She pushes away from the wall, straightens her tattered red skirts, and starts down the street without looking back. Without so much as a thank-you. Rather rude, considering I’ve risked everything to help her. But that’s only half the reason my stomach tightens: If she leaves, she could go anywhere. Do anything. That’s the point of freedom, I remind myself. But up here, with the city sprawling out in a thousand different directions, freedom seems a little too free. Desgrez’s warnings seem very real. And very possible. She could have lied about not returning to her mother. She could have saved the girls just to gain my trust. She could be plotting to lead the Shadow Society back to the sewer chamber.
No. I saw the look on her face when she healed the girls. I saw how she flinched and shrank when Desgrez condemned her for being a poisoner. She won’t betray us.
Are you willing to stake Anne and Françoise’s lives on it?
Cursing, I wipe my sweaty face on the inside of my tunic and jog after her. “Where are you going?”
Mirabelle quickens her step. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“I suppose it’s not, but I’d feel better if—”
She holds up a hand and whirls around. “You kidnapped and threatened to kill me. I’m not concerned with your feelings.”
“Yes, but I also saved you… .”
She shoots me an exasperated look. “Like I said, we’re even.” She rounds another corner and starts up the inclined streets toward Montemartre—the hillside neighborhood overlooking the city center. I watch her go, my toes itching inside my boots.
You will not follow. There’s nothing more you can do.
Pebbles crunch behind me, and I check over my shoulder. The hairs bristle on my neck as I stare into the sinister swaths of shadow and darkened corners. Desgrez could be anywhere. Or her mother, La Voisin. Even if Mirabelle doesn’t return to the Louvre, the Shadow Society could capture her and force her to divulge my siblings’ location.
My sisters aren’t safe unless she’s safely hidden.
I flip my collar high, tug my hat brim low, and trail her at a distance. Up we climb, past sordid gambling dens and rows of maisons de tolerance, with their red-painted doors. “I know you’re still there,” Mirabelle says with an aggravated sigh. She pivots and folds her arms across her chest. “Why?”
I raise my hands and step out of the shadows. “I’m only trying to help. Desgrez will be hunting us. And the city is overrun with your mother’s lackeys… .”
“I know. I’ll avoid them.”
“How?”
“Again, I don’t see—”
Footsteps ring out on the cobbles. Before we can even think to dive for cover, a group of avocats round the corner in a flurry of polished leather cases and powdered wigs. Mirabelle sags with relief, but I remain as rigid as stone, glaring at the side of her face until the lawmen are out of sight and she finally looks at me.
“What?” she hisses.
“If that was Desgrez, you’d be dead!”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“Hide. Like a reasonable person.” I look up and down the road, and my gaze snags on an abandoned millinery sandwiched between two gambling dens. It’s dark and unassuming, the windows boarded up and the steps crumbling. “How about there?”
Mirabelle’s brows lower and she starts to shake her head.
“Just until tonight—to ensure Desgrez isn’t trailing us. Wait until the streets are empty, when you can blend in to the midnight shadows.”
“The sun is barely up!”
“Fine. Don’t. But I’ll be forced to keep following you. For your protection.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“As much as I’d love to get my sisters out of this treacherous city, we won’t get far if the Shadow Society captures you and forces you to compromise our location. So, no. I don’t have anything better to do.”
Mirabelle tilts her head back and groans as she crosses the road to the millinery.
I wait a moment, check up and down the street, and jog after her.
“I cooperate, yet still you follow,” she snips as I catch up with her on the stairs.
“Where else do you expect me to go? I’m not exactly welcome in the sewer anymore.”
“There’s got to be another abandoned shop in this city. Preferably on the opposite side.”
I shut the millinery door, and a thick coating of dust drifts down from the moth-eaten hats and ribbons dangling overhead. We stumble through the fog, coughing and tripping over each other. I bang my knee on the long, low counter in the center of the room and then crash into the shelves lining the back wall. They’re littered with buttons and thread and bent needles—one of which bites my finger. Even the shelves are unwilling to support me.
