and a half, she was my fiercest protector at the orphanage as well as my best friend, before I was indentured to the fabrique and she took to the streets. While I’ve severed all other ties to the wretched girl I used to be, I pined for Marie during the years we spent apart, and sought her out almost as soon as Antoine sprung me free.

Though I have never said it to her aloud, I cannot remember a time before I loved Marie.

“Ma belle,” she cries out now, surging forward to embrace me with her free hand, her thin brown cheek brushing mine. Everything about Marie is sleek, including her narrow face, slim frame, and shining spill of hair dark as chestnut shells. My skin tingles where our cheeks press together, and I breathe in the familiar, subtle scent of her, orange blossom and sandalwood, a faint and spicy sweetness that makes my heart swell like a waxing moon.

She draws back to pout playfully at me, with lips that are ripe and full and creased down the center just like midsummer cherries. “I thought perhaps you’d cast me aside in favor of that bedamned grimoire. It has been ages since you last came out to play.”

“Hardly ages, chérie. And as if I could ever forsake you for much longer than a week,” I soothe, looping my arm through hers. “It’s only that I have been so busy.”

“Yes, busy attending to that book-shaped devil’s snare,” she replies, her mien darkening. “As if you have any notion what evils you might unleash with all your idle tinkering.”

This is not the first time Marie has cast aspersions upon the grimoire’s worth, suggested that a strange divineress’s spellbook might contain dangers best left untouched. But for all that she can cut a purse as deftly as pretend to read a palm, Marie is only a talented grifter. She could not possibly feel or understand the pure power that beats from within the grimoire’s pages like a living heart—much less judge its nature.

“The grimoire is a tool, and a tool cannot be evil,” I reply by rote, as I have the countless other times we’ve had this conversation. “Besides, you of all people should know that a little evil can come in useful.”

“My evil is only of the most innocuous sort, ma belle. The kind meant to keep me in cheap wine and baguettes.” She presses her lips together disapprovingly, then gives over. “But since you insist on prodding at it, at least tell me it has been going well?”

“I wish,” I reply as we merge onto the trottoir. A troupe of fire-eating acrobats capers past us like a demonic horde, swallowing curved blades alive with flames. As we pass by the half-moon alcoves set atop each stone pile, the wheedling voices of quacksalvers and merchants assail us, peddling their wares from covered stalls. My stomach stirs at the smell of crisp-baked wafers and nuts roasted in sugar and cinnamon, sweet above the river’s brackish tang.

“But the scrying spells are damnably difficult to master,” I continue as we dodge a cackling guttersnipe pelting away with someone’s purse. “Sometimes I can nearly feel how they should work. But they almost always evade me in the end, wriggling between my fingers. It is beyond maddening. I was meant to do such magic, Marie, I can feel it—and yet I simply cannot summon it up at will.”

I am articulating it poorly, which is nothing new. I have never