I’m so tired of fighting—with Mirabelle, with Desgrez, with Louis and even Madame Bissette. I am weary to my bones. More exhausted than after a long day of scrubbing in the scullery.
I slump to the floor beside one window and let my legs sprawl out in front of me. Mirabelle stalks to the other window and peers through the slats.
The minutes tick by slowly. I watch the pink and orange rays of sunrise crest the hillock, setting the thatched rooftops ablaze. Slowly, the streets fill with carts and carriages and people buying bread and cheese. At one point I think I see a man in a long black overcoat marching toward the shop and I scramble to my feet. But then I remember Desgrez no longer wears his uniform, and I slide back to the ground.
Mirabelle ignores me with stalwart determination, and I try to do the same, but my rebellious eyes keep darting back to her, wandering along her clenched jaw and trailing down her long, slender neck. Even in that stained scrap of a dress with her hair in wild tangles, she’s one of the most stunning girls I’ve ever seen.
And the last person on earth you should think of that way.
Yet she claims she had naught to do with the attack… .
Of course she would say that.
She glances up from beneath her fan of dark eyelashes. “What?”
My cheeks burn. I’m not about to tell her I was admiring the smattering of freckles across her nose, so I skip straight to the second bit: “How could you not have known about the attack on Versailles?”
“I wasn’t a member of my mother’s inner circle. I hadn’t a clue she planned to poison the Sun King or storm the palace or take Paris. None of it. I was just as horrified as you.”
“I highly doubt that.” I shudder at the memory of the blood dripping from my hands, the wall of ravenous flame, Rixenda crumpling to the dirt. Nightmares that haunt me still.
“I was horrified enough to defy her,” she says to her hands. “To turn my back on my family and the Society and everything I’ve spent my life working for.”
Oh, wow, what a sacrifice. How awful it must be, turning your back on a throne-stealing witch … That’s the response that immediately springs to mind, but she looks so miserable, sitting there with her scrawny arms clutched around her knees, so instead I say, “You don’t have to feel that way.”
Scornful laughter pops from her lips, and she faces me with one eyebrow raised. “How could you possibly know what I’m feeling, princeling?”
“Well, your mother left you to die at the hands of her enemies, and now you’re on the run without a plan or protection. So I’d imagine you’re feeling abandoned, betrayed, alone, inadequate, hurt. Shall I go on?” She stiffens, but before she snaps I quickly add, “I have a bit of experience with those feelings, being the king’s unwanted bastard.”
She bites down hard on her lower lip and is silent for so long, I figure the conversation is dead. But then she says softly, “I tried so hard. I did everything she asked—anything to win her approval. Devil’s claws, I was a fool. Like a dog begging for scraps.”
I nod sagely. “The trick is not to care. If you don’t want their acknowledgment, they have no power over you. They can’t hurt you.”
Mirabelle turns to
face me, the light from the window slanting across her skeptical expression. “You had no desire for the king’s approval?”
“None.”
“I don’t believe you.”
I bristle. Even she thinks me a groveling pissant. “I haven’t wanted it for years. You can ask anyone at court. I was the bane of His Majesty’s existence.”
Mirabelle purses her lips and studies me. “What about your sisters?”
“What about them?”
“It’s obvious you care for them.”
“What does that have to do with my father?”
She rolls her eyes. “Why do you think you’re so doting and protective? Why do you think you’re trying so desperately to be the hero now? To prove you’re better than Louis?”
“First, I am better than Louis—that doesn’t require much effort. And second, I love Anne and Françoise because they’re the only ones who have ever loved me. Protecting them has nothing to do with pleasing His Royal Majesty.”
“If you say so.” Mirabelle’s expression is pitying—as if I’m as sad and confused as she is, which I most definitely am not. That sniveling little boy who needed his father’s approval died a lifetime ago. I buried him myself.
“I don’t know why I bothered,” I mutter. “It was foolish to think a poisoner could understand.”
Mirabelle flinches, but I don’t apologize. Her dark eyes bore into the side of my face from across the shop, but I refuse to look at her.
Finally, she huffs and looks away. “You’re the one who initiated the conversation.”
“Well, I shouldn’t have.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
We sit in silence as the hours pass.
A prince and a poisoner.
Trapped in the same room, but on opposite ends of the world.
11
MIRABELLE
I ball my fists in my skirt—mostly so I don’t fly across the millinery and throttle the bastard princeling—and watch the sun make its languid arc across the sky. Morning shifts to midday then evening. As eager as I am to leave this place, he’s right—it will be safer under the cover of night. So I drum my fingers against the floor and count the seconds until it’s dark and I can be free of him.
Never in my life have I known anyone so bullheaded. So willfully obstinate! Sitting over there with his devil-may-care attitude. I see you! I want to shout. You are just as desperate for approval as I am. Maybe even more so, since you’re too blind to recognize it.
I glance over and hope to catch him staring again—so I can make a barbed remark. But he’s drifted off to sleep. His long legs are stretched out in front of him and his hands are tucked behind his head, his hat propped partially over his eyes. He looks younger in sleep—the hard set of his jaw finally slack, his brows released from their perpetual scowl. A strand of dark hair has slipped from the queue at the nape of his neck and dangles down the side of his face. My fingers twitch, inexplicably wanting to tuck it behind his ear.
He’s impossible. And infuriating. But also desperate and lonely and aching.
Like me.
You don’t have to feel that way.
I want to say his words back to him. Not to rub salt in his wounds, but because they’re true. We’re more alike than either of us would care to admit. In another life, we might have been friends.
But not in this one.
He may be a bastard, but he’s still royal. He grew up at court, oblivious to the hunger and sickness and poverty I’ve spent my life fighting. There’s also the undeniable fact that I killed his father. I don’t know why I omitted that rather large detail when he asked about Versailles. Maybe I don’t want to accept my part in it; I may be less culpable than Mother and Marguerite, but I’m hardly blameless. Or maybe it’s more self-serving than that. He would never grant my freedom if he knew the truth.
Josse insists he wanted nothing to do with Louis XIV, but it’s a lie. Deep down, he loved the man. Desperately.
Which is why we’ll go our separate ways. I have an agenda to keep, and it doesn’t include hiding away like a coward while the Shadow Society ravages the city. Not if I can help the people and quiet the nagging finger of guilt that’s prodding me in the belly. I push up to my knees and peer between the boards nailed across the window, waiting until the night is half gone and the gambling dens on either side are silent. Then I gather up my skirts and tiptoe across the millinery. At the door, I steal one more glance at Josse—the moonlight dancing across the sharp planes of his handsome, but entirely irksome, face—and slip into the chilly night.
After a quick scan of the street, I head south toward the river. More specifically, toward the Louvre.
I may not be able to change what I’ve done, but I can attempt to redeem myself.
I creep toward the city center, past the Palais Royal, which is no doubt overrun with Shadow Society loyalists, and I’m about to turn on to the rue Saint-Honoré—the street bordering the northern wall of the Louvre—when a hand snakes out of a shadowed alcove and catches me by the throat. A moment later, fingers slap across my lips, muffling my scream.
“You filthy little liar!”
I had expected to find Fernand or Marguerite or another high-ranking member of the Shadow Society. But Josse’s gray-green eyes blaze down at me. His fingertips press bruises into the skin above my collar bone.
“Unbelievable,” he seethes.
“Y-you!” I stammer when his hand slides away from my lips. “You were asleep.”
“No. I was testing you. And you failed. Running straight back to your mother, despite your pretty promises. I should have let Desgrez kill you.”
I wrench my arm back, but his hold tightens. “I’m not running back to my mother.”
Josse narrows his eyes. “You just happened to fancy a stroll past her stronghold?”
“I happen to have a plan of my own.” I rear back again, and this time I stumble free.
“And what plan is that?”
I wrap my arms around my chest, rubbing his angry red fingerprints from my skin. “I don’t see how it’s any of your business, but I plan to continue the work of the Shadow Society—our true work,” I add when he scoffs. “Murdering the king and seizing the city was never our aim. Our concern has always been for the common people: brewing curatives and hunger tonics and love potions.”
“I still fail to see how that requires returning to the Louvre. You can’t honestly hope to recruit La Voisin’s followers to your cause.”
“No, but I can steal back my alchemy supplies.”
He’s silent for a moment. His heavy breath billows between us in the cold. “While your intentions are noble … if you’re telling the truth,” he adds with a deliberate pause, “I can’t allow you to put yourself in such a precarious position.”
“Why not?” I cut him off. “The common folk aren’t worth the risk?”
His eyes flare. “I am a commoner.”
“Are you? Truly?”
He tugs at his collar in frustration. “That’s beside the point. I must focus on getting my sisters safely out of Paris before your mother finds us, which is why I can’t allow you to flit about raising a ruckus and getting yourself caught. It’s madness to think one person could make a difference, anyway.”
“Is it, princeling?” I take a bold step closer, the toes of my boots knocking his. He’s a good head taller than me, but my indignation raises me up to his height. “Did I not make a difference when I brought your sisters and Desgrez back from the dead?”
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t others deserve such a mercy?” His lips part, but I don’t let him speak. “I’m not asking for your permission. I’m free to do as I please. You’re free to go on your way, help me, or kill me. And since we both know you can’t stomach the third option …”
He rips off his tricorne hat and rakes his fingers through his messy hair. “I haven’t time to help the whole bedamned city!”
“So don’t. Scurry back
to the sewer.” I charge from the alcove and continue down the rue Saint-Honoré toward the gatehouse in the palace wall, though I’m not entirely sure how I’ll get inside. Perhaps when the guards change… .
I stop beneath the awning of a butchery across the road and study the gate, with its sharp iron teeth digging trenches into the ground. I tilt my head back and frown up at the ramparts that soar higher than the roofs of the half-timbered houses.
“Do you have a death wish?” Josse materializes beside me, grabs my elbow, and pulls me down the street. “You’ll be caught within the hour if you try to get through there. Follow me. I lived here half my life. I’ll get you inside.”
“I thought you didn’t have time to help?”
“I don’t. But I’ll have even less time if you’re captured.”
He leads me past the palace, down the muddy, sloping embankment of the Seine, and plunks me down in the reeds. The cold mud seeps through my skirt, and I shudder as the midnight breeze skiffs across the river. “This doesn’t look like the inside of the palace,” I say.
Josse glowers and removes a dagger from his boot.
I eye it warily but refuse to flinch. “Ah, I see. You’ve decided to kill me after all.”
“We both know I’m not going to kill you,” he murmurs, turning the blade to offer me the handle. “Cut off your hair.”
My hands instinctively reach for my curls. “Why?”
“Why do you think?” He makes large swirling gestures all around his head that are offensive and altogether exaggerated.
“It isn’t that unruly.”
“You’ll be recognized in an instant. Hair is a small price to pay to be the savior of the people. Cut it off.”
Grudgingly, I take the dagger and do as he says, sawing off my curls just above my ears. By the time I finish, I’m surrounded by piles of light brown hair—it looks like I sheered a lamb—and I silently mourn the long, curling strands as they blow away across the river. My ears have never been so cold. “Now what?”
“Now we wait.”
We sit, shivering and soaking, for what feels like an eternity, until the outline of the Louvre glows gray and pink. As the sun rises over the water, a group of palace maids file down the embankment, strip off their dresses, and splash into the Seine.
An Affair of Poisons Page 12
